Is Creationism just as irrational as Young Earth Creationism?

I've had this topic in my head for a while, but I've never got the motivation to put bytes to webpages to write it until last night when I saw this tweet by one of my favorite atheists on the internet, Justin Schieber:

Ad hocness and priors will differ from person to person and from time to time. Don't assume everybody is only rational to share your priors.

— #RealAtheology (@Justinsweh) August 27, 2015

Normally this sort of sentiment would get my full endorsement.  The idea seems pretty straight forward, once you've gotten to a certain level of philosophical understanding anyway.  In the end I may be agreeing with Justin here, but I want to try and hash our my thoughts on the subject, and writing helps.  Jump below the fold for my thoughts.

Before the Big Bang 3 by Skydivephil

I've been a bit late in posting this due to racing to finish my last post/video on the Kalam before going through a major two week project at work.

What I want to share is another great science education video by Phil and Monica who post on YouTube under the handle SkyDivePhil.

In this video they go through some more of the theories being worked on in modern physics to help us describe what could possibly be "before the big bang", with a focus on String Theory.

They both have a good knowledge on the subject and do a great job of helping to communicate it to a lay audience. What's more is that they have access to the scientists working in the field and got them to agree to an interview.  This is truly a gem of a series and the video is extremely dense with information that attempts to give a look at what would be entailed by the theories if we were ever able to prove them. Spoiler Alert: There's no god required.

I highly recommend giving it a look.

Quick and Dirty: A potential defeater for the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

I wanted to throw up a quick post about an idea I have to try and refute Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.  This isn’t intended as a full rebuttal, but more of an idea for an approach to refute it. 

I’m actually looking for feedback on whether or not this approach works or is fundamentally flawed.

The thrust of his argument is that since evolution only selects based on adaptability we can't necessarily trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties on naturalism (the assumption that there is no god).

An example he uses is that of a human and a lion, the truth value of a human's belief's about lions is separate from whether or not those beliefs produce adaptable behavior.  On naturalism we have no reason to suppose our beliefs about a lion being dangerous and wanting to eat us, therefore we should run and hide from it. 

We similarly could have evolved the belief that we should run from the tiger because in order to make tigers happy you should run and hide from them.  The thought is that through the eyes of evolution, both sets of beliefs produce equivalent adaptability and so either could have been selected for.

Naturalism, Falsifiability, and Hiddenness

This post is a bit off the cuff, as it’s mainly in response to a Twitter conversation to elaborate on something you can’t put into a series of tweets.  This was born of a conversation with Alex and Elijiah, and the topic was meaty enough that I wanted to write about it.

The question is whether or not a-priori Naturalism is “reasonable” or at least “not scary”.  That’s basically the starting position in philosophy that: no matter what we observe, we would never accept evidence of something supernatural existing.   It’s rejecting the supernatural a-priori.

Personally, I kind of abhor this line of reasoning, or at least I find it terrible to be in a position where I’d say that there can never be evidence of any kind to prove the existence of a god or other supernatural entities.  

To me, this reeks of a sort of fundamentalism that I’d normally chastise certain religious people for practicing.