I took a look at a long video, and only looked at a very short part of it. I will not attempt exact quotes. Here are the points as I would state them if I believed in Deep Time and Evolution, including explicitation of things PineCreek simply alluded to:
So many different people, of different religions, all except atheists believing in God, in so many countries believe Evolution.
It also involves so many different fields of study, independently of each other.
For it not to be true, you would need a huge conspiracy, how does it work?
You cannot say that it's because Evolution is already very popular and Deep Time is already very popular, since at one time it came to be popular after being very impopular.
You cannot say Scientists do it for the money, they aren't getting rich.
Basically, everyone was Biblical creationists and many independently found out this wasn't true.
Now, I will quote my own restatements and answer each. Because for all the goodwill of Kyle, and I didn't think he did bad, I think I have something to add.
So many different people, of different religions, all except atheists believing in God, in so many countries believe Evolution.
In 100 AD, a certain Ptolemy was born. Before he died, 70 years later, he was going to write Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις, which was later by Arabs nicknamed Almagest. It involved Geocentrism, and very many today believe he was wrong therein. But he could have said that Jews, Osiris worshippers, Baal worshippers, Greco-Romans Platonists, all believing in some kind of God, and also Lucrece who with his predecessors Epicure and Democritus who didn't independently believed Geocentrism.
He would not have used that as an argument, there are far stronger ones, like Geocentrism (of some sort) being what it looks like, and it's good methodology not to deviate from what it looks like before you have a good reason. Geocentrism is the default, Heliocentrism would be in need of specially good evidence in order to not be simply special pleading.
For the record, I believe this still stands.
But, suppose he had instead used "consensus" as an argument. By now there is also a consensus for the opposite side, and this means the two consensus' kind of cancel out. In fact, in history, geography and sociology combined, the one for Geocentrism would be broader. So, it would have been a bad idea. The one of economy in hypotheses is actually better. And by now, either Atheism proves Heliocentrism, or Geocentrism proves Theism, or both Theism and Heliocentrism stand on other grounds. So, Atheism doesn't make sense even as an economy in hypotheses, since it opposes another one, namely Geocentrism.
Now, to push what is being argued a bit further, one could add:
It also involves so many different fields of study, independently of each other.
So, the argument being made is not so much a consensus of opinion as a kind of untutored and not manipulated collusion of many types of evidence. This leading very many researchers independently in one specific direction and them finding unity from that independent arrival at the same conclusion.
What does PineCreek know of the history of ideas? Some, I suppose. He certainly knows the Middle Ages were Geocentric, Theocratic, Scholastic and Roman Catholic in Western Europe. He probably doesn't pretend they were Flat Earth. So, he would understand the history of ideas on the level of what successions of ideas were being made. That's on a level with my understanding of Evolution back when I believed it, before age 9 to 10. I could have given you the ancestry for a given clade, like land animals with birds from Crossopterygians, these leading to Amphibians, these leading to Reptiles and Reptiles budding off Birds and Mammals. But I could not have discussed fruitfully, I think, with either an Evolutionist who was also an expert in Biology or with a Creationist who was expert in biology, how mutations work.
I think the argument Pine Creek is making is about that naive when it comes to the history of ideas. It's like "mutations pop up at all times in all different directions, and always some are functional and even adding new function, so obviously natural selection only has to weed out the bad ones ..." - not counting on things I only found out after I entered the debate as an adult, some 20 years ago, like a certain fish in Mexican caves being blind because it needs ten functional genes for the retina to have both cones and taps that function, and two of the genes are damaged by not very many mutations - while each would probably have 100 + loci in its non-damaged form. It's easier to damage an eye than to repair one.
Now, to give you a more sophisticated idea of the history of ideas, paradigms on big topics actually precede small scientific detail observations. It may be set off by one such, like Siccar Point in this case, but before others come to its support, it already is a paradigm, which one is already trying to illustrate by more detail observations. Very precisely like Scholastics and up to Linnaeus were Christians before using detailed observations (like St. Albert's entomological ones) as support for it.
The thing is not that an establishment was biassed and that for Christianity and then became unbiassed, and then the evidence produced a new bias for evolution. The thing is that establishments changed bias. When doing so, they rearranged already existing observations into the new one, and then started arranging new evidence into the needed slots for supporting the new bias. On the individual level, such behaviour would be considered bad scientific practise. On the collective level, since collectives are only as smart as the smartness common to all or most constituents of them, this is inevitable. It may or may not have been inevitable to change the bias, but it was inevitable to have instututions mainly go on their bias, old or new.
But, paradigms have been successfully overturned, right?
From Maxwell's discovery of electro-magnetism, up to Mitchelson-Morley, light was considered as propagating through a medium called aether, a bit like sound propagates through gasses, liquids and solids. This was very quickly overturned at Mitchelson-Morley.
And this precise case should give a hint. Aether was not supported by a bias with emotional investment, it was supported solely because it was a good explanation. It was abandoned basically within a few years from when, by Michelson Morley, it collided with a stronger bias. Because, if aether were a fact (and perhaps it is, even a proven one, I refer here to Sungenis on the Sagnac effect), then earth has to stand still. If you swim through a river at same speed both upstreams and downstreams, with the same force used, it is because the water is not moving. And if the aether is not moving around earth, it is because earth itself is not moving.
What happened was not that you had value neutral evidence that on all possible hypotheses showed the old paradigm of light propagating through aether to be wrong. What did happen was, an experiment showed "either aether or heliocentrism is wrong" and everyone immediately concluding "aether is wrong" - which obviously happened because denial of geocentrism was already a dogma.
For it not to be true, you would need a huge conspiracy, how does it work?
No conspiracy at all. Just human good judgment of different persons in same collective not adding up, but subtracting. Knowledge adds up. The more people I get around me, the more probable it is I can finally find someone able to tell me exactly how many times over the course of the Julian calendar New Year's Day changed and exactly how many times given regions changed epoch between ab Urbe condita, Anno Mundi, Anno Domini, and therefore what years were leap years and what weren't.
You cannot say that it's because Evolution is already very popular and Deep Time is already very popular, since at one time it came to be popular after being very impopular.
I already suggested that at one time, for centuries, the paradigm was Christianity, specifically Catholic Christianity (but in fields related to this question, the Reformation had little change to add to the conversation, Steno was both sides of the Lutheran-Catholic divide, and he invented Geology in the shape of Flood Geology). I have also suggested to you that at one time, the paradigm was Heliocentrism. And I have already stated the principle, institutions don't cease to act on their bias, they may change bias, and then act on their new bias instead, but they are never without a bias.
In fact, when two paradigms are really competing, neither is the basic bias of the institution, it's something else. So, when Agassiz* and Darwin were debating, they were at least on some level sharing a bias. Which perhaps was and perhaps wasn't one a strict Fundie could share, but certainly was not limited to Fundies.
You cannot say Scientists do it for the money, they aren't getting rich.
Youtubers who get by through patreon are also not upper five % of the income of the US. They still don't want to offend their patrons.
Basically, everyone was Biblical creationists and many independently found out this wasn't true.
This is not how the shift happened. First, while many were still somewhat Christian, as Agassiz* shows, they weren't Biblical. Second, science and religion are not the only two fields involved here.
Let's speak of progressive politics and of freemasonry for a bit.
Once upon a time Luther and Calvin and Popes Leo X over St. Pius V were all of them Biblical Young Earth Creationists. Next century, Frederick V of the Palatinate and Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, were also both of them Young Earth Creationists. So were (even closer on) the Duke of Alba and the Prince of Orange, William the Taciturn. So were also both William Cromwell and Charles I.
There was a specific century in which many people came to see Christian confessions (or confessional diversity) as the reason for wars they had suffered horribly in - pretty much like the 20 - 25 % ex-Catholics saw Catholic clericalism as the reason or at least occasion for, well, sexual predation. I think I have made it clear it started at the start of the 80 Years' War and ended not before another William of Orange (William III of England, William II in both Scotland and Netherlands).
This experience in and of itself would not necessarily have worked for the kind of shift we are now contemplating. Working on a Catholic bias, its natural tendency would have been rather to enforce the Anti-Protestant bias of that Catholic. And indeed, it is nearly as much due to my sides-taking in these wars, as due to my theological bent for ritual, that I was to convert to Catholicism. On a Protestant mind, it could simply lead to what it indubitably led to, a reinforced Anti-Catholic bias. It certainly did that before William III of England was basically ordering the massacre of Glencoe.
But there was a third party. I am not totally against third party, in the US, that could perhaps even be quite useful. But this time, the third party was in fact even less Catholic than the Protestants were.
They started out with fairly "good intentions" on one plane - and probably all intentions, including Ted Bundy's on a killing spree are good on some plane. The one-plane good intention was to get kings away from the Catholic-Protestant vendetta and bring them to cultivating peace and useful things and happiness. But the bad idea was to get them away from both "Orthodox" Protestantism and Orthodox Catholicism. And in order to get "past" the Catholic-Protestant theological problem, they had to deny original sin, and deny Genesis 3. Perhaps not immediately, but at the very least reinterpret - or demote.
We get to Lessing's (a freemason's) Ring Fable, in which he suggested God was equally interested in all of Christian, Jewish and Muslim piety. But before we get there, we get to the Galileo case. And the Giordano Bruno case. Freemasonry and at least part of its precursor Rosicrucianism have been Heliocentric since basically making Bruno and Galileo part of their martyrology. One things Protestants and Catholics had in common back then was studying and getting inspired by martyrs. Both parties and probably all rosicrucians and freemasons in the early years would have considered Sts Peter and Paul martyrs. But Catholics would consider Pierre de Castelnau and Thomas More (with John Fisher) as martyrs. Anglicans would consider Cranmer and Tyndale martyrs. Calvinists would consider Waldensians and Albigensians as martyrs. What kind of martyrs would the third party have? Well, obviously "martyrs for science" - enter Bruno and Galileo into the pantheon of secular Great Men**
This sets the stage for an anti-Biblical bias. And one of the earliest freemasons, Desaguyliers, started out as a pluriconfessional Protestant clergyman's son and and a Newton fan.
Whether you put or don't put the French Revolution down to Freemasonry, you cannot deny certain of its works, like Declaration of the Rights of Citizens and Men, are very directly inspired by Masonic ideology. By the way, as I think 4th of August to be a more decisive date than 14th of July, and 4th of August was precisely a drafting of Masonic inspired Documents, I do fall down on the "Masons' Fault" side of the controversy.
Now, I am not saying that at each institution of science in Lyell's or Darwin's days, a freemason was pulling the strings. I am also not saying there wasn't any Masonic pressure. I am saying the Masons had created a culture, which looked down on Confessional and therefore Christian Orthodoxy. It can be added lots of people in the British royal house were Masons, and lots of or some US Presidents were Masons ... again, not saying they gave any secret orders to bolster Evolution with any and every argument, including the worst and most dishonest. I am saying they had created a culture in the Century of Enlightenment where the Lyellian and Darwinian Revolutions had become as thinkable as the French and American ones had been.
And that this came before specific arguments on the skull shape of Engis 2 or the fossil layers in the Paris basin.
Because, that's how paradigm shifts usually work. And if certain wars end soon, let's not be too eager to hail the peacemaker as a kind of saviour ... if he's a child of God, God will reward him without our exaggerated adulation. That's a takeaway from Freemasons creating Enlightenment. A big one, and an Apocalyptic one.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Sabinus of Assisi with Companions
30.XII.2022
Spoleti item natalis sanctorum Martyrum Sabini, Assisiensis Episcopi, atque Exsuperantii et Marcelli Diaconorum, ac Venustiani Praesidis cum uxore et filiis, sub Maximiano Imperatore. Ex ipsis Marcellus et Exsuperantius, primum equuleo suspensi, deinde fustibus graviter mactati, postremnm, abrasi ungulis et laterum exustione assati, martyrium compleverunt; Venustianus autem non multo post, simul cum uxore et filiis, est gladio necatus; sanctus vero Sabinus, post detruncationem manuum et diutinam carceris macerationem, ad mortem usque caesus est. Horum martyrium, licet diverso exstiterit tempore, una tamen die recolitur.
* Who was a Creationist and confessionally a Christian, but very far from a Biblical or Young Earth Creationist, not really a Fundie by the standard of his times - be that noted in connexion with his racism! Both his not-quite-Biblical creationism and his racism may be put down to the fact he was son of the third generation of Swiss Protestant preachers ... And I suppose someone will try to blow bagpipes over this comment ... No True Sc...
** It would consider both Napoleon and Wellington as Great Men, no doubt too.
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