Reducibly Complex

“I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.”

-Wilson Mizner

Education has kept me very busy lately. Faith never does.

This is Part 6 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #6.

STATEMENT: ”Human Artifacts throughout the Geologic Column…Man-made artifacts - such as the hammer in Cretaceous rock, a human sandal print with trilobite in Cambrian rock, human footprints and a handprint in Cretaceous rock – point to the fact that all the supposed geologic periods actually occurred at the same time in the recent past.”

RESPONSE: The work cited for this claim is Carl Baugh’s Why Do Men Believe Evolution Against All Odds?. However, this claim has been disproved by scientists and, more importantly, criticized by creationists. Many creationists, including the creationist organization Answers in Genisis (AIG), have criticized Baugh, claiming that he has “muddied the water for many christian.” Don Batten, of Creation Ministries International wrote: “Some Christians will try to use Baugh’s ‘evidences’ in witnessing and get ’shot down’ by someone who is scientifically literate. The ones witnessed to will thereafter be wary of all creation evidences and even more inclined to dismiss Christians as nut cases not worth listening to.”

As to Baugh’s “artifacts,” his evidence is lacking. “In 1982-1984, several scientists, including J.R. Cole, L.R. Godfrey, R.J. Hastings, and S.D. Schafersman, examined Baugh’s purported ‘mantracks’ as well as others provided by creationists in the Glen Rose Formation. In the course of the examination ‘Baugh contradicted his own earlier reports of the locations of key discoveries’ and many of the supposed prints ‘lacked human characteristics.’ After a three year investigation of the tracks and Baugh’s specimens, the scientists concluded there was no evidence of any of Baugh’s claims or any ‘dinosaur-man tracks’” (quoted from Wikipedia page on Carl Baugh).

CONCLUSION: It is important to note that Carl Baugh is the founder of the Creation Evidence museum, the organization that has compiled this list of “evidences” for creation. Baugh’s own work has been scientifically debunked, and Baugh himself is considered to be a detriment to the creationist cause by his contemporaries. This fact alone should be enough to convince the masses not to believe in his argument for creation based on human artifacts found “throughout the geologic column.”

(Note: The geologic column in itself is a faulty argument. See Part 1 of this blog for more information.)

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“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

-Bertrand Russell

This is a perfect response to the logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people). Just because a lot of people think that God exists doesn’t mean that he does. It is not evidence for God’s existence; it is evidence of the popularity of that belief and nothing more.

This is Part 5 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #5.

STATEMENT: Physicist Robert Gentry has reported isolated radio halos of polonuim-214 in crystalline granite. The half-life of this element is 0.000164 seconds! To record the existence of this element in such short time span, the granite must be in crystalline state instantaneously. This runs counter to evolutionary estimates of 300 million years for granite to form.

RESPONSE: The work that is the basis for this argument is Creation’s Tiny Mystery by Robert Gentry. Gentry’s overall scientific process was done well, but his interpretations of his data were faulty. Geologist Lorence Collins notes: ”The geology of the sites at which Po halos are found clearly shows that Gentry’s proof of instantaneous creation and a young Earth is nothing of the sort. Gentry’s Po halos simply do not occur in primordial granites, but instead were formed in relatively young dikes that demonstrably crosscut older sedimentary and igneous rocks. Gentry claims to be an objective scientist but he has, in fact, ignored the very extensive published evidence that disproves his hypothesis. In addition, when confronted with this evidence he simply denies its existence. Such behavior is not characteristic of scientists, but of pseudoscientists.” (Dr. Lorence Collins)* Furthermore, Geologist Gregg Wilkerson, in a review of Creation’s Tiny Mystery, stated: “the book is a source of much misinformation about current geologic thinking and confuses fact with interpretation.” I could go on, but I digress.**

CONCLUSION: As with many of the arguments from so-called creation “scientists,” Gentry’s work is biased by his preconceived conclusion. In this case, Gentry was actually doing real science, but was misinterpreting his results based on his biased point of view. The objectiveness of his science is completely lacking, invalidating it all together.

*Dr. Lorence Collins has several articles critiquing the claims of Robert Gentry. The article cited is off of his website, but lacks a title.

**For more information on Gentry’s work, try here.

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“I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.”

-Pat Robertson

He said that in 1992, yet he is still, now 16 years later, a major figurehead of the Christian fundamentalists. How it is that someone as intolerant and bigoted as he is could still have notoriety blows my mind…

And pisses me off to no end.

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This is Part 4 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #4.

NOTE: Because of the nature of the argument presented in point #4, this blog will not examine the argument sentence by sentence, but will address the argument as the whole.

STATEMENT: “World population growth rate in recent times is about 2% per year. Practicable application of growth rate throughout human history would be about half that number. Wars, disease, famine, etc. have wiped out approximately one third of the population on average every 82 years. Starting with eight people, and applying these growth rates since the Flood of Noah’s day (about 4500 years ago) would give a total human population at just under six billion people. However, application on an evolutionary time scale runs into major difficulties. Starting with one “couple” just 41,000 years ago would give us a total population of 2 x 10⁸⁹. The universe does not have space to hold so many bodies.”

RESPONSE: The basis for this argument is a work by Henry Morris called Scientific Creationism. It has several flaws in it, but I will deflect to Lenny Flank, Jr., author of Deception by Design: The Intelligent Design Movement in America, who states:

“Contrary to Morris’s fanciful assumptions, there is no reason to believe that the global human population has been increasing exponentially, and good reason to believe that it was in fact stabilized by environmental factors (just like the housefly population has been) throughout most of human history, right up until the agricultural and industrial revolutions which have allowed population growth rates to climb sharply. Morris’s population argument is nothing more than an exercise in story-telling, and in it we see the basis for the other stories told by the creationists–selecting a short term trend and then projecting and extrapolating it backwards until it reaches the desired result.” (Lenny Flank, Population Rates and the Age of the Earth)

Regarding the statement about evolution, I would like to know why we must assume that we are starting from one couple 41,000 years ago. Why? Evolution does not ask that we start from one couple, as evolution is a slow, progressive process. And no one thinks that the human species originated 41,000 years ago. Actually, it is believed to have been more like 200,000 years ago. So why these arbitrary numbers? While the math they present is accurate, the argument itself is based on the false premise that population growth occurs at a constant, exponential rate. As Flank says, “While Morris’s mathematics are impeccable, the reasoning behind his argument is shoddy at best.”

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This is Part 3 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #3.

STATEMENT: ”The Biblical record clearly describes a global Flood during Noah’s day. Additionally, there are hundreds of Flood traditions handed down through cultures all over the world.”

RESPONSE: The biblical “record” does describe a flood. And yes, there are hundreds of flood traditions handed down throughout the world. This proves nothing. The bible is not scientific, so its story proves nothing. The traditions are not scientific and also prove nothing.

Floods are not an unusual thing. In ancient times, it would not be unusual for a flood (especially in a desert climate) to wipe out vast quantities of the population, as warning systems wouldn’t have existed, waterway control was primitive, etc. Unusually strong rains could and would bring destructive floods, but this is not a biblical event. For instance, I live in Wisconsin. This past spring we had very strong rains, much stronger than usual. Despite the system of dams and controlled waterways (rivers, spillways, etc.), we had large flooding throughout southern Wisconsin and into Illinois and Iowa. These floods (particularly in more rural areas) caused massive destruction and some deaths and injuries. The loss of life was less than it could have been because of early warnings, controlled waterways, and (importantly) a well-functioning healthcare system and emergency response system.

So take this flood and localize it in ancient times when a large rain would produce catastrophic flooding. Is it unreasonable to assume that survivors of such a flood would pass down the story of this flood to their offspring and that this would eventually become a culturally traditional story? And is it unreasonable to assume that a large flood could happen in more than one place on the earth in more than one time period, causing multiple cultures to have their own traditional flood story? The biblical account of such a flood is no proof of a “world-wide” flood. At best, it is the recounting of one large-scale local flood that all but wiped-out an entire community’s or country’s population.

(for the sake of this response, we are ignoring the account of Noah, as it is not mentioned in the article’s argument).

STATEMENT: “M.E. Clark and Henry Voss have demonstrated the scientific validity of such a Flood providing the sedimentary layering we see on every continent.”

RESPONSE: I scoured all over the internet for anything I could find on M.E. Clark and Henry Voss and came up with nothing. Supposedly they have demonstrated validity of the flood at an International Conference on Creation in 1994. I would very much like to know their qualifications, credentials, and what they said! Until this is brought to my attention, I am left to believe that, because they made this demonstration at a creation conference, that they are, like many other proponents of a creation, biased in their findings; why else would the geologic community at large otherwise disagree with the idea of a world-wide flood event.

STATEMENT: “Secular scholars report very rapid sedimentation and periods of great carbonate deposition in earth’s sedimentary layers.”

RESPONSE: Cited as evidence for this statement is Derek Ager’s The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. Here is Ager’s response to the use of his work to support creationist arguments:

“For a century and a half the geological world has been dominated, one might even say brain-washed, by the gradualistic uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell.  Any suggestion of ‘catastrophic’ events has been rejected as old-fashioned, unscientific and even laughable.  This is partly due to the extremism of some of Cuvier’s followers, though not of Cuvier himself. 

On that side too were the obviously untenable views of bible-oriented fanatics, obsessed with myths such as Noah’s flood, and of classicists thinking of Nemesis.  That is why I think it necessary to include the following ‘disclaimer’: in view of the misuse that my words have been put to in the past, I wish to say that nothing in this book should be taken out of context and thought in any way to support the views of the ‘creationists’ (who I refuse to call ’scientific’)” [Ager's emphasis] (Ager, Derek, 1993, 1995 (paperback edition), The New Catastrophism: The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Great Britain). (thanks to Dr. Kevin R. Henke)

As Ager shows, his comments have been taken out of context. Like many pseudosciences and their proponents, creationists cherry-pick scientific material for the one or two factoids that seem to support their view, dismissing the context of the work and the voluminous evidence that contradicts the creationists’ claims.

STATEMENT: “It is now possible to prove the historical reality of the Biblical Flood.”

RESPONSE: This final statement in the argument contains a citation for John Anthony West, who has proposed, with the help of Robert Schoch, an alternative hypothesis as to the age of the Great Sphinx of Giza based on erosion supposedly due to heavy rain. However, mainstream archaeologists and egyptologists do not accept this hypothesis, arguing that the erosion has been caused by wind, sand, acid rain, exfoliation, or poor quality of the limestone used in the Sphinx’s construction.

All this aside, it is not possible to “prove the historical reality of the flood.”  How does the erosion of the Great Sphinx in Egypt (possibly do to rain) have anything to do with the supposed flood of Noah’s time? And how does it prove that the flood happened.

CONCLUSION: None of the supposed evidence given to support the creationists’ argument proves a flood. Traditions are not proof, nor are evidences from scientists that are taken out of context, nor is an argument for the possible erosion of the Great Sphinx due to rain (rain does NOT equal flooding). The supposed ‘great flood’ never happened.

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Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of thenon-existence of God.
   The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
   “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED”
   “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe

Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors, and certainly my favorite fiction author. Its a shame that he is now dead, because we sure could use an skeptic and atheist with his creative wit.

“Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.”

-Stephen Jay Gould

I have nothing to add; its fine enough as it is.