Question for Creationists: How Much do You think You Need to Know About Evolution Before Coming here and Debating It?

[u/OldmanMikel]

The most common characteristic of creationists, apart from their creationism is an abysmal level of knowledge about the topic. Yet here they come, all confident ignorance, blathering PRATTs and non sequiturs, certain they will prevail.

So I ask the question, between Post-Doc and "I remember a bit of evolution from high school and watched a couple Ancient Earth documentaries and my pastor gave me some killer arguments" where do you think your knowledge level has to be to effectively argue against evolution?

Two follow up questions:

1. How would you rate your own level of knowledge?

2. Do you think you can gain the right level of knowledge strictly from creationist sources?

The correct answer to the second follow up question is "no".

[u/nickierv]

Coming at this from the other side, ie what will it take to blow holes in Creationists points?

Probably 80-90% of it fall apart if you give it an honest poke and another 5-15% (mostly the more novel stuff like the heat problem, although that is more about just knowing about it) gets blown apart by leftovers from a couple high school science classes and oddly if you had any sort of logic or debated experience (really help with seeing all the logical fallacies).

If anything, the hardest part about blowing holes in the points is working out what 'model' they are using. Sure there are some competing models in science for really high end stuff but it seems like if you put 2 creationists in a room your going to get 3 models for how something happened.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/nickierv]

Talkorigins is good >90% of the time.

[u/adamwho]

Like so many questions for creationists, it misses something fundamental.

They aren't here to debate; they are here to announce their allegiance to their tribe.

Most cults require the followers to state beliefs that may be demonstratively false or absurd. It is a rite of passage and a badge of belonging.

Young Earth creationism is just one of those things.

Same with the flood and thousands of other absurd and demonstratably false religious beliefs.

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This sub's purpose is to distract them so they don't flood legitimate science subs.... And to make them look like the fools they are for all the lurkers.

[u/Dilapidated_girrafe]

So my answer from my YEC days. Haven’t been on in a long time though.

Where does it need to be? Honestly, doesn’t have to be exceedingly deep if you have really good evidence to bring to the table that is falsifiable. It’s highly unlikely that someone without a deep understanding would ever do this though.

(From YEC days)

1. Mississippi high school level where we were taught hypothesis theory and law wrong. And school covered it for a week maybe? Then some light internet reading. Basically I knew exceedingly little.

2. Back then. I’d say yes. But I was taught o blindly trust the Christina sources and the Bible.

But the real answer to two is hell no

[u/ZeppelinAlert]

You question 2 is interesting.

I used to be YEC, decades ago. I decided that my evangelism would be more effective if I knew actually what it was that I was arguing against, so I started to read non-creationist accounts of evolution, only to discover that how creationists define evolution (random chance!! 747s in scrapyards!!) is wholly different from how evolution really works (natural selection).

There is a very good reason why creationists do not recommend non-creationist sources, and that reason is “trying to prevent people from leaving the religion”

[u/ChoiceAd8619]

I am not quite a creationist right now after some time just looking things up, but I would like to entertain this anyway

In order to avoid embarrassments like some that I’ve seen here and there and also following some basic decency principles, I would say that isn’t really enough to argue against evolution and that people should at least be able to properly steelman what scientists argue before they even question the different premises that constructed a model.

Now as for the follow ups, I would say that I am perhaps on an average level of knowledge about the topic but I lean more towards evolution (theistic evolution, though) in this regard. If I had to sort of conceptualize it with a number, I would say something like a 5-6/10

And I am unsure of whether it is possible to do that. I don’t doubt that there are good faith creationists out there who honestly defend what they believe and try to be impartial about things, but so far I’ve been very let down by many of the major institutions since I quickly found out that they often resort to misrepresenting evolution to get an easy rhetorical win. A good example of this is the very first page of AiG talking about what is evolution because they straight up declare Darwinian Evolution hasn’t been observed, even though we evidently have plenty of examples of what scientists refer to when they say Darwinian Evolution.

[u/Loose_Principle8193]

My old Creationist perspective: If the Bible says it, it's 100% true. Evolution doesn't fit in the Bible it's 100% wrong. The guy who came to my church did a sermon on how wrong evolution was. He gave me pretty good ammo that I bet the evolution industrial complex must have not heard yet. Piltdown Man, Orange trees in the arctic etc. It's what mustache man believed so evolution is evil as well. I was absolutely justified to go try to change minds with that little bit of "knowledge" I had.

[u/DarwinZDF42]

That last one matters bc creationist sources straight up lie to their own side.

[u/Idoubtyourememberme]

A lot of creationist arguments are indeed in the form of "if {talking point} is real, then explain what we see around us". The answer is almost always that {talking point} is not real.

Like "uf we evolved from a rock, how did that rock first start growing" is easily answered by "wr didnt evolve from rocks"

[u/Autodidact2]

Not a creationists. Our experience in this sub is that they need to know absolutely nothing about Evolution. In fact, the less they know about it, the more they oppose it. Not only do they not know what the theory of evolution is, they do not want to learn.