Two Formats: On-Air (in 7 parts) and Written (in 6 rounds).
Beginning with a discussion about Ra's 1st Foundational Falsehood video, Bob debated creation and atheism with one of the web's leading anti-creationists, Aron Ra (born L. Aron Nelson).
* Ra Relents Regarding Newton: Regarding the greatest scientist in history, Aron Ra claimed that Isaac Newton belongs not to the creationist camp but to that of the methodological naturalists. Bob was shocked by Ra's lack of a basic education in the history of science. Enyart tried to explain to Ra, unsuccessfully, that because Newton believed that God created fully human Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and because Newton wrote extensively to show that the biblical chronology of the young earth is accurate, that therefore he cannot be included in the camp of methodological naturalism. Aron Ra rejected that reasoning. (BTW, during or after 1719 Newton wrote in his Short Scheme of True Religion, "Opposite to [godliness] is Atheism in profession and Idolatry in practise. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind...") It is surprising but somewhat forgivable that atheist Aron Ra did not know that Isaac Newton wrote more about Scriptural chronology, history, and theology than he did about physics and math, but it is not forgivable, apart from a correction by Aron Ra, that he then proceeded to defend even in writing his refusal to admit that this historical giant, judged by many to be the greatest scientist who ever lived, Isaac Newton, was in the special creation camp. Newton learned Hebrew just so he could better undersand the Old Testament and even wrote in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms that because of the extreme weather during the global flood, that Noah would not be able to see the Moon for much of the time on the ark. Of course, Newton did not need to know about Darwin nor genetics to reject biblical creation and agree with the ancient Greek philosophical claim of an eternal universe. Newton was a creationist. And if Ra acknowledges that and corrects his claim, we'll update this page! Update: In the 2012 Enyart/Ra written debate Aron eventually begrudgingly admitted, in a backhanded insulting way, that Newton was a creationist.
Fun Update: Here's an Isaac Newton trivia list. Regarding the creationist Isaac Newton, atheists generally have a hard time remembering that:
- Newton held that God specially created the two first humans, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden
- Einstein wrote, "The divine origin of the Bible is for Newton absolutely certain".
- Newton wrote extensively to show the correctness of the biblical chronology starting with the Creation (including his 370-page The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms)
- Newton believed specifically that the one true God, by His divine will, specially created the earth
- Newton rejected the possibility of a naturalistic origin of the solar system
- Newton held that God specially created the solar system in full operation, along with the entire cosmos
- Newton learned Hebrew to better study the Old Testament
- Newton remarked that bad weather would prevent Noah from observing the Moon during the flood year
- Newton admired Bishop Ussher and defended the literal date of creation of the entire cosmos as occurring about 4,000 B.C.
While Newton did acknowledge theoretically that gravity could pull together gas to form a sun (after, of course, that matter had been created and appropriately situated), in one of many examples of his worldview, on February 11, 1692, regarding the big picture of his scientific opinion regarding the origin of the solar system, Isaac Newton wrote to Richard Bentley:
The Hypothesis of deriving the frame of the world by mechanical principles from matter eavenly spread through the heavens being inconsistent with my systeme, I had considered it very little before your letters put me upon it, & therefore trouble you with a line or two more about it if this come not too late for your use. In my former I {represented} that the diurnal rotations of the Planets could not be derived from gravity but required a divin{e} power to impress them. And tho gravity might give the Planets a motion of descent towards the Sun either directly or with some little obliquity, yet the transverse motions by which they revolve in their several orbs required the divine Arm to impress them according to the tangents of their orbs I would now add that the Hypothesis of matters being at first eavenly spread through the heavens is, in my opinion, inconsistent with the Hypothesis of innate gravity without a supernatural power to reconcile them, & therefore it infers a Deity. For if there be innate gravity its impossible now for the matter of the earth & all the Planets & stars to fly up from them & become eavenly spread throughout all the heavens without a supernatural power. & certainly that which can never be hereafter without a supernatural power could never be heretofore without the same power. – Isaac Newton
April 10, 2020 Update: The UK's atheist League of Reason may have recently removed Bob Enyart's high-profile debate with Aron Ra. Feel free to investigate this if you'd like to help and let us know what you find out at Bob@rsr.org. Thanks!
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 1 (this show)
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 2
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 3 (soft tissue; and center of universe?)
- Aron Ra and Enyart Begin Round Two: Pt. 4
- Fred Williams of RSR Weighs in on Aron Ra
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 5 (frozen mammoths)
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 6
- Aron Ra and Enyart: Pt. 7
* 6-Round Written Debate: Aron Ra vs. Creationist Bob Enyart (Rounds 1-5; Round 6)
* Please Note League of Reason Dysfunction: The atheist site League of Reason experienced problems from 2013 to 2019 and since seems to be down. So Bob's debate is available at archive.org (rounds 1-5 & round 6) and via our own PDF for wide or narrower screens. Though the site is down we won't let Aron Ra get away that easily :). So just click on your preferred PDF link above.
Round One: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] As an atheist, Aron appeals to authority. Also, Ra's refusal to admit that Isaac Newton was a creationist.
Round Two: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] Aron Ra did not know about the many peer-reviewed confirmations of dinosaur soft tissue. Also, Larry Martz and Ann McDaniel, Newsweek reporters, replied to Real Science Radio regarding the oft-repeated claim based on their 1987 Newsweek article that, as wrongly claimed by Aron, 99.86% of scientists affirm Darwinism. See rsr.org/newsweek-1987.
Round Three: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] Catalog of the peer-reviewed confirmation of dinosaur soft tissue; rapid stratification; carbon 14 everywhere; wildly unexpected genomic discoveries.
Round Four: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] Millions of nautiloid fossils standing on their heads; uniform strata boundaries; gently curved strata; and alleged millions of years of missing strata; all versus Aron Ra's denial of evidence of rapid strata deposition at the Grand Canyon; Global flooding on Earth vs. Mars; And Bob's brief replies to Aron Ra's claims about Babel and The Exodus including on the major Darwinian predictions about the origin of language being disproved by evolutionists.
* RSR Asks Newsweek Reporters about their 1987 Statistic
Round Five: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] Aron Ra claims that the traditional tree of life, based on anatomy and the fossil record, is doubly confirmed when drawn by genetic sequences. Bob Enyart challenges this and references the many genomes that leading evolutionists admit do not fit into the predicted Darwinian pattern (like PNAS reporting that horses are closer to bats than to cows). Presenting the discoveries published in peer-reviewed evolutionary journals, as in RSF's List of Genomes that Just Don't Fit, and as in the cover story in Britain's leading science magazine, New Scientists' own Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, evolutionary geneticists at respected institutions are nonetheless blatantly admitting that DNA, RNA, and proteins demonstrate contradictory evolutionary pathways and that therefore, genetic science is, far from "doubly confirming" it, actually undermining the alleged Darwinian tree of life. A famed evolutionist repeated Aron Ra's confusion, claiming that the nonconformist genomes are relegated to the realm of microorganisms, which misunderstanding of theirs is falsified in the RSR rebuttal to Jerry Coyne's criticism of Bob Enyart. (In this round Aron included an image and caption that he thought came from the NS article in question, but actually came from two different online sources, and that all added to the confusion of the evolutionists as to what the NS article was saying.)
Round Six Post Ends Debate: [See PDF for wide or narrower screens.] Aron Ra unexpectedly quit the debate shortly after he and PZ Myers bragged about how well this debate was going for the atheists when Aron wrote that Bob's "next submission ought to be interesting whatever it is…" So Bob had the opportunity to conclude the debate regarding:
- Aron presented zero evidence for his claim against creationism in 1st Foundational video
- Copernicus, Bacon, Kelvin, and Galileo reply to Aron Ra's misrepresentation of them
- Evolutionists during debates pretend they've not heard of common words and concepts
- Aron's insistence that Bob claims the dinosaur soft tissue is "edible"
- Darwinists identify entities like bodily organs and supragroups as ancestors even though, because they do not reproduce, they are not even Darwinian evolutionary units
- The claim of the standard model that the universe has "no center" is not based on science but philosophy
- Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam help close the debate
- Evolutionists reject the "hard science" of multiple, independent, radioactive dating techniques that produced a "too old" age for Skull 1470 so they threw that date out based on their certainty of when pigs evolved (really)
- Tropical forests and millions of mammoths catastrophically buried in the Arctic as across thousands of miles these giant creatures one-by-one, according to Aron, fell into holes
- Aron's source, physicist Lawrence Krauss, tells RSR that he agrees that T. rex blood vessels have been discovered
- Aron's source, Dr. Philip Gingerich, agrees with RSR that he wrongly reconstructed alleged whale ancestor Rodhocetus
- Bob answers Aron Ra's Phylogeny Challenge.
* Typo Alert: Two computer-editing typos appear in the final round 6 post, both saying "On MSds", which should say:
Illusions of Identified Ancestry for Turtles, Flowers, etc.: [Aron's 8th of 9]
Discoverer of Whale "Ancestor" Rodhocetus Retracts Claims: [Aron's 9th of 9]:
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* Aron Ra's First Foundational Falsehood Video Completely Unsubstantiated: If this accusation is true, that Aron provides zero evidence to support the central claim of his first video, this undermines the credibility of Aron Ra's entire Foundational Falsehoods series. So feel free to watch the video and see his quotes, omission of evidence, and the evidence that falsified his first and foremost claim, all below!
* Aron Ra Fails to Cite Even a Single Example: Aron's 1st Foundational Falsehood video against creationists, titled "evolution = atheism", says that we creationists claim that evolution is synonymous with atheism, which we do not. We deal with theistic evolutionists all the time. Aron Ra's video provides not a single quote from any leading creationist to substantiate his claim. When Bob Enyart pointed this out in their radio debate at KGOV.com/Aron Ra the popular atheist said that his video shows Answers in Genesis president Ken Ham himself. But Enyart pointed out that it was video of Ken Ham, but with Aron Ra's own voice superimposed. Enyart is unfamiliar with any creation ministry that makes this claim and challenged Ra to provide one example from any leading creation ministry. During our broadcast, it appeared that Aron became confused even about what his first foundational falsehood claim was. So to clarify, from his video, Aron alleges without providing evidence that creationism…
3:53 – 4:03 "is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods. First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well."
4:03 – 4:14 "For decades, those behind the creationist movement have tried very hard to portray that one cannot accept evolution and still believe in God. They know better."
6:43 - 6:52 " Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most “evolutionists” are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists. So evolution is not synonymous with atheism"
4:20 – 4:23 "That's been their central claim since the movement began." [hear all four]
Central claim? RSR cannot present here the quotes or evidence that Aron provides, because his video presents nothing to back up his claim. Judging by his YouTube channel's millions views, his atheist viewers must be satisfied with accusations without evidence because apparently not a single evolutionist has made him realize that he should provide such evidence. Bias has that effect. So Aron should either show that this belief of his is defensibly accurate or he should correct it. As Aaron says in his 4th Foundational Falsehoods video:
8:17 – 8:30 "But if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew." hear it
* Aron Ra Confused about His Own First Foundational Falsehood: When creationists argue that evolution is false, and that atheism is false, Aron Ra confuses himself into thinking that we are asserting that evolution is synonymous with atheism. That is his non sequitur. Aron explicitly does this on the radio when debating Bob Enyart accusing the creationist of conflating evolution with atheism on the sole grounds that Enyart argued that both are false. (See the related story, KGOV.com/pot.) Aron Ra is as confused as if he claimed that anyone opposed to the UFO craze and opposed to Keynesian economics is therefore claiming that Lord Keynes was an alien. So RSR challenges Aron Ra, first to admit that his first foundational video provides not a single quote to substantiate his point. And then to go and try to find one from any leading creation organization. And if he cannot, then he needs to take his own advice.
* Positive Evidence Contradicting Aron Ra's First Foundational Falsehood: Creationists have always acknowledged and responded to theistic evolutionists. (Aron, you seem to confuse the presentation of "conclusions", which you do throughout your videos, with the presentation of "evidence. The rest of this paragraph is an example of the presentation of evidence.) Strident evolutionists (like William Provine and as in the journals Nature and Science), as well as creationists, have long argued that the opposing positions are untenable. Here, however, are examples of the creationist organizations addressing those who advocate both evolution and the existence of God by way of theistic evolution:
- CMI's creation.com has many articles dealing with T.E. including 10 dangers of theistic evolution
- AiG's answersingenesis.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including The Basic Assumptions of T.E.
- RSR's rsr.org/pepperdine presents our warning filmed on the university's Malibu campus regarding T.E.
- ICR's icr.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including Could evolution and creation be telling the same story
- CRS's creationresearch.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including An examination of theistic evolution
- CSC's creationscience.com has many references to T.E. including Theistic evolution vs. the Biblical account
* Evolutionists Commit This Kind of Error Themselves: When Darwinists claim, as they all do, that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, they are saying that a creationist cannot be a scientist (at least not in the biological sciences, and Big Bang and chemical evolution proponents show similar bias in their fields). Thus, in this way, Darwinists commonly claim, falsely, that you cannot be a scientist unless you believe in evolution. Not surprising then, wherever they can, evolutionists kill the careers of those who doubt Darwin. (RSR documents atheists being guilty of the very things that they accuse creationists of.) However, some evolutionists acknowledge that creationists can be good scientists.
Bob's Show Notes:
Aron, as you are introducing your first foundation falsehood video, you say that:
- 1/3 Americans say evolution is supported by facts
- 1/3 Evolution is one of many theories not supported by facts
- 1/3 don't know.
Pollsters often ask poorly worded question, but this survey you've claimed is bizarre. Regardless though, of course scientific truth isn't decided by polls or popular opinion. But contrasting your claimed results with the latest relevant Gallop poll, at gallup.com, is interesting:
- Only 6% have no opinion or say they don't know
- 40% say that God made man in our present form, and
- Another 38% say that God guided man's evolution.
That's 78% of Americans who say either that God guided our evolution or that He specially created us.
Aron doesn't give a source for his numbers. And Bob is not familiar with any poll that's ever asked, as Aron represents, whether evolution is, "'one of many theories,' not supported by facts," which of course would be a bizarre question from a heavily biased poll and surely not worthy of repeating.
Aron writes that "99.86% of [scientists] accept evolution," making essentially an appeal to authority argument. This statistic is completely fabricated. Bob communicated with the Newsweek reporter cited as the indirect source of this statistic (from an article she wrote nearly a quarter century ago), tracked down how the stat originated, and authoritatively shows how completely fraudulent it is. What atheists should acknowledge however, is that such a subtle appeal to authority is problematic, regardless of what percent of scientists actually are evolutionists. For example:
U.S. lawyers are experts at the law; Most of our lawyers claim that we have the best system in the world; Therefore we must have the best system in the world. (In reality, "We no longer have a justice system; now it's just a system." -Bob Enyart)
Scientists are experts in operational physics, chemistry, and biology; Most scientists believe in naturalistic origins. Therefore naturalistic origins must be true.
Some of the world's leading experts on genetics have concluded that molecular biology is so complex that it could not have arisen by physical processes so it must have been created by an Intelligent Designer (some even proposing that aliens might have fulfilled this role, as even Richard Dawkins claims is a possibility). Thus scientists expert in the laws of physics are not therefore automatically authorities in the origin of those laws. And operational science, which gives the public much of its confidence in science, confers no automatic authority upon scientists for them to correctly infer the origin of life. So Aron Ra is subtly conflating notions of the general public to present the illusion of scientific certainty regarding evolution. In reply Aron claimed that "99.86% of [scientists] accept evolution," figure Bob then demonstrated was a completely invalid statistic that resulted from no survey or poll whatsoever and was simply fabricated by atheists. Bob also offered contrasting evidence to Aron's claim of a "complete consensus" among scientists for evolution. Applied science is where the rubber meets the road. And the medical field is where ideas in biology, anatomy, and genetics are confronted with real-world tests. And of course there's a large percentage of U.S. doctors who reject strict Darwinism including 34% of physicians who indicate that they are more comfortable with intelligent design than with evolution. Bob's older audience members know that he's been interviewing scientists who reject Darwin for 20 years. In fact RSR just aired a program on a leading Cornell geneticists (emeritus) who is world renowned for developing the Gene Gun, John Sanford, who wrote Genetic Entropy rejecting Darwinism.
And in refuting the claim that only uneducated people would be creationists, of course many of the greatest fathers of the physical sciences, both before and after Darwin, were special creationists. Aron interrupted Bob who was quickly listing off scientists who would have included, before Darwin, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Cuvier, and Dalton, and after Darwin, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur, Joule, Kelvin, Lister, and Carver, who along with many others, continued to advocate for special creation and reject evolution. Regarding his appeal to authority, Aron wants to dismiss the rebuttal value from our pre-Darwin list of scientists. But various philosophers for thousands of years rejected special creation of the cosmos. Darwin proposed a mechanism, but no philosopher needed a specific mechanism to deny creation. Aristotle claimed that the universe was eternal. And even today there's no demonstrable mechanism for the big bang, yet scientists today reject God as creator of the universe. So the atheist a priori rejection of pre-Darwin creationists is arbitrary and therefore not logically valid.
* Quote-Mining Deep, Rich, and Wide Veins: When evolutionists can't complain that a reference is not to a peer-reviewed journal, they are trained to say "quote mine." For typically, when a creationist provides a solid reference to a journal, Darwinists make a knee-jerk accusation claiming, without even attempting to justify their criticism, that we're taking quotes out of context. ReMine easily defends himself against this common false witness. We creationists often reference the kinds of statements that tend to be the most reliable in all of human history by quoting the contrary-to-interest claims of hostile witnesses. Regarding the metaphor, mining is most profitable where the vein runs rich and deep and wide. Countless evolutionists have expressed disappointment with the evidence, with the pattern intensifying when speaking about their own specialties. Many assume the real evidence lies in some other field. That phenomenon repeats so often that the Denver audience chuckled when this exact thing happened in Bob Enyart's Age of the Earth Debate with a geophysicist, who was asked for the best evidence that the earth is old. As many guessed he might, he answered, "star light." (Seemingly not overly impressed with evidence from his own field, this geologist should have known that even if starlight were billions of years old, that doesn't mean that, say, a satellite on which if falls, nor the earth, is billions of years old.) Merely mouthing the mantra "quote mining" doesn't negate all the contrary-to-interest observations published by countless evolutionists.
* Atheist Two-Word Quote Mine: Ironically, when debating Bob Enyart, popular atheist Darwinist AronRa committed a two-word quote mine implying that Lord Kelvin supported evolution, quoting him as saying that evolution was "not unscientific." So in that RSR debate on the existence of God, correcting the atheist, Enyart quoted Kelvin's own summary of the matter in which he says there is vast evidence, as sure as that for gravity, for the existence of the Creator. (For a second example of atheist quote mining, please see rsr.org/remine#quote-mine.)
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* Mars Flooding vs. Earth Flooding: Here's an interesting excerpt from Bob's written debate with Ra, from Round Four...
"We know for certain that the world-wide flood never happened." -AronRa
Mars: Aron, contrast your certainty with scientists claiming massive flooding on Mars which today is a globally frozen desert. Yet NASA speaks of the Land of Noah (Noachis Terra) on Mars and its watery Noachian Epoch when fountains of the great deep "burst" forth onto the surface. Really. And in addition to the proposed "global-scale" mid-latitude glaciers, there were "giant floods," a "catastrophic flood" or even "catastrophic floods that"¦ occurred nearly simultaneously" which "merged into an ocean" and that this "action of water on and near the surface of Mars occurred for hundreds of millions of years"¦ and possibly global in extent." But then, NASA asks, "where has all that water gone?" And they suggest that those fountains just might burst forth again because perhaps the water was "absorbed into the ground." So there is a great irony that with 70% of the Earth covered with water, naturalists incessantly ridicule any proffer of evidence of a worldwide flood here, and before the chuckling has even died down, the same critics will affirm the possibility of nearly global flooding on bone-dry Mars.
Earth: On our planet continents are covered nearly a mile deep in sedimentary strata, often with thousands of square miles of sharp contrast between horizontal layers, frequently with massive swaths of such intersections, called "flat gaps," showing little or even no evidence of erosion between those layers, and with scores of peer-reviewed articles claiming discovery of original biological material from strata allegedly tens of millions of years old (apparently all of which contains 14C and primarily non-racemized left-handed amino acids). These strata contain billions of dead things rapidly buried, such as millions of closed-shelled clams, and seashells atop the world's major mountain ranges, and millions of mammoths buried around the arctic circle, and millions of nautiloids buried in a single narrow limestone layer at the Grand Canyon. Yet secularists posit that Mars (which might have the equivalent of eight inches of water if evenly spread over the surface from the ice at the poles and the ice presumed to be below ground) may have had global-scale flooding. And the same scientists mock anyone who offers evidence that the Earth (which is more than two-thirds covered in ocean water that averages a depth of 2.5 miles) could ever have been flooded.