Dissecting the Evolutionist Approach to Explanation and Persuation

Don't they find out when they present what they think is their evidence, and we respond with "that actually isn't evidence for your position for these reasons"?

Not everybody operates in a mode of thought where they conclude that that which is best supported by the evidence is probably the best conclusion. Many people reach conclusions based on how poorly they're supported by the evidence, reasoning that "things are usually not what they seem." Many people reach conclusions based on what everyone around them seems to believe, reasoning that "a million people can't be wrong." Those people will not be convinced of evolution because no one around them believes it, either.And, indeed, many people reach conclusions based on the degree to which those conclusions can be supported by the Bible.It's not clear how science-minded individuals can be expected to reach these people. We can hardly argue that the best-evidenced theory in science should be believed because it doesn't have much evidence, for instance. Some people simply are not equipped to reach accurate conclusions about the natural world.

What does indefensable evidence prove?

Not sure if this is even on-topic, but how do you figure that? If living things live all over the world, why wouldn't we expect them to have died all over the world, too? Why? If living things live all over the world, and have for some time, why wouldn't we expect to find their remains all over the world?Now, what I don't understand is, the amount of fossils that exist - the abundance, as you keep reminding us - is too abundant. If the flood is correct we should expect a lot less fossils, because the number of organisms represented from their remains in the fossil record is way too many for all of them to have been alive at the same time. Inaccurately. Unrealistically. There's too many fossils for them all to have been deposited at the same time. The Flood could be an explanation for some hypothetical fossil record, but it doesn't explain the record that we actually have.

Remember the different kinds of thinking I was talking about earlier in the thread? Just about everybody encounters bullshit at one point or another in their lives; just about everybody learns how to detect when they're being lied to, to some degree. Obviously some are better at it than others. But just about everybody learns to see through some of it.One of the ways that most people detect bullshit is when the bullshitter obviously can't answer obvious questions. Posing the questions that creationists can't or won't answer is how we make their lack of credibility apparent.

The fossils are too abundant, though. So the Flood can't explain them. The Flood would be a parsimonious explanation indeed, but because it's contradicted by the number of fossils present, it must be discounted as an explanation.Contradiction disqualifies any explanation, no matter how much we may prefer it. You might consider this the corallary of the Sherlock Holmes principle.

Your view is that your opponents are brainless simpletons?And you wonder why you're treated rudely? Do you think that might have something to do with the way you treat others?

Oh, poor Faith. My heart bleeds, it truly does.I mean, how awful for you! To not be allowed to call people infantile playground names without being treated poorly in return, and left with only the alternative of actually supporting your arguments with evidence. Indeed, you're jammed between a rock and a hard place, aren't you? It's a regular Sophie's Choice. How will you ever survive?Maybe we should take a collection...

It's called "ecology", Faith. One of the things it can study is how many organisms can live in a certain place.Percy has already referred to the example of hundreds of feet of fossils of an organism that can only survive in the top 10 feet of the oceans. In this case, for instance, there's far more fossils of these organisms than could ever fit in the only biome they could live in. Everything's in the past, Faith. If your assertion is that we can't study the past then we can't study anything at all. And I don't particularly put much stock in the conclusions of someone who asserts, boldy, that nothing can be known about anything.

What you've been asked several times is, why? Why wouldn't God have made fake fossils? To assume he wouldn't choose to do that is to claim knowledge about the character of a being previously defined as unknowable.God could have done it; we don't know that he didn't; plenty of people do believe that he did.

Already rebutted. Given the idea of a deity whose actions may not make sense to us - the traditional idea of the Judeo-Christian God - there's no action we can propose that would not be reasonable for him to take.God is already defined as a being whose actions may appear as unreasonable to us. Therefore asserting that fake fossils would be "unreasonable" is meaningless.You have to do better than simply stating an action is not "reasonable". The traditional idea of God makes it certain that he's going to take actions that appear unreasonable to us.

Creationists are the ones that gave us the idea of God putting the fossils there, in the first place. They're the ones that came up with it; we're just repeating it.All you've proven is that you're the one who doesn't pay enough attention to the comments of other creationists.

Reasonable to you and I and Percy, certainly.The point that you seem to keep ignoring is that what is reasonable to us is no indication of what is reasonable to God. He might very well have done something completely unreasonable to us. That's what it means to be "ineffable."

You don't think God could have a perfectly good reason to do something that appears whimiscal or arbitrary to us?