YEC Evidentialist Article: Evidence for a young world

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Don't bother deconstructing the logic, it's obviously wrong. Sarfarti put two arguments with identical form and claimed that one was sound and one was not. If any doubts remained as to his reasoning skills, that should have dispelled them.

For the record, if A v B, ¬A==>B is correct. Sarfarti claims that C v E is not true, so you can not say ¬C==>E, but for some reason you can say ¬E==>C. This is just pathetic. No first-year math or computer science student would likely make such trivial mistakes in basic logic.

Orwell, are you sure about this?

So.



And he has a Ph.D. in “Truthology” from “Christian Tech”

My roommate this semester is one of the duller math majors (he had trouble with the obvious generalization of De Morgan's Laws) and I could not imagine him screwing up something as simple as what Sarfarti did. Two completely identical arguments, one of which is sound and the other not?

Granted, there may be some less intelligent people studying math or CS, but it takes a special sort to do something that absurdly wrong. Certainly no one who had passed a logic-based course (Foundations for math majors, discrete math for CS majors) would have made such a mistake.

While I agree Sarfarti failed to establish his preferred argument was sound, the issue of the form being the same is not relevent, as he is not claiming either argument is invalid. On the contrary, he states unambiguously that the argument form is valid. Sarfarti is resting his criticism on the truth value of the premises.


The arguments are not identical, they share the same argument form, but the content of the premises is different. To be sound an argument must not only have a valid argument form, it must also be characterized by true premises.

Sarfarti is claiming that the truth value of the premise "not creationism" is false and for this reason one of the arguments (the one that posits "not creationism" as a premise) is unsound.

You say people will dispute the facts rather than change their beliefs. You presented that without comment, so I ask whether you think that is what people should do. I would be surprised if you meant that, but I want to be sure.

I read too fast and missed the word "generally", so I have to rephrase: how common do you think this is? The word "generally" can mean anything from the most common (possibly just a few percent if there are hundreds of alternatives) to well over half.


Data collection is only a small part of it. I am more interested in how you think one should decide what data are relevant and what data should be rejected as either irrelevant or flawed?

For example, you appear to have quoted Humphreys with approval. There have been several critiques of elements of Humphreys' argument in this thread. What is your reaction? Have you found flaws in the critiques, have you dismissed them as obviously false because the conclusions are wrong, have you changed your mind about some of Humphreys' arguments, are you just not interested in the critiques, something else I haven't thought of?

I wonder in what category Sarfati and Watson would put theistic evolution? The only special creation in there is that of the universe right at the beginning. The rest is empirically indistinguishable from completely naturalistic theories. I think there are also people who think that after the initial creation of the universe there was a second divine intervention to create the first life, then the rest evolved. Evidence against evolution would be evidence against both those theories containing special creation events.

If Sarfati wants to divide ideas into evolution and not evolution, he really has to deal with this problem.

Do you have a solution, iamnotaparakeet?

The whole argument Sarfarti is trying to pull is painful to read. He seems to just be getting a stroke out of reading this statement:

Although he then tried to put it in logic notation to sound smart, he failed absurdly at that.

Watson was not talking about evolution vs. creationism per se . Safarti's reading comprehension skills made him avoid the 'special' word. Watson is simply saying that assuming that a creator made each of the animals is the only alternative to thinking that evolution works in the macro-biology, if you imagine it it is extremely unlikely for it to happen. He was not talking about the origin of life, but about the origin of species.

Honestly, it is about the first mistake creationists make, that evolution talks about the origins of life and not about the origins of species. But there is more: Even in 1929, the evidence against creation was way too strong to be ignored. Sarfari/Other creationists forget to include the quote in its entire context, because Watson said clearly incredible in relation of all the evidence there was against "special creation" back then.

Of course, Watson's argument was made back in 1929, nowadays it is no longer true, evolution can finally be concluded logically from current evidence. On the other hand, special creation remains clearly incredible. So the dichotomy is not necessary anymore to go for evolution (and I do agree that the disjunctive was not the best argument)

Follows then yet another embarrassing attempt to make 'argument from opposition' . If keet has been learning from guys like this one I am not surprised why he tries to pull that argument out every possible time even on threads with a different topic. Sarfari tries to put Watson as a "clear example of evolutionist bigotry" unfortunately, Watson was not ever an authority in regards to evolutionist biologists, not in 1929 and not now.

I guess it is a good idea to post this link: http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evo ... ie031.html

Sarfarti then makes the huge logic screw up every one recognized already and I won't bother mention so more people try to find out by themselves...

PS: That creationists nowadays still try to make up arguments against stuff scientists said almost a century ago is no surprise. YECs like to pretend nothing happened in the last couple of centuries because it is in those centuries that we accumulated enough theories and evidence to show that their ideals of a young earth created by a deity are completely wrong.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 10 Feb 2010, 4:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ahhh, that'll be how I developed out of being a YEC after leaving my primary school.

It is surprising not everyone grows out of at least the first two letters of YEC after primary school...

Not true. Let's put this in perspective. Under that scheme, observation could be discovering something unexpected, hypothesis is a theory not yet verified or tested and experimentation is an attempt to test predictions of your theory (hypothesis according to your scheme) in order to either confirm or falsify it. There are two kinds of astronomical observations with regards to the fields of both cosmology and astrophysics. One could be the discovery of something unexpected (such as dark energy) which scientists would then have to explain, the other is the making of observations in order to check predictions of already existing theories. The second kind of observation I mentioned actually falls into the experimentation part of your scheme. So that scheme you've outlined is actually followed in the fields of both astrophysics and cosmology. You make a discovery through your telescope which you then have to explain with some kind of theory. Your theory then makes predictions which you have to test by making more observations. These observations provide you with data that either confirm or falsify your predictions and also have to be repeated by others. If the data confirms your predictions, you've gained some support or your theory which which may then be further refined depending on your data (the theory part in your scheme). If your original theory is falsified, it'sw back to the drawing board. In addition, those two fields pretty much incorporate the rest of physics. Expect any new physics discovered at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) to influence cosmology.

You know, there's now an iphone app for this sort of thing. It's a list of creationist claims that have been floating around for decades (including these ones) and their well-known refutations. It's indexed by scientific field; most of these are geological claims, not evolutionary ones.

It just seems to me that the observations made to support say, the big bang theory* are too vague and the flaws in that theory too numerous to ignore. I'm not claiming it's not the best one we've got so far, I'm claiming that the evidence for it is too inconclusive, and our knowledge of how the universe works outside of earth too limited, for the theory to be as accepted as it is. I mean, those who believed in spontaneous generation once claimed that to deny the theory was "to deny logic itself", but once we learned more about biology, the idea that maggots where generated by filth became preposterous. It seems to me that the acclaim the theory is held in will frustrate any attempts to refute it, even though evidence for the theory is only looking for something and finding it, no better than the evidence for spontaneous generation, as far as I can tell.

*I am well aware that the big bang theory explains why objects in our universe seem to be moving away from one another, not the creation of the universe. my questions about the theory are made on purely scientific grounds. I would also like to mention that I am trying to gain more information in a field outside my expertise, and feel that another person an explain it better than a wikipedia article can.

Keep looking. There is definite evidence of the Big Bang.Background radiation points directly to it.

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Is there zero chance that that radiation came from something other than the universe exploding?

Zero? Relatively few things are of zero chance-as-perceived.