Help, what are the falsehoods in this evolution takedown?

So when you speak of “equality” between men and women, you make no qualifications or nuances whatsoever?

Also, you piqued my curiosity… now i’m very curious about such groups. Can you point to me a link to one of these groups that actually forbids girls to learn math? I googled but couldn’t find anything, though i’m not sure what i’m looking for exactly.

That’s not really relevant. The point is “female equality” is a concept that is understood across a broad audience to imply support of some general ideas. If you say you support female equality, just a different “model” of it that is exactly contrary to the way the concept is generally understood and your “model” implies actively working against the general ideas the concept normally implies, then you are being a willfully bad communicator or plain dishonest to say you support female equality.

Well, since much of what they advocate could be construed as child abuse, neglect, or trafficking, they don’t exactly put it all in writing on the internet. Girls aren’t “forbidden to learn math,” they just aren’t taught much beyond basic arithmetic because it isn’t considered necessary to be a good wife and mother. They are told girls shouldn’t go to college because it will just expose them to immorality (their education does not prepare them to get in anyway) and they don’t need a “career” because women should not work outside the home.

You can read “survivor” testimonies on multiple blogs, like Homeschoolers Anonymous, No Longer Quivering, Love, Joy, Feminism, Spiritual Sounding Board

A group called Let Them Marry was in the news somewhat recently was when a group tried to have a retreat to sell their daughters to older men. They believe in the Old Testament practice of “bride price” and that fathers should arrange marriages for post-pubescent daughters to men with established livelihoods. The Salvation Army retreat center ended up cancelling the event due to public pressure.

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Comparing the dates from the video to the Paleobiology Database records:

Video date for Pakicetus 52mya


Database Dates
Collection 45529 Kuldana Formation, Lutetian (47.8 - 41.3 Ma)

Collection 45586 Kuldana Formation, Lutetian (47.8 - 41.3 Ma)

Both of the Discovery Science videos make quite a deal of their perceived chronological inversion of Indohyus and Pakicetus. I do not have access to the papers which are the basis for the Paleobiology Database, so right now I can only offer that these database dates do not match the video presentation. It is difficult to engage with videos as they typically do not substantiate with footnotes.

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The SJG essay is also worth mentioning:

The SJG essays are priceless.

In the first video, much hay was made of the idea that “Darwinists” believed Pakicetus was descended from Indohyus, even though Indohyus lived four million years later. As I pointed out in an above post, they have not indicated who exactly holds to these dates. Both Indohyus and the variants of Pakicetus come from narrow in age Subathu and Kuldana formations in Pakistan and India.

Stratigraphic and Micropaleontological Constraints on the Middle Eocene Age of the Mammal-Bearing Kuldana Formation of Pakistan
The Kuldana Formation is a relatively thin, 20-120 m thick low-sea-stand tongue of continental red beds lying within a much thicker sequence of foraminifera-rich marine formations. … The short duration of the low-sea-stand interval when Kuldana mammals are found means that differences between samples recovered to date probably represent differences in local living environments, sites of deposition, and sampling, rather than any substantial difference in age.

and from Philip Gingerich, the general similarity of mammalian faunas …argues against any marked time transgression."

The message seems to be that fossils in this formation may not be indicative of priority, and given species may be contemporaneous with each other. That is why the 2007 Nature Article introducing Indohyus leads with [emphasis mine]
Here we show that the Eocene south Asian raoellid artiodactyls are the sister group to whales. The raoellid Indohyus is similar to whales, and unlike other artiodactyls, in the structure of its ears and premolars, in the density of its limb bones and in the stable-oxygen-isotope composition of its teeth.

So the video mounts an argument based on “granting the standard Darwinian dates for these fossils, Indohyus is dated as far younger than its supposed descendents” Now if the facts are on your side, there is no need to misrepresent the challenging position. The literature is clear that there is no chronological inversion and that while Indohyus is the more distant relation to whales, it is a sister group. You descend from your parents, not your sister. When somebody says one thing and another reports them as saying something else, the Biblical term for that is false witness.

Which leads us to the second video, the supposed rebuttal to objections, such as just described above, to the first video. More on that later.

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Did you mean later rather than prior?

Yes, dyslexic moment. Edited.

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That did happen with the pastor of a church I used to attend. He homeschooled his 3 girls to know only the basics, told them they didn’t need college, and tried to set them up with chosen husbands. Sadly, the one that did marry a son of her dad’s friend was abused.

The pastor was self -taught from the Bible, and never went to seminary. As I recall, he said that babies cried because of inborn sin, and not to pick them up or love them in response. He was a very attractive speaker in other ways, and led a church split when some criticized his beliefs. It’s another argument that we can’t rely on a “plain reading” of the Bible, based on our own (his) cultural blinders.

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Stories like this lead some anti-theists to over-generalize that being raised in a Christian home is a form of abuse. Of course I don’t disagree that what your ex-pastor did was harmful for his girls.

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To be honest, I also know that things are not black and white. He was cowed by a massive fear of an unkind version of God…what we see across the world, with similar prejudice across regions and cultures. I have no doubt that he deeply loved his girls, no less than other cultures do; and that they loved him. My attitude was perhaps not the best.
The very fact that many unrelated cultures treat their women and children in a restrictive way indicates there is another, nonreligious reason… I I don’t fully understand it, but an evolution of social role differences appears to me to be reflective of many variables. Maybe someone else on the forum can give more insight. Thanks.

Exactly. There are many reasons that customs come to be what they are. Even where Christianity is the dominant source it will not likely ever be the only one.

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Here is the link for those interested to the discussion page for @RyanBebej’s new whale evolution article!

Defending the Tale of the Whale

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