u/Sad-Category-5098

To an all knowing, all powerful God, prayer is completely redundant, and honestly, a bit bizarre. If God already knows every thought in my head, every outcome before it happens, and possesses a divine plan that is by definition perfect, then what is a human monologue supposed to accomplish? Begging an omniscient being to change its mind implies that either God’s original plan wasn't ideal, or that He requires constant flattery and reminders from mortals to act mercifully. It ultimately feels like a strange psychological feedback loop where people talk to the ceiling, attribute random coincidences to "answered prayers," and conveniently ignore the unanswered ones, all to convince themselves they have a dial in line to the universe's master clockmaker. 🙄

I plan to debate Donny and Sam from Standing For Truth in an open mic at some point. One of the topics I'll be discussing is whether human tail atavism provides evidence for human evolution. Since they argue from a young-earth creationist (YEC) perspective, I'd like to be as prepared as possible.

For those who have debated YECs before or are familiar with the common arguments they use, what debate tips would you recommend? Are there any specific objections or talking points regarding atavisms, genetics, embryology, or evolutionary biology that I should expect them to raise? I'd also appreciate any advice on how to keep the discussion focused on the actual evidence rather than getting sidetracked into unrelated topics or common debate tactics.

If you have any recommended papers, books, articles, or past debates that would help me prepare, I'd be grateful for those as well.

When we sleep, our brains naturally make up stories. We call these dreams. Sometimes a dream feels so real, so important, and so peaceful that you think, 'This must be from God.' But here is the problem: A person of a totally different religion has the exact same experience. A Muslim has a vivid dream that tells them Islam is true. A Christian has a vivid dream that tells them Christianity is true. Their brains do the exact same thing. If a 'message from God' feels exactly the same as your brain just making things up, you have no way to prove the difference. You are just guessing. If God is all-powerful, why would He use a confusing, sleepy dream to talk to you? Why not just stand in front of you and speak clearly so there is no guessing?

Why would God not give babies the moral chance to change from their mothers and become Christian? Because I'm talking about the babies that were commanded to be slaughtered by God. Why didn't God give them the chance to maybe change? I'm sure you have heard stories where certain kids don't grow up to be the same as their parents and are actually better and more moral than their sinful parents. I think that would be a good example too be honest.

It strikes me as deeply unjust that people would be damned to hell simply for sincerely concluding that evolution and an ancient earth are true. I’m not saying I hold that position, but if young earth creationism somehow turned out to be correct, could God truly fault someone for following what appeared to be overwhelming evidence and remaining unconvinced by a young earth interpretation? If the age of the earth is supposedly that essential to salvation, why would honest intellectual error on that point warrant eternal punishment? That logic doesn’t hold up.

I’m looking to get some perspective from people who support the idea of rapid post-Flood hyper-evolution. I’m really curious about how marine life would’ve handled it, specifically, how did so many sea creatures manage to evolve fast enough to survive the sudden, massive drops in water temperature and changes in salinity during Noah's Flood? What exactly is the biological mechanism that allows for that kind of crazy fast adaptation in such a short window, and if that's a thing, why don't we see that same level of hyper-evolution happening today when modern marine ecosystems are stressed out by rapid environmental changes?

I’ve been watching some debates with Donnie Budinsky recently, and I’m trying to wrap my head around one of his main points against evolution. He keeps harping on this idea that "the differences make all the difference." Basically, his argument is that even though humans and chimps share a ton of genetic similarity, the massive architectural discontinuities, like differences in gene regulation, alternative splicing, and the completely different structure of the Y chromosome, prove separate ancestry instead of common descent.

To me, this feels like a bit of a logical leap, but I’m trying to understand the actual science behind it. If evolution is literally defined as descent with modification, shouldn’t we fully expect to see massive structural gaps and discontinuities after millions of years of independent mutation and genetic drift? Especially on something like the Y chromosome which doesn’t recombine?

It kind of feels like looking at two languages that split from a common root 5,000 years ago, pointing out that their modern grammar and slang are totally different, and claiming they never shared a root language at all.

How do evolutionary biologists actually answer this specific "discontinuity" argument? Are these major genomic differences actually a problem for the evolutionary model, or are they exactly what the math/models predict?

Would love to hear some thoughts from people who know the genetics better than I do. Thanks!

If God created time, there must have been a reality "before" time existed wherein God could act to create it. However, the concept of a "before" is itself a temporal marker, meaning time already existed prior to its supposed creation. If God instead exists inside time to perform this action, God is bound by the laws of causality, meaning God must have a beginning point and would paradoxically need to create Himself. Therefore, because any act of creation requires a sequential transition from non-creation to creation, a timeless being cannot logically perform an action, and a temporal being cannot create the timeline it inhabits.

If male and females were created from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, how do you explain the extensive fossil record showing that complex multicellular organisms reproduced entirely asexually through cloning for millions of years before distinct biological sexes ever existed, as demonstrated by the 565-million-year-old fossil "Fractofusus"?

Ken Ham often talks about the 'billions of dead things' in the rocks, but my question is about the living things that didn't make it onto the boat. Almost every plant on Earth, including the olive trees and grapevines mentioned in the Bible, can't actually grow or eat without specific fungi living in the soil. If the entire world was buried under miles of crushing, salty floodwater for a year, all that beneficial soil life would have been choked out and killed.

So, when Noah stepped off the Ark, he wasn't looking at a garden; he was looking at a planet covered in sterile, toxic sludge. Without those microscopic fungi to help the plants grow, how did the first seeds not just starve to death in 'dead' dirt the moment they sprouted?

Back in high school I wasn’t actually part of this group chat, but I found out about it through another friend who was in it. That’s how I learned that some people I hung around with would secretly record me or use old pictures of me and post them there.

One example was me practicing basketball alone, and someone filmed me without telling me and posted it in the chat, saying I was “putting in the hard work,” but it was clearly framed as a joke at my expense.

They would also say things like “we love you” or act overly friendly in the chat and in person class. But from what I was told it didn’t feel genuine. It seemed like I was the “odd one out” they used for entertainment or jokes. I wasn’t in contact with them directly through that chat, so I only found out after the fact, which made it feel even worse.

I’m an INTP and generally more quiet and in my own head, so I’ve wondered if that played into how I was treated. I’m not in contact with any of them anymore, but I still think about it sometimes and try to understand why it happened.

The traditional Christian theological framework posits that evil and deception are deviations from a world created by a benevolent God; however, if one flips this premise, an unsettling hypothesis emerges: a reality governed by an all-powerful, purely malicious being. In such a system, what we perceive as "truth," "sin," or "history" would not be objective realities, but rather carefully engineered components of a grand deception designed by a cosmic deceiver. This entity, possessing total control over the fabric of reality, could seamlessly manipulate human senses, manufacture false memories, and even stage historical miracles, such as the resurrection, to anchor humanity in a profound, inescapable lie. Consequently, if every piece of evidence we rely on can be synthetically produced by a sovereign manipulator, it becomes logically impossible to distinguish between a verified historical truth and a perfectly executed illusion, rendering all human belief systems fundamentally suspect.

If you maintain that no amount of geological, astronomical, or biological evidence could ever change your mind because your conclusion is fixed in advance, how can you claim to be an objective seeker of truth? More importantly, if your answer to "what would convince you" is "nothing," how are you not guilty of the exact same dogmatic, "closed-minded" bias that you accuse secular naturalists of having