Monthly Archives: November 2021

Saving Haeckel: Why “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” isn’t so wrong

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Ernst Haeckel published his influential theory of embryology, distilled as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in 1866, seven years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Haeckel’s theory fell out of favor and hasn’t been part of evolutionary theory for decades, but it’s still cited today as a cause of mischief by modern Creationists.

Haeckel’s theory

The similarities between embryos of different animal species were noted decades before Darwin: while adults of different species are easy to tell apart, their embryos are not. Haeckel took this further and is most known for his 1874 drawing (above) of the development of various animal embryos—fish, chicken, human, and so on—to illustrate his point.

Ontogeny is the development of an embryo, and phylogeny is an organism’s evolutionary history. So by “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” Haeckel was saying that you can watch through an organism’s development as an embryo a replay of its development through hundreds of million years of evolution. For example, a human embryo first looks like a fish (notice the gill-like structure), then like a reptile (four limbs and a tail), and finally like a mammal, which is the evolutionary path that humans took.

But it doesn’t work like that.

What embryology actually tells us

Let’s put Haeckel aside for now and look for clues to evolution within embryology. If Creationists could get beyond “Haeckel was wrong,” which no one denies, there are important insights here. What’s fascinating is how embryonic structures that developed in animals that preceded humans, like fish and reptiles, have been repurposed by evolution for humans.

Pharyngeal arches or folds (often improperly called “gill slits”) are the double-chin-like folds under the head in the early embryo stage. This striking feature is found in all vertebrate embryos.

The arches that develop into gills in fish become various cartilages, glands, muscles, and other tissue in the human neck and face.

These arches explain the strange path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Pharyngeal arches four, five, and six (arch one is closest to the head) fuse early in the development of mammal embryos. The recurrent laryngeal nerve comes from the fourth arch, and after the fusion, it is near an artery from the sixth arch. This creates a straightforward layout in fish, but in mammals the neck takes the brain and larynx (connected by this nerve) away from the heart. The problem is that the nerve is hooked around that artery. That means that in all mammals—yes, even the long-necked giraffe—the nerve goes from the brain, down around this artery, and back up to the larynx. No perfect designer would create this, but it is nicely explained by evolution.

Another example of repurposing (technically, exaptation) is the mammalian ear. Structures that develop into a multi-bone jaw in reptiles have been repurposed to become ear bones in mammals. In fact, it was embryology, not fossils, that provided the first clues of this evolution.

Turn back humans’ evolutionary clock and we see the tail grow back (as in other mammals), the ear bones become jaws (as in reptiles), and the throat becomes gills (as in fish).

The Creationists

Creationists respond that the perfect designer was making variations on a theme. If you’ve got a great design, why design everything from scratch? Why not simply tweak it for various environments? This designer is like a car company that makes small cars (shrew, mouse) and big ones (elephant, whale), cars that are beautiful (peacock, gazelle), and cars for tough environments (camel, yak), and so on.

The supernatural assumption adds nothing when we have a natural theory that explains evolution just fine. “God” is a solution looking for a problem, and we don’t have a problem here.

Another obvious similarity across early embryos is the tail. Human embryonic tails are absorbed later in development. The hind limbs of cetaceans like whales also appear in embryos and are likewise absorbed.

If you saw the movie Avatar, did you catch the evolution mistake it makes? The land animals had six limbs and breathed through a second mouth on their shoulders. The winged creatures also had six limbs—four legs and two wings. But the Na’vi people had four limbs and no shoulder mouths. If they had a common ancestor with the other animals of their world, like people on earth, you would see these fundamental characteristics shared.

Ah, well—Hollywood.

Creationism’s failure

Why do adult animals differ in appearance but look similar to embryos? Why should the same basic embryonic components become gills in fish but faces in mammals? Why do human embryos have a tail that is later reabsorbed? The common beginning as early embryos and later divergence to satisfy different body plans points to common ancestry, not design. Evolution explains all this nicely, while Creationism has no explanation.

The Creationist playbook is to attack evolution, usually by asking questions that are important but already answered. Biologists have a ready answer, but these questions stump the average person, and deceiving a lay audience is the goal, not changing biologists’ minds.

Even if Creationism’s questions were new and insightful (they never are), Creationism doesn’t become the dominant scientific paradigm by showing flaws in evolution; it could only do that by explaining the evidence better. But since Creationists are only pretending to be scientific, playing by science’s rules is never the goal. Creationists don’t participate in the domain of regular biology, which includes conferences, journals, and laboratories. They’ve already lost there, and that’s been true for a century. So they peddle their message exclusively to the public, a glaring admission that they aren’t doing science.

Yes, Haeckel was wrong, and his error, like any popular wrong turn, delayed progress. But evolution was never built with this as part of its foundation. Turn back humans’ evolutionary clock and we see the tail grow back (as in other mammals), the ear bones become jaws (as in reptiles), and the throat becomes gills (as in fish). Haeckel got a lot wrong, but he was right that embryology holds clues to where we came from.

Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts.
— Don McLeroy,
on the Texas board of education but not a biologist,
speaking against evolution in public schools

You probably don’t understand what Leviticus says against homosexuality

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The Old Testament book of Leviticus prohibits gay sex for a very different reason than modern evangelical Chicken Littles usually imagine. Understand gay sex from the Ancient Near East to see that it makes no prohibition against gay sex or same-sex marriage as we understand them today.

But before we get to the scholarly critique of Leviticus that makes this argument, let’s warm up with the conclusion of our critique of an article titled, “How gay marriage harms people.”

7. “Children long for and tend to be healthier when raised by their biological mother and father.”

And children tend to be healthier in a two-parent rather than single-parent household. So if a divorced lesbian is a single mother with a child and wants to marry another woman, step out of the way. (Or is the health of children just another smokescreen?)

It’d be great if every marriage were strong, divorce was unnecessary, and every family lived in a safe and nurturing neighborhood and had no financial worries. But it’s an imaginary world where every family is perfect, and some children grow up without their biological parents. We need to get out of the way of institutions that could help, and the newly expanded definition of marriage is one way to do that.

8. “It should not be surprising that, once gay marriage is declared legal, those who oppose it are seen as enemies of the law.”

How? Because no longer can you write an anti-gay article without risk of prison? I think you’ve just falsified that fear.

If you want to speak out against same-sex marriage, I will support your right to do so, even as I write articles to show how hateful, agenda-driven, and thoughtless your arguments are. If you don’t like the fact that the public square is a challenging place for those with flawed arguments, then stay away.

But if your complaint is about the Kim Davises of the world unable to impose their religious views on other people or Christian bakers punished for telling same-sex couples “We don’t serve your kind here” when asked to bake a wedding cake, then I have no sympathy. Christians don’t get an exemption from the law.

9. As Acts 5:29 says, “We must obey God rather than men.”

Do what you have to do. But know that in the real world, the secular Constitution is the foundation of the laws in the U.S. Violate those laws, and you’re punished, even if you’re a Christian. Remember that being a Christian and being able to share your moral opinions are legal in the U.S. thanks to the Constitution, not God.

See also: Does the Bible Reveal Objective Truth About Homosexuality?

If the prohibition in Leviticus is so important, we should understand what it meant

The article that explains gay sex from an Ancient Near Eastern perspective is “When a Man Lies with a Man as with a Woman” by Stephen J. Patterson (published in The Fourth R, May – June 2012). Dr. Patterson is a professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Willamette University.

This article outlines three meanings of male-male sex in the Ancient Near East. The first meaning was domination during wartime, as seen today in rape in prison. This was violence, not gay sex.

The second meaning was sexual pleasure, something a man might do with a slave or servant in the absence of a female partner. A man wasn’t debased by this activity as long as he acted as a man, not a woman—that is, that he was the actor, not the recipient.

This activity was sometimes considered exploitative, however, both because the servant might not be able to refuse and because it demeaned him to be the recipient in homosexual activity.

When gay sex is a religious ritual

The third meaning was religious. In the Ancient Near East, where a successful harvest was uncertain, fertility rituals were common. Priests were the gods’ agents on earth, and fertility was ensured by planting one’s seed in a priest, who was imagined to be androgynous like the god he represented.

In none of these cases of male-male sex from biblical times was homosexuality a factor. Indeed, the opposite was assumed. In the case of rape during wartime, the actor was taking the role of male, humiliating his opponent by forcing him into the feminine role. In the case of recreation, the man is acting as a man, with the servant assuming the role of the woman. And in the case of the fertility ritual, the man is planting his seed in an (imagined) female. While gay sex as we understand it today—sex between two men who identify as homosexual—was likely practiced, it isn’t part of these three meanings and isn’t discussed in the surviving literature.

Given this background, let’s apply it to the prohibition “don’t lie with a man as one does a woman” in Leviticus. Patterson says that most scholars think that this kind of homosexuality is in the third category, the fertility rite, because of the word used to condemn it, “abomination.” This is the word used for religious offense. Judaism had no fertility rite like this, and a rite that called on other gods, as this one did, would obviously be offensive to Yahweh.

What about the issue at hand, using the Bible to criticize homosexual relationships as we understand them today? Patterson says that while we can’t be certain that we understand the original meaning of the relevant passages in Leviticus,

We can say very clearly what the Levitical prohibition does not mean. It does not forbid falling in love with another man and having intimate sexual relations with him. Male-male sex just did not have that connotation in the Ancient Near East. . . . Male-male sex in the Ancient Near East does not mean “I love you.” It means “I own you.” Today, of course, it is different. Male-male sex can mean “I love you.” To such a thing Leviticus offers no comment.

Not only have Christians themselves dispensed with the Levitical ritual laws, but even if they were still in force, they say nothing to inform the Christian of the correct response to modern homosexuality or same-sex marriage.

Christian fundamentalism:
the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful,
infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity
that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.
— Andrew Lias


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-8-2.)

9 arguments Christians make against same-sex marriage

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Who knew? Same-sex marriage not only makes baby Jesus cry, it’s actually harmful!

Luckily, we have “How gay marriage harms people” to set us straight. Each argument is numbered below, followed by a rebuttal.

1. Marriage is part of God’s creation plan

“The Bible says that marriage is rooted in God’s creation of mankind (Matthew 19:4–8).”

The Bible also says that marriage should be avoided. Paul said, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry” (1 Corinthians 7:8–9). This is one more example where the Bible is a sock puppet that can be made to say just about anything.

Marriage as one of God’s sacred gifts to mankind is a new idea. Marriage wasn’t a Christian sacrament until 1215, and that was only to give the church the power to annul marriages that made political alliances it didn’t like. For this and other reasons, biblical marriage is not a pretty picture.

2. Marriage is one man and one woman

“Throughout Scripture, it is clear that marriage is a lifelong, exclusive covenantal union of two people—a husband and a wife.”

Wrong. God gives polygamy two thumbs up. He said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.” (2 Samuel 12:8). This is God making clear that he had no problem with polygamy.

One Christian response is that God was simply working with the imperfect customs of the time, and that’s why God didn’t prohibit slavery or polygamy. But it’s ridiculous to imagine the perfect plan of an omnipotent god hobbled by the primitive morality of an Iron Age people. He didn’t have any problem putting the Ten Commandments into action immediately, and God imposed the death penalty for violating most of the Commandments. If polygamy were bad, God could’ve said so.

Second, if “God was bound by the customs of the time” doesn’t constrain you from rejecting slavery and polygamy today, then you’re not constrained to abide by other nutty Old Testament rules like prohibitions against homosexuality. You can’t have it both ways—God’s clear preferences in the Old Testament either bind you or they don’t.

 If you are honestly concerned about attacks on marriage (rather than being a moral busybody, which is what it looks like), same-sex marriage is the good guy in this story. It is trying to expand and support marriage, not attack it.

3. Because of the children

“The production of children requires both a man and a woman. So there cannot be any such thing as gay marriage, because marriage requires husband and wife.”

Well, that was a leap. Children do require a man and a woman, but they don’t have to be married. And how are children relevant? Reread the Christian marriage vows—there’s nothing about making babies.

And if marriage = babies, why focus on the tangential issue of same-sex marriage? Far more straight couples have a fertility problem than there are potential homosexual couples, and many straight couples simply don’t want children. Why not complain that they are the ones who don’t understand what marriage is about? Or if you’re fine with childless straight couples, why not be consistent and accept childless gay couples?

The answer for those keeping score at home: they reject only gay childless couples because the “marriage is all about the babies” argument is just a smokescreen.

Here again, the Bible is no friend to the Christian bigot. Paul says, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor. 7:1). So much for the celebrated role of procreation.

The Bible also uses marriage as a metaphor for the relationship of Jesus to the church. Is making babies the point of the Jesus/church marriage as well, or can marriage be about something more?

See also: 20 Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage, Rebutted

4. Homosexuality is harmful

“Homosexual activity is harmful and destructive to oneself and others.”

Why? How? This statement is supported by no argument, so it doesn’t need an argument to be dismissed.

5. You can’t just redefine marriage!

“If we abandon the Bible’s teaching on marriage and just make up new definitions as we go, then why couldn’t marriage be redefined in other ways?”

Someone’s not paying attention. Marriage has been redefined, and in your lifetime. Mixed-race marriage is now legal. Divorce has become no-fault. Marital rape is illegal.

Different states even have different rules defining marriage—whether you can marry your first cousin, whether a blood test is required, waiting period, residency requirements, rules for divorced persons, and so on. No, the definition of “marriage” isn’t fixed, so don’t get your knickers in a bunch because marriage has changed yet again.

6. You’ll make broken homes

“The more we move away from the biblical teaching on marriage, the more we’ll have broken homes, because other arrangements simply do not work as well as God’s design.”

In the United States, the Constitution is completely secular, and aligning laws with “God’s design” isn’t a thing. The First Amendment prohibits your impression of God’s wishes from being the basis of any law. This is fortunate since the more religious a Western country is, the worse its social conditions tend to be.

Another problem with your desire to guide America with biblical principles is that the Bible’s punishment for homosexuality is death. There is no crime without a punishment, so your hypocrisy is showing if you tell us that homosexuality is bad because God says so without also demanding God’s punishment.

Finally, and despite your best efforts, same-sex marriage doesn’t affect you at all. If you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t get gay married. If you are honestly concerned about attacks on marriage (rather than being a moral busybody, which is what it looks like), same-sex marriage is the good guy in this story. It is trying to expand and support marriage, not attack it.

You want a problem? Divorce is a problem. Focus on why marriages fail if you want to help them.

The final three arguments plus a surprising interpretation of the Bible’s anti-gay verses in the next post.

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things.
One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in Hell.
The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth
and you should save it for someone you love. 
— Butch Hancock

Christians’ secret weapon against same-sex marriage

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Whining about same-sex marriage is always in season in some circles. Let’s critique one such article, “The importance of your gag reflex when discussing homosexuality and ‘gay marriage.’”

“Gag reflex”? I doubt we’ll find much respect and compassion in this article.

The secret weapon in undercutting same-sex marriage

The author (a pastor) begins by acknowledging that Christians will be branded as hateful, first simply for being Christian and second for their desire to “speak the truth in love.”

(Poor baby. It must be so difficult being a Christian busybody in America today).

He says that the secret weapon against same-sex marriage is first to strip away “euphemisms” like gay or homosexual:

We’ve actually stopped talking about the things that lie at the heart of the issue—sexual promiscuity of an abominable sort. I say “abominable” because that’s how God describes it in His word.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

God labels eating shellfish as abominable. These are ritual abominations, not ones that actually cause any harm.

The Jewish ritual burdens (kosher food laws, circumcision, and other requirements demanded of Jews) were not put on the new gentile converts to Christianity. Prohibitions against homosexual activity in Leviticus 18 and 20 are mixed with other rules that Christians have abandoned. These rules come as a package, and Christians can’t now go back for a few old favorites that they’d like to revive.

The gag reflex is relative, and it makes no sense to say, “Well that grosses me out, so it must be objectively immoral.”

Next the author moves on to a somewhat explicit description of homosexual sex acts with the admitted goal of provoking a reaction of disgust. He concludes:

That sense of moral outrage you’re now likely feeling—either at the descriptions above or at me for writing them—that gut-wrenching, jaw-clenching, hand-over-your-mouth, “I feel dirty” moral outrage is the gag reflex. It’s what you quietly felt when you read “two men deep kissing” in the second paragraph. Your moral sensibilities have been provoked—and rightly so. That reflex triggered by an accurate description of homosexual behavior will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called “gay marriage” debate.

If you’re disgusted at two men kissing, then don’t kiss another man. If you were gay, you’d have a different response.

So two men kissing is offensive but a man and a woman aren’t? How about a male and female coworker kissing in the corner during a business meeting—would that be offensive or at least extremely inappropriate? If you’re made queasy at the thought of your parents doing it, does that mean that it’s morally wrong?

And if, in the right situation, you’d enjoy watching a man and a woman kissing, let’s change it up. Now the woman is much heavier. Or much older. Or much uglier. How about now—is it just as enjoyable? (I’m seeing this from a straight male perspective because the author of this article was male).

The author thinks that dropping our pretense of politeness and describing behavior accurately “will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called ‘gay marriage’ debate.”

3 points of rebuttal

I see several problems here. First, the author thinks that he’s found in the gag reflex a reliable shortcut to God’s morality. He says, “Deep down we all—Christian and non-Christian, heterosexual and homosexual—know it’s wrong.” But do we? Different people have different turn-ons. If a man finds his wife sexy but you find her unattractive, so what? Who cares about your critique of someone else’s sexual relationship? By extension, if a man loves another man, what concern is that of yours? The gag reflex is relative, and it makes no sense to say, “Well that grosses me out, so it must be objectively immoral.”

If he wants visceral gut reactions, pregnant women are often very sensitive to smells. Does he find objective moral wisdom in this? What about the reactions of a typical American to traditional cultural foods in other parts of the world—say, natto (fermented soybeans), Vegemite, or insects. These might provoke widespread disgust, but so what? If these are familiar foods to other people, who are you to complain?

Second, whatever sex act you don’t approve of, there are more straights doing it than homosexuals, simply because there are far more of them. If it’s consensual and the sex pleases them, where’s the problem?

Third, it’s not homosexual sex that’s disgusting but sex itself. Imagine teaching a seven-year-old about how homosexual sex works. They’d be disgusted. Now imagine teaching how heterosexual sex works. They’d be disgusted. Sex is the issue, not homosexual sex.

Or, imagine meeting someone at a cocktail party and having them describe their last straight sexual encounter or their favorite sexual fantasy. It’s not that one kind of sex is pure and beautiful while the other is hurtful and filthy, it’s that sex has its place, and a public setting isn’t it.

(In the interest of completeness, the author responded to feedback to his article).

This author’s book of Iron Age prudery is no guide in the 21st century. Sexual acts are a problem if all parties don’t give consent (or if they withdraw consent) or if precautions against disease or unwanted pregnancy aren’t taken. They’re not a problem simply because they’re homosexual.

I support Christians’ right to speak about their views on same-sex marriage, but they won’t stand up to scrutiny if they’re as weak as this.

If the Bible got the easiest moral question
that humanity has ever faced [that is, slavery] wrong,
what are the odds that the Bible got something
as complicated as human sexuality wrong?
— Dan Savage

Is God the good guy or the bad guy?

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This is one of my shirts. It makes a fun and provocative statement that often gets a smile, but it also raises an important question. When the Christians think they’re talking to God, how do they know? If there is a supernatural world populated with both good and bad beings, maybe one of Satan’s little helpers is answering your prayer instead of God, Jesus, or a saint.

Now consider the bigger question: who’s in charge? Is this a good world governed by an all-good god (the Christian view), or is a bad god in charge?

Think about the Problem of Evil, why a supposedly good god allows so much evil—tsunamis, childhood diseases and birth defects, millions of people living in abysmal conditions, and so on. Is this really the best that he can do? But drop the assumption that the guy in charge must be good, and things make more sense. You now have the Problem of Good—why the evil god in charge wouldn’t make things much worse. This question has potential answers: maybe having things bad but not too bad allows hope to flourish and then be dashed. Or maybe the guy in charge is just a well-meaning but imperfect craftsman—a celestial Homer Simpson or an extraterrestrial middle schooler who got a C+ on the simulation that we call our universe.

So is God good? (I’ll use “God” as our name for the being in charge of our world.) Let’s imagine a dialogue with a Christian.

Of course God is good! The Bible says so.

Yes, it does. Here are some examples.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

For everything God created is good. (1 Timothy 4:4)

But the Bible is a sock puppet that can be made to say almost anything. God not only created good, but he created evil:

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

When disaster comes to a city, has not Jehovah caused it? (Amos 3:6)

The Bible isn’t much help to the Christian when it documents what God does when he’s off his meds. God demands human sacrifice and genocide. God supports slavery and polygamy. God drowned the world. These would universally be condemned as evil by anyone who didn’t have an agenda to defend God.

The Bible is also full of errors and contradictions, just the kinds of clues to suggest that an inept or even evil guy was behind it.

God is good by definition

If God did it, that’s “good.” He’s the Creator of Everything! How could it be any other way?

In the first place, this isn’t how the dictionary defines “good.” There’s no mention of God in the definition of the word. (That’s right—the dictionary takes precedence over the Bible.)

But see where this takes Christians if the guy in charge is good by definition. There’s no amount of carnage he can do for these Christians to change their evaluation. Natural disasters, disease, individual calamities—it’s all good. If you can’t understand, then you’ll just have to content yourself with God working in mysterious ways. The Christian has completely disconnected themselves from reality by making their worldview indifferent to evidence.

This “God” could just as easily be objectively bad. Tricking us into believing that this very imperfect world is actually the best of all possible worlds is just the kind of monkey business that the Lord of Lies would do, isn’t it?

Imagine Satan in charge. He might do something abominable like convince Christians that the death of an innocent child is an acceptable part of his greater plan, if you can believe such a thing. Indeed, grieving Christian parents are told exactly that!

Christians have ceded their right to evaluate God’s goodness. Good or bad, this guy has convinced Christians that we must label every act of his “good.” Christians don’t say that he’s good because he performs actions that anyone can see are good; they say he’s good by default.

But God has his own morality.

What’s wrong with God following the same morality that he demands of humans? We were created in his image, after all. But if he has his own moral rules, what are they and how do you know? What rules can we be confident God will follow, or are you determined to clean up after him no matter what rules he breaks?

This is a beautiful world!

Just look around you—God’s hand is all over it.

A well-known poem says, “All things bright and beautiful . . . The Lord God made them all.” Puppies and sunsets and snow-covered mountains are beautiful. But tsunamis and guinea worm and cancer are not. Don’t forget that God made them, too.

I respond to the Design Argument, which says that life on earth is so complicated that it must be designed, here.

God has his own reasons

God could easily have his own reasons for things that appear strange to us. For example, the tragedy of the crucifixion led to the gift of salvation. Just because Noah’s flood seems wrong to you doesn’t mean that it wasn’t right from God’s standpoint.

This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. It assumes God, offering no defense of the outlandish God hypothesis. Maybe God had his ineffable reasons for inspiring the holy books for Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and more—who are you to object that this makes no sense?

God’s children, made in his own image (moral and otherwise) would be able to weigh God’s perfect moral actions and find that they are always correct. They should feel intuitively right in an aha! sort of way, and they should show themselves to be logically right in an intellectual way. No one would say, “God has his own morality” except as a desperate attempt to avoid critique of God’s actions.

This argument is nothing more than, “Yeah, but you haven’t proven me wrong!” That’s true, but that was never the goal. All we can do is follow the evidence, and it doesn’t point to the supernatural. We have to evaluate the God claim with the evidence we have, and Christianity can offer very little.

It’s not God’s fault!

Don’t blame God for poor conditions here on Earth, blame Satan.

Here again, the Bible isn’t the Christian’s friend. Satan is said to have killed Job’s servants and his ten children, but that was with God’s approval. And that’s it.

Now consider God’s killings, also documented in the Bible. The Dwindling in Unbelief blog estimates five million people dead in 157 incidents plus another twenty million for the global flood.

Like God, “Satan” is a character who has changed over time. In the book of Job, he was simply God’s prosecuting attorney, making sure that Job was obedient for good reasons rather than selfish ones. The idea of Satan as God’s sworn enemy (as in Revelation 12:9, “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray”) developed centuries later.

How can you know??

Well, aren’t you the cocky know-it-all? God is unjudgeable. God said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

Here again, this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. You don’t start with the assumption of God.

An open-minded skeptic will consider religious claims on their evidence. We must evaluate the evidence as best we can; there is no other option. If God exists, what could please him more than that we use the brain he gave us to evaluate claims, not simply accept unevidenced nonsense because it’s convenient or pleasing?

As an aside, there were other versions of Christianity where the good guy wasn’t in control here on earth such as Marcionism and Gnosticism. This is also true for Apocalypticism, a strain of Judaism that influenced Christianity. These approaches neatly sidestep the Problem of Evil since adherents didn’t have to apologize for the crazy actions of the guy in charge.

What God does is sometimes evil by any reasonable standard. It’s not hard to see how this might have developed. Imagine a skeptic pressuring a Christian about slavery or genocide in the Bible, with the Christian responding, “Well, uh . . . whatever God does must be good. Yeah, that’s it—God’s actions are always good by definition!” But, as we’ve seen, this unevidenced Band-Aid has consequences.

See also: “And God is Not Good, Either”

Gullibility and credulity
are considered undesirable qualities
in every department of human life—
except religion.
— Christopher Hitchens


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-7-12.)

Organic material found in T-Rex fossils: Evidence of young earth?

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Paleontologists try to recover dinosaur fossils intact. The last thing they’d want to do is break a precious fossil bone. It’s just mineralized bone—what of interest could possibly be inside? Anyway, cells and proteins quickly degrade in time periods used to measure fossils.

Or do they? Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer published evidence in 1993 of biological molecules like collagen, a common protein in animals, found in Tyrannosaurus rex fossils. In 2005, she published more evidence, this time of soft-tissue preservation. (Note that many fossil bones are completely mineralized. Collagen can only be found in under mineralized fossils—that is, fossils that are incompletely fossilized).

Creationist Christmas

Creationists jumped on this discovery. They don’t actually do science, of course, but they love to sift out the bits that can be spun to support their conclusion. Let’s look at their reaction to this discovery as we explore the science.

Shortly after the 2005 research, Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis said,

The creationists now possess immensely powerful evidence against the well-publicized belief that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago and instead have tremendous support for the biblical timeline of a recent creation.

More recently, Creation Ministries International said:

These facts [about soft tissue in fossils] have been a thorn in [scientists’] side for several years now as they are incredibly difficult to explain within an evolutionary (millions of years) timeframe. Needless to say, they fit beautifully within a biblical (young earth) timescale; these are almost certainly the remains of creatures that were buried during the Genesis Flood, approximately 4,400 years ago.

This isn’t a thorn; it’s a new discovery. New discoveries are a good thing, but science must make really, really sure that new ideas are solid before they are accepted.

And scientists did push back. One proposed explanation was that Schweitzer was seeing modern bacterial contamination rather than ancient dinosaur protein, but that has been rejected.

Answers in Genesis observed about Schweitzer: “Her first reaction was to question the evidence, not the paradigm,” as if she had been at fault for not immediately leaping to their young-earth conclusion. But questioning is what good scientists do. There might be many ways the result of an experiment could be misunderstood, so of course, she questioned the conclusions. The result was a more solid conclusion.

New discoveries are a good thing, but science must make really, really sure that new ideas are solid before they are accepted.

Gloating

There was the obligatory cackling in delight. I suppose that’s expected since reality so often craps on Creationists.

Evolutionists like [Schweitzer] have been scrambling . . . to explain away this powerful evidence that dinosaurs have been around in relatively recent times.

Long-agers went into intense, but not very effective damage control.

The information that there are abundant amounts of soft tissue in creatures supposedly millions of years old is spiralling [sic] out of control. Evolutionists know that they need to confront this dinosaur soft tissue matter head on, and their responses to date have been far from convincing.

This is what someone looks like who’s determined to misunderstand the process of science.

What explains the soft tissue?

If paleontologists think that dinosaur fossils are tens of millions of years and organic material degrades in less time than that, the soft-tissue discovery means either that the fossils aren’t that old or (gasp!) the estimated rate of decay for organic molecules in fossils is wrong. Shocking though it seems, there’s a rather obvious alternative possibility than that the Creationists have been right all along.

The current conclusion is that iron is the key to the soft-tissue puzzle. After death, iron in the dinosaur blood is freed from the blood cells and forms free radicals, which then act like formaldehyde to cross-link the proteins. This cross-linking makes the protein stronger and resistant to decay.

One Creationist source sniffed that this iron explanation was an act of “desperation.”

It’s all about the PR

Creationists fight their battles with words, since they don’t have the science on their side. Sometimes they imagine that their opponents play the same game.

Such is the power of the evolutionary paradigm that many choose to believe the seemingly impossible rather than accept the obvious implication, that the samples are not as old as they say.

Ah, so it’s just a seductive worldview that blinds scientists to the obvious truth. And wouldn’t “We didn’t fully understand how protein degrades” be an even more obvious implication?

About the iron hypothesis:

It’s actually very strategic. By announcing this as ‘the answer’, evolutionists may catch creationists off-balance, lessening the impact of the argument. From now on [the average Joe] will likely not be surprised if he is presented with the facts of dinosaur soft tissue found in fossils, thinking evolutionary scientists have already explained this. The creationists are crazy to think dinosaurs died out recently!

Since Creationists start with their conclusion and select facts to support it rather than starting with the facts and following them to an honest conclusion, they imagine the same deviousness in their enemies. Here they lay out the playbook:

A world that made itself is basic to this religion [of secularism], and it absolutely, definitely needs millions of years. So instead, in the face of this evidence, the desperate search has continued—for some mechanism, even part-way plausible-seeming, to give this belief system some straws to clutch at.

Apparently, biologists and paleontologists are in the same sad, evidence-denying boat as they are. It’s the world’s biggest conspiracy—tens of thousands of scientists know the truth but have pinkie-sworn to cover it up.

Hemant Mehta summarized this issue a couple of years ago. He came across an article from Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. They had been given some dinosaur bones, and David Menton (Ph.D. in cell biology; now a speaker and researcher for Answers in Genesis) planned on looking for organic material inside. The article concluded:

If Dr. Menton finds what he is looking for, you can count on a big write-up for Answers in Genesis in the near future!

In other words, we’ll report on the findings if and only if they support our conclusion. True to the mission of the museum—“Why God’s infallible Word, rather than man’s faulty assumptions, is the place to begin if we want to make sense of our world”—they have no use for evidence.

Unless they can find a bit that supports their view, in which case they’re all over it.

It’s the film version
of winning arguments in your head in the shower.
— comment in response to
the “God’s Not Dead” trailer