Proffesor Dave Fact Check

Below is RSR's convenient Fact Checker for the many claims made by popular YouTuber "Professor" Dave in his five part series The Definitive Guide to Debunking Creationists. RSR has debunked this series with our own four part YouTube series The Debunking of Professor Dave.  Dave Farina is not an actual professor, but instead a failed ex-teacher according to the Discovery Institute.

 

Creation scientists are quite aware of the Big Bang cosmology doctrine, they simply disagree with it due to the scores of evidence that contradict the Big Bang.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/big-bang and rsr.org/big-bang-predictions

Fallacy: Misrepresentation, Strawman

No creation scientist has made this claim. Instead, they point out that retrograde planets contradict the Nebular Hypothesis, specifically due to the Conservation of Angular Momentum.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/big-bang and rsr.org/big-bang-predictions

Fallacy: Strawman

This is of course a childish claim by Farina, and ironic given that it’s creationists who have been thrilled (but not surprised) with the findings of the Hubble and now James Webb space telescopes. For example, there are massive fully formed galaxies where they aren’t supposed to be (Webb Spots Super Old, Massive Galaxies That Shouldn’t Exist). RSR has documented many more failed predictions of the Big Bang.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/big-bang-predictions

Fallacy: False caricature

Pretty much all the fine tuning arguments used by creationists come from secular scientists. For example, see Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/fine-tuning

This was not a prediction, but instead a retrodiction. A paper in Nature magazine describes the particulars of this "prediction" as, "assumed ad hoc to obtain the required [predicted] abundances". In Physics Essays, "The study of historical data shows that over the years predictions of the ratio of helium to hydrogen in a BB universe have been repeatedly adjusted to agree with the latest available estimates of that ratio as observed in the real universe."

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/big-bang-predictions

Fallacy: Cherry-picking

Claims of observed Pop 3 stars is speculation. Daniel Whalen, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth, said “it’s not clean evidence” because” Other piping hot cosmic objects can produce a similar helium II signature”.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/list-of-star-formation-problems

Fallacy: Speculative evidence

Creationists have several competing theories to explain distant starlight. RSR leans toward either stretch cosmology or the plasma cosmology explanation. Note however that evolutionists also have a distant starlight problem called the "horizon problem" that forced evolutionists to posit the untenable and largely falsified inflation theory.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/starlight-and-time, rsr.org/plasma

Fallacy: Inconsistency

Professor Dave mentions zircons, but doesn’t want to tell his listeners of a huge, gigantic elephant in the room which is the fact that those zircons have helium in them. Helium is slippery and should have escaped zircons long ago. Dr Russ Humphries set up an experiment with an independent lab that confirmed their slip rate through the material, and found that the zircons were roughly 6000 years old. This is one of many indicators that point to an earth much younger than "4.54 billion years plus or minus 50 million years".

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/list-of-not-so-old-things

Fallacy: Inconsistency

RSR champions Dr. Walt Brown's compelling and evidence-based theory on the origin of radioactivity (link below). Moreover, even evolutionists know that decay rates may have been different in the past: "There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man." – Evolutionist Frederic B. Jueneman, FAIC, Industrial Research & Development, p.21, June 1982

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/origin-of-earths-radioactivity

Fallacy: Unwarranted assumption

In Professor Dave's illustration, he says they will ISOLATE then re-run the mutations. This is called truncation selection, something that does not happen in nature. So if they don’t isolate their enzymes, then more random mutation is going to blur the ability for natural selection to select anything of value. So what he just described is a sleight of hand, and a form of artificial selection. What does artificial selection require? Intelligence!

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/abiogenesis

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

Organic chemist Dr. Royal Truman points out that after literally thousands of carefully DESIGNED experiments, the best OOL researchers could do was produce a small peptide in a miniscule amount! Prof Dave protested to the tornado in a junkyard analogy by creationists, but that’s exactly what they are proposing, except in this case each iteration is its own small tornado. So to put it another way, its not a single tornado in a junkyard, its millions of them back-to-back over time. Dr Royal Truman also noted that OOL researchers terminate the experiment when its convenient to them, given all the chemistry working against them.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/royal-truman

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

Randomness left to itself always leads to ZERO information. What this YouTube personality isn’t telling you is that after one improbable event, you have to retain that improbable event to build on it. An analogy Bob Enyart gave is a TV set with random pixel generation. It will always look like noise. If by some fluke after trillions of years in trillions of universes it randomly creates his face, how much more is needed to show him giving a thumbs up? Before it even has a chance to do so his face would have been already scrambled in the very next frame.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/information
Fred's talk  Information Theory and the Demise of Darwinism

Fallacy: Rank stupidity

Professor Dave starts his abiogenesis video with the tired claim that there is no evidence for Noah's flood. This despite overwhelming geological and historical evidence.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/flood-evidence

Fallacy: Invincible ignorance

It is true that plenty of Christians make this claim, but so do believers in evolution who are unfamiliar with the debate. Many also testify that this is what they learned in grade school (and likely by many high school teacher). We've never met any informed creationist familiar with the origins debate ever claim this.

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Hasty generalization

Some Christians have made claims that attribute "a cow turning into a sheep" to evolution, but never an informed creationist. Ironically, plenty of informed evolutionists claim this! In fact, it was an evolutionist scientist, Richard Goldschmidt, who proposed the “hopeful monster” hypothesis. Goldschmidt rightly noted that neo-Darwinism could only account for small-scale microevolution that no one disputes. Hence he came up with the lame idea that macromutations in the right place could yield a new species in a single generation. There are evolutionists today who still defend this idea.

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Hasty generalization

Farina appeals to several examples that could easily be attributed to design. Even if design was not involved, it would be akin to claiming two pieces of driftwood getting stuck together in the ocean is evidence that a yacht can form given enough time. A key missing ingredient in his just-so story is how information can arise to lead to this major event. And at what point did Eukaryotic sexual reproduction evolve? There are elaborate design mechanisms involved, such as the locking mechanism that prevents polyspermy.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/design, rsr.org/sexual-reproduction

Fallacy: Begging the question

Pakicetus is “known from a skull”, and just fragments at that. Dr Carl Werner has uncovered forged fossils, and one of the major whale proponents, Philip Gingerich now admits that Rodhocetus had no flippers and no fluked tail (and certainly no blowhole), so what millions of evolutionists believe regarding whale fossils is based on fabricated, and fully falsified, misinformation.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/whales

Fallacy: Evidentiary

Dr Carl Werner uncovered THREE frauds: 1) Donald Johanson claimed that all analysis showed that the knee joint was human. This was contradicted by Johanson's dig parter, who said it was ape. 2) Johanson hid the fact that a human skull (Laotoli fossil 18) was also found at Laotoli! 3) Johanson hid alterations to Lucy's pelvis to make it more ape-like.

If human evolution is true, 1) why resort to so many frauds? 2) why is it easy to find evolutionists who agree with many of the problems (e.g. as Lord Solly Zuckerman once quipped, "they're just bloody apes!").

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/lucy, rsr.org/ape-men

Fallacy: Evidentiary

See our shows with Dr. Carl Werner where he uncovered HUNDREDS of outright frauds!

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/ape-fraud

Fallacy: Evidentiary

Nature News & Views admits that this "icon" of evolution has been "knocked from its perch" after leading paleontologists reassessed "the creature that has been considered the evolutionary link between the two."

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/archaeopteryx

Fallacy: Evidentiary

The vast majority of documented random mutations are considered at best  "near-neutral". In fact “most mutations with observable phenotypic effects are deleterious” (ref). A 2022 Nature article shows that even silent mutations are harmful!

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/bergman

Fallacy: Circular Reasoning

The vast majority of proteins and enzymes have different amino acid sequences, as the specific sequence of amino acids is what defines each unique protein and determines its function. Even slight variations in the sequence can lead to a significantly different protein structure and function. This claim gives the illusion that design is not involved and thus becomes a case of circular reasoning.

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

What a few scientists did was insert some random RNA into the cell of an already existing gene and noticed that some gene regulation activity changed. They provided no evidence that the bioactivity improved the cell. Out of literally millions of sequences they started with, they found 700 active sequences for which roughly 150 were from the random piece. The experiment did nothing to show the evolution of functional genes. As Dr Rob Carter of CMI points out, they are playing fast and loose with the facts, and provides more fatal problems to this study.

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

There is no tangible evidence that gene duplication has ever led to increased information in a genome. AI could only offer examples such as "The different globin proteins involved in oxygen transport are thought to have arisen from gene duplication events". AI also served up a common evolutionist claim that the immune system, which employs gene duplication, shows how it can happen. These are not random mutations, which are required by neo-Darwinism. Instead they clearly are designed to do this.

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Circular reasoning, special pleading

The only examples Farina provided were harmful mutations resulting in deformities or diseases. Also, "astounding similarities" of Hox developmental regulatory genes across the animal kingdom prompted prominent evolutionist Sean Carroll to write that, “no biologist had even the foggiest notion that such similarities could exist between genes of such different animals.”

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website:  rsr.org/shocked-evolutionists

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

Real scientists and surgeons have long said the human tail claim is a myth. According to Physician and surgeon Dr. Michael Egnor (Vice-Chairman, Department of Neurological Surgery, and Director, Pediatric Neurosurgery, at State University of New York at Stony Brook) stated the following about ‘human tails’:
“None of them—and none of the reports in the literature that I know of—are actual tails. A tail has vertebrae, is a continuation of the coccyx, has developed muscles, nerves and other soft tissues, etc. … None have the structure of a tail, even in rudimentary form, and none of the ones I have operated on were attached to the coccyx in the way that a tail is.”

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

Back in 2014, we already knew 80% of the DNA was functional. As the Yale School of Medicine Reported, “Junk no more”. But the article rightly notes that scientists have known for decades that this so-called junk DNA played a regulatory role, and mutations in this area were traced to diseases.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website:  rsr.org/junk-dna, rsr.org/genomes-that-just-dont-fit

Fallacy: Circular reasoning

This is patently absurd. The bacterial flagellum and injectisome are two different machines that differ in both structure and function. Irreducible complexity means you can’t remove any interacting part of a system for it to remain functional. Which part is Dave Farina removing from the flagellum where it still works?

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website:  rsr.org/id

Fallacy: Invincible ignorance

This is perhaps the dumbest thing professor Dave has said. Randomness is the very opposite of information. This isn’t just common sense, it’s well-established by information science. See evolutionist Dr. Tom Schneider's simple primer here.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website:  rsr.org/information
Fred's talk  Information Theory and the Demise of Darwinism

Fallacy: Invincible ignorance, rank stupidity

This old canard of 98% similarity has been refuted for years. Dr Jeffrey Tompkins of ICR analyzed the fully sequenced data and found the difference was closer to 85%. Some years later, University of London evolutionist Richard Buggs analyzed the results of a comprehensive comparison of the new chimp genome with the human genome and posted his shocking anti-evolutionary findings. He stated, “The percentage of nucleotides in the human genome that had one-to-one exact matches in the chimpanzee genome was 84.38%.

RSR YouTube response
RSR Website:  rsr.org/genomes-that-just-dont-fit
ICR: https://www.icr.org/article/human-chimp-dna-similarity-research

Fallacy: Invincible ignorance

Was Hitler religious? The Nazi leader hated Christianity as well as Judaism. - The Washington Post. Note also that Professor Dave is a communist who fails to acknowledge that the greatest mass murderers in history were communist (Stalin, Mao).

RSR YouTube response

Fallacy: Wishful thinking

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