Creation Science

Creationists are happy to accept any scientific data that supports (or at least appears to support) their theory, whether it comes from fellow creationists or from the scientific establishment. Where their theory is not supported, or even flatly contradicted by "standard" science, they fall back on faith, ad hoc hypotheses, conspiracy theories, misrepresentations of science or even outright lies.

If you examine creationist articles, they often cite many papers from mainstream scientists, and use these to back up their claims. Interestingly, if you examine the citations, you often find that they are quite old (often at least twenty years, and occasionally over seventy!). Whether or not the theories are out of date, or have changed or even been abandoned since then is irrelevant - it's a science paper that can be interpreted as supporting a young universe, so it will do nicely. The intended audience is unlikely to know the current state of that particular science, so the reference to the paper or journal lends a lot of weight to the creationist argument (which would float off into space otherwise). Also, any controversies in science are good ammunition for the creationists. Whenever scientists disagree over something, that will be used as solid evidence that the theory in question is defunct (unless, of course, it's a creationist theory). Most people recognise that science thrives on debate. All current theories can be, and should be, questioned. If theories were not questioned, and scientists never argued, science would grind to a halt and no progress could ever be made. Could it be a coincidence that creationists rarely disagree with or question each others theories (even contradictory ones), and their "science" has not changed in the thousands of years since Genesis was written?

( Joyce Arthur has some articles detailing these techniques. )

Here I shall explore some of the blatant problems with key points of Creationism - the doctrine that the Universe was created exactly as described in the Book of Genesis.

Let there be light

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
[ So, there's the light ]
4 And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
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14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
[ And then the stars... ]
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.
[ And finally the Sun and Moon! ]
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that [it was] good.

Any qualified astronomer will tell you that many stars are billions of light-years away. That is, at the speed of light, the light has taken billions of years to reach us. These distances and ages are almost incomprehensible to the human mind.

How then do creationists account for this apparently ancient age of the universe? There are two main arguments (creationists can never actually agree on much) :-

1. The speed of light has changed. When the universe was created, the light from the distant stars was travelling many orders of magnitude faster than it does today. Over the last few thousand years it has slowed to it's present state.
2. God created the light in situ, on it's way to us. That is, he created the light throughout the universe, as if the stars were already there.

Problem 1) Reliance on an omnipotent being. These argument both assume the existence of God. If you personally accept that God exists, this is fine, but to be credible scientific theories it becomes necessary to first demonstrate that "God" exists and is capable of performing this act of creation.

Problem 2) They are both perfect examples of a cop-out, or ad hoc hypothesis. There is no available evidence to demonstrate that the value of c (notation for the speed of light) has decayed. It cannot be tested. It is not falsifiable.[1] All available evidence shows that the speed of light is always constant. They might as well have said "Satan influences telescopes to make it appear that the stars are old" - it would be equally as valid (and invalid) as the decaying-c hypothesis (I do not say "theory" because they simply do not qualify as scientific theories).

Problem 3) The stars are not point light sources. If God had created the light in situ, apparently from a point of light, that might not be too bad for the creationists to explain. However, a star is not a tiny point in space. A star is an enormous ball of exploding hydrogen, containing many times the mass of the Earth, and exhibiting remarkably complex interactions of convection (of gases and plasma), nuclear reactions, magnetic releases, and so on. This image from the Astronomy Picture Of The Day website demonstrates the complexity of our own star, the Sun. The surface of any star is a continously heaving mass of burning gases, not a neat pinpoint of pure white light.

In order for God to create light in situ, from each star, he would be required to account for the emissions of every single particle in the star. Not only visible light, but all the other radiation and particles a star emits - infra-red, ultra-violet, X-ray, gamma ray and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum (the spectrum of each star is dependant on its chemical composition, which is different for every star) as well as neutrinos and the solar wind. Also, he would have had to lengthen the wavelengths of each photon to account for the red-shift that is observed in star-light, caused by the expansion of the universe.

Okay, you may say, no problem for an omnipotent God, is it?

Maybe not, but let's explore this a little further to reveal the astonishing absurdity of it all. In order to correctly place all the light in the universe, God had to know the exact position of every particle in the universe, otherwise the light would not match up with the particles which emit that light. Remember, God created the light before he created the Stars that the light came from.
e.g. for just one single atom of hydrogen, God created a continuous stream of light that persisted until he got round to putting the atom in place. Also, to keep up the illusion of a real star, he would have had to move these false light-sources around in the manner that the actual atoms would move, had they been there. He would have to simulate the motions of all the particles in each star, including the absorption and re-emission of all the light (and neutrinoes, etc.) in the star. If he did not do this, then the stars would not look right. The light emitted from a star depends on the composition, size and age of the star, and all the forces that keep the star burning.

If you were in a space-ship near a star (or where a star was going to be) at the time of Genesis, you would have seen a star, and been able to detect all the radiation from that star, even though there was not actually any matter there to produce the radiation. Your instruments would show pictures not unlike the solar images above. For all intents and purposes the star is there, it is real. Your are apparently seeing an massive ball of burning hydrogen, exhibiting all the complexity and fluid dynamics that you would expect. Alas, there is not actually any matter there at all, just the radiation that the matter would produce if it were there.

You instruments may also detect something strange. Even though you can see the apparent star, and detect it, and measure it's radiation, there is no pull of gravity. As there is no matter (yet), there is not a gravity well. Unless, of course, God thought to create the light from each particle, and also create the nuclear forces as if each particle was there (gravity, magnetic, strong and weak forces). This starts to get us into rather tricky physics. Matter and energy are inseperable, and some would even say indistinguishable. If a point in space exhibits all the properties and forces that it should do if a particle was present, is it possible to say whether or not the particle is actually there or not?

If he did not bother with the gravity until he'd put the matter in place, then he would also have to simulate the effects of gravity on the light that he'd put in place. Light is bent by gravity. For each photon that reaches Earth from the time of the Creation, God not only tracked all it's interactions with imaginary particles until it exited it's imaginary star, but also tracked it's path between the stars, galaxies, planets and dust/gas clouds (which were then still imaginary) to the Earth.

Seems a bit odd that he'd go to all that trouble and not bother to bung a few protons and neutrons in at the start...
But hey, if you think God did all that, then stand up and proudly call yourself a Creationist.

Could it be that Genesis is not a scientific reference manual?

Why do creationists get so upset about evolution?

Instead of trying to prove Creationism, trying to gather all their theories into one harmonious whole that may be presented to the scientific community, creationists seem to spend an awful lot of time attacking the theory of evolution. They use the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy, saying that either the theory of evolution is true, or Biblical Creationism is true. Disproving one automatically proves the other. Because they cannot prove that Creationism is true, they try to indirectly prove it by attempting to show that evolution is false. One of the (many) major problems with this approach is that it is not a dichotomy at all. To say that the only possibly alternative to naturalistic evolution is Christian Creationism is bogus in the extreme. For example, you can have:

• Theistic evolution, where God uses evolution as a tool for creation.
• Last-Thursday-ism, where God created the universe last Thursday, but made creationists believe He created it six thousand years ago with Adam and Eve. All our memories are forgeries implanted by God a few days ago. After all, He doth worketh in mysterious ways...
• The Creation myths of a thousand other religions, each of which is a valid supernatural alternative to the supernatural Christian Creation myth. Why choose one over any of the others?

Ruling out evolution therefore does not rule in Biblical Creationism.

In a way, there is nothing wrong with people attacking the theory of evolution, and I am happy to encourage it. Science thrives on skeptical inquiry into new ideas. If not, it would never advance. When new theories are presented, scientists fall on them like a pack of ravenous hyenas, looking for weak spots and problems until the solid bones of the theory are laid bare (hmmm... time to brush up on my analogies, I think). Scientists are encouraged to look for problems with long-standing theories. This applies to evolution just as much as it applies to quantum theory, and evolution and all it's predictions should be, and are, tested on a daily basis. Unfortunately, most people who attack the theory of evolution (i.e. say that evolution simply does not happen) have an incomplete understanding of what the theory actually is, and end up criticising a wildly distorted view of the subject.

Creationists rarely seem to attack evolution from a scientific angle, relying instead on emotive pleas to a scientifically ignorant audience. They say that evolution is the only alternative to Biblical Creationism, and this is why they attack it so much (another tactic is to say that the theory of evolution is the cause of all our social problems, and only immoral people subscribe to it).

It seems to me that one of the real driving forces behind the way creationists think is all to do with Jesus (and of course the belief that the Bible is one hundred percent literal truth). Jesus is supposed to be the Saviour of humanity. Saving us from what? From Original Sin. Where does Original Sin come from? From Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Therefore, to truly believe that Christ is our Saviour, you need to also believe in Original Sin, the Garden of Eden, the Fall and pretty much the rest of Genesis. This is the root of the problem. If all creatures, humans included, were not Created (as it says in Genesis), but rather evolved over billions of years (as all available evidence suggests), then the Garden of Eden story is nothing more than... well, a story. In which case there is NO Original Sin, and Jesus' death has nothing to do with Original Sin.

There is then a direct conflict between evolution and the very basis of (fundamentalist) Christianity itself.

A second aspect of this is the idea that Jesus is Perfect. Jesus cannot lie. It is simply not possible, as far as the creationists are concerned, because he is perfect in every way, including morally. In Luke 17:26-27, Jesus refers to Noah and the Flood. Jesus said it, therefore it is simply true (if you accept the Bible as 100% literal truth, which many fundamentalists do), regardless of any evidence against it and lack of evidence for it.
I came across this on a message board recently :

HOWEVER, apparently, Jesus Christ KNEW the account to be true and related it to His Second Advent when speaking about the exact time of His return. CONCLUSION: According to the Word of God: THERE WAS A FLOOD!

To the author of that, little more evidence was required. If the flood did not occur, exactly as stated in the Bible, then Jesus would be a liar (or at least mistaken) and that is utterly unacceptable to the creationist mind. If Jesus had said "Bananas are blue, highly intelligent and eat fish." then your can bet your boots someone from the ICR would be trying to prove it.

Basically, the Creationists think that if you accept evolution, then you cannot accept Jesus-As-Saviour. This is utterly unthinkable to a Christian Fundamentalist, therefore evolution MUST be false, no matter how overwhelming the evidence is. If they were to admit that evolution is true, they would be denying the sacrifice (and perfection) of Christ.

Robert G. Ingersoll put it very clearly:
"If the Bible is true, certainly Adam was the first man; consequently, we know, if the sacred volume be true, just how long man has lived and labored and suffered on this earth.
The church cannot and dare not give up the account of the creation of Adam from the dust of the earth, and of Eve from the rib of the man. The church cannot give up the story of the Garden of Eden -- the serpent -- the fall and the expulsion; these must be defended because they are vital. Without these absurdities, the system known as Christianity cannot exist. Without the fall, the atonement is a non sequitur. Facts bearing upon these questions were discovered and discussed by the greatest and most thoughtful of men. Lamarek, Humboldt, Haeckel, and above all, Darwin, not only asserted, but demonstrated, that man is not a special creation. If anything can be established by observation, by reason, then the fact has been established that man is related to all life below him -- that he has been slowly produced through countless years -- that the story of Eden is a childish myth -- that the fall of man is an infinite absurdity."
THE DIVIDED HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH ROBERT, G. INGERSOLL, 1888

They believe in the Bible first, and the real world second. If the real world doesn't fall in line with the Bible then reality is wrong, as the Bible can only be right.Creationism has everything to do with religion, and little or nothing to do with science.

Other thoughts

• Creationists say that if the universe was not so finely tuned, life (especially us) could not exist. Parameters like the weight of certain particles, the strength of gravity and so on. If these were slightly different, stars would not form, or would not form at the right speed, and there would be no life. Apart from the obvious contradiction that they don't believe galaxies formed by themselves anyway (so what would it matter if the fundamental forces of nature changed on a daily basis, if God is holding it all together?), it also raises this problem : some creationists say that the speed of light has slowed down by many orders of magnitude since Creation. Light is a universal constant, and many other constants are inextricably linked to it (by E = Mc²). If light has been changing so much, many other universe-parameters had to change with it. How could life survive all this messing about that God appears to have been doing with rates of atomic decay, strength of nuclear forces and so on? It's no good saying on one hand "The universe is perfectly fine-tuned" and on the other hand saying "Dozens of important parameters have changed by many orders of magnitude in a very short time".
• Creationists tend to get upset by radiometric dating methods ( Carbon-14 and the like, which rely on well-known rates of radioactive decay ). They say they are unreliable, and if the Earth is only 6000 years old, then something that claims to date an object at several million years must be hopelessly flawed. Why then, do we not see hordes of creationists complaining about nuclear power stations, which also rely on these same rates of atomic decay. Surely, they must be completely unsafe if the scientists are clueless about atomic decay. Also, maybe God has not yet finished tinkering with the half-life of uranium yet and it could be radically different tomorrow.

Notes

[1] Actually, this is not entirely correct, and I could probably have phrased it a little better. It has been pointed out to me (see Andrew's email) that the decay of the speed of light is in fact quite falsifiable (i.e. it can be tested), and surprise surprise! it has not in fact decayed. See
The Distance to Supernova SN1987A and the Speed of Light for one such example.
To an astronomer, certain (if not all) observations only make sense if the speed of light has not decayed by many orders of magnitude. However, to the True Believer creationist, such an observation would still not be a problem as they can always invoke the supernatural to explain it away - they can always say that God miraculously manipulated the light from any given source to make it appear ancient, no matter how sound your equations are. God can change the speed of light at any point and time in the universe by any amount, whenever he feels like it. That is what I mean by unfalsifiable. When you invoke the supernatural, anything goes, no matter how potty.

© Adrian Barnett 1998, 1999, 2000
Last updated: 7th July. 2000