Copyright 1998-2003 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.
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Young Earth creationist arguments for a young universe and a young Earth are terrible to say the least. They can only be matched by arguments by evolutionists for evolution. For a comparison see my page: Eerie Similarities Between Evolutionists and Young Earth Creationists.
These issues are important for three reasons. First, the traditional interpretations allow people to go around saying that Science has proved the Bible wrong. This makes it hard to get many people to pay attention to the Bible. People who are searching for meaning and purpose in their lives are liable to look at the New Age concepts, Hinduism, Buddhism, various forms of scientific mysticism based on quantum mechanics or just anything else except the Bible.
Second, the arguments that believers in the traditional interpretations have come up with to try and counter the evidence for the the old age of the universe and the old age of the Earth are exceptionally bad. Their efforts have stigmatized Christians as brain-dead. For instance I do gardening and in rec.gardens there was the issue of how music affects plants and I put in my two cents worth about an old experiment I once heard of that gave some really unexpected results. A rational guy looked at what I said, saw my christianliving.net address and posted a note to the effect that I was a member of a group that was "unreliable in scientific matters". I then took the opportunity to post my scientific credentials and then asked him if that was the group he was thinking of that was unreliable in scientific matters.
Third, some preachers have been telling their congregations that science has proved correct the traditional Biblical interpretations that science has actually shown to be incorrect. They call it "Creation Science". They tell people that science has proved the 6000 year old Earth, the global flood and so on. There is a serious problem with this. Everyone knows that the vast majority of scientists are saying just the opposite. If you look carefully you find out that the young Earth scenario is based on wishful thinking and denial of the evidence. This situation is especially bad for young people because once you find out your elders have been lying you realize you can't believe anything they say, not even the part about there is a God who loves them. Plus they learn that lying is standard procedure. It also looks an awful lot like the preachers are simply trying to bully people into being sheep in the same way that cult leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh bullied people into never questioning anything. It looks like a control thing. If you've a victim of this type of procedure remember: not all who sound religious are really godly people and the fact that some religious people are phonies does not invalidate the Bible. Glenn Morton has collected a few stories from people who were raised with the young Earth doctrine and then came up against the evidence, the stories can be found at: DMD Publishing Co.
I can add a story of my own. I once tried going to a church three blocks away. (The church is called Norwood Gospel Chapel. I'm including the name here because if there is anyone out there searching for their web address in order to look them over as a place to go to church you will have some idea of what things are like there. I'm thinking maybe churches should be required by law to publish all their rules and regulations so people can know what they are getting into ahead of time.) One member was interested in astronomy. I passed him the address of http://www.bibleandscience.com because they have a weekly email newsletter on Bible/Science issues that includes a section on new developments in astronomy. A heritic hunter in the church overheard the conversation and immediately reported us to the pastor. The pastor had the other guy's phone number but not mine and immediately called up the other guy to warn him that he should not be passing around addresses of Science and Bible sites on the net. When the elders called me in to talk about this they said no one was allowed to talk about such things. I find it incredible that freedom of speech is not allowed in some churches. If you're really going to be free you have to have access to and be able to discuss absolutely anything. So I got my own little lesson that some churches are effectively police states. This reflects very badly on Christians and Christianity. Sometimes Christians are their own worst enemies.
| In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. |
| -- Paul Dirac. |
Re-interpreting the Bible in the light of new evidence has had to be done before. God likes to be poetic so it can be difficult to know when what He says should be taken literally and when it should be taken poetically. The poetic approach is much more effective at making His writing beautiful and inspiring but it really plays havoc with the people of today who are used to reading dull, dry scientific textbooks. In Revelation 7 the Bible speaks of the Earth as having four corners. There was a time when some people interpreted this to mean that the Earth was flat and square. Then in Psalm 19 it says the sun moves across the heavens and people used that to justify the idea that the Earth was at the center of the universe and the sun moved around it. In both cases God was being poetic and people now realize this. So it should not be surprising if other statements in the Bible will need re-interpretation as we learn more about the world. Many Christians seem to hate the scientific evidence because it does not agree with their theology but for them let me remind them what it says in Romans 1:19-20:
God punishes them, because what men can know about God is plain to them. Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature have been clearly seen. Men can perceive them in the things God has made. So they have no excuse at all.Thus the scientific evidence needs to be considered as well although when you take into account the scientific evidence you do need to be careful because often times scientists go too far and offer up opinions and assumptions as evidence and opinions and assumptions are not really evidence.
Trying to alter young Earth creationist thinking on these issues may be a stupid thing for me to do though, human nature being what it is many Christians will hate me for telling them that the arguments and the people they've believed in are wrong. Some young Earth creationists will tell you that if you do not believe their interpretations then you are not a true believer (so you're going to Hell!) however these people fail to realize that God will EAGERLY take in anyone who honestly WANTS Him. In God's eyes the issue at hand is to get people to realize that doing their own selfish things will never make them happy and they need to turn away from that selfishness and embrace God. This is the important issue for people and all the other details of Scripture take a back seat to this one. As Paul said in Galatians 16:15:
... what counts is whether we really have been changed into new and different people.I think that the people who say you have to believe all their interpretations of the details to be a true believer don't seem to know God at all. Recall the Pharisees who insisted that you had to follow all sort of rules that they made up and they managed to completely miss God's intentions. Also recall from Matthew 7:21 "Not all who sound religious are really Godly people." Be aware then that when someone says that "the Bible clearly teaches ... " there is a good chance it is not the Bible that clearly teaches it, there is in fact a good chance that the person saying that has an interpretation that they want to force on you.
Liberals are not alone in attempting to intimidate their followers and potential followers into believing exactly what their leaders tell them they should believe. It happens in Christianity as well. A very nice example of this comes from the web page: The Global Flood of Noah's Day at the Institute for Creation Research where Dr. Morris is listed as the president of ICR. Instead of dealing with real issues Dr. Morris intimidates his readers.
Instead of dealing with the original text and the possible interpretations of words Morris deals with a version that assumes a global flood. Neither does he attempt to look at the evidence for the lack of a flood. What about the ice cores? What about the bristlecone pine trees? He also simply claims, without any calculations to back him up, that there was room on the ark for two (or even seven!) of each kind of animal. This is exceptionally silly because you can't fit even a fraction of the animal life of this planet into a zoo and a zoo is much larger than the ark.
He skips evidence and reason and simply attempts to intimidate his readers with statements like these:
I have to figure that if you have to intimidate people, then you know the evidence is no good. All in all his page reminds me of the emperor's new clothes story. The tailor comes along and says he'll make a new suit of clothes for the emperor but only highly intelligent virtuous people can see the clothes. So everybody has to go around pretending they see beautiful clothes when in fact there is nothing there. Christians are particularly vulnerable to this type of intimidation because they think that because it comes from a "Godly" person on their side the person must be right. In my opinion works like this one from Dr. Morris reflect badly on the person doing the intimidation and on the people who mindlessly accept it. This is how cults get started.
I scan comp.infosystems.www.announce just to see if anything interesting comes up and if it does it becomes a tiny diversion for me from the usual routine. One day someone offered an Evolution vs. Creation page so I took a look. It contained the usual creationist nonsense so I had to write the guy and tell him so. He later sent me a set of statements he'd compiled on reasons why evolution is foolish and I sent him back my analysis. Here I have his questions and my answers with some additions since then. I think it's important for Christians to realize that much of what they are being fed is absolute nonsense.
> The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that over time, anything that was
>organized starts deorganizing. Animals could not "evolve", because this
>increase in information would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The second law in no way, shape or form prohibits evolution. It's totally irrelevant! What's really disturbing is that once this idea got started nobody stamped it out, no one who understands thermodynamics could possibly think such a thing.
The second law argument is what I call a "wordy" argument. In a wordy argument you use words or analogies to make your point and the words can be quite sloppy to the point where you can reach the wrong conclusions or be totally confused by what is going on. What's called for in any analysis is to go to the nuts and bolts level and proceed to calculate. It appears to me that this is why philosophers never make any progress, they just argue forever. Words don't settle anything.
The Second Law has a purely technical meaning at the nuts and bolts level. When it gets translated into a natural language like English it often gets described as saying that "the universe is running down", that "things decay" and "get less organized". If you know the Second Law at the technical level then you can understand what the English REALLY MEANS but if you don't know it at the technical level the words can make you think other things. It makes young Earth creationists think that the evolution of life from chemicals to single cells and and single cells to complex animals is prohibited by this law. Unfortunately it doesn't even apply. When you evaluate evolution you have to state it at the nuts and bolts level as a process (like a computer program) and determine if it could work. When you do the mathematical analysis of the process the odds of evolution happening are pretty low :-) to say the least, but there is nothing in the process that is flat out prohibited by the second law of thermodynamics or any other law. If someone would care to find a place in the nuts and bolts process where the second law comes in please tell me about it!
In the second law of thermodynamics and in the analysis of evolution you do turn up something similar. In both cases after you do the analysis you find out there are things that are so unlikely to happen that we end up saying they can't ever happen. But similar is not the same thing and there is no place where the second law can be brought into the analysis of evolution.
One of these days I do have to expand this section into a full-blown example of the process of evolution and of the second law but not now, now I will use words :-) to try and give you some idea why the second law isn't relevant. One nice example I ran into that shoots down this silly idea pertains to people with children. Children's rooms are likely to be messy (disorderly). So let's say you go in and clean a messy room. This leaves the room more orderly. Is this a violation of the second law? No, because the effort you made to do the cleaning burned sugar and fats and produced carbon dioxide and water which are now floating around the air and heat was given off that is radiating around the house. At the level of elementary particles and molecules the disorder of the universe increased even while one little corner of it got orderly according to human notions of orderliness.
Another more technical example of the second law argument is this. Take a volume of cold, damp air near freezing. It's full of water molecules moving around at different speeds and in different directions. It's chaos! Disorganization if ever there was disorganization. Let the volume of air cool a tad more and snowflakes will form. Nice orderly, neat snowflakes. If the second law prohibited things from getting more orderly how do you manage to form orderly snowflakes? The answer is that the "disorder" covered by the second law once again increased. Heat in the form of photons are radiating all around the universe.
So the bottom line is that orderly structures can form in one little corner of the universe even while the disorder of the whole universe increases.
THE SECOND LAW ARGUMENT IS THE SECOND WORST AND SECOND MOST EMBARRASSING ARGUMENT CREATIONISTS HAVE EVER COME UP WITH. IT BRANDS CREATIONISTS AS BRAIN-DEAD. USE THE SECOND LAW ARGUMENT AND PEOPLE WILL ASSUME YOU'RE AN IDIOT AND YOU'VE LOST YOUR CHANCE TO INFLUENCE THEM.
>The sun pushes particles of dust from space (about 100,000 a day) away from
>the solar system. If the solar system is "billions of years old"; how come
>there is still billions of particles of dust in space?
The dust argument assumes the sun is simply sitting still but the sun is moving around the galaxy and constantly encountering more dust.
>Sea slugs feed on sea anemones. But sea anemones have poisonous needles that
>stick out and the needles will paralyze anything it comes in contact with;
>but the sea slug puts the darts in its stomach and uses it as defense. If sea
>slugs had to "evolve" that ability, then how would they live without eating
>sea anemones, since the sea anemones would kill them, how would sea slugs
>live for the "millions" of years it took to "evolve' that ability?
Arguments like this don't work either because people who believe in evolution can always come up with a plausible story about how it could happen gradually over a long period of time. Arguments like this might succeed with a mathematical analysis of how likely such evolution is and this requires a lot of expertise in biology and probability but experts on both sides will just end up accusing each other of using faulty assumptions of some sort. In the long run it might work.
>No two species of animals on earth have the same amount of chromosomes. If
>animals "evolved",
>wouldn't they have close to the same amount of chromosomes?
Not necessarily, after all there are mutations going on and changing chromosome numbers is just one of them (well, that's what they'd say).
>There isn't enough soil layers for the Earth to be "millions of years", Even
>in a desert soil will build up. But there are barely any soil layers. If the
>soil fell into the ocean, we would have no ocean because the dirt would cover
>all the water.
No argument based on the age of the world will work. Soil washes down into the ocean. Now you're going to ask why the oceans aren't full of soil? The answer is that there are cracks in the ocean floor around the world where new hot rock is coming up, for instance at the mid-Atlantic ridge. The rock coming up along this ridge is forcing Europe and North America to move away from each other. Meanwhile the seafloor under the Atlantic near North America is sinking. The continents of the world are "floating" on the softer rock beneath them, just as wood floats on water. So now what gets washed into the ocean get recycled back inside the Earth. Besides which there are mountains popping up every so often either from volcanic activity or plates piling up on each other leaving plenty of low spots for water to occupy. Plus I think most soil simply ends up forming land at the deltas of the rivers.
For a better answer than mine see the one by Glenn Morton: The MisGuided Erosion Argument.
>The Bible describes some dinosaurs. If dinosaurs were before man existed, how
>did the Bible describe it so accurately?
I've been through the Bible a lot and there is no place where it describes a dinosaur accurately. There is one place in Job where the author may be describing dinosaurs however it typically gets translated as a crocodile. Hardly decisive.
>Where are the fossils of creatures between "evolution"?
A lot of them are missing, most of all the ones before the Cambrian explosion. Quotes from people like Dawkins and Niles and Eldridge are highly effective however be aware that the counter-argument is that fossilization requires specific conditions that don't occur very often and many fossils get lost as plates shift, rock gets worn away and mountains pop up. The missing pre-Cambrian predecessors to the Cambrian era life forms is a very effective argument against evolution.
>A human DNA code can fill at least 50 books, 600 pages each! The
>mathematical chances of that occurring by chance are absolutely ZERO.
They would argue that evolution is a gradual process where you don't have to get it right all at once, you get it right over a long period of time by trial and error. They would have a reasonable point however the analysis done by honest Mathematicians at the Wistar conference show it can't happen in the amount of time available, a really good selling point.
>Humans that are fossilized have been found lower than dinosaurs not 1, but 28
>times! I would like to see you explain that…..
Never heard of it. I have heard of some supposedly human tracks and dinosaur tracks that were found crossing over in the same field of mud in the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas but some expert(s) established to almost everyone's satisfaction that the "human" tracks were really some animal tracks and that few young Earth creationists currently think that the tracks were human. (See:) It is one of those things I would not trust anyone to judge by themselves, I'd want to hear all the various expert opinions and see the tracks for myself. On the other hand I was watching an episode of "Creation in the 21st Century", a young Earth creationist show (web page at: http://creationevidence.org) where they were claiming that dinosaurs have existed even into modern times based on 1) sightings of strange animals in Africa and Loch Ness monster type monsters in a lake along the US-Canadian border and 2) on the existence of old human artwork depicting "dragons" and that dragons counted as dinosaurs. OK, suppose some dinosaurs did survive into human times. Scientists used to think that a fish called the coelacanth died out about 70 million years ago but then fishermen started finding them off the east coast of Africa so it is not all that unreasonable to think that other species may have survived as well (I'll wait to see one in the flesh however). Finding a fossilized trail with human and dinosaur footprints then is not an argument against evolution or for young Earth creationism.
Rocks get mixed up as mountains wear down, volcanos pop up and the Earth's plates get shifted. If there are human fossils below dinosaur fossils believers in evolution will invoke the argument I just gave. Then it becomes a big argument between experts about whether or not the positions of the fossils got mixed up or not. Not decisive now, perhaps in the long run it would work IF the evidence was really there. But it would have to come from mainstream science, the young Earth creationists have discredited themselves to the point where I recommend that you don't believe anything they say.
>How come everything seems so orderly? If the conditions weren't perfect, we
>wouldn't have life on Earth. The sun is the right size, the moon is the right
>size to clean the ocean, there is actually land on Earth, the Earth has many
>more perfect conditions. How could all of that happened by chance?
A good argument but hardly decisive. The typical
counter-argument is that because it's orderly we're here to
see it, if it wasn't orderly we wouldn't be here to see it,
so what?
>The human eye will not work without being fully developed. If there was one
>single flaw it would not work. How could an animal survived without an eye
>for the "millions of years" it took to "evolve" the eye?
A reasonably good argument, especially taking into consideration the Cambrian explosion. Trilobites with very sophisticated eyes simply appeared without any prior evolutionary history. You could argue that the time available for this happening was less than 5-10 million years and given the results from the MATHEMATICIANS at the Wistar conference there is just no chance of evolving an eye in that little time.
> How can life originate from dead chemicals?
So far there is no known way it could, the math says it is highly unlikely but people who believe in evolution will still take it on faith that it can happen.
>Scientists have found that the magnetic field of the Earth decreases by half
>every 1400 years. 1 million years ago or more the Earth would be a magnetic
>star.
BAD SCIENCE!!! The Earth's magnetic field just keeps varying like the alternating current in your house. The Earth's magnetic field hits a maximum, then weakens down to 0, then starts building again in the opposite direction. So after a while a compass will end up pointing south instead of north. Then the field weakens again and builds up in the opposite direction meaning the compass will again point north. And on and on. Some scientists recently did a simulation of the Earth's core and its magnetic field on a supercomputer and the simulation produced just such a reversal, see: WHEN NORTH GOES SOUTH: Three-Dimensional Simulation of Geomagnetic Field Reversal. The sun's magnetic field goes through such a cycle in 22 years, the Earth's magnetic field takes much longer. The following two pages from NASA are on the sun's magnetic field but the first one also mentions the Earth's magnetic field, see The Sun Does a Flip and Understanding the Sun.
> The Earth is slowing down about one/third of a second each year. Multiply
>that by 1 million years or more, the Earth could not hold together.
The number used by creationists is bad.
> If animals "evolved", why has no animal has ever "evolved" today?
They would argue that evolution is going on now but it's too slow to be observed much, if any. And they would tell you how bacteria "evolve" to become resistant to antibiotics. There are counter-arguments for bacterial evolution, namely that the amount of evolution is too small to count or that it is not coming from mutations at all but only from plasmid transfer of existing genes.
> There have been fossils found from "millions of years ago", and they are
>the same as the animals today.
A fairly good point, but it only proves THOSE animals have found a good niche and have no need to evolve further.
>The Bible has absolutely no flaws. It has been proven in history everything
>the Bible says, like the fall of Jericho, and The Israelites getting out of
>Egypt, and much more. Jesus has been worshiped by millions of people
Not worth mentioning because they will say that the traditional
six days of creation in Genesis was proved wrong by Science.
They will say that there is no evidence for Noah's worldwide
flood (a traditional INTERPRETATION) so that the Bible
is wrong on that point. Now beginning around the time of
Abraham you can make a good case for the Bible being right
but before that they will shoot you down easily after laughing
themselves silly.
>worldwide. And why do you think people have always believed in gods? They may
>have not been the true God, but it is at least human's nature to believe in a
>god or gods, even if they aren't the One True God, which millions of people
>have believed in. And don't try saying the Bible got messed up over time,
They'll simply say that, OK, people like to believe there is
a better world where they will live happily ever after, that
death is not the end and that whenever people didn't have an
explanation for something in nature they guessed it was the gods
who make things happen.
>you've heard about the dead sea scrolls, haven't you? People found some
>scrolls near the dead sea, and found out they were the Bible. The city nearby
>had hidden them from invaders in some pots on a mountain. They found that
>when they translated it, it was identical to the Bible today. So there goes
They'll say, so what? All it proves is that they did a good
job of copying fairy tales all those years.
>your argument that the Bible is untrue. Let's see if you can answer these
>questions:
> Evolutionists have made up several lies:
> 1.Piltdown man- the jaw bone was ape-like , but the teeth were human.
>People found out later it was a hoax. The jaw was of an ape, but the teeth
>were filed to look like a human's teeth.
> 2.Nebraska man- a tooth was found and used as "irrefutable" evidence
>evolution was correct, but when they found the whole body, it was just a pig.
>This is why evolution is being taught in schools.4
> 3. Archaeopteryx - this was thought to be a transitional form between
>reptiles and birds. However,
>true birds have been found lower in the fossil record and proved this a hoax.
> There are many more I could name but evolutionists would kill me for it.
No, actually they would declare you to be ignorant. :-)
Most arguments from creationists range from shockingly wrong
to shockingly pathetic. Which is why it's important to use
only the most rational of arguments and I think those are
that the math says it can't happen and the fossil record
says it didn't or at least it did not happen to any great
extent what with most species appearing out of nowhere.
Apparently the scientists have screwed up a bit but THAT does
not negate the theory, it only proves people make mistakes
and do stupid things.
> Evolution is believed widely because people think it is "scientific
>fact", but given these reasons, who would believe life "evolved"? Evolution
>is a religion. No matter what you call it, it is a religion, not a theory.
Yes. A lot of people have been fooled because it was "Science"
vs. Religion but if you examine their arguments you can see
that it was mostly "spin", the kind of thing that politicians
use. If you can make more people aware of the details you
can persuade many people that evolution is false and that the
"scientists" who promoted it have been dishonest just like our
politicians. Evolution is well-respected these days because
many Christians have insisted on the young Earth, something
that is easily refuted by massive amounts of evidence, if you
want to win then give up on the young Earth idea and win with
scientific evidence.
For more refutations of young Earth arguments see the page: 12 False Statements Made by Anti-Evolutionary Apologists by Glenn Morton. Oh, heck, read all his pages at: DMD Publishing Co. Glenn was a former young Earth believer with ties to the Institute for Creation Research who managed to figure out that all that he had been taught was wrong.
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