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

About six weeks before the 2014 surprise movie hit God’s Not Dead, I correctly predicted that the Chick tract “Big Daddy?” looked like the first back-of-the-napkin sketch of that movie’s script. (Read my review of that movie here and its 2016 sequel here.)
Chick tracts are tiny cartoon booklets that usually have an unbeliever making the decision to accept Jesus just a little too late. (Don’t be like him, kids! Accept Jesus today.)
In honor of the recently departed Jack Chick, creator of these popular fear-based tracts, I’d like to review that early script, the Chick tract “Big Daddy?” The story opens in a biology classroom with a portrait of an ape titled “Our Father.” [As the story progresses, I’ll give my rebuttals in brackets. Read along, and see if your favorite Creationist claim makes an appearance.]
The professor asks how many of the students believe in evolution. All but one student is on board, and the professor is furious at the holdout. He’s about to expel him from the class but thinks better of it. Publicly destroying the Christian argument will make a good demonstration for the class.
You can’t mention the Bible in school
The student begins by using the word “Bible,” and the professor declares that that is illegal. Here we have the first of many footnotes referencing Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind. Not only is our nutty professor is wrong that mentioning the Bible is illegal, the footnote is wrong when it says, “it has never been against the law to teach the Bible or creation in public schools.” Teaching the Bible in a comparative religions class is fine, but it’s not legal to evangelize from the Bible or teach Christian creation as science.
Hovind is a poor authority. His doctorate is from a diploma mill, and he was released a year ago after serving over eight years for federal tax evasion.
Does science prove anything?
The professor declares that science proves evolution. [No—mathematics proves things, not science. Science is always provisional. I would say: evolution is the scientific consensus.] He points to carbon-14. [A biologist would likelier point to the entire field of radioisotope dating, not just C-14, which can reliably date samples to only about 40,000 years ago.]
The many flavors of “evolution”
The Christian student argues that there are six kinds of evolution—cosmic evolution, chemical evolution, stellar evolution, organic evolution, macroevolution, and microevolution. Don’t worry about the distinction—it’s not much clearer in the comic. Creationists sometimes argue that “evolution” is ambiguous to justify their use of the word “Darwinism,” but I’ll stick with the term used by biologists.
The student says that all but microevolution are believed by faith. [Science is accepted because of evidence, not faith.]
Piltdown Man was a hoax
Next, he attacks fossil dating by stating that Richard Leakey found a modern skull under 212-million-year-old rock. [Nope. That skull was an early hominid dated to 1.9 million years.] Our precocious student then declares that Lucy was just a chimpanzee, not an early hominid. [I saw Lucy when it toured the U.S. in 2009. Our student is wrong again—the consensus is clear that Lucy is an Australopithecus.]
Next, we see a chart listing various hominid fossils, with comments dismissing each of them. But no biologist would include Piltdown Man (a hoax) and Nebraska Man (an error) on such a list. Other fossils are dismissed as irrelevant, but again, that’s Dr. Dino talking.
Note also that hominid fossils alone provide little evidence for evolution. Only given the overwhelming evidence for evolution from DNA evidence and the enormous variety of other fossils can we make sense of the hominid evidence.
Fossil dating uses circular reasoning.
Oh dear—Professor Frantic is losing this debate. He changes the subject to the old dates of fossils, and the student charges him with circular reasoning—you know that a layer is old because it has trilobites in it, but you know that trilobites are old because of the age of the surrounding layers. [Which is nonsense. Radioisotope dating is reliable only for igneous rock like basalt or granite. Fossils in a sedimentary layer can be dated by nearby layers of basalt laid down as lava, for example. If there isn’t any convenient igneous layer, new fossils can be dated by using known “index” fossils if those fossils were reliably dated at some other site.]
The quick-witted student next brings up polystrate fossils—fossilized trees that intrude through many layers. If layers deposit very slowly, is a dead tree going to sit there, intact, for thousands of years while the layers of sediment slowly accumulate around it? [The error, of course, is that layers are sometimes laid down very quickly. For example, land can subside during an earthquake. When that land is next to the ocean, many feet of sand can be deposited within hours.]
Embryology errors
The professor tries again and says that human embryos have gills, which proves that they evolved from fish. The student points out that Haeckel’s embryos are discredited.
Haeckel made a mistake—get over it. His “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis has been discarded, and yet embryology gives yet more clues supporting evolution. For example, human embryos go through stages where they have slits in their necks (like gill slits) and tails (that are then reabsorbed).
Vestigiality?
The professor points to the human tail bone and the pelvis in some whales as vestigial structures. Mr. Smart-ass replies that both bones are useful because they anchor muscles and so aren’t vestigial. [Wrong again. “Vestigial” refers to something no longer used for its ancestral function. Wings on an ostrich are vestigial, not because they’re useless (they’re not) but because they aren’t used for flying. Similarly, the whale’s pelvis isn’t used for providing support for legs, which is what pelvises do.]
The student says, “Even if there were ‘vestigial’ organs, isn’t losing something the opposite of evolution?” [Dude—read a textbook on evolution! Animals evolve by becoming better suited to their environment. We might call that a loss (loss of eyesight in a cave fish or loss of walking for a sea mammal) but that perspective is pointless. By being selected by evolution, these animals have become fitter.]
And we have a winner!
After a bizarre turn where the student rejects the idea of gluons, our bedraggled atheist hero is ready to hear from the Bible. A beaten man at the end, he takes his ape portrait and resigns. The Christian victor wraps it up for his fellow students: evolution is a lie and Jesus saves.
Since he had it all figured out, one wonders why that Christian was in a class on evolution in the first place.
Back in the real world
This is embarrassingly bad science. Creationists, study up on evolution before you try to attack it, and when an unbiased study of the evidence shows that Creationism is wrong, reconsider your position.
See also: I follow up on the confident Bible references in a number of Chick tracts here: “Never Quote a Bible Verse (and 7 Examples Where Christians Forget This Advice)”

Believers, think about all the things you would do if you were God. 
Then contemplate the fact that you worship a God who hasn’t. 
— Tiger C. Lewis (paraphrased)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/12/14.)
Photo credit: Chick Publications