Real Science Radio invites Dr. Royal Truman to weigh in on the legitimacy of Professor Dave’s arguments against creationists. With a background in organic chemistry, Dr. Truman sheds light on common misconceptions surrounding DNA, intelligent design, and scientific integrity. This episode promises an insightful journey into the nuances of scientific debates and the importance of approaching these discussions with logic and evidence-based reasoning.
00:28:29 Closing Segment and Teaser for Next Episode
SPEAKER 01 :
If you’re asking children to describe a big bang cosmology, then they might say something like that, and that has nothing to do whether They believe in creation evolution. It’s just a reflection on what they have envisioned, that a fully formed planet and comet just sort of popped out after, you know, a few minutes, hours, or days. Perhaps they believe that, but that has nothing to do with a body of consensus of what creation scientists believe.
SPEAKER 03 :
Congratulations, you played yourself.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 05 :
Today we have a scientist to review Professor Dave’s video series, The Definitive Guide to Debunking Creationists. I’d like to welcome Dr. Royal Truman, who has found some concerns with Professor Dave’s series. That’s right, Fred.
SPEAKER 04 :
And it’s always good to have a real scientist on Real Science Radio. Dr. Truman received his PhD in organic chemistry from Michigan State University. Dr. Truman, it’s an honor to have you on. What are your concerns?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, thank you for having me. Mr. Farina is an authority on creation science and intelligent design errors. I thought it’d be worthwhile to see what he has to offer. He put together a series, and I quote, debunking virtually every creationist talking point. In another place, he says, the things that they collectively say. In other words, this is the body of knowledge or the consensus position of creation scientists. And the purpose, and I’m quoting again, is to arm the viewer with the ability to immediately discredit anything a creationist says. Now, Mr. Farina has spent years on this topic. I assume much scholarly research has gone into this effort. He has access to a large number of scientists and he makes a living as an online science communicator with millions of YouTube subscribers. So that said, I thought it would be interesting as a scientist to see what he has to say. He summarizes, His series saying, in summary, creationism by any name is nothing but superstition and a tool of oppression.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, he doesn’t seem that oppressed. He has millions of YouTube viewers. We’re not doing a very good job. But we appreciate you coming on to help us with this. Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
So I did have some serious concerns about the content. I put together some lists. I don’t think we’ll be able to get through too many of the lists. Here’s the first one. Concerns number one through ten. Perhaps you would like to respond to things that I noticed. First, we are informed that there is no such word as evolutionist. Two, the book of Jonah refers to a whale as a big fish. Leviticus and Deuteronomy claim that bats are birds. We are told that creationists claim the rate of lunar recession is assumed to be constant, whereas he believes that lunar recession was slower in the past. Number six, creationists apparently represent Big Bang cosmology as forming fully formed planets and comets. Seven, creationists misrepresent aviogenesis. some molecules floating together and becoming a cell in an instant. He tells us creationists believe that an organism can suddenly sprout wings or fins or legs. Creationists claim that enzyme sequences must be identical. And then 10, he tells us there are no competent creationists or intelligent design scientists And he specifically singles out a geologist and chemist.
SPEAKER 04 :
Chemists, okay. Chemists?
SPEAKER 01 :
Clearly I’m not, either I’m not a chemist or not competent, so we’ll just have to decide which of the two is true.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, well I think that your words will let everyone out there decide who’s competent.
SPEAKER 05 :
So Dr. Truman, you’ve got 17 concerns for today’s show. Can you start with concern number one?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. First, we are informed that there is no such word as evolutionist. Now, in scientific discussions, it is always advisable to get your terms properly defined to avoid confusion. So if it’s true there is no such word, we should know about it. Mr. Farina informs us that it is not only not a real word, but it is used, you know, for nefarious purposes by creationists. So I looked up all the major online dictionaries, the Oxford English, Cambridge, American Heritage, Meridian, et cetera, et cetera. And they all gave the exact definition of evolutionist that I have always heard from the creationists. I checked the eight AI tools that I use. I simply asked the question, my English is not very good. I mean, after all, I live in Germany. What is an evolutionist? Is this a real word in English? And they all unanimously said, yes, it’s a real word and gave precisely the definition that creationists use.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
Number one is that’s a rough start.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Let’s move to concern number two. We are informed that the book of Jonah refers to a whale as being a fish. And the concern here, according to Mr. Farina, is that whales are not fish, but they are mammals. Well, we have to look at what the Bible actually says. In the Hebrew, the word is dagadulah. And it is a collective term that can refer to any large creature which includes a fish, a whale, a shark, etc. It’s a collective word. So, to make it short, the Hebrew does not claim that whales were involved in any way in the book of Jonah. Nor do any of the translations from Hebrew to English use the word whale at all. To the right, you see several dozen translations, big fish, huge fish, great fish, big fish, etc. No whale. No whale. So, I’m not sure why Mr. Farina made that statement.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, concern number three sounds like it’s the same thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Same concept, yes. Here we are told that in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, bats are claimed to be birds. Therefore, of course, God doesn’t know anything about the creation that he made. That is what we are told. And he simply reiterates that. No, they are mammals, not birds. But we got to go back and see what the Bible actually says. The word used is off, and it is used to introduce the topic of clean and unclean flying creatures. You see, the word off doesn’t exist in English or Spanish, German, or anything else. It is a collective term. The root is derived from flying or winged. Hmm. And so it can refer to a wide category of animals. And then later, when Leviticus and Deuteronomy specifically refer to certain birds and to bats, it does so. But they have all been introduced under the collective term of flying creatures. So there is no contradiction.
SPEAKER 04 :
We could assume that David James is not a biblical scholar. He doesn’t claim to be a biblical scholar, so we’re not going to be too hard on him with the biblical stuff. What’s concern number four?
SPEAKER 01 :
Number four is more of an astronomy or physics question. It deals with the rate of lunar recession because that has been used to calculate the maximum age of the Earth-Moon system. Now, his accusation is that creationists extrapolate erroneously. Specifically, he explains that more or less, how the recession may work. In his words, the rate of recession can’t be constant due to gravitational influences. And since it can’t be constant, then you cannot make a linear extrapolation and therefore the creationists are all wrong.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, he basically claims that creationists claim a constant rate. Am I getting that right?
SPEAKER 01 :
That is correct. And that would assume, of course, that the PhD physicists who made these calculations are incredibly stupid because, of course, they know these things, right?
SPEAKER 04 :
I would hope so.
SPEAKER 01 :
You can always do a quick check like I did on ChatGTB, and I asked how do Croatian scientists calculate the rate of recession of the moon from the Earth to extrapolate, blah, blah. And it gives a very good answer, a very detailed answer, explains that the work was done by Croatian scientists like Professor De Jong, a physics professor, explains the details of how it was done. And then I quote here, they, the creationists, then argue that the rate at which the moon recedes isn’t constant over time. It’s the very foundation, it’s the very basis of calculations. In other words, the accusation is simply not true. This is not the way the experts have done the calculations.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, so concern number five is related to lunar recession also, right?
SPEAKER 01 :
It is, but before I get there, maybe a comment or two for those who are interested in how this works. Essentially what happens is that as the Earth rotates and the moon exerts a gravitational force, it leads to a tidal bulge. on the Earth, the part facing the Moon. But the issue is that the Earth is rotating a little bit faster than the Moon is moving around and therefore this bulge gets ahead of the Moon. So what happens is the gravitational force attracts the Moon, like throws the movement of the Moon ahead. It accelerates it. And this is where the recession then occurs. It is accelerating The separation, the distance between the two. So there are two issues here. Basically, the faster the Earth is rotating, as everybody agrees occurred in the past, the stronger this effect. This means that this tidal bulge, the effect would be stronger and more pronounced in the past. leading to a larger angle, that means that the gravitational torque would have been stronger in the past. In the past, the Moon would have been thrown away farther from the Earth faster. And in addition, just simply the fact that the Earth and Moon went closer together, again, means that the gravitational force, and therefore the torque, would have been stronger. So interesting calculations, which you folks can look up if you want. That is basically how it was done. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s bottom line. It’s not a constant rate. We never claimed it was.
SPEAKER 01 :
Correct. Professor Dave then makes a remarkable statement. To him, all this makes a lot of sense. He believes that lunar recession was slower in the past. Why? Well, he says, and I’m quoting again in yellow here, it was close and it makes perfect sense given the stronger attraction they were close to get extraction and so there is no contradiction in the in this data well unfortunately he just doesn’t understand the nature of what’s causing this recession as i explained one way to look at it would be from a well-known equation on celestial mechanics a little daunting the equation, but the two things to look at are the terms, the one over eight, the sixth power, that is telling us that the recession rate is faster as one over the distance. So in other words, that means that When they were closer, the recession would have to be faster. That is not only logical, but it’s what the mathematics is showing here.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and now this equation is new to me, Dr. Truman, but you’re saying this equation is not new to scientists.
SPEAKER 01 :
Not at all. This is using the starting bell time. And the same is true with the omega term, the very, very last term of the equation. It’s the same thing. There is a linear relationship, and therefore, the faster the rotation of the Earth, the faster the recession rate. So not to belabor the point, but it doesn’t make perfect sense, and the conclusion is wrong. And so this simply is not a correct statement.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, exactly. So kind of a straw man argument. So concern number six has to do with the Big Bang.
SPEAKER 01 :
Concern number six, we are told that creationists misrepresent Big Bang cosmology, claiming that fully formed planets, comets, just came tumbling out. What I would like to say there is, If you’re asking children to describe a Big Bang cosmology, then they might say something like that. And that has nothing to do whether they believe in creation, evolution. It’s just a reflection on what they have envisioned, that a fully formed planet and comet just sort of popped out after, you know, a few minutes, hours or days. Perhaps they believe that, but that has nothing to do with a body of consensus. of what creation scientists believe.
SPEAKER 05 :
Perfect. Okay, concern number seven.
SPEAKER 01 :
And similarly, we are told that our understanding of our biogenesis, so molecules just float together and a cell is formed in an instant, whereas evolutionists would say this was a long, long period of hundreds of millions of years. Same comment. Again, if you talk to little kids, you know, who don’t know a whole lot about these ideas, then they can say anything, but this has nothing to do with creationists or evolutionists. It’s just a reflection that you’re perhaps talking to kids instead of qualified people.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I’ve never heard a creationist say that, so you’re absolutely right. So concern number eight?
SPEAKER 01 :
Also that supposedly we believe that organisms can suddenly sprout wings or fins or legs. Again, I’ve never heard anything like that. Though I must point out that there are some evolutionists that do believe that, like Richard Goldschmidt. He did believe this. That’s right.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hopeful monster.
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly. But again, if any creationist is saying this, then again… You shouldn’t be talking to, you know, seven, eight year old kids, but you should be talking to about some serious scientists.
SPEAKER 05 :
All right. So the next one, concern number nine, enzyme sequences are identical.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. Here we are accused of claiming that the probability of forming a protein is extremely low because what is done is at every position in the protein or enzyme, the We’re taking impossibilities and we’re raising it to the power of how many amino acids are in that sequence. And you say, well, that’s crazy simply because there could be alternative sequences that would still produce the same function. Well, the statement’s correct. You can have different sequences and a large number of sequences producing the same function. But I… have heard in their whole life a creationist ever say this, and he was immediately corrected by somebody else in the audience. I personally have written papers on this topic more than 30 years ago. This is not how the calculations are done. In fact, I recommended using a Shannon theory approach to take into account certain mathematical features like low probability sets or low probability sequences. Long story short, if you were to ask high school or junior high school kids about the probability of proteins forming, they are just as likely to make this incorrect statement whether they are creationists or evolutionists, and this is not something that the body of knowledge of creationists would say.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so now that brings us to number 10.
SPEAKER 01 :
Before I do that, I see now a pattern of what we call poisoning the well, which is not something that one should do in scientific discourse. When you go through this series, you see a lot of statements like, how clueless they are about the entire body of scientific knowledge, or creationists are not part of science, they don’t learn science, they don’t do science. Real scientists don’t waste a single second thinking about them, or they just ignore all science. refers to the cartoonish mischaracterizations that preachers promote, like Leslie Wilson’s example, porcupines magically morphing into fiddler crabs.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, Dr. Truman, can you restate that one?
SPEAKER 01 :
So, and then there is the example of the, quote, cartoonish mischaracterizations that preachers use, like, porcupines magically morphing into fiddler crabs. I have no idea who has ever said that. And he says that we are allergic to science. And then he uses a phrase I want to come back to, and to basic logic. This term, basic logic, we’ll come back to that during the presentation. Continuous idea of poisoning the well. You’ll see quotes like, creationists are willfully ignorant of scientific principles. Creationist preachers are barely real people. What creationists actually fundamentally believe is completely incompatible with logic. There is a magical word again, logic. I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to have a PhD to use good logic. When referring to other experts like Professor Tour, he says that he got debunked worse than anybody in the history of the Internet, which is why, in a quote, he’s a shell of his former self and doesn’t talk about origin of life and research anymore. He doesn’t talk about life. I listened to myself personally to a conference presentation a couple of days ago by Professor Tour. He invited me to a podcast a few days ago on his show, and he is daily, daily involved worldwide. and every other Genesis discussion, so he has slowed down one bit.
SPEAKER 04 :
If James Tour today is a shell of his former self, that means he used to be the Incredible Hulk. I don’t know where David James got that one. Wow.
SPEAKER 05 :
So he spends a lot of time, as you said, Dr. Truman, poisoning the well. His listeners probably just love that stuff. And unfortunately, people get deceived by it, too. They’re like, wow, these guys, these creationists, they’re just total idiots. And he spends a lot of time, Professor Dave does, trying to poison the well. Definitely.
SPEAKER 01 :
Let’s move on to concern number 10. There are no competent creationists or intelligent scientists. For example, he says there are precisely zero working geologists who are young Earth creationists.
SPEAKER 04 :
There are entire… Working geologists, okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
There are entire conferences on geology run by PhD geologists on this topic. I go myself now and then to an annual conference here in Germany One only has to review the author list of peer-reviewed journals to see how many of them are working geologists with doctors. He also says that there’s only one apologist fraud in the entire world who understands chemistry well enough. to lie convincingly about origin of life research.
SPEAKER 03 :
Is that a backward slap against Dr. Tour?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, in this case, that is correct. Now, just reviewing the last year or two, the papers that I have published alone, I can think of three or four world-class PhDs in chemistry from places like Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, etc., All of them have been worldwide active in apologetics and arguing that the original life chemistry makes no sense. I can think of Dr. Eberlin, who I have not authored with, but I met last year. One of the most famous organic chemists in Brazil wrote a book about Genesis. The place where I work alone, it’s a big company. There are, I don’t know, Dozens, dozens of PhD chemists that are creationists, okay? Wow. And one must not forget is some of the most active and influential critics are actually evolutionists or open-minded critics who simply say, guys, Give me a break. What you’re saying here is really pretty, pretty off the wall. Maybe they don’t say this publicly and it’s kind of behind closed doors and whatnot. But think of people like Professor Shapiro from University of New York and others have written books and many, many articles. It’s just not true at all. That there’s like one chemist involved at all.
SPEAKER 05 :
All right. So we’ve gone through 10 concerns already. And you had a whole bunch more, Dr. Truman. You actually had 11 through 17. We’re hoping that Professor Dave will pick three or four out of this list so that we can go into more details because we’re just kind of skimming the surface on these. And, I mean, we’ve really just gotten started.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s right. I’m going to move on to the second list now. But let me say, yes, I would welcome a response from Dr. Dave. But he can pick any topic he wants out of chemistry or biology or information science.
SPEAKER 05 :
Do you want to say that again? You actually said Dr. Dave. I want to make sure that doesn’t get out there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, it’s perfect.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, no, it’s perfect.
SPEAKER 05 :
No, it’s not perfect. Oh, did I blow it? You did the same thing, Doug.
SPEAKER 04 :
I forgot about that. I was just going to say, Dr. Truman, you just promoted Professor Dave to Dr. Dave. But here’s the thing. You’re allowed to misspeak on Real Science Radio. We’re not going to play gotcha over that.
SPEAKER 01 :
The problem is, everybody I know has a doctorate. It’s like no big deal. It’s like no big deal. And then you got this guy pretending to be an expert, and he’s talking at high school level, you know? But anyway.
SPEAKER 04 :
Let’s get to concern number 11 before we run out of time, Doctor.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, okay, so let’s continue with concerns 11 through 17. I’m quoting now, all organisms have DNA wrapped around histones. An enzyme interacts with a promoter. Mutations are simply changes to the genetic code. Genes make up around 1 to 2% of the genome. Genes for ribosome RNA and transRNA are coding DNA. 10% maximum of the human genome is functional and 17, 84% of the human chimp sequences identity allegedly neglects rearrangements.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so now some of those are evolutionist favorites, so definitely make the top 17 of arguments I’ve heard from them.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, so these can all be put under the category of freshman genetics, okay? That’s why I picked these particular ones, because they can be grouped together. So he prepares the ground here by explaining that Most creationists do not comprehend genetics at even a high school level. He says that there’s a lot that creationists don’t understand, but we and his listeners should understand. And that creationists lie about high school level genetics concepts. and says that dishonesty is the only recourse because the evidence is overwhelming. So we’ll wrap up, I think, today’s session just about genetics. Let’s jump into concern number 11. So he starts off explaining some general things about genetics to make sure everybody’s properly oriented. We are told that every organism has a genome
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, we’re out of time for this week, but be sure to tune in next week as we wrap up our interview with Dr. Royal Truman and his takedown of Professor Dave. If you thought this week was eye-opening, just wait. There’s more to come. And as a bonus, right after next week’s show, we’ve got a special guest joining us for some extra fun. So don’t miss it. Same time, same place. See you then.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent Design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
Real Science Radio invites Dr. Royal Truman to weigh in on the legitimacy of Professor Dave’s arguments against creationists. With a background in organic chemistry, Dr. Truman sheds light on common misconceptions surrounding DNA, intelligent design, and scientific integrity. This episode promises an insightful journey into the nuances of scientific debates and the importance of approaching these discussions with logic and evidence-based reasoning.
