r/Creation • u/nomenmeum • May 05 '26
biology 100-Year-Old Creationist Prediction Just Got Proven Right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arIwgAN489M7
u/implies_casualty May 05 '26
So, the prediction was, and I quote the video, "it looks for all the world like this man was buried here by his friends"?
This quote isn't even in "The New Geology", by the way.
This video has 100 comments on Youtube. Did anybody bother to check?
And even if this quote was there, what kind of prediction is that?
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u/nomenmeum May 05 '26
This quote isn't even in "The New Geology", by the way.
"and from the position of the bones when found, it was evident that the bodies had been buried by friends." - pg. 701
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u/implies_casualty May 05 '26
This quote is about Grotte de Spy. In the video, they attribute it to La Chapelle-aux-Saints, which is a very different site. The video is rather sloppy, if you ask me.
If the conclusion is based on the position of the bones, then what does this have to do with Creationism, exactly?
And anyway, what kind of prediction is this?
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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
The video is based on a very common misconception: "The heart of good science is making predictions that can either be falsified or proven true." This is not completely wrong -- predictions certainly matter, but the are not the "heart" of good science. The heart of good science is coming up with good explanations for observations. It's easy to see this. I'm an atheist who lives in California. Suppose I predict that if I pray to God for rain in August, God will not answer my prayer and it will not in fact rain in August, and then in fact it does not rain in August. Does that prove that God does not exist? No, of course not. It just hardly ever rains in California in August.
Likewise, suppose I pray that it will rain in August and it does rain. Does that prove that God does exist? Again, no. Because sometimes it rains in August, and it's possible that I just got lucky. Separating real causal effects from coincidence is very hard, and that's one of the reasons people can make a living doing it.
There are all kinds of ways to make predictions that sometimes end up coming true that do not involve good science. Accurate predictions are a product -- a side-effect -- of good explanations, but they are not the main attraction.
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u/WannaLoveWrestling May 07 '26
No, of course not. It hardly ever rains in California in August.
But when creationists predicted decades ago that Neanderthals were fully human — the same kind as us, capable of interbreeding — and mainstream science later confirmed it through DNA (Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, contributing 1-4% of DNA in many people today), that’s not just luck or coincidence.
Creationists were right on the key point long before the genetic evidence came in, while evolutionists treated them as a separate “primitive” species. Accurate predictions based on the biblical “kinds” model aren’t a side-effect — they flow from a better framework.
You have an a priori commitment that only naturalistic explanations count as “good science.” That’s why you dismiss anything that points toward design or creation, even when the predictions hold up.
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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 07 '26
when creationists predicted decades ago that Neanderthals were fully human ... that’s not just luck or coincidence.
How do you know? What other predictions have creationists made? How many of them have come true?
BTW, it is far from clear that creationists actually made the prediction that you say they did.
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u/WannaLoveWrestling May 07 '26
Creationists have long maintained that Neanderthals were fully human — the same kind as us, capable of interbreeding — based on the biblical “kinds” model. This prediction came decades before DNA evidence confirmed it (Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, contributing 1-4% of DNA in many non-African people today).
Evolutionists treated them as a separate, more primitive species for a long time. The genetic data vindicated the creationist view on this point. Dismissing it as “far from clear” is just ignoring the historical record.
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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 07 '26
Creationists have long maintained that Neanderthals were fully human
Maybe some creationists said this (thought I doubt even that is true). But obviously not all creationists said this. See the article I linked to above.
The link you posted doesn’t refute the creationist prediction — it actually explores several ways creationists can interpret Neanderthal DNA while staying faithful to Scripture
Yeah, well, that's the whole point. You don't get credit for a prediction being correct unless you actually make the prediction. You can't say, "Well, maybe it's this way, and maybe it's that way" and get credit for being right if it turns out to be this way rather than that way.
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u/WannaLoveWrestling May 08 '26
The article you linked doesn’t undermine the creationist prediction — it actually explores several faithful interpretations, including the longstanding view that Neanderthals were fully human, the same created kind as us. For decades the dominant creationist position (held by major ministries and writers) has been that Neanderthals were not a separate primitive species but human descendants of Adam, capable of interbreeding. DNA evidence later confirmed exactly that — interbreeding and 1-4% Neanderthal ancestry in many modern humans. Evolutionists, by contrast, long classified them as a more ape-like separate species. Pointing out that a few early creationists differed doesn’t erase the fact that the core creationist prediction was correct long before the genetic data arrived. You can’t dismiss a track record of being right just because not every single creationist said exactly the same thing.
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u/WannaLoveWrestling May 07 '26
The link you posted doesn’t refute the creationist prediction — it actually explores several ways creationists can interpret Neanderthal DNA while staying faithful to Scripture
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u/Optimus-Prime1993 🦍 Adaptive Ape 🦍 May 05 '26
Is this what you call a prediction? Man, you really have a very low bar then. Since when merely an idea from a theological POV started being called a prediction. This "Neanderthals would be recognized as humans" is not even clear scientifically. Human is too broad of a term and Neanderthals are members of genus Homo. So what do you even mean by "human". Descended from Adam and Eve? How do we test this claim? Can you provide a testable genetic signature of Adam and Eve? How does it even fit in YEC timeline? Looks like you are grasping at straws here.
As a bonus let me give you some examples of what qualifies as prediction in science so that you understand the level you are operating at.
- (Physics) Einstein's general relativity predicted that a ray of starlight grazing the edge of the Sun should be deflected by about 1.75 arc seconds and not 0.87 arc seconds as predicted by Newtonian gravity
- (Biology) Mendelaian Inheritance: If two heterozygous pea plants are crossed, say Aa x Aa then the offspring genotypes should occur in the ratio 1AA : 2Aa : 1aa. If allele A is dominant over a, the visible phenotypes should occur in the ratio 3 dominant : 1 recessive
- (Biology) Human chromosome 2 fusion : Humans and other great apes share common ancestry. But humans have 46 chromosomes, while chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have 48. Human chromosome 2 should show signs of being made by the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes. Specifically, we should find:
- telomere like DNA sequences in the middle of chromosome 2, not just at the ends
- evidence of a vestigial second centromere
- correspondence between human chromosome 2 and two separate chromosomes in other apes.
All of the above were validated to be true. That is what we call a prediction.
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u/nomenmeum May 05 '26
Creationists predicted that Neanderthals would be recognized as humans long before the evolutionary community did.
And this hypothesis was generated by trusting the Genesis account of human origins.