NewStats: 3,261,627 , 8,174,549 topics. Date: Thursday, 29 May 2025 at 08:05 PM 3d2263

Won't anybody try and answer these questions? Olaadegbu, KingEbuka'sBlog, felixomor, shadeyinka, butterflylion, dalaman, therationa, AgentOfAllah, DoctorAlien, Antiparticle.

How baraminology produces observed diversity

Creationists hold that baraminology explains the diversity of life observed today despite the extinction level event of the alleged global flood. This requires new species to diverge — by whatever means — from the original "kinds" taken on board Noah's ark. Todd Charles Wood estimates, from the fossil record and Biblical text, that 15 million species arose in only three to four centuries after the flood, and many of those are now extinct.

This poses a sizable problem, because proponents of baraminology are the same people who reject most of evolution, asserting that new species do not, an d cannot, form over time. According to them, only "microevolution" occurs, since horses are still horses and haven't evolved into anything startlingly different in the last few hundred years. (Creationists also have yet to clearly distinguish the "microevolution" process they accept from the "macroevolution" processes they reject, which they define as one kind descending from another.)
And there is the little issue of the separation of living things into species. If baramins are the things that were created by God, are species just accidents, things that came about by random chance after the Flood? The Bible doesn't tell us that God had anything to do with the origins of species, does it?

Extreme rates of differentiation

The problem is that evolution just does not happen as fast as would be needed. Baraminology requires a mechanism that causes diversification at super-evolutionary speeds. If genetic differentiation could occur fast enough for several thousand creatures to result in the many tens of thousands of vertebrate species alone, then it would be simple enough to submit the "proof" of evolution that creationists often ask for — showing one species developing into a totally divergent one in a few generations.
The greatly increased mutation rate that baraminology requires to achieve this differentiation would have caused severe problems in the organismal populations. The mutation rate required for such rapid genetic change would not leave enough viable genomes for negative mutations to be selected out of the gene pool.
There are an estimated four harmful mutations per zygote (embryo) Link: http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297%2807%2962663-9.
Normally, this is not a problem because nearly all mutations are recessive, and natural selection can weed out these malignant changes. Baraminology would require the rate of mutation to be sped up by a factor of up to 250,000, and we could expect to see a gigantic influx of mutations approaching one million detrimental genetic changes per fertilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mPPnN1c0jk. This would result, of course, in the sudden termination of all life on earth.
In addition, genetic mutations cause most types of cancer; an increase of even a few hundred times, far less than baraminology demands, would have tremendous and fatal consequences for animal life.
Of course, one could resort to special pleading that God "switched on", and then "switched off", the high-speed differentiation. Baraminologists have presented no evidence as to why God is unwilling and/or unable to repeat such a process now or in the future, or indeed any evidence that such a thing has happened in the past, particularly as fossil evidence only indicates a smooth and relatively slow evolutionary process. Even the best evidence for rapid evolutionary change (known as punctuated equilibrium) — such as the Lenski experiment or the Cambrian explosion — do not show evolution happening anywhere near fast enough for such rapid genetic differentiation to be realistic.

Even animals do not do it, to show you how disgusting & morally wrong it is! The designer & giver of life knows it is wrong!

Wikipedia link:https://www.0.freebasics.com/https/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals?iorg_service_id_internal=1547440102204384%3BAfotnKgAivGDMsa7

Homosexual behavior in animals

Homosexual behavior in animals is sexual behavior among non-human species that is interpreted as homosexual or bisexual. This may include same-sex sexual activity, courtship, affection, pair bonding, and parenting among same-sex animal pairs.[1][2][3] Various forms of this are found in every major geographic region and every major animal group. The sexual behavior of non-human animals takes many different forms, even within the same species, though homosexual behavior is best known from social species.

Scientists perceive homosexual behavior in animals to different degrees. The motivations for and implications of these behaviors have yet to be fully understood.[citation needed] According to Bruce Bagemihl, the animal kingdom engages in homosexual behavior "with much greater sexual diversity – including homosexual, bisexual and nonreproductive sex – than the scientific community and society at large have previously been willing to accept."[4] Bagemihl adds, however, that this is "necessarily an of human interpretations of these phenomena".[5] Simon LeVay stated that "[a]lthough homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity."[6] One species in which exclusive homosexual orientation occurs, however, is that of domesticated sheep (Ovis aries).[7][8] "About 10% of rams (males), refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams."[8]

According to Bagemihl (1999), same-sex behavior (comprising courtship, sexual, pair-bonding, and parental activities) has been documented in over 450 species of animals worldwide

Er excuse me felixomor, but your refutation to this resurrection contradiction issue has given me a lot of problems. To see whether or not you are correct, I suggest that we walk through it, step by step (I would appreciate it if you answered my questions directly, rather than directing me to another website). So, according to you, the empty tomb discovery in the book of Luke, takes place chronologically before that of the book of John. I believe that for the sake of argument, this has been established between you and your critics. I believe that your next claim is that, in Luke's , apart from Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, there were other women who followed them to the tomb and found the man. Then, in the book of John, where the second visit takes place, it is Mary Magdalene that is weeping for Jesus's body. Am I following? Please answer yes or no. If you answer no, then correct me so that we can continue to the next step.

Hello DoctorAlien.
I have read about the RATE project on Wikipedia and while it had some strong names on its team, there were still numerous issues with it that do not allow us to accept a young age of the earth.

For one, the of that project itted that there was evidence for an age of the earth as far back as 500 million years.

Also, the conclusions that they came to had two major problems with them

This is from the Wikipedia page
"Accelerated nuclear decay Edit
Based on these findings, the authors postulated that nuclear decay rates were accelerated by a factor of approximately 500 million during the Creation week and at the time of the Flood. Short-lived isotopes such as 14C were not affected, while long-lived isotopes such as 40K were affected by a factor of a billion or more. Stable isotopes were apparently not affected.

They identified two unresolved problems with this theory. One was excessive heat generation, which would have been sufficient to raise the temperature of the earth's surface to 22,000 °C,[3] sufficient to evaporate the earth unless some extraordinary cooling mechanism were applied. They acknowledged that neither conduction, nor convection, nor radiation could remove this heat quickly enough, and that therefore a new, esoteric solution would have to be found. They further acknowledged that this solution would also have to have cooled some material more than others to prevent the oceans from freezing over.

The other problem is excessive radiation generation, which would have killed Noah and his engers on the Ark by the radiation generated from ratioisotopes such as 40K in their own bodies.
"
Full link:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATE_project?iorg_service_id_internal=1547440102204384%3BAfqFiKJD9A_en_jW

So I hope you understand why their findings cannot be accepted, as they themselves know that there are problems with their conclusions

Also, the change in the speed of light also known as c-decay, comes with some serious problems of its own, the major one being:
The mass of an object is dependent on the speed of light.

You probably already know the equation :
E=mc^2
Where
E=energy
M=mass and
C= speed of light in a vacuum

It basically states that matter and energy are two forms of the same thing and that in an object they are proportional to each other with c as their constant. So if the speed of light were to, for instance, decrease, then the amount of matter in a body would also have decreased. But we know that matter and energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, only converted to another form or energy, so it makes it impossible for the speed of light in a vacuum to change.

>10,000

Evidence for a minimum age of 10 thousand years.

Thermoluminescence dating: 10,000

See the Wikipedia article on Thermoluminescence dating.
Thermoluminescence dating is a method for determining the age of objects containing crystalline minerals, such as ceramics or lava. These materials contain electrons that have been released from their atoms by ambient radiation, but have become trapped by imperfections in the mineral's structure. When one of these minerals is heated, the trapped electrons are discharged and produce light, and that light can be measured and compared with the level of surrounding radiation to establish the amount of time that has ed since the material was last heated (and its trapped electrons were last released).

Although this technique can date objects up to approximately 230,000 years ago, is only accurate on objects 300 to 10,000 years in age. This is, however, still over 4,000 years older than the creationist figure for the age of the Earth.[2]

Dendrochronology: 11,700


Clearly defined tree rings.

Building backwards.[3]
See the main article on this topic: Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology is a method of dating based on annual tree growth patterns called tree rings. Tree rings are the result of changes in the tree's growth speed over the year, because trees (in normal conditions in temperate regions) grow faster in the summer and slower in the winter. Thus, a tree's age can be found by counting the rings. Dendrochronology is the only method on this list that can date events precisely to a single year.

The thickness of tree rings varies with the local seasonal weather, so a sequence of thick ring, thin ring, thin ring, thick ring, thick ring, thick ring, thin ring, thick ring shared by two trees is strong evidence that the corresponding rings formed at the same time. Each individual tree only covers the span of time it was alive and growing, but as these spans overlap it is possible to match up overlapping sections and work backwards. By observing and analyzing the rings of many different trees from the same area, a map of the past can be recreated.

Even dates derived from individual trees contradict the recent-creation doctrine, since the oldest trees pre-date the supposed global flood. There are two known living trees that are older than 4,350 years (the global flood would have occurred in 2348 BCE, according to Ussher) -- Methuselah

Wikipedia's W.svg
is 4851 years old (501 years too old) and a currently unnamed tree is 5069 years old (719 years too old). One dead tree also fits the bill -- Prometheus

Wikipedia's W.svg
was 4899 years old (549 years too old).

The oldest plant alive has been dated back as far as 11,700 years (7369 years too old) and is called King Clone. King Clone's age is not precise to a given year, as it wasn't dated by dendrochronology proper (counting rings). Instead, KC was dated by applying known patterns of plant growth to a single organism that self-reproduces by "cloning".[4]

Linguistics: 14,000

Linguists divide languages into groups, called, families, based on descent. These groups are given names, often from their locations, and these languages derive from one common ancestor(much like biological evolution), and this common ancestor is usually named by adding "proto" before the name of the group. For example, the group including nearly all European languages and many north Indian languages is named Indo-European, and the ancestor of this language is known as Proto-Indo-European. The locations and dates of these languages can be rather accurately guessed at from linguistic, anthropological, and archeological evidence. One example is the group of languages in the Middle East and north Africa known as Afro-Asiatic languages. They include ancient Egyptian and Akkadian, among many others. Ancient Egyptian and Akkadian were both written well over 4,000 years ago, and are rather different from each other, and therefore a common ancestor of the two must be older than 6,000 years. Through more rigorous research, linguists estimate the age of Proto-Afro-Asiatic to be anywhere from 12,000 to 18,000 years old. The fact that Egyptian, Sumerian, and several other languages were written centuries before the date of the great flood is also rather convenient.

Oxidizable carbon ratio dating: 20,000

Oxidizable carbon ratio dating is a method for determining the absolute age of charcoal samples with relative accuracy. This dating method works by measuring the ratio of oxidizable carbon to organic carbon. When the sample is freshly burned, there will be no oxidizable carbon because it has been removed by the combustion process. Over time this will change and the amount of organic carbon will decrease to be replaced by oxidizable carbon at a linear rate. By measuring the ratio of these two allotropes, one can determine ages of over 20,000 years ago with a standard error under 3%.[5]

Widmanstatten patterns: >57,300


A Widmanstatten pattern in a Gibeon meteorite
Wikipedia's W.svg
.
See the Wikipedia article on Widmanstätten pattern.
Widmanstätten patterns are crystals composed of nickel and iron that are found in some meteorites.

Widmanstatten patterns have never been produced in the laboratory. This is because nickel-iron crystals can only grow this large (several centimeters) when they cool at an extremely slow rate of about 100-10,000 degrees Celsius per million years, from a starting point of about 500-700 degrees Celsius[6] to a temperature of about -73 Celsius.[7] Even at its shortest (starting at 500 degrees and cooling to -73 Celsius at 10,000 degrees per million years), this process would still take 57,300 years. The longest cooling ages have been reported at 10 million years.[6]

To date, the only creationist response is that meteorites couldn't be that hot for that long because space is cold,[8] which is patently absurd.[note 3][note 4]

>100,000

Evidence for a minimum age of 100 thousand years.

Mitochondrial Eve: 99,000

See the main article on this topic: Mitochondrial Eve
Since the mitochondria in sperm are in the tail (which does not enter the egg), the DNA contained therein comes from the egg. Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent woman with an unbroken female line of descendants. She is estimated to have lived from 99,000 to 234,000 years ago.[9][10][11][12][13]

There is a male equivalent to Mitochondrial Eve: Y-chromosomal Adam.

Lack of DNA in fossils: 100,000

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the universal carrier of genetic information, is present in all organisms while they are alive. When they die, their DNA begins to decay under the influence of hydrolysis and oxidation. The speed of this decay varies on a number of factors. Sometimes, the DNA will be gone within one century, and in other conditions, it will persist for as many as one million years. The average amount of time detectable DNA will persist though is somewhere in the middle; given physiological salt concentrations, neutral pH, and a temperature of 15°C, it would take around 100,000 years for all the DNA in a sample to decay to undetectable levels.[14]

If fossils of the dinosaurs were less than 6,000 years old, detectable fragments of DNA should be present in a sizable percent of dinosaur fossils, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic regions where the decay of DNA can be slowed down 10-25 fold. A claim that soft tissues in a Tyrannosaurus fossil had been recovered in 2005[15] has since been shown to be mistaken,[16] ing the idea that dinosaur fossils are extremely old.[17] More recent work appears to Schweitzer’s claim with limited speculation on how the DNA survived.[18]Prior to this was a report on DNA extraction from a 3.8 million-year-old ostrich egg shells.

The evidence against a recent creation is overwhelming. With the possible exception of Flat Earthism, there is no greater affront to science than Young Earth creationism (YEC).
This article collects evidences that place a lower limit on the age of the Universe beyond the 6,000 to 10,000 years asserted by most Young Earth creationists (YECs) and the literalist Ussher chronology. All of this evidence s deep time: the idea, considered credible by scientists since the early 1800s, that the Earth (and the Universe) is millions[note 1] or billions of years old. Modern science accepts that the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old and the entire universe is around 13.77 billion years old.[note 2]
These limits usually take the form: "Because we observe [X], which occurs at rate [Y], the universe must be at least [Z] years old". There are three standard creationist responses: First, creationists assert that current rates (Y) are different than past rates. It is possible that these rates changed — but under uniformitarianism, which is necessary for science to function, we must assume that rates did not change unless there is evidence for this change. Second, creationists appeal to the Omphalos hypothesis and argue that God deceptively created the world to appear old. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and is unscientific. Third, creationists ignore the evidence and deny that [X] exists altogether or assert that belief in a Young Earth is based on faith, not science. All of these answers are critically flawed.
These ages weren't just made up — or, worse, accepted to "give evolution enough time". Each was concluded from a range of experiments and observations made across multiple disciplines of science, including astronomy, geology, biology, palaeontology, chemistry, geomorphology and physics. For YEC to be true, each of these fields would have to be incorrect about almost everything. Some of these reported ages have indeed been revised based on new evidence (sometimes larger, sometimes smaller), but never to the orders of magnitude required by YEC.
Moreover, these dating methods are not mutually exclusive: where their range, accuracy, and applicability overlap, the dates they produce agree with each other. (For example, all dating methods for the age of the Earth agree on a 4.4-4.6 billion year-old world.) This is important especially because YECs regularly claim that radiometric dating is unreliable — yet radiometric dating is unnecessary to prove an old universe, because we have many methods of dating at our disposal.
What follows is 33 independent reasons not to believe in a young Earth:

Why is the universe so hostile?
“ Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" ”
—As quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams

A common argument either for the existence of God or the benevolence of an intelligent designer is the fact that the world is perfectly made for us. Indeed, the very fact we exist at all is therefore used as proof of creation. So, how ideal is our world - the planet and the universe - itself for human life anyway?
The majority of the planet's surface is covered in salt water, hardly conducive to human life. While organisms tend to be mostly water and must replenish it to survive, drinking water with such high levels of salt dehydrates the body and can kill. Yes, you can die of thirst pretty quickly when stranded in an ocean, you don't want to be caught out there without some supplies. Another large proportion of the land surface is mountainous and not particularly hospitable. Here, the land isn't particularly fertile and usable resources are scarce. Go really high up and the oxygen content in the air drops - and above certain altitudes it becomes impossible to adapt to. Again, not ideal conditions for human life. The ice caps (well, at least some of the creationists who happen to be climate change deniers will say God is letting them expand the kingdom there by removing the ice caps through climate change) are even less welcoming still, and even indigenous people have to rely on a degree of technology and hunting skill to survive there. Then there are deserts, where specially adapted life forms such as the camel can survive well, but a human might be lucky to last a few days, if not just mere hours. In fact, there are few places on Earth that can be said to be "ideal" for human life - and Africa and the Middle-East where civilisation was first founded aren't among them.
Furthermore, we have many natural predators (if we didn't have technology to defend us, we'd be considerably farther down the food chain) and our lack of fur or other specialisation makes the heat and cold potentially lethal. Monsoons and storms can drown us, tornadoes can destroy our homes and are powerful enough to shred us to pieces, and then there are viruses and bacteria (arguably our remaining natural predators) that can make short work of human populations if they're not equipped, by science and technology, to deal with them.
And that's just on the minute portion of the universe called planet Earth; just about all the rest of the entire universe could never harbor human life, at least in its present and supposedly "designed" state. There are gas giant planets that would crush us, the vacuum of space that is literally wasted space as far as we're concerned, the surface of stars that would burn us in the click of a finger (if the gravitational tidal forces didn't tear us molecule from molecule first) and vast regions of space polluted with electromagnetic radiation that would kill us in short order.
In our natural, naked state—as creationists would envision Adam and Eve being born—the world is anything but nice to us. To argue that it was specifically designed for us would almost be laughable when you actually consider all of the universe and stop focusing only on the bits that aren't out to kill us.
So, why is the universe—if built especially for us—in fact so hostile towards us?

Why is God's design repetitive and imperfect?
Assuming that God is not limited in any way, then he should have been able to design every animal so that it was individual and unique. Yet still we we find clear relationships between groups of animals strongly suggesting common ancestry. Not only was this suggested by homology, but managed to fit in with fossil evidence showing divergence, experiments showing speciation and eventually DNA evidence that matched. In short, common ancestry of similar looking creatures is pretty much assured by every single piece of evidence that is physically possible to obtain. Whether it is outward appearance, genetics, embryonic growth, cellular chemistry, skeletal structure or fossil records, these relationships make many animals seem broadly the same underneath. We even find relationships between groups of animals which are not even in the same families by using DNA, as it is the basis of all animal life and can demonstrate far more distant relations.
If these organisms are designed despite this appearance, then they raise some very important questions about the nature of the designer:
Why would God design something evil like a parasitic wasp or polio?
Why would God design something unnecessary like an ostrich's wing?
Why would God design something imperfect which included vestigial organs such as the palmaris longus?
All of the above make perfect sense if life evolved as a form of selfish survival and unguided adaptation. For instance, the laryngeal nerve routes in an homologous way between mammals and fish, moving around analogous arteries in the exact same way; except in mammals this exactly analogous route around the body is long and convoluted but in fish it appears more direct and makes sense. A slow evolution from one animal to the other would produce these results. These facts would make no sense if life was intentionally created by a perfect (and Good) designer - at best we could call it "incompetent design" or "unimaginative design".
So why would a designer, with intelligence, omnipotence, infinite imagination, unlimited ability, and so on, actively, and intentionally, decide to include these bizarre quirks that happen to make sense in the light of evolution?
A common counterargument is that the imperfect bits of nature were created to test or punish us, or were caused by Satan. This results in an unfalsifiable Morton's fork, where every good part of nature is a sign of God's grace and every bad part of nature is a sign of God's punishment.

Who designed and created God?
Many of the arguments for the existence of God, and for creationism, rest upon the question of what created the universe. This is the first cause argument that puts God as the answer, and is often backed up by William Lane Craig's first premise in his version of the argument: "what begins to exists must have a cause". However, this isn't consistently applied to God - which is asserted to exist, but is somehow immune from this premise by an eternal (and slightly very question begging) nature. Craig's wording there ("what begins to exist" is almost certainly an attempt to get around the problem, but again it's assuming what it's trying to prove. As Carl Sagan put it, "If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?". This is a sticking point mostly in theology, so what does it have to do with ID and/or creationism? In much the same way we can apply the first cause argument to God, we can apply the argument from design to God, also.
Creationists (and especially intelligent design advocates) consider life to be irreducibly complex, meaning it could not arise through gradual changes proposed by natural selection and evolutionary biology. This forms a basic pillar of intelligent design, and without it the entire concept dies before it can even get out of the starting blocks - the fact that irreducible complexity isn't the case in the natural world isn't particularly relevant to this point, however.
A problem arises when we apply this exact same reasoning consistently to everything. Those who believe irreducible complexity as a problem for evolution would state that humans are irreducibly complex, so must have had a designer and came into being through a special creation. This makes sense if you can rule out gradual, naturalistic changes. But whatever this designer is, it must be far more complex than a human being - and indeed the universe itself.
This is true because whatever the intelligent designer must be, it must be able to hold all the necessary information for the design (whether it be a body, or the entire universe) at a minimum and then add in all the information about how to create the design process, modify it, create it and then all the information necessary to be itself. This is complexity by necessity; an intelligent creator is necessarily complex in order to fit any meaningful definition of "intelligent creator" and actually have the ability to go about intelligently creating anything! Simple assertions that God is not complex (Alvin Plantinga, for instance, suggests God is exempt from being complex due to being supernatural) don't so much answer this point as handwave it away and pretend it doesn't exist. Even assuming different rules for the "supernatural" components, God must have an interface with the real, material universe that is necessarily as complex as the universe itself, in order to transfer the information required to satisfy omniscience.
The designer, therefore, should also be irreducibly complex and would require a further designer, by this same line of reasoning.
Who designed God? Why would God be exempt from the same criteria used to supposedly "prove" that an intelligent, personal entity exists? Why is God deg or creating himself not just a case of special pleading? And if He was never created but always existed, then that invalidates the original premise that everything, in fact, needs a creator.

What if the Bible is a divine hoax?
Creationists are almost always biblical literalists and take the Bible at face value. However, given its violent, bizarre and sometimes contradictory content, there is a case to be made that even if the Bible is divinely inspired, it does not follow that the god who inspired it was being sincere. Although the God of the Bible could exist in some form, it is equally probable that this God is actually deceitful, and he devised the Bible (and possibly other holy books) as a test to separate the gullible from the skeptical, with the latter being rewarded in the afterlife.
Ask yourself which of those four possibilities is the most likely: that the Bible is true when taken at face value, that it is a rather cruel divine hoax, that some of it should be taken at face value and other parts allegorical, or that it is neither and was written by humans. Most reasonable people will choose one of the latter two.

Whose creation?

Uranus, the god of the sky, and Terra (Gaia), goddess of the Earth.
This is perhaps the question that all religious mythology and belief boils down to, since—contrary to what YECs would have you believe—it's not a simple choice of either young-earth creationism or atheism. One can discuss cosmological arguments or ontological arguments all day—but do these actually prove what is really being stated by most creationists: that it is their god, specifically, who has created the world, literally as their holy book and priests tell them? Let's just start with a brief outline of various creation myths:
Hinduism
Hindu creation states that this isn't the first universe, nor is it the last. These universes are created by Brahma (the Creator), maintained by Vishnu (the Preserver), and eventually destroyed by Shiva (obviously, the Destroyer). Hindu creation involves a far more metaphorical and philosophical interpretation than the Biblical literalism we're used to. They don't attest that the universe is insanely young, for instance, stating that Brahma sleeps and the world is destroyed, and awakes, to create it again, on a cycle longer than four billion years. In general, Hinduism doesn't conflict with evolution and so we don't hear about this story so much.
Islam
Islamic creation has a striking similarity to Christian creationism—which is unsurprising, as Islam is derived from Judeo-Christian mythology. It possesses features such as the "6 days" (although translations can also vaguely mean "stages" and that humans are descended from a specially created Adam. While Islam does tend to frown on evolution, and Harun Yahya is well-known as one of the most pathetic creationists in the world, it doesn't mandate a particularly young Earth. Yes, the Islamic ones are typically Old Earth Creationists.
Buddhism
As a religion that came out of Hinduism, Buddhism teaches something very similar to that of Hindu mythology—talking of universes that are cyclic and that reincarnate on a regular basis. As Buddhism (or certain flavors of it, at least) is, for lack of a better term, actually atheistic in its way, it doesn't possess a literal creation story. But it does state how long the universe should exist, and that it is consumed with fire at the end, and that beings are reincarnated in other realms.
Ancient Egypt
But existing religions aren't the only ideas we need to consider to properly assess creationism. Ancient Egypt has a series of creation myths associated with its ancient religions. In the beginning, there was only water, the Nun, and from this everything flowed. Dry land first appeared, one hilltop at a time, at the will of the creator Atum, and then other gods were created by Atum in turn to build the world. Several writings suggest that it is Atum's semen that forms the world (yum!).
Makiritare
The Makiritare creation story starts in a way that would make Douglas Hoftstadter proud: "The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming them." A lot of smoking and maracas later, the world was made from cracked eggs and metaphors about being reborn.
Shinto
Izanagi and Izanami are central deities in the Japanese creation myth. This gets particularly good when Izanagi thrusts his "jewelled spear" into the primorial ooze and then spills a "salty substance" that eventually becomes the land. It gets weirder from there. In fact, it seems like it's only really the Judeo-Christian mythology and its derivatives that don't have an overwhelming abundance of sexual metaphor in them (unless you count the snake, of course).
Aboriginal
The native religions of aboriginal tribes in Africa, the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere each have their own creation story, and they're all different from one another. They're often patently silly; for instance, the Gagudju of Australia's Northern Territory believe that their creator god got stuck in the mud, and so created everything around him. (You might notice at this point the creation of things/people from mud being a frequent theme in these stories.) As ridiculous as such a story sounds to us, the Gagudju believe it as sincerely as Evangelical Christians believe their own creation story.
But what is the point of going over these? Simply put, why is any particular story in the list more valid than the others? A good, strong theory—and that Biblical literalists and young Earth creationists like to call what they do "science"—must not only explain evidence presented but explain why other competing theories don't quite work. Creationists have only their own specific god in mind when they talk of creation, or of "teaching the controversy", and never try to for other potential creation stories.
So, why are all of the above, and the countless others that haven't been explicitly mentioned, wrong, and why is your particular story right? The bottom line is that, without solid evidence to back up your ideas, you have no reality check, no way to justify why your explanation for things is more valid than those of other peoples

Why is the Moon full of craters, but the Earth not?

The Mare Humboldtianum, and accompanying craters. You can even spot a couple of craters inside other craters.
If we look up at Earth's Moon, or any moon or asteroid in the solar system without an ice coating or a thick atmosphere, we immediately spot one thing that differentiates them from Earth: the presence of an enormous number of craters. In a Young Earth view, what explains the high number of craters on the Moon compared to the low number of craters on the Earth?
The naturalistic explanation for this fact runs like so: the Earth and Moon have been exposed to the same number of meteor impacts across time; however, the Earth possesses an atmosphere and hydrosphere that continually erode and "renew" the surface of the Earth. Geologists talk of "old" and "new" surfaces based on how old their features are before being churned up by tectonic activity, impact events, or natural erosion. So in this sense, the Earth has a "new" surface because of its atmosphere and the moon has an "old" surface because it lacks a significant atmosphere. By figuring out the rate of asteroid impacts in the solar system and comparing it to the number of impact craters on the Moon, we can arrive at an approximate age for the Moon. Secondly, rates of erosion can be calculated simply by looking at how easily coastal waters or wind can wear down rock, and we would expect that over millions or billions of years the craters on the Earth's surface would wear away.
But this isn't the only issue when it comes to explaining impact craters. There are 300,000 craters wider that 1km, just on the near side of the Moon. Obviously, no one has recorded the Moon being struck by meteors for some time so large events must be pretty rare—for instance, the Giordano Bruno crater is attributed to the following observation by Canterbury monks in 1178:
“”There was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.
With modern technology we can observe the frequency of the more common smaller impact events, such as those associated with known and predictable meteor showers. Yet it is the far larger events we need to concern ourselves with. If hundreds of thousands of these events were squeezed into a few thousand years, as opposed to billions, then we surely would have noticed it. Ancient cultures would have recorded the impacts easily, as they would have to happen almost daily to for so many—and compressing all those impacts into shorter and shorter "pre-history" time frames only makes problems far worse. If the Moon was being pelted with craters at a rate high enough to pepper it like that in under 6000 years, then the Earth would similarly be swamped with extinction events that would have rendered it uninhabitable!
Answers not being accepted for this one include: circular ones, such as "the world is 6000 years old, therefore uniformitarianism must be wrong" as you would have to offer an actual explanation as to why those assumptions are incorrect; Goddidit ones, such as "the flood did it", as the wide variety of structures and erosion patterns in the world certainly aren't consistent with a single sudden source of erosion; and silly ones, like the lunar Mess hypothesis, because that's really beyond ridiculous. These standard answers make no sense in either logical or physical . What would be the purpose of specially creating the Moon with a cratered appearance, and specially creating the Earth with a few major impact sites, such as the imaginatively titled Meteor Crater in Arizona, still visible? As always, when considering the evidence available, special creation is no better than Last Thursdayism.

Why is life so diverse given the current rate of mutation?
Baraminology is the proposed creationist solution to the problem that Noah couldn't have put all the world's species on the ark. It posits that Noah only needed to take a few species, or "kinds", with him - and the diversity of life since then has arisen through some form of natural selection.
For instance, there is an proposed "cat" kind which is claimed to have given rise to both domestic cats and big cats, and a "horse" kind that covers horses and ponies and even zebras. However, by reducing the millions of species observed today to a few thousand, creationists have given themselves the problem of explaining present-day diversity.
Simply put, the presently observed rate of natural selection isn't compatible with generating this diversity from a mere handful of individuals in the space of only 4000 years, and as a consequence Baraminology is often mocked for requiring an unbelievable rate of "super-evolution" in order to get around the problem. The wake of this rapid genetic change would be readily observable today or within recorded history - with species diversifying almost within a single generation.
Even assuming that the rate of evolution has slowed down so that we can no longer observe this "super-evolution", the diversification must have stopped thousands of years ago - shortening the space of time in which it needs to occur from 4000 years to 2000 years or significantly less. For life to move from only two or seven of one kind into the multitude of species observed today in a shorter period of time would require one species to actively give birth to offspring of a different species; this particular requirement for "super-evolution" is especially ironic considering that creationists say evolution cannot happen because monkeys giving birth to humans isn't observed. Evolution doesn't require this, but thanks to the reduction in the number of species required by baraminology, young-earth creationism does.
How do creationists even begin to explain this "super-evolution", even though by some of their own argumentation it doesn't actually happen?

Why are many DNA errors shared between humans and chimpanzees?
The genetic code of most organisms is rife with errors, nonfunctional genes, remnants of viruses, and pointless repetitions. For example, a small number of species have a defective gene that prevents them from synthesizing vitamin C from glucose, and this includes humans. Surely this can't be the work of a perfect creator: does He want His creations afflicted with scurvy? Creationists suggest that all these errors are a product of decay and mutation after the Fall of Man. However, they agree that mutations are random. We should therefore expect each "kind" of animal to have accumulated different errors. Creationists consider humans and chimpanzees to belong to different "kinds". Yet, they share a great number of errors in their DNA: for example, they have at least 11 shared endogenous retroviruses.
Why did humans acquire the same errors as chimpanzees? Why is this pattern of similarity in DNA errors something very common in all life, to the point that evolutionary scientists use the analysis of these errors as one of the most reliable methods of establishing common ancestry?

Why do humans have an immune system?
Before the Fall of Man, humans were supposed to live in paradise. Animals would not eat each other, but only plants, and there was no disease. It would make no sense for God to create humans with an immune system, because it would be useless; therefore it must have arisen after the Fall. However, the complexity of the human immune system is astonishing, and certainly meets the criteria of what intelligent design creationists refer to as irreducible complexity. How do you solve this contradiction? Did God create our immune system for us (and for the other plants and animals)? If so, why such an imperfect one, that many are killed by disease?

A response to the Question Evolution campaign.
(Of course, anyone who has debated with creationists knows that when all else fails goddidit, and they win. But it's worth a try, anyhow)

Questions
1 How do you know?
2 Why are there precariously balanced rock formations?
3 Why are there salt deposits?
4 How did sedimentary layers form?
5 Why are there no fossils of modern animals?
6 How did the Earth survive all the radioactive decay?
7 Why is the Moon full of craters, but the Earth not?
8 Why is life so diverse given the current rate of mutation?
9 Why are many DNA errors shared between humans and chimpanzees?
10 Why do humans have an immune system?
11 Why is the universe so hostile?
12 Why is God's design repetitive and imperfect?
13 Who designed and created God?
14 What if the Bible is a divine hoax?
15 Whose creation

How do you know?
One of the most well-worn canards that creationists use against evolution is the phrase "How do you know? Were you there?" This is used to imply that without direct observation, and someone being there to witness either the beginning of life or to cover every single one of the millions of years required for evolution, it cannot be confirmed. Yet, the exact question can be turned back on any historical event - real or mythological. For instance, was anyone from Answers in Genesis or Creation Ministries International present in the Garden of Eden at the start? Did any of them personally board the ark and see the flood? Were any of the school children who are told by Ken Ham to parrot "How do you know? Were you there?", in the face of other compelling evidence, there to actually see who Cain and Abel were able to marry and breed with to continue the human species?
Of course, there's the Bible. Right? But we can similarly expand the question to ask if anyone was there when the Bible was being written. Did anyone personally observe the 6 day literal creation of the Earth and give eyewitness testimony today that couldn't have been either made up or fabricated thousands of years ago? Even given the New Testament, where events slightly line up with established history, was anyone personally there to confirm that those events were real and not, perhaps, made up or embellished by the authors? The usual analogy given is that of eyewitnesses to a crime, testifying in court. Yet those using the analogy fail to notice that eyewitness testimony is some of the most unreliable evidence that can be presented; people can misinterpret events, mis them, or simply lie. Hard evidence, on the other hand, is far more concrete and more issible, being less prone to tampering or basic human failures in memory and recollection. If creationists demand eyewitnesses to evolution, then everyone else is equally entitled to eyewitnesses to special creation and witnesses to corroborate that those claims aren't made up. And further witnesses to testify that those people aren't lying. Oh, and additional witnesses to make sure that by this point people aren't just repeating a lie because it's established.
The other problem with the Bible is that by assuming God to be omnipotent it kind of works against the case of ing the Bible to be the word of God. Whether the Bible says itself to be the word of God doesn't count. Simply put, given God's omnipotence by definition, there is no way to distinguish between genuine revelation of God from some faith-testing device from arbitrary non-God entity because there is no satisfactory answer to the question "Can god create authentication scheme/encryption secure enough that even God cannot crack?". Once you attribute the Bible to be the word of God because you believe Bible is something God would have revealed to you, the fact that you have a reference point to compare to means that neither the reference point nor the bible can possibly be from God.
This would be a completely asinine question if it wasn't for the fact that creationists use it in exactly the same way all the time. So, how do you know? Were you there?

Why are there precariously balanced rock formations?

How did that survive the Flood?
A balanced rock is a natural rock formation, usually thousands of years old, that consists of a boulder balanced in a relatively unstable position on top of another. Countless examples exist worldwide of different sizes and ages, and exist due to erosion over a long period of time. As rock wears away due to erosion, the formation isn't really subjected to any extremes of force that would topple it, therefore it would stay perfectly stable unless struck by an almighty force, for example, strong flood waters.
Flood waters are devastating. We have very good evidence for the power that these natural forces can wreak upon even strong structures. Whether it be the 2005 flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, or the 2011 flooding around Bangkok and tsunami in Japan - just to name a few very recent examples because of their salience and the masses of video evidence documenting what this force of nature can do. Not to make light of these deadly events, but they are nothing compared to the global flood proposed by biblical literalists. , flood geology proposes that the flood was literally global, and hydroplate theory suggests that waters gushed out of the ground with enough speed and pressure to vaporise it into steam immediately. This requires water to envelope the entire world in well under 40 days. That means to get it to Mount Everest's height (assuming no implausible geological changes) the water would have to rise faster than 200 meters per day - whereas the fastest recorded rainfall in 24 hours is 200 centimetres, a hundred times less than a global flood requires. Let's make no mistake here, what creationists are proposing when they talk of the flood is the single largest, most devastating, powerful and chaotic event that can befall a planet short of the Death Star turning up.
Given a global flood that, according to creationist flood geology, was capable of carving the Grand Canyon in a few days, how do these formations even exist? If the power of this event was enough to carve through rock, why would it leave eroded boulders in relatively unstable positions rather than knocking them down completely?

Why are there salt deposits?

Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia. A global flood would cause such flats to form all over the planet evenly.
Creationists claim that geological layers formed during the Flood. This would imply that the layers were lain in place by water as it receded or... wherever the hell all that water went after just 40 days sloshing around on the surface. There are a few things with this assertion that don't add up. Several minerals found on Earth are easily soluble in water, for example halite, niter and trona. These would quickly dissolve in an environment inundated with water, and stay in solution until the water had evaporated to a point where the salts would then crystallise out of the solution more easily.
After the flood, any minerals dissolved in the flood waters would precipitate together on the surface of the ground as the waters evaporated, as these would be the last to be laid down as opposed to the less soluble rock and dirt that was merely suspended in the water. In such a case, we would expect to see all those minerals occurring together at or near the surface, as we see with a salt flat. And this is assuming that the water remained still enough for long enough for this crudely layered ordering to happen, which is unlikely given creationist descriptions of the flood, which include massive upheaval that would continually mix all the debris together.
Yet most open salt flats are better explained by smaller lakes evaporating as opposed to an entire planet-spanning flood. Many larger salt deposits are buried deep below the ground, which makes no sense given a single flood explaining it all.[1] A single flood would, most realistically, result in one homogenous layer of silt and salt laid down in a single bed, or at best it would lead to soluble salts forming at the surface and the geological column would show only a few layers, rather than hundreds.
How were the vast underground deposits of these minerals formed after the flood? How did the mixture, from a single event, separate into deposits of distinct minerals? If the mineral deposits formed before the Flood, how did they survive intact given the catastrophic nature of the flood?

How did sedimentary layers form?

Rock cores, showing sedimentary layers. Pretty precise for such a chaotic flood.
Ever seen a proper cliff face before? Or a rock core? Or the faces of an open cast mine or eroded canyon? The first thing you'd notice on all of this is that rock is rarely ever a homogeneous mass - it all comes in layers. Some are distinct, such as the the Dogger layer, a region of red-brown rock laid down in the middle-late Jurassic. Above and below it is a different type of rock, laid down by different processes as the environment changed. Perhaps the most famous layer is the K-T boundary (now formally known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary) which exists as a very thin layer of dark, iridium rich sediment thanks to an asteroid impact.
The thing about these layers is that they represent a considerable amount of time. To lay down sediment and compress it takes time. To then change conditions and lay down a different rock takes time. Floods, for one, can lay down sediment that form distinct layers, and layers that are being set down can change as sea beds dry up or plains become flooded.
But here's where it gets tricky for Flood Geology. In a massive flood—one capable of smothering the entire planet in water, let's not forget—one would expect to see a sedimentary layer due to it. Most importantly, one would expect to see a single layer from it. All that rock and mud would be mixed up, sloshed around in the water, and then very abruptly deposited on the land where it would form a sedimentary deposit. That would be a single, homogeneous layer. Yet we don't see that. At all. Anywhere. We see finer sediment, we see sediment that corresponds to known climate. And not least, we see fossils in those layers and only in those layers, with certain organisms only being found above and others only being found below. The work of coincidence, or deep time building this geological record slowly?
So, creationists need to for this. How did a massively chaotic flood wipe out the planet less than 6000 years ago and leave little trace of its existence except neatly stacked and nicely ordered layers of sediment (including one nice and thin, iridium rich K-Pg boundary layer) rather than one whopping great big layer of soil that should only be found as deep as ancient Egyptian ruins?

Why are there no fossils of modern animals?

The standard creationist explanation for fossilised remains is that they are animals that died in the flood. They also make other bizarre claims such as the fossil sorting being caused by the animals running from the flood waters (which totally explains why we find fossilised ammonites on mountaintops...).
According to creationists the only animals to survive the flood were on the Ark, and there were only two (or seven, depending which verse you believe) specimens per species—or "kind" if you insist. Some creationists also insist this included dinosaurs and God's command did not include any exceptions for these creatures, and they handwave the space issues (Amphicoelias is estimated to have grown up to 60 meters in length; the more established well-established genus Supersaurus has specimens at least 30 meters long) by making them young or "teenage" individuals.[2]
By virtue of the fact that only a limited (and very small) number of animals were saved by the Ark, all the rest of the population of any species must have perished in the flood and must appear as fossils if the flood story is true. Fossilisation may be a rare event, but if it has bones nature can't really tell the difference between a cow and a T. Rex.
We would, therefore, expect to see the fossilised remains of apparently modern animals in the fossil record (cows, horses, humans, and so on), as they died and the bodies subjected to the same conditions as examples that are seen as fossils. But this is simply not the case. The fossil record is overwhelmingly composed of extinct species. And more besides, they're all found in neat layers, with fossils discovered in one layer of sediment matching fossils in the same layer in a different location, and with some animals never found higher or lower than certain boundaries. This is quite an intriguing piece of sorting to be brought about by a chaotic global flood!
So why are only extinct species, and not extant species, observed frequently in the fossil record?

How did the Earth survive all the radioactive decay?

Young Earth creationists commonly do not accept the validity or radiometric dating, and propose that rates of decay could have been different in the past.
Let's assume for a moment that decay rates might have been significantly different in the past and see what would happen. We know that uranium ores contain a lot of lead, and it is evident from its isotope composition that this lead comes from the decay of uranium and not through other means. Let's assume that all this decay happened in 4540 years, about a million times faster than the current scientific estimate of 4.54 billion years.
The current heat flux from radioactive decay in the Earth's crust is around 0.04 W/m2, which can be measured with reasonable accuracy.[6] If decay was a million times faster in the past, it would have generated 40,000 W/m2 at the end of the accelerated decay period. This is 50 times more than the power of solar radiation reaching the ground at the equator. Furthermore, a million-fold increase in the decay rate required to get down from 4.54 billion years to 4540 years would increase the natural background radiation level on Earth at the end of that period to around 2000 Sv per year, or more than one lethal dose per day.
How did the Earth manage to cool down to present-day temperatures? How did people, animals and plants survive in extremely high levels of radiation?
A possible response would be that if the rate of decay had been different, then the quantity of heat released could also have been different - so small as to be negligible. However, in this case the decay process could easily be reversed, and various nuclear reactions could happen under ambient conditions. This would mean that the isotopic composition of every rock would be dependent on the history of its chemical composition. However, we have extensive observations proving that the isotopic composition of elements in the Earth's crust varies from place to place by at most a few parts per million, with the exception of meteorites, things coming from nuclear reactors and exploded atomic bombs. This precludes the existence of low energy nuclear reactions at any point in the past.

KingEbukasBlog:
1. Dr. Joel McDurmon at the organization American Vision wrote about a University of York study involving magnetism and brain function:

“ This has to be embarrassing . . . if you’re an atheist. A new study performed at the University of York used targeted magnetism to shut down part of the brain. The result: belief in God disappeared among more than 30 percent of participants. That in itself may not seem so embarrassing, but consider that the specific part of the brain they frazzled was the posterior medial frontal cortex—the part associated with detecting and solving problems, i.e., reasoning and logic. In other words, when you shut down the part of the brain most associated with logic and reasoning, greater levels of atheism result.

2 On September 19, 2011, the Discover Magazine website had an article indicating that there were empirical results showing a positive correlation between atheism and high functioning autism and the article declared:

“This is why the empirical results on the correlation between atheism and high functioning autism are important.....some people were angry that I seemed to suggest that atheists were antisocial weirdos. Well, there is some data to back that up


3 Asperger's syndrome (sometimes referred to as "High-Functioning Autism" or "HFA" is an umbrella term used to classify problematic behaviours similar to, but less severe than, those within the lower reaches of the autistic spectrum.

Day wrote concerning atheist PZ Myers' blog audience:

“ It's by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ Myers place report an average score on the Asperger's Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger's but did not report any test results."

As PZ himself said: "I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive."


Below is some information that Aspergerstest.com gives concerning interpreting their Asperger's quiz results:

"Basically the range for possible answers is 0 to 50. The information below shows you the different ranges as recorded from others sitting this same AQ quiz over the years.

* 0-11 low result – indicating no tendency at all towards autistic traits.

* 11-21 is the average result that people get (many women average around 15 and men around 17)

* 22-25 shows autistic tendencies slightly above the population average

* 26-31 gives a borderline indication of an autism spectrum disorder. It is also possible to have aspergers or mild autism within this range.

* 32-50 indicates a strong likelihood of Asperger syndrome or autism.

In fact, scores of 32 or above are one of strong indicators of having as ASD.


4 According to the leading science news website Phys.org:

“ Believing in God can help block anxiety and minimize stress, according to new University of Toronto research that shows distinct brain differences between believers and non-believers.

In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task - a well-known test of cognitive control - while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made...

Their findings show religious belief has a calming effect on its devotees, which makes them less likely to feel anxious about making errors or facing the unknown.

Sources : http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/08/religiosity-and-personality-how-are.php
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/09/atheism-as-mental-deviance/#.WD4ef7KLTcc
http://www.piepalace.ca/blog/asperger-test-aq-test
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/01/im-mostly-normal/#comments
[url=Phys.org]Phys.org[/url]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090304160400.htm

we have a Christian Web site called AmericanVision that cites a study to prove that not believing in a god requires less brain power, and yes, it is not a satire site, he is being very serious. It is actually a posting published back in Oct 2015 and so the reason I’m highlighting it today is that it has just popped up in my FB feed.

The author, a Dr Joel McDurmon, writes without a hint of any shame the following …

This has to be embarrassing . . . if you’re an atheist. A new study performed at the University of York used targeted magnetism to shut down part of the brain. The result: belief in God disappeared among more than 30 percent of participants.

That in itself may not seem so embarrassing, but consider that the specific part of the brain they frazzled was the posterior medial frontal cortex—the part associated with detecting and solving problems, i.e., reasoning and logic.

In other words, when you shut down the part of the brain most associated with logic and reasoning, greater levels of atheism result.

You’ve heard the phrase, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”? Apparently we can now also say, “I have too many brains to be an atheist.”

… and what then follows is the usual patter … bla bla bla … Darwinism … bla bla bla (bible verse) … more babble … (bible verse), etc… and finishes with this truly weird assertion …

Reason and logic exist because the God of the Bible exists. What this study proves is not that any hijacking took place, but that a tremendous suppression is taking place: of that which must be presupposed. Without the God of the Bible, reasoning would be impossible. Thank you to Izuma and Holbrook for showing us this strong relationship between the two. Christians can further rest content understanding what we’ve believe all along: the existence of God and the use of logic and reasoning are hard-wired and inseparably intertwined in the brains of every human being.

What is his actual source for all this?

The peer-reviewed science journal that he cites as his source for this claim is the UK’s Daily Mail … (you can insert your stunned silence here) … and they in turn point to an actual study but (surprise surprise) grossly misrepresent it in order to spin a good story out of it.

So did Dr McDurmon actually by the Daily Mail and check to see what the actual study really is all about?

Heck no, that would spoil his claim and we simply can’t have little things such as facts intrude on a fantasy, that would not do at all. It might also require the deployment of logic and reason, but apparently he has used all that up doing his believing.

So what is the actual Study about?

The study itself has been written up within the paper “Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief” within Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. So let’s take a look to see what it is really all about.

Oh wait, there are a few you may need to become familiar withfirst …

pMFC = posterior medial frontal cortex
TMS = Transcranial magnetic stimulation
OK, on to the study, You can find it here https://sci-hub.io, and discover that the publicly available abstract explains what it is really all about (I’ve underlined the key phrase there for you) …

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies. We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by downregulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.

Yes there is a pay wall there, and if that should happen to be a problem … well they do want $40 for you to access the full paper for just 1 day, so I guess I should not tell you that if you keyed the title, “Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief” into https://sci-hub.io it will then give you a free able copy.

So this was their idea …

we hypothesize that when problems involve conflicting ideological values, or insoluble dilemmas such as the inevitability of death, pMFC mechanisms may invoke relevant belief systems. Specifically, we predict that participants confronted with their own mortality will “solve the problem” via pMFC mechanisms that facilitate amplifying their belief in God; likewise, participants confronted by an out-group member’s critique of their group’s values will more intensely derogate out-group critics. Participants whose pMFC has been experimentally down-regulated via TMS should therefore display less religiosity following a reminder of their own mortality and less derogation of critical out-group .

In other words … measure, then use TMS on the pMFC and measure again and see what happens, and by doing so they demonstrated that their hypothesis was correct and that the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) is indeed a mediator of shifts in ideological commitment.

Why would the researchers explore this?

Well it does all lead to some very interesting conclusions …

History teaches that investment in cherished group and religious values can bring forth acts of both heroic valor and horrific injustice. Understanding the psychological and biological determinants of increases in ideological commitment may ultimately help us to identify the situational triggers of, and individuals most susceptible to, this phenomenon, and thereby gain some leverage over the zealous acts that follow.

The present findings suggest that the pMFC integrates processing distributed across interconnected brain regions to augment adherence to high-level ideals upon detection of relevant conflicts (e.g., criticisms of group values trigger strengthening of investment in group values; reminders of death motivate enhanced belief in a pleasant afterlife).

The results provide evidence that relatively abstract personal and social attitudes are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, opening the way for researchers to not only describe the biological mechanisms undergirding high-level attitudes and beliefs, but to establish causality via experimental intervention.

Lastly, these findings illustrate the economical manner with which the brain utilizes common conflict-resolution mechanisms to achieve shifts in both concrete behavior and adherence to abstract beliefs.

Now that is all very much many orders of magnitude far more interesting than the daft fictitious apologetics manufactured by Dr Joel at American Vision that attempted to dishonestly hijack it.