An open letter to Rhett McLaughlin and anyone else on the road to unbelief

[To our other readers: “Rhett and Link” are a popular YouTube comedy duo.1 They were once professing Christians but have recently come out as “hopeful agnostics”. On their popular podcast, Ear Biscuits, they each spent a couple of hours detailing their walk away from the faith.2,3 This letter is in response to those podcasts. I don’t expect them to actually read this, nor to respond, but this is from my heart. Maybe some other struggling Christian can be helped by what I say.]

Dr Robert W. Carter

Dr Carter was converted to Christ at an early age, but did not know what to do with the theory of evolution. He always knew what he wanted to believe, but had no way to express what he was thinking and no evidence to support his views. In his freshman year of college, he was exposed to the information for creation for the first time and soon after adopted it as his modus operandi. He says he felt a tremendous joy when he realized his science and his religion were no longer at odds. This joy (and, he says, Creation magazine and the Journal of Creation) enabled him to get through the in-depth evolutionary training of his undergraduate and graduate programs with his faith intact.

He obtained a BS in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992. He then spent four years teaching high school biology, chemistry, physics and electronics before going to the University of Miami to obtain his PhD in Marine Biology. He successfully completed this program in 2003 with a dissertation on “Cnidarian Fluorescent Proteins.” While in Miami, he studied the genetics of pigmentation in corals and other invertebrates, designed and built an aquaculture facility for Caribbean corals, performed well over 500 SCUBA dives, many of them at night, and licensed a spin-off product of his research (a patented fluorescent protein) to a biotech company.

He is currently a senior scientist and speaker for CMI-USA in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently researching human genetics and other issues related to biblical creation.

See where Robert Carter responds to Rhett’s claim of:

Rhett: “Humans and chimps are 99% similar.”

Carter:

“Dude, this idea comes from the genetic Stone Age (the 1970s) and the man who first made that claim is now a biblical creationist whom we have interviewed in Creation magazine.

https://creation.com/jon-ahlquist

“Everybody knows that [99% similarity is true], because the human genome has been mapped.” No, everybody does not know that. In fact, anybody who has studied the issue realizes that the human and chimp genomes have millions of single-letter differences, thousands of comparative rearrangements, and a huge amount of DNA is not shared between our two species. See Is the human genome nearly identical to chimpanzee?—a reassessment of the literature.

https://creation.com/human-chimp-dna-similarity-literature

The real percent identity is sitting around 80–85%. Yet the number does not matter. All we need is for the differences to be greater than can be handled by drift and selection in the assumed 6.5 million years. The cutoff is up around 98–99%, which is why people are still clinging to the old claims even though they have been discredited. See Genomic monkey business—estimates of nearly identical human–chimp DNA similarity re-evaluated using omitted data and similar claims from non-creationists.8

https://creation.com/human-chimp-dna-similarity-re-evaluated

The “99%” claim is just plain wrong and the amount of difference cannot be explained in any evolutionary scenario I am aware of.”

A lot of FR Darwinians are quite schizophrenic:

How?

They shout out “Scientists have proven evolution.”

... and then they say “See, scientists would NEVER lie to you about evolution.”

Then the “scientist” says “Hold muh beer” and then starts talking to you about global warming...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.