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 sex evolve? There are elaborate design mechanisms involved, such as the locking mechanism that prevents polyspermy.
RSR YouTube response
RSR Website: rsr.org/design
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
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