Proving YouTube Wrong

This is the title I put in my outline so long ago, but it is oversimplified. It was only one YouTube channel in particular that I set out to refute.

At some point I came across Evid3nc3, where a YouTuber, through a series of videos, explains his own experience with deconversion:

I show how evidence, reason, and experiences related to prayer, morality, deconverted Christians, the Bible, and my relationship with God Himself all led to my eventual inability to believe anymore. – Evid3nc3

I was filled with pity and empathy for this deceived soul, and I set out to listen to all his videos, figure out his logical errors, and prove him wrong. I felt it was within my ability and duty to do this, not necessarily for him, but for others like him, and for myself.

…Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you… – 1 Peter 3:15

I was confident that the Bible was true and would stand to debunk his shenanigans and provide satisfactory answers to his conundrums.

I took detailed notes. I prayed, researched, and studied. At times it was uncomfortable; I didn’t like to admit when he made a good point. At times I wrote him off because of his occasional theatrical elements, using “he’s just manipulating emotions” as an excuse to ignore the actual points he was raising. I pressed on with my intent to refute him.

But by digesting his experience and reasons, my pity turned to empathy – truly understanding his perspective, even when I didn’t share his beliefs. And the more I studied things myself (independent of his channel), the more I found myself in the same boat, sharing an experience in many ways similar to his own.

So here is the first video in his series, yet another small influence in where I am today.

Certainty and Comfort

Well, I’ve taken a break from writing lately, but I’m going to try to pick things up here again and finish off the last of my posts categorizing and sharing the reasons that slowly accumulated to change my views into what they are today. Moving along with the next topic in my outline here, this next post deals with my feelings regarding certainty and comfort.

As a teenager I had made a list of reasons for why I believed the Bible. One of them was:

“I like it. It provides comfort. The Bible offers good explanations for evil in the world, for the origin of language, for hope to see loved ones after death”.

Of course at that age I hadn’t studied social psychology, evolutionary explanations for human behavior, or the evolution of human language, etc. The Bible held the only answers I knew of for those topics, and without working knowledge of any alternative theories, I accepted the Bible as the best explanation. And it was an explanation I liked.

Of course we all know that liking something doesn’t make it true.

But I think that liking something can still be a reason people believe things.

And I think it’s important to be aware that it can influence our decisions as an emotional or subconscious reason.

I’ve since learned about a trait called Cognitive Closure, describing people’s need for certainty in their beliefs. Both closure and non-closure have their costs and benefits. Having a higher need for one or the other isn’t morally “better”. Much like introversion vs. extroversion, different people just fall on different sides of the spectrum. I’ve found it useful to recognize this scale exists, helping me understand my own feelings and actions, as well as the actions of others.

Some people need a sense of certainty more strongly than do others. I think I initially had a higher need for closer and certainty when I was young. I wanted the world to be simple, I wanted to know I had the right answers. I wanted black and white.

When I started seeing contradictions, I felt desperate. I clung to the remnants of my faith, calling for God to save me and show me he was real in the face of my growing doubts. No help came. My need for certainty was screaming.

Evolution: Art of Algorithm

Evolution isn’t random. It isn’t just chance. It’s mathematical. It follows the laws of physics, chemistry, and natural selection.

I understand that “reducing” the beauty and complexity of our world to math, to a blind algorithmic process, may seem undesirable or ridiculous.

Image Source

But to me, it’s a little like algorithmic art. Take this image, for example. An ancient ancestor might see its beauty and complexity and, not understanding the actual process that made it, attribute its qualities to the time and skill of a great artist. Yet this complex and beautiful creation, and others like it, was not individually designed by anyone. It is simply a product of unconscious rules and mathematics. But that doesn’t make it any less beautiful, or diminish my awe of the process.

This comparison of course doesn’t prove anything about evolution. But it’s an interesting analogy to me, demonstrating the overall conclusions I had reached: that creation, with all its beauty, complexity, and design, requires math, but not necessarily mind. A mind can use math. And God could use natural selection. But fundamentally the process itself is mathematical.

Evolution: Misconceptions

This post is just a random list of realizations I had over the course of changing my mind,  realizations about my misconceptions of evolution. They are the last of the main points that influenced me and shifted, in my mind, the probability that evolution, rather than YEC, best accounted for the world we see today.

As with all of my posts, I value correction and discussion.

Evolution can’t be true because some creatures, like trilobites, haven’t changed

Sometimes a new creature out-competes its ancestor for its old niche, causing its ancestors to go extinct. But other times newly evolved forms fill new niches in the ecosystem, leaving their ancestors to continue to reproduce un-changed.

Evolution is just random chance; and it’s ridiculous to think random chance made us

Evolution is not random. It it guided by the laws of chemistry, physics, natural selection, etc. An individual mutation might be random chance, but which mutations are selected for and which become dominant in a population is not.

Also, The process of evolution has no goal. It wasn’t striving to create us, or any other specific end product. If there was a goal to create a specific structure or creature, the likelihood it would appear is small. But evolution wasn’t trying to make our modern eye when the first light sensitive cells were formed. The things that happened to be beneficial got passed on, changing into what are today.

Evolution: Irreducible Complexity?

I was taught that the complexity of life must mean there is a creator. I was very familiar with the argument, “You wouldn’t find a watch in the desert and assume it formed itself. Its complexity shows there was a watchmaker.”

I loved this argument as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) because it exemplified what seemed obvious: design necessitates a designer. The problem with the analogy is that a watch has no mechanism to form or change itself, whereas a reproducing organism does. Chemistry, math, and natural selection offer a way for life to form and change, and comparing that to the creation of inanimate objects is irrelevant.

Eyes and bacterial flagellum are two examples of complex structures that many YECs have claimed are irreducibly complex (i.e. only functional in their current complex state and evolutionarily pointless/non-functioning if any one part is removed). However, I no longer find these claims to be convincing. Below are some articles and videos explaining why.

Evolution: Residual Effects

Lots of vestigial organs exist. In our own body, examples include our appendix, erector pili muscles, body hair, palmaris longus muscle in the forearm, and the auricularis muscles around the ear. Other examples include fake sexual activity in Whiptail lizards, the collapsed eyes of the Astyanax Mexicanus fish, and the residual hind leg bones in whales. See more here (1).

Vestigial doesn’t mean these organs or actions are completely devoid of all function today, just that they’re remnants of something that used to be larger or more useful in the past. And while I’ve read the YEC rebuttals, to me they sound like excuses. To me it makes the most sense to acknowledge vestigial remnants as tributes to our evolutionary past.

Footnotes:

(1). http://www.livescience.com/11317-top-10-useless-limbs-vestigial-organs.html

 

Evolution: Niches

One of the reasons I started considering theistic evolution is because animals didn’t make sense to me outside the niches they filled in the ecosystem.

The idyllic image of every animal living in harmony in a tropical paradise makes a nice story, but it doesn’t make sense ecologically. I could picture the lion and the lamb together. But I couldn’t picture the polar bear, the anglerfish, the vulture, the T-rex, the kangaroo, and the panda all thriving in Eden.

These animals co-exist with their environments. Their physiology, habitat, and diet are intertwined. So it seemed reasonable to accept that maybe God designed these animals by letting them grow and evolve alongside the provisions and pressures of their habitats.

Evolution: Unexpected Animals

As a young earth creationist I thought “intermediary forms” didn’t exist (outside the fictional artwork of atheistic textbooks, of course). So I was shocked to discover the actual existence of animals like the Mudskipper (1).

Image Source

This is exactly what I would expect to see if evolution was true. I thought it only existed in the cartoons and imaginations of atheists. But it’s real. It’s freakin’ real!

And there are so many animals like this, unfathomably strange, some beautiful, some horrifyingly repulsive and disgusting. They were arguably the result of a blind process, existing because they “work”, not because they’ve been specifically and individually designed. They survive long enough to reproduce, and that’s all that the laws of natural selection care about. It was hard to imagine these creatures being the purposeful creations of God. Rather, they were what I expected to see in a world formed by evolution (still including theistic evolution).

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part IV)

A lovely, explorable, expanding fractal tree of life:

Here’s their website: http://www.onezoom.org

Please explore. It’s really fascinating and beautiful.

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part III)

I was familiar with the usual animals: dogs, cats, horses, cows, fish, whales, lions, tigers, etc. They were easy to mentally separate into kinds. But I didn’t think much about the African wild dogs and the kiwis, the okapi and the manatees, the tapirs and the fossas; these animals made the lines between “kinds” seem fuzzy.

Here are some connections between animals I had never explored or expected as a young earth creationist:

• Hippos and Whales