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

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

In part 1 of my rebuttal to this young-earth Creationist movie, we looked at the argument that Noah’s Flood lay down 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 several questions that I think should have been addressed. 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 with things happening 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 we have will be interpreted in different ways, depending on your paradigm.

Let me suggest different descriptions of these two paradigms: one is built on evidence, and one 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 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?

The philosopher stated that Christians have a witness that the scientists don’t have: the Bible. He was dismissed the idea that this approach pits science and religion against each other (a failed attempt that we will see repeated 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 kol, which means “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, 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.

He said that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, which listed Noah’s sons’ 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

Andrew Snelling (geologist) 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 little more than 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 we had any supervolcanoes in human history?? Well, there you go.”

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.

Hold on now—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, you know, just cuz—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—you can’t have them both. Christians can’t allay their concerns about being antiscientific with the arguments in this movie. They must choose between the option with the evidence and the remarkable track record of telling us about nature and the one with the Bronze Age god who likes human sacrifice.

Pick.

Continue with part 3.

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

Image credit: Web page for movie