In part 1 of my rebuttal to the young-earth Creationist movie “Is Genesis History?,” we looked at the argument that Noah’s Flood deposited thousands of feet of sand, silt, and dead animals that was then cut into a canyon. And then, over a few thousand years, this somehow turned to stone.

I’m a novice about geology, but still I came up with questions that were sidestepped. Unsurprisingly, the fact that conventional geology nicely answers each one was also ignored. Let’s continue.

Philosophical grounding

Our next expert is Paul Nelson, a philosopher. He contrasted the two major views of the history of life and the universe. There’s the conventional paradigm of a 13.7 billion-year-old universe where things happened naturally, gradually, bottom up, and without design. Against that is the Genesis paradigm, which imagines a much shorter time scale and a divine intelligence that designed things. The data from the field we have will be interpreted in different ways, depending on your paradigm.

Of these two paradigms, one is built on evidence, and the other is built despite it. Instead of interpreting data through the lens of a worldview, the honest scholar follows the data and builds a worldview as a conclusion.

And why does this Christian philosopher propose just two views? If we’re going to free ourselves from the scientific consensus and cast the net wider, why reach for just young-earth Creationist Christianity for an alternative cosmology? Why not also get the Hindu view and some traditional Native American views and the flat-earth view?

This philosopher stated that Christians have a witness that the scientists don’t have: the Bible (cuz God was there, so he ought to know!). He tried and failed to dismiss the idea that this approach pits science and religion against each other. We will see more of this later.

What does the Bible say?

Next was hebraist (Hebrew scholar) Steven Boyd. (Uh, yeah—I always turn to Hebrew scholars when I have a puzzling question about cosmology.) He tells us that the Bible’s authors clearly thought they were talking about real events. Yes, it really was six literal days (yom means “day”). Yes, it really was a global flood (the Flood story has dozens of instances of the word kol, meaning “all”). Only if you impose an agenda-driven, external point of view onto Genesis would you come up with anything else. He asks, Why else would these authors want future generations to learn their history?

You could ask the same of Homer. Why would he want to pass along the Iliad? Presumably to tell his listeners that they were Greeks, a great race of people descended from gods. But even if Homer thought the Iliad was history, that doesn’t make it so. The same is true for the Old Testament and its authors.

Boyd said that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, which listed Noah’s descendants, was more evidence that the flood was global, since it touched on every society. I wonder, though, where the father(s) of the pre-Columbian societies in the Americas are in that list—the Mississippian culture or the Olmecs, Mayans, Incas, Nazca, and dozens of others. Or the other important civilizations far from the Fertile Crescent. How do they fit into the myopic viewpoint of Genesis?

He talks about the genealogy listed in the Old Testament (all the “begats” in Genesis) and the two (incompatible) lists given for Jesus. This again shows the Bible’s historical foundation.

Yeah, if the Bible were trustworthy, this might be good evidence. You’ve done nothing to show that it is.

He said about the Adam and Eve story as the origin of mankind, “The biblical text is not compatible with the conventional paradigm” of evolution.

Uh, yeah, you got that right.

Dating the earth

Geologist Andrew Snelling was the next expert. He gave several examples of monumental volcanism—the Yellowstone supervolcano (in Wyoming), which sent ash as far south as Texas, or the Deccan Traps, which is a million cubic kilometers of basalt (solidified lava) in central India. He declared that you can’t use today’s rates of volcanism as a standard, because he wants to compress all prehistoric volcanism into about one millionth the time that conventional geology gives for it. He didn’t explain why this makes more sense of the data or address the question of how the environment would be different with that much concentrated volcanism.

As for evidence that today’s rates of volcanism can’t be applied to the past, his argument seemed to be (my paraphrase), “Have any supervolcanoes erupted in human history?! Well, there you go.”

But he gives no evidence to support a compressed timeframe. If volcano magnitude follows a power law distribution (as with earthquakes), it’s not surprising that the last 10,000 years haven’t overlapped with any of earth’s most dramatic volcanic events of the last billion years. (Oops—was it inappropriate to bring up the idea of long time to neatly explain an issue?)

Next on the chopping block was conventional geology’s use of radioisotope dating. We’re told that today’s slow radioactive decay rates can’t be assumed in the past. (Why not?) To prove the unreliability of this dating method, he explained how he had samples from a single rock layer tested using different isotopes. The tests returned dates that were all over the map.

I heard him relate this anecdote in person years ago. My reaction to that is here. Briefly, only igneous rock can be reliably dated using radioisotope dating. Deliberately use metamorphic rock instead, and you can get dates with which to lie that this method is never reliable.

Let’s pause and ask, if this powerful new evidence from the Creationists is correct, why hasn’t conventional science accepted it? Haters gonna hate, apparently. Conventional scientists have a “commitment to millions of years.” Here’s how it went down: nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell proposed that the earth was millions of years old, and biologist Charles Darwin felt empowered by this to hypothesize millions of years for evolution. Conventional scientists are committed to evolution—not because it’s well supported by evidence but to make baby Jesus cry—so you must have millions of years.

We’re told at the end, “It’s not a question of science versus the Bible”; rather, it’s two different views of earth’s history.

Right, and the two different views are incompatible. It is indeed science versus the Bible, and you can’t have them both. Christians can’t allay their concerns about being antiscientific with the arguments in this movie. On one hand is the evidence and science’s remarkable track record of telling us about nature. On the other, the Bronze Age god who likes human sacrifice.

Pick.

Continue to part 3.

See also: For a more science-y take on Grand Canyon documentaries, read paleontologist Donald Prothero’s summary of his experience as a science expert trying to talk sense into five Creationists (four Christian and one Muslim) on the “Creationism” episode of Conspiracy Road Trip (BBC, 2012), recommended by commenter flexilis.

I’m even told sometimes, “You’re attacking the Bible,”
and when I am accused of such I simply say,
“I’m not attacking the Bible. I’m attacking you.
Your problem is that you can’t tell the difference.”
— Pete Enns

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/24/17.)

Image credit: Web page for movie

Imagine squeezing your eyes real tight and wishing hard. What do you wish for?

No, not that Santa Claus will bring you all the stuff on your list or for Tinker Bell’s health after she drank the poison. This time, we’re wishing that all those stories from the Old Testament were really, honest-to-goodness true—from the six-day creation and Adam and Eve to the global Flood, the Tower of Babel, and all the rest. And—it’s a miracle!—our wish has been granted. Or, at least we can imagine so for 101 minutes by watching Is Genesis History?, a “documentary” released as a DVD in 2017.

The movie is unapologetically young-earth Creationist (“young earth” means that they think that the earth and the rest of the universe is roughly 6000 years old, and “Creationist” means that they reject evolution).

The production quality is high, with some beautiful natural locations, and they interview a dozen relevant scientists. Breaking ranks with typical Creationist “scholarship,” these scientists’ doctorates are often actually in the field that they’re critiquing—geology, paleontology, biology, astronomy, and archaeology. They only tangentially addressed the elephant in the room, that conventional science has overwhelmingly concluded that the Big Bang and evolution are real, and a 6000-year-old earth and global flood and the rest of the Bible’s “history” are not.

As an outsider to these scientific fields, I’m sometimes in a difficult spot. Some of the movie’s arguments are clearly nonsense. Some are legitimate open questions within conventional science. And some require more expertise (or research time) than I now have. I’ve written about a couple of times Creationists were able to shut me up with arguments I couldn’t immediately answer here. That is, they shut me up until I had a chance to investigate the claims more thoroughly and found out how I’d been lied to, which is not the best way to win me to your side.

If you can expand on my responses below, share your insights in the comments.

Canyons

The movie opens at a stream in a small canyon. The walls of the canyon look to be made of sand and gravel. We’re asked: How long would it take for a small stream like this to carve this canyon? Thousands of years, you might think? Surprise—we’re near Mt. St. Helens! It’s been just four decades since the famous eruption of 1980, and it already has new canyons. We’re told that streams “cut through deep [bedrock], all in a couple of days.”

Don’t be ridiculous—streams didn’t cut through bedrock in days. I’ve been to Mt. St. Helens many times, including two visits to the Mount St. Helens Creation Center, a tiny museum with a Creationist presupposition that may have been the source of the observation, “Gosh, but don’t these recent canyons look just like a mini Grand Canyon?!”

Who would be surprised that water quickly cut canyons at Mt. St. Helens? They’re made of sand and gravel!

The Grand Canyon

The movie introduces Steve Austin (geologist) who argued for a global flood, using the Grand Canyon as evidence. He said that the many layers show evidence of rapid sedimentation—that is, within hours or even minutes.

How? The upper Grand Canyon layers include sedimentary rock including sandstone, limestone, and shale. These rocks form under different conditions. Are they imagining that the advancing or retreating Flood changed its conditions so that different things would settle out? Limestone is mostly made from tiny fragments of marine organisms like coral. Shale is made from clay and other minerals, and unlike limestone and sandstone, it is composed of thin sheets. It would be complicated enough if all the sandstone were at the bottom, then the shale, and then the limestone (for example), but it’s actually a complex interleaving of various kinds of each stone—sandstone, then shale, then limestone, then more sandstone, and so on.

It gets worse when you remember that these layers contain fossils that are distinct to that layer. It’s not something simple like the animals were graded by size—the biggest falling out of the turbulent flood first and becoming part of the lowest layer, and so on. Why are there trilobite fossils in the Tapeats sandstone layer but none in the Hermit shale above, and why are there fossils of dragonflies with an eight-inch wingspan in the Hermit shale but none in the Tapeats sandstone? How would a chaotic flood create thousands of feet of distinctly interleaved layers? And if the flood was global, why aren’t canyons like this commonplace around the world? The questions aren’t even acknowledged.

The movie points to the Bible, handwaving a geological explanation for water bursting out of the ground (“the fountains of the deep”) to create the Flood.

No, geology doesn’t help you much here, but a mythology borrowed from the nearby Sumerians explains things nicely. They imagined a dome of salt water above the earth (that’s why the sky is blue!) and fresh water underneath. (More analysis here and here.)

Next, we’re assured that the flood was global, not local. Where did all that water come from? Don’t worry—the mountains weren’t as high back then, so covering the earth didn’t take that much. But that means extreme mountain building in the few thousand years since the Ark landed. Again, we’re given assertion but no evidence for this.

Cutting of the Grand Canyon

Finally, he rejects the idea that the Canyon took tens of millions of years to be cut by the Colorado River. He said, “Most geologists have jettisoned that idea” (untrue as far as I can tell). What did carve the Canyon, he says, is catastrophic erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes, which might’ve carved the Grand Canyon in weeks.

Actually, I can imagine erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes. Dry Falls in eastern Washington state was formed that way. The one small problem is that Dry Falls and Grand Canyon look completely different (pictures of each here), which makes clear that they were formed in very different ways.

He can sidestep this problem by imagining that the erosion happened to sand or silt, before it was turned to stone. In that case, of course, he must explain the magic that made it turn to stone in a few thousand years.

So many unanswered questions.

To be continued.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect
has intended us to forgo their use.
— Galileo Galilei

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/17.)

Image from Daniel Mayer (CC BY-SA 3.0)