Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

Guest Post: Thinking My Way Out of Religion

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This is a guest post by Lewis Vaughn, a former child preacher and author of the recently published memoir Star Map: A Journey of Faith, Doubt, and Meaning. In it he tells how as a boy he fell deeply into dogma and blind faith but as a young man climbed out of the abyss to find solid ground in science and reasonable doubt. But his deconversion is only half the tale. After leaving the faith, he set out to discover whether without God there could be such a thing as moral truth and meaning in life. After a long and anguished search, he unexpectedly found both. 

Guest PostStar Map is about my ten-year odyssey through the upside down world of Christian fundamentalism. I try not only to tell the strange, half-mad tale of my religious conversion and deconversion, but also to document my bruising confrontation with the philosophical and theological implications of my religious (and irreligious) beliefs. My faith shattered because my religious beliefs self-destructed. When I took them at face value and accepted them without question, they undermined themselves, their inconsistencies cracking my faith like an egg. Then science and reason punched holes in the pieces that were left.

This is how I described to a friend the pivotal moment of doubt:

“When the Holy Spirit spoke,” I said, “I was always sure it was the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit told me something, I was always certain it was true. But when I was most certain, when I was most sure, the Holy Spirit spoke—and the Holy Spirit spoke falsely. It looks like I had been speaking to myself all along. Anything I took on faith before is—”

“Is what?”

“Unknown. I now know nothing.”

“Are you telling me you’re a damn agnostic?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Simon stared at me for a long time, and when he spoke, he spoke softly. I was surprised not to be getting the full Billy Sunday treatment.

“Do you think you’re the only Christian who has ever felt this way?”

I wasn’t about to tell him I felt hopeless and alone, like the last person left on a dying planet. “No,” I said, “I think every devotee of every religion of faith is in the same boat with me. I don’t see how they can know anything based on their inner experience.”

This crushing revelation came after years of my trying to abandon the concerns of this world and focus every thought and action on the other world, the spiritual realm that bred a disregard for anything human, natural, and real. The two worlds pulled at me so hard I thought I might split in two. Much later I would identify other-worldliness as a critical flaw in nearly every religion.

This is how I viewed my cosmic tug-of-war:

Inside me began another battle in the war of the two worlds: the spiritual, or heavenly, world, and the earthly world. I had been trying to give myself over to the world where every coin in life is spent for the sake of the spiritual or the heavenly, where faith and scripture hold sway and earthly concerns wane. In this ethereal other world, the first commandment is believe, the second is obey, and the last resort is evidence and reason. In that sphere I was supposed to have the faith of Abraham, the biblical hero who believed God had commanded him to sacrifice his firstborn son and who raised the knife to do what human morality forbade. Abraham’s hand was stayed at the last moment because he proved that he would murder the human race if God asked him to. Most Christians saw this story as a vindication of Abraham’s faith. That’s what I wanted to believe too. But I couldn’t help viewing it sometimes as evidence that faith and obedience can lead a good man to commit horrific acts.

Some of me was still in this world, the sphere of the finite and earthly and secular. The prime commandments here are live, think, and feel. In this sphere, Abraham is a moral monster willing to drown common decency in the blood of his own child. Here Abraham is ready to do the unthinkable without thinking. Why? Because a voice from a burning bush commanded him?

Bewildered and traumatized by the loss of my God and my pious absolutes, I wondered what all godless seekers must wonder at one time or another: If there is no God, is there any such thing as right or wrong? If God is dead, is everything permitted? Without religion, is earthly life bereft of all meaning?

Trying to answer these jagged questions dropped me into intellectual and spiritual agony but also pulled me slowly down a path to enlightenment. I turned to the only truth-detector I had left—reason:

I had already lost faith in faith, and I decided that, contrary to the true believer’s creed, reason was a wiser bet. After all, it was through reason that I had uncovered the failures of faith, the fallibility of the church, and the phoniness of my miracles. On these issues, faith had gone dark, and I had gone dark with it.

I figured reason could not be the bugaboo that believers made it out to be. First, they used reason themselves every day in all sorts of ways. Second, from their perspective, reason was a gift from God, just as the senses of smell and touch were. Did they presume that God gave them this light and forbade them to shine it on the world?

Ultimately I found there really were objective moral truths and objective sources of meaning—and God had nothing to do with it. I was driven to this conclusion not by dogma or scripture but by philosophical reflection on the goods and evils of the real world. In an odd, painful way, I had come round to secular views on morality and meaning that philosophers and other thinkers had articulated hundreds of years before and after Christ. Now, at age sixty-six and after authoring or coauthoring almost twenty books on philosophy, ethics, and religion, I still think those views are essentially correct—except that now they are, I hope, more solidly backed by science and reason.

Most deeply committed believers don’t respond to critiques of their religion from external sources like philosophers and biblical scholars. What is more likely to turn their heads is internal critiques, those that arise from the contradictions and conflicts in their own beliefs. When religious beliefs themselves lead to rational doubt, a grain of honest skepticism is born, and that can lead to personal transformation. This is why religions work so hard to douse even the smallest flames of doubt. But for people who aren’t afraid to think critically, doubt is the way to wisdom.

Atheism isn’t a religion,
it’s a personal relationship with reality.
— seen on the internet

A Dozen Responses to the Transcendental Argument for God (3 of 3)

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We conclude our responses to the Transcendental Argument (TAG) here. I introduced the argument and begin in part 1.

9. Transcendental Argument for theNon-existence of God (TANG)

TANG is a variant on TAG. It supposes that God created everything, including logic. But then logic is dependent on God—it’s contingent. Said another way, logic isn’t logically necessary. The laws of logic are then arbitrary, and God could’ve made them something else. X and not-X could both be true, for example.

You may enjoy logic as we know it, but TAG says that it’s not as absolute as you thought.

10. Some things don’t need supernatural explanations

I’ve always found the claim, “Well, if there are moral or logical laws, there must be a lawgiver!” to be a mindless applause line.

When falling sand in an hourglass forms a cone, does that require a supernatural cone maker? When a river changes course as it meanders over a flat valley, does that demand a river designer? When there is an earthquake, must the timing and placement of that be supernaturally ordained? No, there natural explanations for all these things.

Similarly, the question “Why these fundamental laws and not others?” doesn’t demand the supernatural. To support a claim of supernatural grounding, we need the evidence.

11. An answer without evidence is no answer

“God did it” explains everything. Therefore, it explains nothing. “God did it” is a solution searching for a problem, and apologists thinks they’ve found one with “What grounds logic?”

But “God did it” is simply a repackaging of “I don’t know.” It tells us nothing new. I’m no smarter after hearing “God did it” than before. How did God do it? Why did God do it? Did he break any scientific laws to do it? Who is this guy and where did he come from? This is an answer that just brings forth yet more questions, and it never comes with any evidence to back it up. Since the apologist answers “I don’t know” to each of these new fundamental questions, let’s just save a step and avoid replacing a natural “I don’t know” with a supernatural one.

And which scientists, on hearing and believing TAG, say, “Well, I guess my job is pointless now, so I’ll go be a plumber”? That “explanation” doesn’t explain anything; it simply relabels “We don’t know.”

12. TAG asks a poor question

The Edge had an interesting list of scientists’ musings on a similar topic. I’ll summarize a few points from physicists Sean Carroll and Jeremy Bernstein.

We’re used to asking questions about nature. What causes earthquakes? Why do the continents move? Why is the sun hot? It seems natural to then ask, “Why does logic work?”

But that’s a different kind of question. Earthquakes, continents, stars, molecules, and the elements of nature are part of a larger whole. Asking about the fundamental properties of reality is instead asking about the whole.

The demand to explain the laws of reality is malformed—explain in terms of what? There’s no larger context in which to explain them. The buck stops with these fundamental properties.

Caltrop arguments

I first heard the TAG argument when it was given as a challenge by apologist Matt Slick during a live radio interview ten years ago. Here’s a tip: a radio interview is not the best place to hear a new argument against your position.

And that’s the point. That’s why TAG is a good argument—not that it’s accurate but that it’s confusing.

I call this category of argument caltrop arguments—arguments made simply to slow down an opponent. They’re good for scoring rhetorical points, not for revealing the truth.

You can make your argument so simple that there are obviously no errors. Or you can make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors (Hoare’s Dictum). Said more colloquially, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

Gods are fragile things; 
they may be killed by a whiff of science 
or a dose of common sense. 
— Chapman Cohen

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/9/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

 

Movie Review: “Is Genesis History?” (Part 4)

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is genesis history movie critique

Let’s conclude our critique of this young-earth Creationist movie (part 1).

Proteins in fossils

Next up in our succession of Creationist experts is Kevin Anderson, microbiologist. His argument is the one I responded to in my last post: “Organic Material Found in T-Rex Fossils—Evidence for Young Earth?” Given the two clashing facts—fossils that are 60+ million year old vs. biological material that shouldn’t last that long—he rejects the one that is most inconvenient for his young-earth worldview, even though it has all the evidence. His argument is that with time, you could explain evolutionary history . . . but with this new discovery, you no longer have enough time.

“Your paradigm is that it has to be old,” he said. No—a mountain of evidence says that it has to be old.

Robert Carter is a marine biologist, working in St. Thomas. He rejects evolution, but it’s not like he’s unreasonable. He accepts change. For example, God put the ability to adapt to a changing environment into sharks. They change . . . “but they’re still sharks.”

Let’s study that statement. Sharks are classified as a superorder. There are 12 orders of sharks (an order is the category above family, which is above genus, which is above species). An isolated group of sharks could evolve radically and still be sharks. “But they’re still sharks” sounds pretty deceptive from a guy who must know how meaningless that is when there are over 400 living species of shark.

He said, “Life is so complex that small changes can’t explain it” and said that just like a computer operating system didn’t evolve in small steps, species didn’t either. If his point is that software and life don’t change the same way, I agree, though he gives no reason to accept his claim that evolution is impossible.

He pointed to the similarities between diverse species in the echinoderm phylum—starfish, sea urchin, and sea cucumber, for example.

That sounds like the handiwork of evolution. Evolution creates species with similarities, but God-created life wouldn’t need to. God could’ve created every species from scratch, but he apparently created in the same way that evolution would have.

This biologist wrapped up with the Argument from Incredulity: “It’s impossible to think that all of this could’ve happened just by a series of slow processes over billions of years. . . . I realized that creation in six days makes the most sense from an engineering perspective.”

One wonders how.

Speciation or not?

Todd Wood, biologist, is next. He said that all of the 42 living cat species in the family Felidae have a cat-ness, so they must’ve descended from a single pair on the Ark. He imagines a few thousand “kinds,” each with built-in diversity that was expressed in the 4000 or so years since the Ark landed. (More here.)

It’s discouraging to see a biologist using a word like “kind” when there are grown up, biologist words he could use, like order, though I’ll admit that it’s hard to know what word to use since “kind” is undefined. (There are roughly as many animal orders as he imagines “kinds.”)

He didn’t address the paradox that he rejects evolution and yet imagines rampant speciation at a pace no conventional biologist today would accept. Nor did he explain why, if today’s species are the result of selecting a few features from a profusion of options latent in each Ark pair, you don’t see evidence of that in their DNA.

Wood admitted that there are questions with his view but was confident that answers will be found, but that’s like saying, “Okay, I realize that an asteroid will collide with the earth and destroy all human life next week, but look—I fixed the leaky faucet!” At best, he’s saying that various bits of evidence are compatible with the God hypothesis. The multiple lines of evidence for evolution and lack of evidence for Creationism’s fundamental claims make this a just-so story to satisfy a small group of Christians.

I’ll throw in one more expert who wasn’t interviewed for the movie. Michael Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a darling of the Creationist/Intelligent Design community. He said in his Darwin’s Black Box: “I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.” Common descent is the idea that all life on earth has a single common ancestor. I’m sure none of the experts in this movie would accept this idea.

Where does our concept of time come from?

Danny Faulkner is an astronomer. Solar eclipses happen because the moon is just the right size and at just the right distance to just cover up the sun. Ours is the only planet in our solar system on which this happens, and ours is the only planet on which anyone exists to notice. A coincidence??

Yep, a coincidence. If there were a significant message behind it, what would that message be?

He was asked how to explain an enormous universe with objects billions of light years away that was made 6000 years ago. He suggested that things moved abnormally fast in each of the six days of Creation in Genesis. For example, the plants could’ve grown from seeds all the way to mature plants on day 3. Day 4 was star-creation day, and this was also abnormally fast, speeding up the light from distant galaxies.

Apparently, this speed-up varies. While day 3 might’ve needed a hundred years of tree growth, day 4 needed billions of years for the light to travel from distant galaxies. No evidence was given.

He pointed to one clue for a young universe that we see in spiral galaxies. Because the center rotates faster, it should first create the spiral arms but then destroy them after enough rotations. (Conventional astronomers have an explanation of why the arms should continue in an old galaxy here).

Asked about the Big Bang, he thinks it has problems. He cites a 2004 NewScientist article, “Bucking the big bang” (original article behind paywall; free copy), that has a long list of signatories. This shows that there are a large number of cosmologists who have issues with the Big Bang, we’re told.

This article is an appeal for funding for research into non-Big Bang ideas. An internet search shows no reference at science popularizing sites (such as Scientific American, Popular Science, or even Wikipedia) but it is referenced at a large number of Christian sites. This is not a revolutionary rejection of the consensus but something that is being spun by apologists, perhaps like the Discovery Institute’s nonsensical “Dissent from Darwinism.”

If others have conclusions on this NewScientist article, I’d like to hear about it.

One thing puzzles me. Is it relevant that this astronomer has company in questioning the Big Bang? If so, then I wonder why he doesn’t just go with the consensus. And if he cheerfully rejects the consensus (thinking, perhaps, that if he’s right it doesn’t matter who agrees) then I wonder why he points to a long list of dissenters from the Big Bang.

He says that you can’t reconcile the Big Bang with the Bible. Because science changes, he warns about interpreting Genesis using uncertain science. However, Pope Francis says that the Big Bang and evolution are both real, which makes Faulkner’s view a minority in his own religion.

That reminds me of the observation, “Science changes and that’s its strength; religion doesn’t change, and that’s its weakness.”

TL;DR

I’ll end with a John Trever cartoon that lays bare the agenda of this entire movie. The cartoon contrasts the scientific attitude with the Creationist attitude. The scientist in a lab says, “Here are the facts. What conclusions can we draw from them?” And the Creationist holds a copy of Genesis and says, “Here’s the conclusion. What facts can we find to support it?”

Science is the great antidote
to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
— Adam Smith

Image credit: JohnBWilson, flickr, CC

Organic Material Found in T-Rex Fossils—Evidence for Young Earth?

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I’m in the middle of reviewing the young-earth Creationist movie Is Genesis History? (part 1 here). I must postpone my shocking conclusion (Is it history? Is it not? Stay tuned!) to pursue one of the movie’s arguments that needs a post of its own.

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 degrade even in the most stable environments.

But that turned out to be wrong. 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 will be completely mineralized. Collagen can only be found in undermineralized fossils.)

Creationist Christmas

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

Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis said this, shortly after the 2005 research:

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. Other paleontologists pushed 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.

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.  Source

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

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. Source

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

What explains this?

If paleontologists think that (1) dinosaur fossils are tens of millions of years and (2) organic material degrades in less time than that, the soft-tissue discovery means either that (1) the fossils aren’t that old or (gasp!) (2) 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. They can 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. Source

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 ‘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! Source

Since Creationists select facts to support their conclusions rather than following those facts 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. Source

Apparently biologists and paleontologists are in the same sad, evidence-denying boat as they are.

The Friendly Atheist summarized this issue a couple of years ago. He came across an article from Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. They’ve been given some dinosaur bones, and David Menton (PhD in cell biology; now a speaker and researcher for Answers in Genesis) plans on looking for organic material inside. The article concludes:

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.

I would like [this] to be the year when people remembered
that science is a method of investigation,
and NOT a belief system.
— John Cleese

Image credit: Steve Starer, flickr, CC

A Dozen Responses to the Transcendental Argument for God (2 of 3)

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transcendental argumentWhat grounds the laws of logic and mathematics? We know that they work, but why? The Transcendental Argument (TAG) says that they exist because of and are sustained by God.

I introduced the argument and explored the first responses in Part 1. Let’s continue.

6. You ask “why?” but I ask “why not?”

When we look at reality, we usually explain things in terms of more primitive laws or principles, but eventually you come to the bottom. These few elementary principles, which can’t be defined in terms of anything more fundamental, are called axioms.

Apologists claim that they can do better than this—they rest everything on just “God did it.”

The first problem is that this is stated as a theological claim, not as evidence. Second, they’ve simply replaced natural axioms with a supernatural one. There are still axioms at the bottom, so this is no improvement.

Like naturalists, apologists agree that you’ve got to stop somewhere; it’s just that their stopping point is based on nothing. It has no evidence to support it. Contrast that with the naturalists’ logical and mathematical axioms. Unlike God, these aren’t taken on faith but are tested continually. Why would we want to ground the one that is strongly confirmed with evidence (logic) with the one that isn’t (God)? Why demand something solid to hold up the fundamental axioms but then use faith to hold up God?

I’ll admit that “that’s just the way reality is” isn’t completely satisfying, but “God did it” resolves nothing. The apologist won’t tell us why or how God exists; he just exists. This informs us as much as “fairies did it.” But if the Christian can have a fundamental assumption about reality (God), so can the naturalist (natural axioms).

Show me that the laws of logic are optional or different in an alternate universe. Otherwise, we can presume that the logic that we have is universal.

Let’s say instead that reality just has properties. Or: properties are a consequence of reality. A universe with zero axioms is a universe without properties. Could such a universe even exist? Is that what a godless universe would look like? I await the evidence.

See also: The Parable of the Mathematician and the Theologian

7. TAG undercuts itself

Apologists jump into a TAG presentation using logic. At the end of their argument, they conclude that God exists.

But wait a minute—was that a valid argument? The apologists will certainly say so. But it was made using logic without a presumption of God! The TAG proponents themselves argue that logic can be reliably used without assuming God.

(I believe that this is Timothy Pew’s argument.)

8. Logic needs a vessel, like a mind

One variant of TAG says that logic requires a vessel. Logic can’t be just free-floating truth but must reside in a mind. Before humans, logic must still have been in force, but what held it? God’s mind, of course.

One popular example of this is the argument that gravity is a ghost in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Before humans, there was no mind to hold the law of gravity. It had no mass or energy. How much more nonexistent could it be?

The problem here is that gravity and the law of gravity aren’t the same thing. Before Newton, Newton’s Law of Gravity didn’t exist. But gravity did. Similarly, you don’t need a mind for time to exist, but you do for “September” or “ten o’clock.” And you don’t need a mind for logic to exist, but you do for the laws of logic.

Said another way, logic and math are languages. We didn’t need to invent English for rocks to exist, we didn’t need to invent physics for gravity to exist, and we didn’t need to invent math for 1 + 1 to equal 2.

Gravity, time, and logic are properties of the universe, and no mind is required.

Concluded in part 3.

Atheism is the arrogant belief 
that the entire Universe 
was not created for our benefit.
— Michael Nugent

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/4/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

 

Movie Review: “Is Genesis History?” (Part 3)

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Let’s continue with our critique of this young-earth Creationist movie (part 1).

Undercutting uniform change

Our next expert is paleontologist Kurt Wise. He has a PhD in geology from Harvard. In high school he used scissors to cut from a Bible everything that, if taken literally, would contradict science. He said about the resulting corrected Bible, “I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two.”

The movie doesn’t give this background on Wise, but he has made clear that his allegiance lies with the Bible, not with science. “If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.”

Back to the movie: the Creationist’s dilemma is acknowledging the great change during earth history (mountain formation, volcanism, erosion, and so on) but not having enough time to do it in, assuming today’s rates of change. The solution is to imagine that the rate of change is now drastically reduced. (Just hope that no one asks for an explanation for or evidence of this change.)

Or, play the Bible card, as he does. 2 Peter 3:3–6 says that naysayers will ask about the promised second coming. Where’s the big change? “Everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation,” they will say, but they forget that God’s great building (Creation) and destroying (Flood) projects are part of history as well. Nothing like that happens today; therefore, the present is no guide to judging the past.

Of course, as objective evidence, New Testament quotes are useless. Further, drop the agenda-driven constraint of squeezing all the geological events and evolution of life into only 6000 years, and the problem goes away.

Mechanisms of the Flood

Next up is Marcus Ross, a paleontologist at a museum in Tennessee. He talked about the mechanism of how the Flood would deposit the animal carcasses, but he didn’t answer what seems to be the obvious question. If we ignore evolution and suppose that all animals lived together before the Flood, why aren’t animals from the same ecosystem buried together? Since hippos live in rivers and wetlands, the Creationist should expect Hadrosaurs or similar water-dwelling dinosaurs to be fossilized alongside them.

This parallels the famous response by biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked what could destroy confidence in the theory of evolution, he said, “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” The fossils created by the Flood should provide countless examples of the coexistence of all life. We see none. Score another one for evolution.

Back to our paleontologist. As an example, he gives the distribution of fossils of mosasaurs (large aquatic reptile predators) across the map of the earth. “[Mosasaur fossils] are globally distributed and they’re distributed on continents. So, looking at these things, you’re saying, ‘What is it that has the power or capacity to take the marine world and throw it on top of continents in such a violent and destructive manner?’ And the Flood makes perfect sense for this.”

Huh? The Flood is magic! It should be the explanation of last resort. We don’t need to imagine mosasaurs swept onto continents by a global flood. Conventional science explains mosasaur fossils just fine—they lived and died in many parts of the world’s oceans for 20 million years. Land rose, and some seas became part of continents, which made some of those fossils accessible for us to discover. Where’s the problem?

He likes the Cambrian Explosion, because Creationists imagine that the rapid diversification of animals into new phyla that happened during this 25-million-year period is impossible to explain through evolution. He said that this comes from “conventional paleontology” (perhaps he meant “reality-based paleontology”). But that won’t work—he wants to agree with paleontology when it suits him so he can choose factoids here and there, like picking flowers for an arrangement. Is he on board with “conventional” paleontology or not? He can’t dismiss its foundational tenets but then sift through its conclusions for goodies to make his argument.

The discovery of Tiktaalik, a plausible transition between fish and land animals, is a popular example showing how evolution works. Knowing the date that such an animal would’ve lived, paleontologists found exposed sedimentary rock of the right age on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. They searched, and bingo.

Duplicate that with Creationism.

And we shouldn’t get overexcited about the Cambrian Explosion. Yes, most of the animal phyla developed during a relatively small period, but that’s about it. Dramatic speciation had to wait millions of years for the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (more here). The Cambrian Explosion was remarkable, but so were other periods.

He ends by stating that the savage dinosaurs that embody the Age of Dinosaurs for most of us are the result of “the Curse.” These are Flood-era animals, not Eden-era animals.

Yet again, this raises more questions. Did these animals evolve between Eden and the Flood? What did they look like in Eden? Since we still live in a fallen world, why don’t we have equivalently scary animals today?

Mechanisms of fossilization

Arthur Chadwick is a taphonomist, a scientist who studies decaying organisms over time and how fossilization works. With a Wyoming fossil deposit as background, he noted that a dead coyote would be quickly scavenged, leaving its bones scattered. He demanded to know what could explain the intact skeletons that he was digging up, implying that a Flood would do nicely.

Yet again, where’s the puzzle? There are lots of ways to preserve an intact (or moderately so) carcass from scavengers. Ash from a sudden volcanic eruption buries animals intact. The slow part of a river bend collects and buries animals that died individually or were carried downstream by a flood. Deep water in lakes. Peat bogs. Marshes. Swamps.

He concluded with a dig at conventional science. Evolution is imposed with an agenda; it’s not coming from the data. And he assumes “the historical record of Genesis.”

None of this was backed up with evidence. Quelle surprise.

Concluded in part 4.

[Does God ever appear?]
We only ever seem to get the monkey,
never the organ grinder.
And the monkey always says,
“This is what I say my god wants.”
— commenter epeeist

Image credit: Kevin Walsh, flickr, CC