Leeches are not an important part of a doctor’s pharmacopoeia today.
Imagine that debate between a medieval doctor and a modern Westerner:
Doctor: “Leeches are an important way to correct an imbalance in bodily humors. For example, they can cure pneumonia.”
Modern: “How do you know?”
“This comes from Galen! Anyway, I had pneumonia myself last winter, and I took a treatment of leeches. Look at me now.”
“How do you know the leeches were a part of the cure? Maybe you would’ve gotten over it yourself. Maybe the leeches hurt you, and you got well in spite of them.”
You can imagine how this would continue. The doctor would defend his tradition; he would cite other anecdotes of supposed cures; he might explain the theory of the four humors in Hippocratic medicine; he might say that that’s just how they do things here, and you should keep your nose out of it; he might say that leeches only push things in the right direction, not that they’re a guaranteed cure; he might demand that you prove that leeches are useless or harmful; and so on.
Before you shake your head at the shallowness of thought of our medieval ancestors, at least they had an excuse. Modern science didn’t exist and so hadn’t demonstrated the benefits of hypothesis testing and evidence following. It’s more puzzling when you compare this with a discussion you could have with a Christian today.
Christian: “God answers prayers.”
Skeptic: “How do you know?”
“It’s in the Bible! Anyway, I was jobless for months last year, and my finances were getting desperate, but then I prayed about it. I had a great job in two weeks.”
“How do you know that God was involved? If it was God, why did it take two weeks—shouldn’t you have heard the phone ringing with the job offer right after you said ‘Amen’? Maybe it was all the work you put into the job search that finally paid off.”
You can imagine how this would continue. The Christian would defend their tradition; they would give anecdotes of answered prayer; they might explain how and why prayer works; they might say that that’s just how they do things here, and you should keep your nose out of it; they might say that God has his own perfect way of doing things, not that prayer always works as you’d want it to; they might demand that you prove that prayers aren’t answered or that God doesn’t exist; and so on.
Unfortunately, prayer is just the start of it. You can have similar medieval conversations today about God’s hand in current political events or natural disasters, about God protecting you from covid or protecting the earth from climate change, about God steering Christians’ lives or standing with them during hardship, about the Bible being so remarkable that only divine inspiration explains it, and so on. While these claims are usually stated with confidence, they’re never backed up by convincing evidence.
Evidence didn’t matter much to the medieval doctor, but you’d think that it would be important to a Christian today, living in 21st century society and with a modern education. The problem is that we’re the same superstitious humans with imperfect brains that we were a thousand years ago. And if we’ve been indoctrinated as children, our adult intellect is usually focused on defending our stance, not questioning it.
In a time before modern science, religion answered questions, but only because it was the only option. It exists today, not because it provides useful answers (it doesn’t—its answers are culturally specific and depend on which religion is answering) but because of inertia. Religion has outlived its usefulness.
Here is a thought experiment . . . tell your wife that you have a lot of invisible qualities that can be clearly seen and see what kind of response you get. — commenter Otto
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/17/17.)
This is a guest post by a long-time commenter at this blog, Richard S. Russell. Richard is a retired research analyst (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction) and long-time activist in the realms of atheism, science fiction, and liberal politics. He has more opinions than any ten people should legally be allowed to have but makes up for it by giving them away as fast as possible. He blogs irregularly at richardsrussell.blogspot.com.
We begin with a joke.
It was the night before the Chemistry 217 final exam, but the brothers of Beta Beta Sigma were not in the mood to study. They hit the bars, then the party circuit, then their private stash back at the frat house. Just before Jack passed out, he mumbled to the rest “Be sure to wake me up for the Chem final at 9.” But moments later the others were out of it, too.
Needless to say, when they regained consciousness around 11 the following morning, they were disgusted to realize that they’d missed the final altogether and would probably be getting F’s for the course. They quickly hatched a desperate scheme to at least give them a shot at taking the test late.
“Gentlemen!” exclaimed Prof. Hume, as they filed sheepishly into his office. “We missed you this morning. To what do I owe the honor?”
Matt spoke first: “Well, uh, Dr. Hume, we feel really bad about this, but we’re hoping you’ll understand.”
“Yeah, see, we were off last night for Luke’s wedding rehearsal, and it’s about 90 miles away, and on the way back we got a flat tire.”
“And we didn’t have a spare,” Mark added, “and it was in the middle of nowhere, and we couldn’t get a cell-phone signal, and there was no traffic. It wasn’t until this morning that a state trooper finally stopped and promised to send a tow truck to get us.”
“Uh huh. And by the time the truck arrived, the exam had already started, so we couldn’t call you or anything. But we’re hoping you’d let us take the test anyway.”
And they all looked properly hangdog and repentant, not to mention rumpled and grungy.
“Well, fellas, I understand that these things can happen. Head across the hall and distribute yourselves around the classroom while I run off a few extra copies of the test for you.”
On the way there, the brothers were smirking and giving each other winks and nudges.
Then they got the exam. Handwritten. Here it is, in its entirety:
Q1 (5%). Explain the formula H2O. Q2 (95%). Which tire?
OK, you can see how this played out, can’t you? If Matt, Mark, Luke, and Jack really had had a flat tire, the second question would have been even easier to answer than the first. But, since they hadn’t, their answers were all over the map, just like common crooks put into separate interrogation rooms by the cops. The mere fact that any of them disagreed on that answer constituted prima facie evidence that all of them were lying.
Which brings us to the gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, allegedly written by the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All concerned—Christians, atheists, Biblical scholars, adherents of rival religions—agree that the cornerstone of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Easter is the most important holiday in Christian churches. No less an authority than Saint Paul wrote “… if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). This event is so important that it’s the one story that appears in each of the four gospels.
But, of course, it’s a different story for each of them.
Dan Barker, former fundamentalist child preacher and now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has a simple challenge for Bible believers: “Tell me what happened on the original Easter Sunday. Just a simple chronology. Who went where and did what and said what and saw what? And in what order? Be sure to include everything mentioned in any of the gospels.”
Nobody can meet this challenge, because the gospels are horribly contradictory. (Don’t take my word for it, read them yourself: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20–21. Also Acts 1:3–12 and Paul’s tiny version of the story in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8.)
What should we conclude from this? That one apostle got it right and the rest differed in a few of the minor details? No. This is the most important story in all of Christianity, and if the gospels were divinely inspired—as true believers invariably assert they were—then their ultimate author was God, who’s supposed to be omniscient, so the four stories should be entirely consistent.
Just as consistent as which tire went flat.
If that were the truth.
The only reasonable conclusion is not that some of the gospel writers were slipshod, or mistaken, or forgetful, or embellishing. It’s that all of them are lying.
True believers have engaged in child rape, torture, mayhem, murder, and genocide, all for the greater glory of the Biblical God. What on Earth makes anyone think their consciences would bother them so much that they’d draw the line at mere lying, cheating, stealing, plagiarism, and forgery?
I always refer to the Bible as the world’s oldest, longest-running, most widespread, and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test. You can look at it and see whatever you want. And everybody does. — Richard S. Russell
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/16/17.)
Let’s conclude our critique of the young-earth Creationist movie Is Genesis History? (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 of organic material in partially fossilized bone, 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.
Sharks? They’re still sharks.
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 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” of animals, 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 after the Flood 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 these questions attack the fundamentals of his worldview. He explains things as best as a Creationist can, but he’s arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 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??
Yes, a coincidence. If there were a message from God behind solar eclipses, 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 to support these claims.
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 here), that has a long list of signatories. We’re told this shows that a large number of cosmologists have issues with the Big Bang.
This article is an appeal for funding for research into non-Big Bang ideas. An internet search shows no reference to it from 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 no revolutionary rejection of the consensus but something that is being spun by apologists, perhaps like the Discovery Institute’s nonsensical “Dissent from Darwinism” that tries to cast doubt on evolution.
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 isn’t alone in questioning the Big Bang? If that’s true and he argues that there is strength in numbers, why doesn’t he just go with the consensus? The numbers are greatest there. And if he is happy to reject the consensus (thinking, perhaps, that simply being right is all that matters, and 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
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/10/17.)
Let’s continue with our critique of the young-earth Creationist movie “Is Genesis History?” (part 1 here).
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.
Well, at least he lays his cards on the table. Evidence is clearly not what he uses to support his worldview.
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 today’s rate of change is much less than it had been. (Just hope that no one asks for an explanation for or evidence of this change.)
Or, you can play the Bible card, as he does. 2 Peter 3:3–6 anticipates Bible naysayers. These naysayers will ask about the promised second coming. They will say that geology doesn’t show the rapid change Creationists need, 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 and similar water-dwelling dinosaurs to be fossilized alongside them. Hippos and hadrosaurs are both large animals from watery environments, so we should find them in the same rock layers. Show me the fossils.
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 of evidence for a global flood, he pointed to 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 seas became part of continents, and those fossils are found far from the ocean. Where’s the problem?
It’s like the discovery of fossilized sea life in the limestone on top of Mount Everest. What was once a sea bed is now at the top of the world.
Ross 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 bits he can use to support 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.
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?
See, kids? This is what happens when you don’t follow the evidence.
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 quickly buries animals that died and were carried downstream by a flood. Deep water in lakes. Peat bogs. Marshes. Swamps. Tsunamis. Landslides.
He concluded by attacking 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.
To be 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
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/3/17.)
In part 1 of my rebuttal to the young-earth Creationist movie “Is Genesis History?,” we looked at the argument that Noah’s Flood deposited thousands of feet of sand, silt, and dead animals that was then cut into a canyon. And then, over a few thousand years, this somehow turned to stone.
I’m a novice about geology, but still I came up with questions that were sidestepped. Unsurprisingly, the fact that conventional geology nicely answers each one was also ignored. Let’s continue.
Philosophical grounding
Our next expert is Paul Nelson, a philosopher. He contrasted the two major views of the history of life and the universe. There’s the conventional paradigm of a 13.7 billion-year-old universe where things happened naturally, gradually, bottom up, and without design. Against that is the Genesis paradigm, which imagines a much shorter time scale and a divine intelligence that designed things. The data from the field we have will be interpreted in different ways, depending on your paradigm.
Of these two paradigms, one is built on evidence, and the other is built despite it. Instead of interpreting data through the lens of a worldview, the honest scholar follows the data and builds a worldview as a conclusion.
And why does this Christian philosopher propose just two views? If we’re going to free ourselves from the scientific consensus and cast the net wider, why reach for just young-earth Creationist Christianity for an alternative cosmology? Why not also get the Hindu view and some traditional Native American views and the flat-earth view?
This philosopher stated that Christians have a witness that the scientists don’t have: the Bible (cuz God was there, so he ought to know!). He tried and failed to dismiss the idea that this approach pits science and religion against each other. We will see more of this later.
What does the Bible say?
Next was hebraist (Hebrew scholar) Steven Boyd. (Uh, yeah—I always turn to Hebrew scholars when I have a puzzling question about cosmology.) He tells us that the Bible’s authors clearly thought they were talking about real events. Yes, it really was six literal days (yom means “day”). Yes, it really was a global flood (the Flood story has dozens of instances of the word kol, meaning “all”). Only if you impose an agenda-driven, external point of view onto Genesis would you come up with anything else. He asks, Why else would these authors want future generations to learn their history?
You could ask the same of Homer. Why would he want to pass along the Iliad? Presumably to tell his listeners that they were Greeks, a great race of people descended from gods. But even if Homer thought the Iliad was history, that doesn’t make it so. The same is true for the Old Testament and its authors.
Boyd said that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, which listed Noah’s descendants, was more evidence that the flood was global, since it touched on every society. I wonder, though, where the father(s) of the pre-Columbian societies in the Americas are in that list—the Mississippian culture or the Olmecs, Mayans, Incas, Nazca, and dozens of others. Or the other important civilizations far from the Fertile Crescent. How do they fit into the myopic viewpoint of Genesis?
He talks about the genealogy listed in the Old Testament (all the “begats” in Genesis) and the two (incompatible) lists given for Jesus. This again shows the Bible’s historical foundation.
Yeah, if the Bible were trustworthy, this might be good evidence. You’ve done nothing to show that it is.
He said about the Adam and Eve story as the origin of mankind, “The biblical text is not compatible with the conventional paradigm” of evolution.
Uh, yeah, you got that right.
Dating the earth
Geologist Andrew Snelling was the next expert. He gave several examples of monumental volcanism—the Yellowstone supervolcano (in Wyoming), which sent ash as far south as Texas, or the Deccan Traps, which is a million cubic kilometers of basalt (solidified lava) in central India. He declared that you can’t use today’s rates of volcanism as a standard, because he wants to compress all prehistoric volcanism into about one millionth the time that conventional geology gives for it. He didn’t explain why this makes more sense of the data or address the question of how the environment would be different with that much concentrated volcanism.
As for evidence that today’s rates of volcanism can’t be applied to the past, his argument seemed to be (my paraphrase), “Have any supervolcanoes erupted in human history?! Well, there you go.”
But he gives no evidence to support a compressed timeframe. If volcano magnitude follows a power law distribution (as with earthquakes), it’s not surprising that the last 10,000 years haven’t overlapped with any of earth’s most dramatic volcanic events of the last billion years. (Oops—was it inappropriate to bring up the idea of long time to neatly explain an issue?)
Next on the chopping block was conventional geology’s use of radioisotope dating. We’re told that today’s slow radioactive decay rates can’t be assumed in the past. (Why not?) To prove the unreliability of this dating method, he explained how he had samples from a single rock layer tested using different isotopes. The tests returned dates that were all over the map.
I heard him relate this anecdote in person years ago. My reaction to that is here. Briefly, only igneous rock can be reliably dated using radioisotope dating. Deliberately use metamorphic rock instead, and you can get dates with which to lie that this method is never reliable.
Let’s pause and ask, if this powerful new evidence from the Creationists is correct, why hasn’t conventional science accepted it? Haters gonna hate, apparently. Conventional scientists have a “commitment to millions of years.” Here’s how it went down: nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell proposed that the earth was millions of years old, and biologist Charles Darwin felt empowered by this to hypothesize millions of years for evolution. Conventional scientists are committed to evolution—not because it’s well supported by evidence but to make baby Jesus cry—so you must have millions of years.
We’re told at the end, “It’s not a question of science versus the Bible”; rather, it’s two different views of earth’s history.
Right, and the two different views are incompatible. It is indeed science versus the Bible, and you can’t have them both. Christians can’t allay their concerns about being antiscientific with the arguments in this movie. On one hand is the evidence and science’s remarkable track record of telling us about nature. On the other, the Bronze Age god who likes human sacrifice.
Pick.
Continue to part 3.
See also: For a more science-y take on Grand Canyon documentaries, read paleontologist Donald Prothero’s summary of his experience as a science expert trying to talk sense into five Creationists (four Christian and one Muslim) on the “Creationism” episode of Conspiracy Road Trip (BBC, 2012), recommended by commenter flexilis.
I’m even told sometimes, “You’re attacking the Bible,” and when I am accused of such I simply say, “I’m not attacking the Bible. I’m attacking you. Your problem is that you can’t tell the difference.” — Pete Enns
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/24/17.)
Imagine squeezing your eyes real tight and wishing hard. What do you wish for?
No, not that Santa Claus will bring you all the stuff on your list or for Tinker Bell’s health after she drank the poison. This time, we’re wishing that all those stories from the Old Testament were really, honest-to-goodness true—from the six-day creation and Adam and Eve to the global Flood, the Tower of Babel, and all the rest. And—it’s a miracle!—our wish has been granted. Or, at least we can imagine so for 101 minutes by watching Is Genesis History?, a “documentary” released as a DVD in 2017.
The movie is unapologetically young-earth Creationist (“young earth” means that they think that the earth and the rest of the universe is roughly 6000 years old, and “Creationist” means that they reject evolution).
The production quality is high, with some beautiful natural locations, and they interview a dozen relevant scientists. Breaking ranks with typical Creationist “scholarship,” these scientists’ doctorates are often actually in the field that they’re critiquing—geology, paleontology, biology, astronomy, and archaeology. They only tangentially addressed the elephant in the room, that conventional science has overwhelmingly concluded that the Big Bang and evolution are real, and a 6000-year-old earth and global flood and the rest of the Bible’s “history” are not.
As an outsider to these scientific fields, I’m sometimes in a difficult spot. Some of the movie’s arguments are clearly nonsense. Some are legitimate open questions within conventional science. And some require more expertise (or research time) than I now have. I’ve written about a couple of times Creationists were able to shut me up with arguments I couldn’t immediately answer here. That is, they shut me up until I had a chance to investigate the claims more thoroughly and found out how I’d been lied to, which is not the best way to win me to your side.
If you can expand on my responses below, share your insights in the comments.
Canyons
The movie opens at a stream in a small canyon. The walls of the canyon look to be made of sand and gravel. We’re asked: How long would it take for a small stream like this to carve this canyon? Thousands of years, you might think? Surprise—we’re near Mt. St. Helens! It’s been just four decades since the famous eruption of 1980, and it already has new canyons. We’re told that streams “cut through deep [bedrock], all in a couple of days.”
Don’t be ridiculous—streams didn’t cut through bedrock in days. I’ve been to Mt. St. Helens many times, including two visits to the Mount St. Helens Creation Center, a tiny museum with a Creationist presupposition that may have been the source of the observation, “Gosh, but don’t these recent canyons look just like a mini Grand Canyon?!”
Who would be surprised that water quickly cut canyons at Mt. St. Helens? They’re made of sand and gravel!
The Grand Canyon
The movie introduces Steve Austin (geologist) who argued for a global flood, using the Grand Canyon as evidence. He said that the many layers show evidence of rapid sedimentation—that is, within hours or even minutes.
How? The upper Grand Canyon layers include sedimentary rock including sandstone, limestone, and shale. These rocks form under different conditions. Are they imagining that the advancing or retreating Flood changed its conditions so that different things would settle out? Limestone is mostly made from tiny fragments of marine organisms like coral. Shale is made from clay and other minerals, and unlike limestone and sandstone, it is composed of thin sheets. It would be complicated enough if all the sandstone were at the bottom, then the shale, and then the limestone (for example), but it’s actually a complex interleaving of various kinds of each stone—sandstone, then shale, then limestone, then more sandstone, and so on.
It gets worse when you remember that these layers contain fossils that are distinct to that layer. It’s not something simple like the animals were graded by size—the biggest falling out of the turbulent flood first and becoming part of the lowest layer, and so on. Why are there trilobite fossils in the Tapeats sandstone layer but none in the Hermit shale above, and why are there fossils of dragonflies with an eight-inch wingspan in the Hermit shale but none in the Tapeats sandstone? How would a chaotic flood create thousands of feet of distinctly interleaved layers? And if the flood was global, why aren’t canyons like this commonplace around the world? The questions aren’t even acknowledged.
The movie points to the Bible, handwaving a geological explanation for water bursting out of the ground (“the fountains of the deep”) to create the Flood.
No, geology doesn’t help you much here, but a mythology borrowed from the nearby Sumerians explains things nicely. They imagined a dome of salt water above the earth (that’s why the sky is blue!) and fresh water underneath. (More analysis here and here.)
Next, we’re assured that the flood was global, not local. Where did all that water come from? Don’t worry—the mountains weren’t as high back then, so covering the earth didn’t take that much. But that means extreme mountain building in the few thousand years since the Ark landed. Again, we’re given assertion but no evidence for this.
Cutting of the Grand Canyon
Finally, he rejects the idea that the Canyon took tens of millions of years to be cut by the Colorado River. He said, “Most geologists have jettisoned that idea” (untrue as far as I can tell). What did carve the Canyon, he says, is catastrophic erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes, which might’ve carved the Grand Canyon in weeks.
Actually, I can imagine erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes. Dry Falls in eastern Washington state was formed that way. The one small problem is that Dry Falls and Grand Canyon look completely different (pictures of each here), which makes clear that they were formed in very different ways.
He can sidestep this problem by imagining that the erosion happened to sand or silt, before it was turned to stone. In that case, of course, he must explain the magic that made it turn to stone in a few thousand years.
So many unanswered questions.
To be continued.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. — Galileo Galilei
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/17.)
