Why Choose Creationism?

The Secular Web Kiosk has a new article by Jon Jermey titled "Why Choose Creationism?" Jermey argues that Creationism is a symptom of a dying Christianity in the Western World. As church attendance in Christian churches decline, as more moderate Christians go on about their lives taking little thought for how their religion ought to impact their lives, then some have clung to Creationism as a last dying gasp for what Jermey calls "a belief badge."

A belief badge, according to Jermey, is like a Masonic handshake, a way of identifying others in an in-group, is easy to adopt with no strenuous effort required, and can be determined quickly to identify allies or enemies. Simply ask someone, "Do you believe God created the universe?" If the answer is yes, then the other person is a creationist, end of discussion. How the person answers the question has no bearing whatsoever on how he performs at his job or deals with his family. It offers no input to whether he pays his taxes or how much he gives to charity. It simply is an easy marker to identify if someone belongs to the right crowd.

Therefore, Jermey argues, secularists and scientists who have no truck with Creationism ought to ignore it completely, as whether a person espouses creationist ideals is irrelevant to the world at large.

I find myself sympathizing with Jermey's argument to a degree. When I was a die-hard creationist, I recall as a teenager reading a Batman comic book in which an evolutionary principle was casually mentioned off-hand. It was accepted as a given, a well-known fact, the way even most Christians accept heliocentrism with no threat to their faith, unlike Christians of several hundred years ago. When the Batman comic book told its story with the evolution principle behind the scenes, I recall being deeply disturbed. A frontal attack against creationism by an evolution advocate I could handle, as that was a large part of what I studied in my high school science class--why evolution is contrary to the Bible. But when rousing good stories were told with evolution latent, assumed in the background, I began to wonder--what does everyone else seem to know that I don't?

Which brings up the reason that I can't wholeheartedly agree with Jermey's call to ignore Creationism as some harmless badge belief--the impact on education. The Discovery Institute's Wedge Document clearly reveals that it is trying an end-run around the well-established scientific process by avoiding all the messy peer-reviewed research and field testing for Creationism, and just inject their beliefs directly into the science education classes. The stated notion is that if we ground kids in creationism and god belief, they'll be more open to Christianity--or a more committed version of the religion--at a later time. They'll grow up more moral, as the theory goes, and America will become a Christian nation through and through. Creationists assume that this will be far superior to what they see today, in which teachers don't lead kids in Christian prayers and laws that espouse Christian principles such as those denying homosexuals freedoms or those allowing abortions are struck down as unconstitutional.

That's why I don't feel that Creationism is a harmless belief to help Christians identify each other in secret prayer meetings. When Texas School Board members--most of whom have no experience in education--work to throw out reliable science and history textbooks because they are contrary to their cherished biblical beliefs, this affects the children of Texas and other states who purchase the same textbooks. Injecting Creationism into the classroom puts American children at a disadvantage to other more secular countries who hammer the facts into their kids from the beginning. When generations of American children enter the workforce knowing nothing about evolution other than it's all wrong, they will find themselves at a comparative disadvantage to the rest of the world. I would be hard pressed to argue that the United States must be the greatest country in all things, but I can't justify intentionally hobbling children in the name of a religious belief with little to no basis in reality.

The failure of Microcreation

Intelligent Design advocates have long asserted that while microevolution may occur resulting in minor changes within species, only an intelligent designer can make major changes that result in new species or body types.  However, cultural anthropologist David Eller argues in Skeptic magazine that this notion of 'micro-creation' fails on two levels: it neither strengthens the case for 'macro-creationism' nor does it weaken the case for macroevolution.

A STANDARD TACTIC USED by creationists to attack evolution is to contrast microevolution (i.e., within species evolution, which they accept) with macroevolution (i.e., between species evolution, which they adamantly reject). Microevolution, they grant, may or does occur. But they assert that macroevolution either has never been observed or is theoretically impossible. They argue that while microevolution may be true, it is trivial, and the major claim of evolution — the evolution and emergence of species — is either unsubstantiated or false.

This failure to account for macrophenomena, such as human life, the earth, or the universe, then serves as an opportunity to suggest that creation is the only plausible alternative for the origin of life. This conclusion suffers from the fallacy of the excluded middle or false dilemma (just because B is false does not make A true). But ironically the “success” of the “scientific” creationist enterprise, particularly its most recent and “serious” incarnation — Intelligent Design (ID) — has itself up to this point rested on claims regarding a few minor fragmentary subspecies processes rather than the macroprocesses that it is so keen to deny to evolution.

Eller concludes:

[I]n the end, microevolution is nothing more than descent with modification over the short term, and macroevolution is descent with modification over the long term. Put another way, macroevolution is merely the accumulation of microevolutionary changes. The only difference between them is time-scale. The same thing cannot be said about microcreation and macrocreation. Macrocreation is not the accumulation of microcreationist events; if it were, then macrocreation would be “blind” or incidental. You do not get a flagellum over the short term and a protist over the long term. Where would the flagellum reside in the meantime? We can conclude with confidence that microcreation fails as an explanation even of microlevel phenomena and that, even if it were it to succeed at that level, it would still fail as a ground for macrocreation.

Fish make judgement calls

One tenet of creationism is that there is a huge gap between mankind and the animal kingdom.  For some, the notion that humans are just smart animals offends them and eliminates our special creation.  For support, they constantly point to our special abilities and declare them to be a part of our spiritual nature.

Over time, scientists have discovered more and more abilities once thought to be uniquely human are also exhibited by animals.  Monkeys  and dogs have a sense of morality and know when they're getting a raw deal.

Last week, Scientific American's 60-second science featured fish that make judgement calls.  A type of stickleback fish was able to determine when others of its kind were finding more food and thus switched their feeding patterns.  This goes against the notion that all animals are merely obeying their God-given instincts and that only humans can make these sort of complex decisions.

No death in the Garden of Eden?

I have often heard Christians assert that the Garden of Eden was a paradise in which no death ever occurred. 

God's original creation was "very good". without blemish, death and suffering. Even the animals did not eat each other, they were all vegetatians (sic). Something happened to change all that and it was sin. After that the Lord cursed the universe but gave a way for man to be restored to him.

They cite sources such as Genesis 1:29-30, in which God gives the newly-created Adam and Eve and all animals "every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed" for food.  Lions, wolves, bats, sharks, alligators, eagles--all of them were strictly herbivorous.

While this might appear at first glance to an idealistic paradise, more investigation reveals this scenario is rife with problems.

The first problem with this scenario is that predators certainly look as if they were designed to catch and eat prey. What with the claws, the fangs, the forward-facing vision to track movement, the variation of hide coloring to conceal themselves, the digestive tracts suitable for consumption of flesh, hair and bone--all of those features are absolutely unnecessary for animals hunting plants. No cheetah needed to sprint up to 70 miles per hour to catch a bush.

So perhaps God created these creatures with useless features that not only would not help them consume plants but in fact would hinder them from doing so. It's hard to survive if your teeth can't properly chew cellulose and it passes right through you. This would be a colossal example of bad design. Or, perhaps God repurposed a large swath of the animal kingdom (and plants--think of venus flytraps and other plants that feed on insects) to be carnivorous after Adam and Eve's fall. Essentially this would mean that God took a lion with flat, plant-grinding teeth and performed divine dentistry to give it sharp incisors, along with a meat-preferring digestive system as well as the natural desire to consume meat to begin with. If that's the case, then I'd have to say that a plant-eating lion could hardly be called a lion in the first place.

What's more, the introduction of death would also require the creation of an entire group of creatures we call scavengers. Vultures, hyenas, even many bacteria feed off dead flesh. But according to the Creaion myth, they were not a part of the original six-day creation. They would have had to be created after the Fall, even though Genesis is clear that after six days God rested from creation. According to Hugh Ross, who sees Genesis as an uncannily accurate scientific treatise, we are still in this seventh day, which is why Ross asserts no new species are evolving today. (He's wrong about that, of course, but he needs it to be true for his premise to hold up.)

But we know what happens in situations today when predators are removed from an ecosystem--the herbivores overpopulate, consume all the food supply, then begin a massive starve-off.

And yet, according to the story, death hadn't entered the world, meaning no rabbits were starving to death for lack of greenery. So the only way that I can imagine this scenario panning out is for plant-eaters to not reproduce. At all. Despite God's command to increase and multiply, no animals or plants could reproduce. They certainly don't need to, since they aren't dying, and if they did, they would multiply unchecked. So again we have the same problem as the predators, in that every single species is equipped with organs and hormones and sexual characteristics with absolutely no purpose. The male peacock's beautiful plumage is completely pointless, because no female peacock will ever select a male for mating. No plant ever blooms, no tree ever launches seed pods. Even worse, no tree ever bears fruit either, since within each fruit is the seeds of future generations. And yet every single living creature is dependent on the plants bearing fruit for food--an unsolvable conundrum.

So either God created reproduction ahead of time for no reason, or he re-created all of creation after the Fall. Neither scenario is satisfying.

In a world without death, there can be no birth, either. Just unending, unchanging, static existence--as stagnant as a dank pool of brackish water. Certainly not the paradise we've imagined Eden to be.

All of these problems are what to be expected in a world with no death. I'm just an ordinary guy--I'm sure a trained biologist could come up with even more problems. These are the logical conclusions of holding to a primitive myth. Now there is no doubt that the idea of no pain, sorrow, and death is a compelling one. I completely understand the desire to believe that "Once upon a time nothing ever died." But like all fairy tales, they reveal our innermost desires and dreams and fears, but we must be very careful not to take them literally.

Debate: Michael Shermer vs. Eric Hovind

Dr. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine, engaged in a radio debate on Creationism vs. Evolution against Eric Hovind, son and heir apparent of "Dr. Dino" Kent Hovind. The full podcast can be heard here, or you can listen to a sample below:



Not much new material here, for those who are interested in the subject. Shermer gives a good account for his support for evolutionary science, although he allows himself to get dragged down rabbit trails by Hovind too often. Of course, that's easy to do, because Hovind is like his father, quick to insert a half-dozen canards and outright falsehoods regarding Creationism, Evolution, Biblical authority and textual criticism in one go. If you thought Piltdown Man, and Julius Caesar can't be combined in a single sentence, then you haven't hear a Hovind speak.

When the show hosts or callers asked questions of Hovind, most often his answer was to invite the questioner to buy or obtain one of his DVDs, something even the sympathetic show hosts mentioned as a point against Hovind.

One of the callers asked Shermer a question that's been asked and answered countless times: Why aren't any transitional species found in the fossil record but always fully formed? Shermer answered the question adequately, stating that many, many fossils have been found of transitional species, but the question likely stems from a problem of definition. How does the questioner define "transitional species"? Ray Comfort defines it as two existing (and incompatible) species somehow mashed together, like a duck with a dog's head.

Of course, no evolution scientist has ever postulated such a species, living or dead. This is a cartoon version of Evolution. It would be like debunking gravitational theory by watching cartoons of the Road Runner and Wil E. Coyote.

Every species is a transitional species, just like every ring of metal, when connected to others in a line, becomes a "link" in a chain. Some transitional species are more apparent than others. Certain crickets can differentiate from each other by as little as the songs they employ to find mates, yet when they are fossilized they appear identical. Other species are clearly intermediates between different types of species, such as the feathers and other bird-like characteristics on the lizard Archaeopteryx.

As for the definition of the term, "fully formed," I suspect the Creationist is insisting on being shown birds with only one wing, or horses with three legs and one stump. Again, the theory of evolution doesn't postulate that such species exist, except as mutations within established species. Such errors of gene copying typically don't live long enough to reproduce due to their enormous disadvantage.

Thus, the Creationist has protected herself by insisting on evidence that does not and can not exist, ensuring she will never have to change her mind, or even worse, admit that they were wrong once. And yet they believe in Creationism on even scantier evidence, namely, the writings of an ancient book written in a pre-scientific society.

More Noah's Ark replicas

I wrote earlier about a Dutch creationist building a replica of Noah's Ark, commenting on the fact that while impressive, it was only one-fifth the size of the original, per the dimensions listed in Genesis.

Well, I just learned that three Hong Kong billionaires have built a full-size replica. Seventeen years in the planning, it's a biblically-endorsed 450 feet long, but with modern amenities such as a rooftop luxury hotel.

The article includes a slide-show of several other ark builders and their monumenal creations, some with either models of, or even real live animals on display (although far too few to repopulate the world's animal kingdom).

Do Atheists Care About Others?

Answers in Genesis, a young-earth creationist organization, has a disturbing campaign arguing that you matter to God. The campaign has a signature video depicting a boy walking up to the camera, looking the viewer in the eye, then pointing a gun at the camera and firing it. The caption reads, "If God doesn't matter to him, do you?" The implication is that if you don't believe in God, you have no reason not to walk up and shoot people in the face. After all, what do you care, right?

AIG has received much press for their campaign, many of it negative, something that I think they were hoping for. They have a page up explaining their rationale, and it only fuels the stereotypes and hateful thinking that the video expresses.

Every day we are inundated with evolution-based messages intended to remove the Creator from the fabric of our society, our lives, our thoughts. But if we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible can’t be trusted and life’s supposed billion-year history is one of continual death and struggle.3 If the Bible isn’t true, then why should we be fair and kind and love our fellow human beings, as the Bible teaches?4 After all, evolution relies on survival of the fittest—no matter who gets in the way.

The theory of evolution was intended to explain the rich diversity of the biosphere on planet Earth. It was NOT intended to remove a belief for a specific creator-deity, no more than studying North Pole climate is intended to remove belief of Santa Claus from society. Granted, an acceptance of the theory of evolution does make it difficult to also accept a literal interpretation of Genesis which was written based on sixth-century B.C. scientific knowledge. In twenty-six hundred years since the era of ancient Babylonia, humans--Christian and non-Christian--have learned a few things about the world, such as its true shape, its position with regard to the sun, and the framework of the wide variety of life. What AIG can't seem to understand is that most Christians accept evolution just fine--they simply feel that it was God's primary tool for creating the life that Genesis said he did.

Those who feel that neither they nor their actions matter to God lose their motivation to care for the lives of others or for their own life.

This is at best an unproved assertion and at worst an outright lie. Atheists, agnostics, and non-believers around the world all care for their families, their friends, and their communities. If this were not the case, then the sociological results would be clearly obvious: atheists would not be married or have children; agnostics would crowd our prisons; non-believers would all be anarchists bent on destruction. The fact that these social behaviors are certainly not true demonstrates that AIG may claim that atheists don't care about others, but in reality, AIG doesn't care about the truth.

Noah's Ark Replica

According to the Book of Genesis, God warned Noah that he was going to flood the entire earth to eliminate evil humanity. To spare Noah, God gave him specific instructions to build an ark large enough to hold a sample of all the world's animals, plus food and supplies for over a year. The Genesis account is detailed enough that we can know exactly how large this ark was supposed to be.

Dutch Creationist John Huibers took the listed dimensions to heart and built a replica of the ark that spans two-thirds of a football field.

People are reportedly amazed at the size of the replica, but the Biblical dimensions would make it even five times larger.

On the other hand, there are additional problems with the replica. For one thing, the pictures show a long row of windows across the top, whereas the Biblical account implies that Noah built only a single window less than eighteen inches on a side. Never mind the inaccuracies of the replica; how was Noah and his family to deal with tons of methane-producing manure with only a single small window for ventilation.

The TalkOrigins site has an excellent article called Problems with a Global Flood which provides this information:

Wood is not the best material for shipbuilding. It is not enough that a ship be built to hold together; it must also be sturdy enough that the changing stresses don't open gaps in its hull. Wood is simply not strong enough to prevent separation between the joints, especially in the heavy seas that the Ark would have encountered. The longest wooden ships in modern seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped. The ark was 450 feet long [ Gen. 6:15]. Could an ark that size be made seaworthy?

Whether Huibers built an impressive replica or not, Noah's Ark is certainly beyond the realm of feasability.

Two Problems with Biblical Literalism

Fred Clark who writes the slactivist blog, complains about Biblical literalists. Clark is an admitted Christian, but there are two problems he has with people who believe in Young-Earth Creationism:

The first is that it is not just false, but demonstrably false, and is thus often the place where the collapse begins for soon-to-be-former Christians raised to believe in the fundamentalist house of cards. . . If every item isn't true -- or isn't blindly accepted as true -- then they insist that it all must be false. Thus if it is not true that the world was created in six, 24-hour days about 6,800 years ago, then it is not true that Jesus loves you. Or that you should love others as Jesus has loved you. Or that your sins are forgiven. Or that you are anything but alone and godforsaken when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Clark describes a particular kind of fundamentalist who eventually learns that the neatly compartmentalized tight beliefs that he grew up with are not even close to being truth. Then the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction, Clark complains:

They become as strident and binary in their unbelief as their failed mentors at Bob Jones were in their belief. Yet even their rebellion tends to remain shaped by that world and its narrowly imagined options.

I personally didn't go through this "anti-fundamentalist fundamentalist" stage he describes, or if I did it lasted about ten minutes. Those that I know that no longer are biblical literalists aren't this angry, cynical creature Clark speaks of, either.


But I do recognize this character from popular movies and television. For example, Character is a person of deep faith. Character undergoes personal crisis. Character rejects his faith and seethes at God, himself, and anyone else who believes in God. Inevitably, if the story goes on long enough, Character softens (often thanks to the kindness of another) and begins to believe again, but with a more mature, less strident faith, and all is well with the world.

Clark says his scenario is not hypothetical and is not rare. It's not my experience, however.

His second complaint against Biblical literalists seems to be that they don't seek the poetic metaphors behind, say, the first eleven chapters of Genesis but instead treat it as a neutral history text:

The accounts of creation seemed, for them, to have nothing to say about divine intent or divine affection, but only about divine technique. The story of Noah seemed to be nothing more than a complicated word problem involving the measuring of livestock capacity in cubits. The story of Adam giving names to all the animals seemed, to them, to be a reason not to learn about biodiversity. And I probably don't need to tell you how they seemed to regard that bit about the Tree of Knowledge.

Of course, one could simply argue: That's because that's what they were raised to believe. Biblical literalism is, to me, an invevitablity of dogmatic faith, a method to assert, "My god can beat up your god." If I'm going to, say, explain the substitutionary death of Jesus using the Bible, it helps my case to refer to the Bible passage as an accurate account, just as it would help me demonstrate that Lincoln was the U.S. President during the Civil War by referring to newspaper reports. But if only some passages of my Bible are accepted as literal, then the inevitable question becomes, "Which ones?" We could argue back and forth about which passages are literal and which are metaphorical forever. The only way I can end the argument is by declaring the entire book to be a literal account, thus leaving my opponent no wiggle-room.

Of course, once I've made that claim, then I'm forced to defend that the Earth was covered in a world-wide flood, donkeys can talk, and a man walked on water. If scientific evidence disputes me, then I either reject the science or invoke a miracle to cover myself.

I've no doubt that Clark is frustrated by this behavior--most rational thinking adults are, whether they believe in God or not. What I don't understand is why he doesn't understand where it came from.

For them, the creation accounts* and the story of Noah in the early chapters of Genesis have nothing to say about the inherent goodness of creation or about the obligation of stewardship. For them these chapters exist solely as some kind of divine amicus brief in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District -- as polemic arguments, that is, in a 20th-century American political dispute that has little to do with either science or theology.

Despite my difficulty in understanding how exiling Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge or committing watery genocide are examples of God's "inherent goodness," Clark doesn't seem to see the trap he's laying for himself. If Noah's Ark is a cosmic metaphor--meaning it didn't really happen, everybody knows that!--then perhaps that means the crucifixion of Jesus didn't really happen either. Everybody knows that people don't rise from the dead! Maybe there isn't even a God, either--there certainly isn't much evidence, is there? If the reported miracles of God are reduced to poetic story-telling, then we can no longer claim that God exists because of the existence of miracles, can we?

He demonstrates this point in a footnote when he complains that certain cynics look at the two different accounts of Creation in Genesis 1 and 2 and declare them a discrepancy. He compares this to Robert Burns describing love like both a rose and a melody--is that a discrepancy? Okay then, when the authors of Genesis wrote two accounts of the beginning of the world, they were only speaking poetically. Fine. This puts the Biblical account of our beginnings into the same category as just one more ancient creation myth. No problem. And the accounts of Moses and Joshua are just more ancient hero tales with no more or less relevance than stories about Hercules or Jason and the Argonauts. And Jesus is just one more demi-god resurrection myth who can no more answer my prayers than Dionysus or Superman.

I can live with that.

Bone Structure and Intelligent Design

I recently saw a video that brought up an interesting point.


Pneumatic bones, or bones that are hollow, are light but not very strong. On the flip side, solid bones are stronger, but much heavier. All birds have hollow bones, which only makes sense because they need a light frame to enable them to fly. However, their bodies are fragile and can't take much punishment. It's a logical trade-off.

Mammals, on the other hand, need stronger bones to hold up their weight against the surface, to run from or after other animals. Again, it only makes sense that mammals that don't need to fly should have heavy, dense bones.

However, there are a handful of exceptions in the animal kingdom. Ostriches, for example, never spend a minute of their lives in flight, and yet they have hollow bones, and in fact suffer from a higher incidence of bone fractures than other land animals of the same size and weight. Likewise, bats spend an inordinate amount of time in the air, and yet they have the added weight of solid bones like their land-based mammalian cousins.

So it seems that someone decided that if you are a bird, then you get hollow bones, whether you need them or not, and if you are a mammal, then you get solid bones, whether they help you or not. Why would that be the case?

The theory of evolution has an answer, and it's remarkably simple. Ostriches descended from birds of flight and thus inherited their hollow bones, to their disadvantage. Also, bats descended from mammals, and thus received solid bones and their extra weight.

Now it seems to me that if I were in charge of designing the animal kingdom, I wouldn't parcel out bone structure based on whether you were a bird or a mammal. I would divvy up hollow bones to flying creatures and solid bones to land-based creatures, regardless of their class.


Essentially, this is William Paley's watch argument in reverse: If you are tromping through a dense woods, and you come upon an ostrich corpse lying on the ground next to a bat corpse, what can you infer? Looking at the feathers, wings, and hollow bones of the ostrich, you might conclude that it is a flying bird. And looking at the hair, teats, and solid bones of the bat, you might conclude that it is a land-based mammal. And you would be dead wrong on both counts.

Yes, we could argue that our mythical Intelligent Designer must have had a good reason to create these two creatures with these handicaps--it's not a suboptimal design if you designed them that way on purpose. But it seems very strange to me that the Intelligent Designer would intentionally design something to appear as if it wasn't intelligently designed.