ReligionCreationism
ReligionCreationism
October, 2002
The following is not meant to be an all-inclusive list, nor is it meant to characterize the views of all creationists. But
there are certainly some, if not most, who can be so characterized. The main objects of my satire, for so it is
intended, are the young-Earth, biblical-literalist types, although other generations of creationists may detect some of
their views skewered here also.
Disclaimers
The following is not intended as an attack upon the Bible as inspirational, divinely inspired, or of literary merit. Nor is it in any way an attack upon Christianity or any other religion, or upon the moral fabric of American society (although, inevitably, many creationists will see it as such, since any questioning of their own views is seen as an attack upon God Himself, and all that's holy). Neither is it an attack upon those who see divine purpose in evolution, or view evolution as the handiwork of a divine Hand. It most emphatically is intended as a verbal pie-in-the-face to those who insist that the Bible is to be read as an accurate science book and description of the natural world. I hope it is an affront to those who demand that Genesis, in particular, be taken as literal, historical fact. And most particularly, I wish to be downright offensive to those who would remove evolution from our public schools or insert into schools sectarian religious teachings under the guise of "scientific creationism."
An Invitation
These are just a few of the "things that creationists hate." If you are reasonably cognizant of science, or theology, or even simple logic, you can probably think of others. If so, please email them to me, and I'll add them to the ever-growing list, and be happy to give you credit.
The Things!
(Note: Several categories of Things were growing so large that they have been given separate pages of their own, to allow this page to load more quickly. The links below will take you to items on those pages, as well as items on the main Things page, or you can go directly to the Whole Silly Flood Story page, the Creation Research Projects page, or the Naughty Vestigial Bits and Other Bad Engineering page.)
Geology
Even before Darwin, it was geologists who began
to establish that the Earth is much older than old Jim Ussher said
it was. And modern geology stubbornly refuses to yield up proof of a universal
flood, or the recent and coeval existence of all creatures, living and extinct.
Charles Darwin
Well, duhh....
The Whole Silly Flood Story
So many things were accumulating under this
heading that I decided to make a separate Whole Silly
Flood Story
page!
Physics
...has all those embarrassing laws, like decay
rates of isotopes, the non-decaying speed of light, the refraction
of light to produce rainbows, etc., which have to be ignored, twisted,
or denied to defend Genesis. And to add insult to injury, physicists
can't seem to see the truth that evolution violates the
Second Law of Thermodynamics
--a "fact" that every good creationist knows, even without a degree in
physics!
The Scientific Method
Creationists detest it so much that they've
apparently invented their own, improved version, with the following highly
logical rules:
Each Other
Old-Earth creationists think the Young-Earthers
are too zealous and dogmatic, even for them. Young-Earthers know the Old-Earthers
and Multiple-Catastrophists have given in to "liberal" (if not to say Satanic)
influences. Some years there are multiple "Ark-hunting" expeditions to
Turkey, each of which thinks the others are obstructing the progress of
"Bible science."
The Holy Bible
That old Book persists in saying things that
the creationists, who claim to take it as literal truth, have to admit
are metaphorical (like the "doors" in the firmament that let the rain through).
That means, of course, that they have to arbitrarily decide which parts are
literally literal, and which are only metaphorically
literal (and can't they twist the English language!). I've never yet read
a justification for who gets to make that determination and how, so I'll
summarize it thus: Everything is literal except things that even we creationists
can't stomach.
Even worse, the "scientifically accurate"
Bible reveals not a single fact about nature that wasn't commonly known at
the time. If only it had revealed the atomic structure of matter, or the
inverse square law, or the existence of bacteria--or even the heliocentric
solar system!
Still doubt that creationists hate the Bible?
Ask several if they've ever read it--all the way through, cover-to-cover.
97% of the time the answer will be no. They're sure every word is
literally true, and the divine message of God, but somehow they've never
quite found the time to actually read the thing. Is this irony thick enough
yet?
Bats
Somehow, quite perversely, they changed from
"fowls" to mammals between the time Moses (according to literalists) wrote
the Pentateuch and now.
The Human Mind
...just to be ornery, has moved from the heart,
where it resided through New Testament times, into the brain.
Stars
...somehow have grown a lot bigger and moved
much farther away, so that by now it seems foolish to expect a sizable
fraction of them to fall to Earth, as predicted in Revelation.
The Earth
...on the other hand, to test Man's faith
in the literal veracity of scripture, has shrunk to become much smaller
than the sun, and has taken to circling the latter, instead of vice versa,
as originally established. Furthermore (confirming its sinful nature),
it has floated up off its pillars or foundations, lost its four corners,
and become a silly ball, on which there just is no
possible mountaintop from which one could see all nations of the Earth.
Plate Tectonics
Since this is such a new development in geophysics,
creationists don't seem to have much to say about it yet. (They haven't
been told yet that they can't believe in it.) Though they may not have heard
it excoriated from the pulpit yet, it surely makes them uneasy, since it
just doesn't jibe with young-Earth or Flood geology.
Original Thought
Creationism is about believing without question
a particular interpretation of scripture. Indeed, in a belief system of
that nature, any questioning or original thought about the revealed knowledge
is not only incorrect, it is sinful. (In genuine science, on the
other hand, questioning and testing of accepted or authoritative beliefs
is the method--it's what you're supposed to do.
No wonder creationists detest and distrust science, and almost always fail
to understand how it works.)
Pi
...has inexplicably changed its value from
a nice, neat 3 (reflecting the trinity, no doubt) in Solomon's time, to
a messy 3.14159... today. Despite some legal attempts in some state legislatures
to return it to the divine purity of 3, pi has hardened its heart and refused
to conform to the biblically prescribed norm.
Universal Gravitation
Although "just a theory," universal gravitation
continues to be, well, universal. It holds true in all places, under
all conditions, so it renders the brainless quip about evolution being
"just a theory" a bit specious, at best.
Micro-organisms
Why did they have to show up? They're
never mentioned in the Bible at all, so creationists have to do some creative
rewriting of Genesis to account for their day of creation, and their presence
or absence on the Ark.
Ice Ages
Very inconvenient! They have to have occurred
since the Flood, since, according to creationists, the surface of the Earth
was reworked by the Flood (to create, for instance, the Grand Canyon practically
overnight), which would have messed up all those marks of glaciers on
the landscape. That means mile-thick ice sheets had to advance and retreat
again and again, across half the Northern Hemisphere, with the speed of
freight trains. (As with plate tectonics, some creationists seem to have
abandoned complete denial of ice ages [even though they're never mentioned
in the Bible {How could the true history of the world miss
those?}], and acknowledged a single ice age, which had to have
occurred within historical times.)
The Sky
...has evaporated! In Adam's time it was clearly
a solid dome, a "firmament," which could separate waters above it from
those below on the Earth. By Noah's time it was still solid enough to have
windows in it that had to be opened to let the rain through. I think that
creationists that try to rationalize (weasel) their way out of this one
by calling it "poetic metaphor" have given in to the godless materialists!
The Bible really is literal, in the true sense of the word. The
sky was a hard firmament with windows in it--but at some time
since then it evaporated. Anybody who says different is a mealy-mouthed evolution-sympathizer.
[Paul Murray adds the footnote] The word "firmament," according
to Strong's Concordance (word 7549) is a translation
of the Hebrew "raqiya." "Raqiya" means a canopy, as in "Hast
thou with him spread out the sky?," and "that stretcheth out the heavens
as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
A Pile of Sand
So the universe comes from randomness, and
order only comes as a result of a conscious intent? When sand trickles
down into a pile, the pile is conical. Now a cone is an ordered shape.
Does God, therefore, organize each collision of one grain against
another so as to fulfill his purpose that the pile be conical? Is there
some reason why He goes to all that trouble? It's a mystery, no doubt.
Or maybe, just maybe, dissipative systems like this can exhibit
spontaneous order-forming behavior. Other dissipative systems include
crystal growth, snowflake
formation and--horrors--organic life itself. And Burt Ward adds one more in the same
vein: Cans of mixed nuts and bags of potato chips. Those awful, inconvenient
examples of a steady application of energy promoting order instead
of chaos. Big nuts and large chips go to the top, small nuts and crumbs
go to the bottom. Don't those silly containers know that the odds
of that happening BY CHANCE ALONE is trillions to one against? It's
against the second law of thermodynamics
!
The Apostle Paul
Dustin Huwe points out that in 1
Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, Paul advises us to ignore "fables and endless
genealogies." The genealogies of Gen 10, Chr 1-9, Mt 1, and Lk 3 are
one of the key ways creationists have 'proved' the Earth to be about
6,000 years old.
Fossils
...have always been a thorn in the side
of creationism. First of all, extinct creatures shouldn't even exist in
a perfect Creation, since their very extinction implies that they were
not so perfect. And there are so darn many of them, of so many different
kinds. Every excuse they come up with for why there even are fossils
of extinct organisms makes creationists look silly. And the very fact that
they've come up with so many different, mutually exclusive explanations
would seem to indicate that, essentially, they're clueless. I have personally
been offered all these sound, creation-scientific explanations of what fossils
are and how they got there:
Transitional Fossils
...can't possibly exist, since nothing
ever gradually evolved into anything else. Less sophisticated creationists
handle the issue by merely spouting the slogan "There are no transitional
fossils." They heard that from a good, born-again fundamentalist, so it
must be true--no further research necessary. The few who are vaguely aware
of the vast range of fossils that have been found, including beautiful
examples of transitional series, merely draw lines: everything on that
side of the line is ape, and everything on this side is human.
If another fossil turns up with features exactly between the two, no
problem--just assign it to one side or the other. No matter how fine
the gradation, creationists will never admit seeing transition, because
they know ahead of time that it can't exist. Amusingly, however,
in series such as the hominid line leading to us, different creationist
"experts" draw the line between ape and human in different
places !
DNA
Nasty stuff. It's really a shame
that it had to turn up and confirm predictions of relationships made
by evolutionary theory perfectly. And what a dirty trick to have
human DNA fit right into the distribution, right next door to the
chimps'! It's just not fair. It almost looks like Someone arranged
the whole thing just to make evolution appear to be true. Worse
yet, this ultimate blueprint for building entire human beings turns
out to be just plain chemicals, with nothing magical or even particularly
unusual that sets humans aside from other living things. And those
geneticists can even tinker with the stuff, and build new creatures.
They can replace defective genes in people, and even put human genes
into pigs. Why wasn't something put into Leviticus to forbid such
ungodliness?
Honesty and Moral Behavior
...among evolutionists. It must really
irk creationists that the great majority of us "evolutionists" are
basically upright, moral folks. We shouldn't be, because belief in
evolution "destroys our faith in the Bible," so naturally we have "no
moral guide" and "no fear of eternal damnation," and since "we think
we came from monkeys," we see ourselves as "animals with no eternal
souls." I'll confess it right now: my basically upright, honest, cleanly-lived
life is all a sham. I'm part of the One World Government Evolutionist
Conspiracy (OWGEC), and my apparent morality is merely a deception to
lure unsuspecting young creationists over to the Dark Side!
(And yes, I've signed Satan's black book, I have a barcode on my left
arm [just like "Dr." Kent Hovind says] with which I pay for groceries,
and I am in personal email contact daily with the Antichrist. I
admit all that, so accuse me of something original.)
Ribs
...human ribs, that is, present a real
problem. I've been told, on good authority (by creationists, whose
scientific authority is the Bible, and what could be more authoritative?),
that men have one less rib than women, because one of Adam's ribs was
removed to mold into Eve. My creationist informant has generally become
confused upon being asked if that means one less pair of ribs,
or just one rib missing from one side. Then my instructor in human
origins becomes red in the face and defensive, if not to say hostile,
when asked if he has ever actually counted ribs on male and female
human skeletons, living or deceased. None that I've met have ever
actually tried this simplest of scientific experiments, which could
go a long way toward proving a testable prediction
of creationism. (For members of the Republic of Texas Militia: men
have exactly the same number of ribs as women.)
NEWSFLASH: I've just been informed
by a rock-solid creationist that the latest discovery of "creation
science" is that men used to have fewer ribs than women, but
they don't anymore! Perhaps creationists have unearthed a whole bunch
of ancient skeletons, with all the males being short a rib. An appeal:
PLEASE reveal this evidence to the rest of the world, so that we all
can be brought into the Light of True Bible Science! (Dang, I posted
this back in '98, and not a single creationist has written me about
that archaeological Shocking Proof of the Genesis Story! I so
wanted that one tangible piece of evidence that would prove that evolution
is a sham.)
LATEST NEWS from Joseph Armstrong
in Australia: I don't supposed men (gasp) evolved the extra rib? Is
this a classic case of cretinist "micro-evolution"?
Ron Buckallew, a biologist is...
Viruses
Viruses hardly fit into the creationist's
view of the world at all. In the first place, nothing even remotely
like them is even remotely alluded to in either Testament. About the
only "biblical" disease that anyone can remember is leprosy (a bacterial
disease), and there's no clue that any of the writers that mentioned
it knew that it was caused by any sort of micro-organism. Egyptian
cattle suffered a "murrain"-- with no apparent cause other than a divine
curse. A blight on crops is mentioned in a place or two, which, if it
were naturally caused, might be a viral disease, but again only the disease
is mentioned, not any organic cause. Then there are the "emerods" (hemorrhoids)
with which God afflicted some folks he was miffed at. I have been told
both of the following by "creation scientists":
The Order of Creation
...is a bottomless can of worms
for literal creationists, especially if one takes literally and in
their most obvious meanings both Genesis 1 and 2, which don't match in
many particulars. But consider just a couple of minor difficulties
in the first chapter. For one, the light of day is created before the
sun from which it comes. If we assume it was some divine form of light,
requiring no material source, then what need of the sun? In the same
curious order were plants created before the sun, which is needed for
photosynthesis (especially confounding to the day-age folks).
Insects
...which have so many generations of
nasty babies so often that in just a few years they can change. Those
ugly boll weevils, for instance, develop resistance to pesticides;
and those filthy peppered moths in England (Darwin's home--coincidence?
I don't think so.) change the shade of their camouflage. Evolutionists
want to call those piddlin' changes "evolution"--which just shows
that they don't even know what the term means. So we creationists
have to tell them that "evolution" means apes popping out human babies.
You'd think them evil-utionists'd have that straight by now. (For
folks who trust Rush Limbaugh to ever get any facts right: the above is
sarcasm.)
Footprints
...especially human ones, which creationist
"investigators" keep discovering in the same strata as dinosaur bones
or footprints, and paleontologists keep demonstrating are nothing
of the sort. It's been my experience that creationist authorities (oxymoron)
usually end up admitting that they weren't really human prints after
all. But they are somewhat lax in passing that information on
to their flocks of True Believers, with the result that your average
grassroots creationist is under the impression that the fossil record
is replete with human footprints, clear back to the beginning (suggested
by Floyd Waddle). (To my knowledge, there are NO "manprints"
in mesozoic strata that are claimed as such by the main creationist
organizations. It's only a few fringe crackpots that continue
to make those claims, and embarrass the "mainstream" creationists, who
have to eventually denounce them. Your pot has to be SERIOUSLY
cracked to get even your fellow creationists to admit you're over the
top.)
Craters
Creationists have to hate those pesky
asteroid craters which are found all over the planet, throughout all
geological strata. The Bible is strangely silent on such devastating
impacts as Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Ring Lakes in Quebec, and
that biggie that likely dusted off the dinosaurs and created all that
beautiful beachfront property on the Yucatan peninsula (suggested
and borrowed nearly verbatim from Jason Bowes). (The Tunguska
explosion or its aftereffects were noticed worldwide, and it didn't
even leave a crater! Why wasn't the Chicxulub event, with a 170 km
crater, which had to have caused worldwide devastation, at least noted
in passing by some biblical patriarch or another?)
Planets
Anybody notice that in the last few
years astronomers, using improved techniques and instruments (like
Hubble ), have begun to discover other planets
around other suns? Have we noticed that several of those solar systems
are at several of the stages of planetary-system evolution hypothesized
for the evolution of our own system? To further increase the squirm
factor for our reality-challenged fellow citizens, perhaps they would
be kind enough to locate the passages in the "scientifically accurate"
Bible which acknowledge that there are, in fact, other worlds.
(Or even that the moon is a world upon which men could someday live,
and not just a "lesser light" hung in the sky).
"In our image"
That's how God made man, according to
Genesis, and therefore according to creationists. But every moderately
bright 8-year-old immediately comes up with two questions which are
never satisfactorily answered. If any answers are offered, they are
usually cobbled-up rationalizations from outside the Bible. Generally,
the kid gets the message that he's better off not asking such things.
The first is whom the One and
Only God meant by "our"--but that's really a theological question,
not related directly to creationism. The second question, however,
is right on target: If man was made "in [God's] image," then Adam must have
looked just like God--right? But wait--it gets more confusing. Man is
immediately referred to as "them," so maybe it's not just Adam who looks
like God. Then to further confound literal-minded youngsters, "..in
the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
If God is male (the assumption of 97.83% of all creationists), then
how could a female be made in His image?
Let's grant the general creationist
assumptions (correct me if I'm wrong): God is male; men are made
"in [His] image" in only a general way (maybe even Adam didn't look
exactly like Him); and women were made
with necessary differences to enable reproduction. Still a load
of embarrassing questions arise. Much has been made of Adam's navel,
and why he would have one, having never been attached to a placenta.
I want to know if God has one. I want to know if He has a digestive
tract. If so, why? Does He eat? If so, what, and why would He need to?
Does He excrete? Where? What happens to it? Does He have lungs? Why
would He need them? Does He have sweat glands? And naughty stuff: does
He have genitals? Why would He need those?
(And that nasty Paul Yost wants to know
if He is circumcised! I figure He is, since He ordered his chosen
people to be, presumably to make them more like their God. So who did
it?) Does He even have two legs, and feet, and toes? Why would
He need them, unless He's bound by gravity, as we are?
Childish questions? Of course,
but only because they arise from a literal (i.e., childish)
reading of Genesis. But the point is profound: either God has human-like
organs and glands and body parts, or He doesn't. If He does, why,
and what does He use them for? If He doesn't, then made "in [His] image"
has no literal meaning. (For those creationists tempted
to inform me that the human soul was what was made in God's image,
let me save you the trouble and thank you ahead of time for backing
up my point: the phrase has no literal [physical] meaning.
I would point out that a great many generations of Judaeo-Christians
have taken the phrase to mean physical resemblance,
and that most fundamentalist believers still do.
Ever see a painting that showed God with anything but a human form?
Let me also direct you to the section of Exodus wherein Moses is
covered with God's hand, and then allowed to view His backside.
Note also numerous other biblical references to God's hands, face,
and other apparently human-like body parts. One of my favorites
is Jacob's wrestling match with God, in which Jacob didn't recognize
the Lord of All Creation until later, and God couldn't win until
He cheated by using magic!)
Faith
Albert Chan points out that...
Humility
I have determined, after extensive surveying,
tabulation, and data analysis, that the average creationist in the
US earns $21,387.29 in family income; owns 1.2 cars, 1.8 TVs, and 2.3
kids; and has, at some point in his life, answered to the name "Bubba."
He has less than one year of college. Yet he knows more about paleontology
than Bakker or Horner or Currie (or he thinks that what they know is
wrong--same thing). He knows more about the definition of evolution
than Gould or Dawkins. He knows more about biology than Dobzhansky or
Mayr. He knows more about cosmology than Hawking, Smoot, or Witten,
and more about human fossils than Johanson or the Leakeys. He knows
more "true" geology than geologists, more physics than physicists, more
astronomy than astronomers--and more about everything than atheists like
Asimov or Sagan.
Humble, they're not. And speaking of lack of humility, M. J. Chapman contributes
the following:
Intuition Basic, universal human intuition on fundamental
mathematical (e.g. probability functions on unrelated events) and physical
principles (e.g. heavy and light objects falling at the same rate) is demonstrably
wrong, and those demonstrations have often come well after Biblical times.
Truth
This isn't about the things creationists
are just wrong about, like how old the Earth is, but about things
that I suspect a good many know are not true, or gross distortions
of the truth. The general one is that there is a great debate among
scientists about whether species have evolved. A joyous update is that
only a few die-hards still believe in the Big Bang. There are plenty
of other amusing examples:
Thermodynamics according to Isaiah
The temperature of Heaven can be rather
accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26, describing
Heaven: Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light
of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light
of seven days. Thus, Heaven receives from the moon as much radiation
as the Earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven
(forty-nine) times as much as the Earth does from the sun, or 50 times in
all. The light we receive from the moon is 1/10,000 of the light we
receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. The radiation falling on
Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is
just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50
times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stephan-Boltzmann
fourth power law for radiation, we have (H/E)4 = 50 where
E is the absolute temperature of the Earth, 300 K (27 C). This gives
H, the absolute temperature of Heaven, as 798 K (525 C)! (For old-fashioned
Americans, that's close to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Your kitchen oven
won't get nearly that hot.)
The exact temperature of Hell
cannot be computed. However, Revelation 21:8 says: But the fearful and
unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with
fire and brimstone. A lake of molten brimstone (or sulfur) means
that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6
C (above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake). We have, then,
that Heaven, at 525 C, is hotter than Hell, at less than 445 C.
So who says that the Bible has
no accurate and useful scientific data?
(suggested by Austin Rosenfeld)
Authentic Degrees and Credentials
Isn't education a pain? It seems
that creationists are more prone to getting their science degrees
from non-accredited (or just plain fake) religious institutions rather
than genuine, accredited schools or universities. Sometimes that's
too much of a pain, so they go to a degree mill. Fifty bucks and an SASE,
and you're a Ph.D., ready and qualified to refute evolution!
(For a lovely picture of the "university" where "Dr." Kent Hovind
got his "PhD,"
go here
.)
(suggested by Daniel Ball)
Their Third Cousins
One of the more idiotic quips I've
heard (more than once, I'm sad to say) from creationists is, "If humans
evolved from apes, then how come there are still apes around?" I can't
speak for the creationists' immediate ancestry, but mine runs something
like this: one of my great-great-grandfathers was named Ross. Among
his offspring, one married a Thompson and produced children who were
Thompsons. One of those children had children of her own who were neither
Rosses nor Thompsons, but Icenogles. An Icenogle daughter produced
me, who am none of the above, but a Riggins.
Thus, Rosses gave rise to descendants
who are no longer Rosses. Some have become Rigginses. But some Ross
descendants are still Rosses! There are still Rosses around, even though
some of their descendants "evolved" into Rigginses, and a lot of other
"species."
This isn't biological evolution,
of course, but the principle is exactly the same: an ancestor can
produce descendants which are very like itself (of the same species),
while at the same time having other descendants which have become something
else. The existence of descendants which have varied widely doesn't
mean the original type has ceased to exist, or that there wasn't,
in fact, a common ancestor. That's as true of anthropoids and Homo
as it is of your ancestors, you, and those
third cousins who retain the ancestral name that your branch of the
family no longer uses.
From a contributor:
Carnivores
One of the more bizarre creationist
notions is that before the "Fall," all creatures lived in perfect
harmony, and all ate plants (it seems to have something to do with
death not existing until Adam bit the fruit). Thus we have an idyllic
Eden, with herbivorous cheetahs, eagles, rattlesnakes, wolves, tarantulas,
and presumably tyrannosauri and velociraptors. Indeed, the lion could
lie down with the lamb.
But then there's me and my dumb
questions: Unless the carnivores evolved really rapidly after the
"Fall," they came originally equipped as they are now--with claws,
incisors, fangs, web-spinning apparatus, etc. What need would an herbivorous
rattlesnake have for venomous fangs? Why would a cheetah need blazing
speed, unless to run down impala--and why would the impala need to
be fast unless to escape speedy cheetahs? Why would those infamous peppered
moths have needed camouflage? Why would a skunk need its stink, or
a porcupine its quills? What sort of grass did a tyrannosaurus eat with
its steak-knife teeth? No matter how hard I try, I can't imagine without
amusement a black widow trapping what--berries?--in her web, then envenoming
them until they quit struggling! A bison is "designed" as a herbivore,
and has been one for a long, long time. Your housecat is plainly "designed"
as a meat-eater, and would clearly have a devil of a time trying
to graze for a living.
To which David Edmondson adds...
Before the Fall, all creatures lived in harmony,
and there were no diseases. Either one of those would rule out parasites
of animals. So what did tapeworms do for sustenance? Can anyone
even begin to imagine a way in which a tapeworm could parasitize a plant
rather than an animal? Most plants (carnivorous plants such as pitcher
plants are the only exceptions of which I am aware) do not have digestive
systems in which tapeworms could live. Even pitcher plants do not
excrete, so that a tapeworm that took up residence in one could not spread
its proglottids to other pitcher plants, and thus could not be fruitful
and multiply after its kind. Besides, if the tapeworm "kind" that infests
animals microevolved from the tapeworm "kind" that supposedly infested plants,
why is there no evidence for plant tapeworms? There are other examples;
for instance, lice would have had to microevolve from aphids at a startling
rate after the Fall.
Our Founding Fathers
...because they make creationists
appear, shall we say, less than intellectually competent when they
toss out a howler like, "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were
creationists!" It makes one want to knock on their heads and call out
derisively, "Helllooo! Anybody home in there? In what year did Washington
die? When was Origin of Species published?" Old George didn't
know about germs, either; and Tom famously stated that he could never
believe that stones ever fell from the sky. (Even Charles Darwin accepted
the standard creation model of his day--until he learned better.)
Flat-Earthers
Oh, yes, there are still some
around, and they make young-Earth creationists uncomfortable, because
their risible, crackpot notions are based on a literal interpretation
of the Bible. In fact, they take the Bible even more literally
than most creationists, assuming it means what it says about corners,
foundations, and pillars of the Earth, and that mountain from which
one could see the whole Earth. When we laugh at flat-Earthers, and can
hardly believe such nuts are still around--we're laughing at them for
having the same belief system as young-Earthers: take-no-prisoners biblical
literalism. A subclass of creationists seriously contend that
the Earth inhabits the center of the solar system and is orbited by sun,
planets, stars, et al. And "creation
science" organizations actually give them a forum from which to promote their
14th Century cosmology!
Chemistry
Chemists, being somewhat familiar
with how elements and molecules combine and recombine non-randomly,
haven't risen up as a body to declare the chemical origin or subsequent
evolution of life to be a flat-out impossibility. Now why do you suppose
that is?
Dendrochronology
That means tree-ring counting.
Dendrochronologists, by matching patterns in annual growth rings, can
establish a sequence in living, dead, and long-dead trees in certain
areas of the world. That can be a very reliable dating technique for,
say, a beam used in an ancient shelter. But this archeological specialty
must be completely useless and unreliable, since in some areas ring
sequences extend back through the supposed
date of the Flood, showing no evidence of same, and indeed way past
the usual young-Earth creation date. One of the conundrums of creationism
is that the Earth was apparently created complete with evidence of
a past that never happened, including tree rings, other annual layering
phenomena, fossils already in the ground, and light from distant stars
already most of the way here--revealing cosmic events that never
really happened!
Varves
Those are annual layers deposited
in lake beds. In some places they are clearly distinguishable because
of varying colors and compositions of materials deposited in different
seasons. We can see them form, over a few years, so we know exactly
what causes them and that they do, in fact, represent one year per
layer. The problem, of course, (and darn near everything, it seems,
is a problem for creationists) is that there are lakes in the world
with many times the 6,000 annual varves that could have been
laid down since the Creation.
P.S. Annual ice layers in
Greenland and elsewhere are also Satanic deceptions.
The Nobel Prize Committee
...is seemingly blind to the enlightenment
brought to the world by "creation scientists." Is that because "creation
science" would overturn so many "preconceived notions" of the "scientific
establishment," with its "deeply-rooted prejudice against all things
Christian"? I don't think so, Tim. I'll wager, conservatively, that
at least half of all Nobel prizes go for discoveries that
overturn, radically modify, or greatly improve upon older concepts. Science
rewards the finding of better answers, not hiding from
them.
I would like to know, quite
seriously, when the last time was that ANY biblical-literalist-creationist
won a Nobel prize in ANY field. Also, has anyone ever won for
any work that patently supports a major creationist principle, as
opposed to the "evolutionary" view of the nature of the world?
Beetles
Does God have a beetle fixation?
Why else would He create so many different kinds? Maybe He loves them
more than man. After all, can a beetle sin?
The Efficacy of Science
Funny how science gets it all
RIGHT when you want a computer, medical science to eliminate smallpox
or treat your "erectile disfunction," anti-lock brakes to save your
life--but all evolutionists--using the scientific method you take
advantage of all day long--are wrong.
Libraries and Schools
John has also realized that creationists
hate libraries, because they allow curious people like him to find
the resources they list, which have been terribly misquoted. That also
makes him think they hate schools, that taught him to read and use
the library to get information.
The Power and Majesty of God Almighty
...and His subtlety. They will
only allow God the minuscule, infant universe described by the writers
of Genesis (or Moses, if you prefer). They can't stand it that God
has been working on this version of the universe for something like
14 billion years, and His workshop is so inconceivably huge that
it seems silly to imagine the Earth and its dominant species to be
the center of God's attention. They won't allow Him to work His miracles
of life patiently, subtly, using the gradual, majestic power of evolution.
My hypothesis is that creationists, having short attention spans
themselves, just can't allow God three billion years of patience and
attention to Earthly life. Instead, all they'll allow Him is one *POOF*
magic, all-in-one creation, barely 6,000 years ago. (This attention-deficit
difficulty may have something to do with the fact that hardly any of
them have actually read the whole Bible
.)
1,000 Pennies
Ten bucks worth of pennies is
all it takes to show how fast a little selection can turn randomness
into perfect order. (For fans of those tiny Chick Publications comic
books: This is an analogy. If you don't know what that is,
stop now.)
Randomly scatter the pennies
on a table. Apply a little "natural" selection (after all, you're not
supernatural): pull out all that come up heads and set them aside (they
will "survive"). Flip all the tails again. Save the heads. Repeat until
"perfect order" is achieved.
How many "generations" will
that take to "evolve" the race of pennies from evenly mixed to pure
heads? Nine or ten, with average luck. Make it slightly more realistic
by giving the "favored race" (Darwin's term) just a slight survival
advantage: save just two or three each time. You can still have all
heads in less than an hour. All it takes is "random replicators" (Dawkins's
term) and a bit of selection pressure. The point is, a random system
can become very organized, very fast, with just a little selection
pressure.
Tornadoes, Junkyards, and 747's
It used to be a
pocket watch
that "proved" evolution can't happen. Now that lame creationist
analogy has apparently evolved to demand that it be possible for
a tornado to assemble a 747 out of a junkyard before we can admit
the possibility of evolution.
What the creationist always
conveniently leaves out of the analogy is the power of
NON-random selection
on repeated events. Allow a little leeway here for differences
between mechanical assembly and natural systems (chemistry and life).
Have the tornado roar through repeatedly, several times an hour (representing
the speed of chemical reactions, or of cells multiplying). Allow selection
pressures to "favor" parts or accidental assemblies that could
function as part of a 747 (they're allowed to "survive," i.e. are
not torn apart). Let the experiment run a few million years and you
will have your wide-body jet.
Admittedly, that's still
a pretty lame analogy, but it represents evolution way better than
the creationists' single windstorm. This would make it even closer
to evolution: Don't demand a specific product at the end (like a plane
or a human). Instead, "favor" any chance assembly that would be useful
for any purpose. Allow assemblies
to reproduce with occasional random
changes. Select the most useful. Hey, that is evolution.
Give it some time and you will have some amazingly "well-adapted" and
useful mechanisms. Granted, the chances of one being a 747 are effectively
zero (unless it was intentionally selected for), but no biologist I
know of ever claimed that evolution "intended" to produce a person.
Their Own Lack of Faith
(Watch 'em deny this one vehemently.)
The reason creationists so rabidly deny evolution is that they have
so little faith in the value and truth of
the Bible that if one tiny detail is shown to be wrong, then the whole
rest of it can't be depended on, either. In other words, their faith
is so weak that it will fall apart if one tiny brick is knocked out
of their feeble structure of faith (I call this the Jenga Principle
). Real faith, like a solid structure, can tolerate a brick or
two loosened. Indeed, a real structure and real faith are strengthened
by the replacement of a weak or defective brick with a new, stronger
one (like replacing the shoddy myth of a 6000-year-old Earth with the
grandeur of 4.5 billion years of Earth history).
"Balanced Treatment"
A recent creationist plea is for
"balanced treatment" in the classroom: "Let us present creationism
along with evolution, so students can make an informed choice. That's
only fair isn't it?" (The spirit of fairness doesn't seem to prompt
them to invite biologists to present a "balanced treatment" of evolution
at revival meetings, though.)
OK, let's go along with
it. In 9th grade biology let's do evolution on the first day of the
school year--then we'll proceed to "alternative theories of origins" and
"intelligent design theories." Tuesday we'll cover the Algonquin creation
myth, Wednesday the Shinto, Thursday the Yoruba, Friday--Mayan. Next
week it's Pawnee, Inuit, Mogollon, Hindu, and Zoroastrian. We'll get
to the Hebrew adaptation of the Babylonian (as recorded in Genesis)
the third Thursday in May (if we don't have a fire drill).
One of the Big Lies of creationism
is that there are only two alternatives, and that by "defeating evolutionism"
(sic), the only possible remaining alternative is the Genesis
myth. (Those of us who have Seen the Truth know that the TRUE creation
account is that preserved since the Beginning by the !kung bushmen
of South Africa.)
From a contributor: I think they should teach
creationism in school. Time is equal to evidence. Thus on
the first day, the teacher stands up and says, creationism is an alternative
to evolution. Creationism has not a single piece of verifiable
evidence to support its claims. Now on to evolution.
Ambiguous Gender
Dustin Huwe reminds us that although
Genesis tells us that God created Man and Woman, there are some unfortunate
folks around who are hermaphrodites or have ambiguous genitalia.
Hermaphrodites therefore are mass produced by evolutionists to confuse
believers.
The Order of Becoming
a Creationist
After years of intensive
research, I have all but given up hope of finding a biologist, geologist,
physicist, astronomer, paleontologist, or whatever, who--through
his actual field or laboratory research--came up with such overwhelming
evidence that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, or that new
species never evolve--that he came to the inescapable conclusion that it
was all created recently. Then he looked around for who knew that all
along. Then he became a fundamentalist Protestant.
As I said, I've nearly
given up searching for such a rare species. I suspect I'm more likely
to find a biblical unicorn. It never happens in that order. A person FIRST
becomes a fundamentalist--either raised that way or converted--THEN
learns what he is supposed to believe about the history
of Earth and life.
Europeans
My buddy A. Fuchs (and
several others) informs me that despite creationist fantasies that
only a handful of atheists and die-hard "naturalist" scientists still
believe in evolution...
How come ?
I wish to heaven I knew, my
friend.
Inconvenient Biblical Laws
Andrew I. Kapust wonders
why creationists don't keep kosher, as he proudly does. I accuse them
of picking and choosing among Old Testament laws and pronouncements.
Anything they like, like the six days of creation, or "Thou shalt
not kill" (mainly as applied to fetuses) is the inerrant word of God.
However, most of the other 687 laws (like not wearing cotton-polyester
blend fabrics, keeping the SABBATH [Saturday] holy, punishing rapists
by forcing them to marry their victims, etc.) they have been excused
from observing by Jesus. I can't seem to find the list in the New Testament,
however, that details exactly which laws can safely be ignored by
fundamentalists.
The Lord's Honesty
Don also recalls
a verse in the Bible which he paraphrases as:
The Missing Laws
David from Alaska
asks:
OK, the appearance
of life had to be miraculous, since it increases order (decreases entropy),
and that violates the second law of thermodynamics
(not!). In that case the formation of every single snowflake
that has ever existed (imagine how many!) must be a discrete miracle,
and not a natural process at all, since a snowflake is much more "orderly"
and contains more "information" than the vapor or droplets from which
it forms. A more likely answer: neither is miraculous and neither
offends the thermodynamic sensibilities of nature. Everything
in this world that works, works by temporarily and locally reducing
entropy. Maybe the real miracle was performed by God when He
designed a universe with natural laws that permit such wonders as snowflakes
to form and hummingbirds to evolve, without His constant tinkering.
Convergent Evolution
And once again, from
down under: Something like the wetas of New Zealand
must give them fits, too. Since there were no land mammals until the
Maoris introduced rats, these insects related to grasshoppers and katydids
grew to outlandish proportions to fill the niche that small mammals
take up elsewhere.
Or maybe God was just in a puckish
mood and decided to create somethin' reeeeaal ugly!
Insulin
Edward Oleen passes
on this tidbit: All the human insulin available for diabetics today
is made by genetically engineered E. coli bacteria (whose native country
is your colon--eewww)! What does that have to do with evolution? Real
human genes were spliced into bacterial DNA using recombinant techniques,
so the nasty germs now churn out authentic human insulin. Kind
of sounds like the stuff that makes us human and the stuff that makes
germs germy is the same kind of stuff, and is almost as interchangeable
as tinkertoys. Maybe it shows that we're closely enough related
to our own intestinal bacteria that we can stick a bit of human being
into them without their minding terribly.
Big Numbers
Millions, billions...especially
as applied to years, light-years, species, etc. They seem determined
to limit the universe to a comfortable human scale. Really big
stretches of time, especially, seem to scare the pants off them.
Strange, when they insist God is eternal.
The Definition of Christian
Every dictionary I
can lay my hands on defines Christian (n.) as "one who professes
belief in Jesus as the christ" or words to the same effect.
Not a one of them defines Christian as "one who believes in
the literal truth of Genesis, especially as regards the creation and
flood accounts." (Who would
have thought that the ranks of lexicographers had been so infiltrated
with atheists and satanists?)
If you've ever been around fundamentalists for long, you've run
into statements like, "I don't believe in evolution, because I'm a
Christian." If you've ever said anything like that, here's some
unpleasant news: it's NOT because you're a Christian. It's because
you're a literalist-fundamentalist, and you're in the minority even
among Christians. As a matter of fact, most of the Christians
in the world are people whose beliefs you would find abhorrent, and
a great many of whom accept evolution. They include many millions
of Catholics, not to mention Episcopalians and other mainline Protestants,
Mormons, Orthodox, Coptics, and many hundreds of denominations other
than Southern Baptist and Pentecostal.
(If you want to really reveal your ignorance and prejudices,
ask someone if he is a Catholic or a Christian!)
creationist does not equal christian!
Luigi Novi points out that...
Creationist Scientific Research Projects
They apparently hate
them, because they're seldom, if ever, attempted. There are
multiple reasons for that, including the facts that few creationists
have a clue about how to design and conduct legitimate scientific research;
doing one is probably sacrilegious, since the answer is already in
the Bible, and testing it shows a lack of faith; and (I think
this is the big one) they are very afraid of that most common
of research outcomes: negative results.
In order to help
my creationist friends (it's amazing how many have offered to
pray for me), I have compiled a
brief list of research projects
to demonstrate the truth of recent creation as detailed in Genesis.
It should be the duty (mission? ministry?)
of every dedicated creationist to conduct this research in a sound
scientific (that means replicable,
peer-reviewed, and published in recognized journals)
manner, because we all want the truth, especially if our eternal
souls depend upon it. (Although
one could argue that creationists don't want the truth--they want the
answer they know is right ahead of time.)
AN APPEAL:
If you can think of any other research projects that would indisputably
prove the recent creation of the Earth or the simultaneous creation
of all living and extinct species, or the validity of any other major
creationist contention (such as the Flood), please
email
them to me! Remember, my creationist friends,
you can't prove a negative, so don't dream up something to "prove"
evolution isn't real. Believe me, they've all been tried--to no avail
except to make evolutionary theory all the stronger! Besides, proof
that evolution is false would NOT be proof of Genesis-type creation.
I'm looking for projects that, with positive results, would prove
a major creationist belief that is in direct opposition to the "evolutionary"
view of the world.
The Genesis 1 & 2 Resolution
Paul Murray has
recognized a solution to some of the Genesis 1 & 2 conflicts--but
not one that creationists are likely to welcome:
A Deck of Cards
Ever hear impossibly-large
numbers quoted as the odds against a cell or a particular DNA molecule
having formed "by accident" to create the first living thing? It's
an example of the propensity of creationists to entirely miss the point
and set up a specious straw man, ripe for destruction. Ronald Stearns
suggests the following to help them see where they are missing the
point:
And a further suggestion from Jay Laudig:
And Stephen Reese reminds us that creationists can't
seem to abide peer review. They must REALLY hate it because no one has ever
seen a trace of creationist peer review.
Update: Creationists seem to have missed the
boat on the plate tectonics question. Since it was around for a number
of years without being denied by creationists, by the time they got around
to considering it, it was too late to deny (if it was wrong, why didn't
they say so from the start?). So recently I've seen several creationist
attempts to somehow work plate tectonics into their fantasy, and even use
this ultimate account of an ancient and evolving planet as proof of a recent
creation!
-Paul Murray
Secondly, in Titus 1:14, Paul tells us to ignore Jewish fables.
Wouldn't that mean most of the Old Testament, if not all of Genesis?
2 Corinthians 3:6 "He has made us competent as
ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the
letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
...well aware of DNA, genetic diversity, and how cloning fits
into the picture. Now, if Eve were made out of Adam's rib, it would
seem that Eve is a clone of Adam. Since these two were the parents
of all mankind, and they had the same genetic structure, then there is absolutely
no way to account for the wide range of genetic diversity present in the
human race. Even if you were to concede that Adam's rib only played
a small part in Eve's make up, and she had her own genetic structure, with
different DNA, the union of only two individuals to form all of mankind [only
6,000 years ago] would still lead to a very limited genetic diversity (unless
of course you allow mutations to play a role to diversify our genetic structure
- but then, if you do, you have let in - dare I say it? - evolution).
But the really disturbing thing about
viruses is that they occupy the twilight zone between living and dead,
a zone that would seem ought not to exist in a creation in which
creatures were "given life," or have "the breath of life." Of course,
the creationist may arbitrarily assign them to either the "living"
or "dead" category, but either assignment is a forced fit. Can they
be alive if they don't move, breathe, eat, excrete, or metabolize
at all, and can even be crystallized, like other non-living chemicals?
Can they be dead if they can self-replicate (reproduce) using the same
basic methods as other living things, parasitize other creatures, and
are made of nearly the same proteins and nucleic acids as we are? Evolutionary
theory doesn't demand that there be a sharp distinction between living
systems and nonliving molecules. That's the premise of abiogenesis, which
creationists insist on lumping in with evolution, so what the heck...
we'll take it. Evolutionary theory can also explain where viruses came
from, or why they exist. The fact that there are presently several tentative
explanations in no way threatens the structure of evolutionary theory;
we're perfectly happy with hypotheses until the preponderance of evidence
clearly favors one over all others. In evolutionary theory (with abiogenesis)
there should be some hazy area between living and
nonliving, and viruses are dwellers of that twilight zone.
(suggested by Ron Tolle)
Creationists hate faith. They count
on evidence, words, logic, and arguments to uphold their views. All
this reflects how weak (or even absent) their faith is. "See, we can
prove that evolution is wrong, so that automatically means that the
Bible is correct ." This implies a notion that [Genesis] is correct...
just because evolution has (in their minds) been "proven" wrong. But
then it follows that the Bible can in principle be proven wrong. (Something
which can be proven right can in principle be proven
wrong.) If [creationists] argue that they do have faith, and that the
Bible is right regardless of the validity of evolution, then why on
earth would they care about whether evolution is right or wrong?
(Boy, does this one put some creationists' shorts in a twist--especially
the "Bubba" part! As Hamlet might say, methinks they protest too much
[for members of "Christian Identity" churches, that means I'm hitting
uncomfortably close to the truth]. Interestingly, not one of
the hostile emails has challenged the substantive point.)
Evolution is a lie, correct? It's an idea spawned by Satan to
damn our souls. Okay, let's think about that. Satan gets the
souls of sinners, correct? If he wants souls, he has to make humans
sin. What are the seven sins? There's greed, lust, sloth, envy,
gluttony, pride... and I can never remember the last one, but that's okay
because the important one here is pride. The Bible goes to
great lengths to say that terrible things lie in store for the proud in
the great hereafter.
So which is an idea that contributes more to human
pride: that we were specially created in the image of God to be the masters
of all other creatures upon the Earth? Or that we are one species
out of countless billions that has arisen according to simple and probably
inevitable rules of chemistry and selection?
Now, it makes perfect sense that blind
evolution would select for the cheapest implementations of those intuitions
that were "good enough" for everyday use. Yet what possible reason
would God, who has special insight into those rules, (He created them!)
and is making our souls [minds?] "in His image," have to give us such a
faulty understanding of how things work?
(Brad)
Nothing seems too silly or too obviously
wrong to pass along. (I've even read things by creationists
that justify "lying for Jesus" if it helps save a few more souls!)
Actually, the creationist quip of "if
humans evolved from apes, how come apes are still around?" has a much more
serious flaw than the fact that a species can still exist after another
has descended from it. Humans did not evolve from apes. Humans
share a common ancestor with apes. So a better analogy is that both
I and my 3rd cousin are around, regardless of the fact that we share a common
ancestor (our great-great-grandparents). I think this one goes hand
in hand with the claims like "evolution claims that dogs evolved from bananas"
(Kent Hovind said this one).
To which Donny Kay Lonovy adds...
Venus Flytraps and other carnivorous plants don't make Biblical-literalist
sense. All the animals were vegetarians when they were created (or
so Creationists tell me), so plants wouldn't be carnivorous when God made
them, either. So these plants developed their trademark traps within
a few thousand years, right? I can see animals starting to feed off
other animals, but...flytraps? Creationists must admit that they evolved
these bug-eating systems, since God didn't make them that way. So,
they admit they COULD evolve, but now they had to have used some sort of
super-fast evolution. What makes more sense?
Parasites of Animals
Stephen Reese adds: It's not just carbon 14 dates
or Jim Ussher's calendar dates that make creationists look silly.
They say silly things like "Evolution is the theoretical basis for communism."
Oh really? The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848
and The Origin of Species was published
11 years later, in 1859. (Suggested creationist research project:
find out who owned the time machine to make this possible, Karl or Charles?)
(Another one that my creationist emailers have been strangely
silent on.)
--Noah Riggins
(with apologies to the distinguished British
biologist, J.B.S. Haldane. On being asked what one could conclude as
to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane
is said to have answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles.")
-Rob Mickus
To which I would add this further
note: evolutionary biology gets it right when you want improved
corn yields, a vaccine ready for this year's flu strain, or the discovery
of new oil fields--but we must keep that a secret from the kids, or
at least teach them that magic is an equally valid explanation for how
things got to be the way they are.
Who will teach creationism? Since almost all science teachers
don't believe creationism is valid [alas, too many do--largely because
few are actually scientists {one of the failings of American education}rjr],
are we going to require that each school now hire, in addition to
the current science teachers, a fundamentalist Christian to teach
science classes? Where would these fundamentalists get their
education? Bob Jones University? I'm sure the Jim Bakker
school of religious economics must have had a science department!
...in fact, there is no term like
'creationist' in our public debate, and I'm not sure if it exists in
our language (German). ...On most of our TV news shows they
have something like 'joke of the day,' or the most unbelievable
event and so on. That's where I first heard that both creationism
and evolution has to be taught in some states of the US. It's quite
surprising for Europeans (also if they visit the US) that there are
so many nearly uneducated people [in the US], but on the other hand,
you have the world's best scientists over there.
"God is not man, that He should
deceive." Wow! What's with all the confusing fossils and distant
light rays? I grew up being taught that they were put there
to test my faith! I would expect an omnibenevolent deity to
be less of a jerk than that.
-Donald Wilson
Why wasn't "Thou Shalt Wash
Your Hands" or some such included in the Big Ten [or even way down
the list]? Or maybe "Thou shalt not dirty the open sore."
Either would have saved a tremendous amount of suffering over the
centuries.
Snowflakes suggested
by Tony Leff
Convergent evolution. I'm thinking specifically of Thylacinus
cynocephalus [AKA the Tasmanian wolf]. Here we have a marsupial with
all the outward appearance of a member of the dog family, a placental
group. Plus all those cute little marsupial 'mice' running around in
the outback. [Why would God invent a whole new "wolf" when He had perfectly
good ones already? These sure didn't "microevolve" from two of
the dog "kind"!]
-David Bailey
Among the many Christians who accept evolution is….Pope John Paul
II. Yep. The Big Guy himself. On October 27, 1996, in an address
to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, he declared [the Church's]
acceptance of evolution as a scientific fact, and noted that there is no
war between religion and science: "Consideration of the method used in
diverse orders of knowledge allows for the concordance of two points of
view which seem irreconcilable. The science of observation describes
with ever greater precision the multiple manifestations of life…while theology
extracts the final meaning according
to the Creator’s designs."
[In Paul's words] Genesis 1 and 2 do not conflict, provided
that you remember that Moses and the patriarchs were polytheistic
heathens, just like their heathen neighbors. They believed that the
world was inhabited and animated by "spirits," much like most native
religions do. They claimed that their particular god was better than
all the other gods (much as people today will cheer for their home-town
football team), but that does not mean that they were monotheists.
The wording of the First Commandment in Ex 20 makes that plain ["thou shalt
have no other," not "there is no other"]. Jehovah was to be number
one god, but that's all.
As to "the order of creation," many people
have noted that the word translated "God" changes from "Elohim" [a
PLURAL] to "Jehovah" in Gen 2:4. Some take this as evidence of Gen
2 being a second account. I say: the two tell a single story.
Genesis 1 describes how the spirits created
the world and mankind; the spirits (or "Elohim"--plural) made their
own people after their own image--that's why races of people look different.
The spirit who created the Hebrews made people that looked like himself,
the spirit who created the Egyptians made people that looked like
himself, etc.
Genesis 2 zooms in to one among the Elohim,
named "Jehovah," and his little eugenics experiment in the Garden
of Eden.
See? Doesn't it all make perfect sense? The
name of God changing from the plural "Elohim" to "Jehovah" in Gen
2:4 is not an artifact, it's actually a meaningful and important distinction.
Gen 1 is talking about the gods in general, Gen 2 about one particular
one. [In other words, the Bible is right, even where creationists DON'T
want it to be. -RJR]
So enough of this "Gen 1 & 2 contradict
one another" business! It's total nonsense - there's a perfectly
reasonable explanation.
One demonstration that has worked well for
me in illustrating the difference between a priori and a
posteriori calculations just uses a deck of cards. Give someone
a deck of cards, ask him to shuffle it, and then read off the first
26 cards. After your subject does that, jump at him and question
his veracity. "You don't really expect me to believe that sequence
is what you pulled up, is it? The odds against getting exactly
that sequence is 2 x 10 41-to-1 against!"
Then, of course, explain that what the odds were before the exercise
is irrelevant, because what is important is that SOME sequence occurred,
and that the idea is to understand what that sequence actually was,
not what the chances were of obtaining that sequence. If your
subject has kept the stack of cards intact, then you can show that you
have the evidence. It also looks a lot like a set of geological
strata, and you can show that it remains valid even if you take the
stack and slide it around, twist it, and fold it a bit, [to provide an
analogy for how] geologists really can still unlock the story of geological
history, with a lot of work.
Begin by asking a creationist
if he denies his own existence, or the fact that he was produced
by the sexual reproduction of his parents. Assuming he says yes (if
he says no, creationism is the least of his problems) point out the
odds that his parents produced HIM, specifically, are one in 70 trillion
(roughly). This is based on the 46 total chromosomes, each
a 1 in 2 shot, contributed by his parents.
If those odds aren't astronomical enough, go after his grandparents
next. (Admittedly the chromosomal probability
is a simplification of the entire process...but any further complications
would only make an individual LESS likely, so the argument works
fairly well.)