Colleen Thomas, who claims to have arrived on earth as mother of a host of “Pleadians,”1 explains how the Creation story in Genesis is really, really scientific:
The serpent of the Bible is in reality the subtle transverse wave of phonon magnetic fields (photon magnetic fields are far more excited and energetic and as such hotter) which are cold dark matter with cool energy (1,000 degrees Kelvin at most), the mediators of darkness and our contracted awareness of reality. Phonons emit radio frequencies that sound like a white noise hiss, that is why the etymology of the serpent in Hebrew is “hisser.” Snakes move in transverse waves as well. It is clear that the story of creation is in reality the story of the physics of creation and [an] explanation of the causes of human conditions experienced on Earth as result of dark matter imposed intellectual and spiritual blindness. In and of themselves phonons are essential for creation to have contrast and form and as such no evil really exists. It is merely our ability to imagine evil that imposes evil conditions where none otherwise would exists, our minds have that kind of creative power!!!2
She is apparently writing a book.
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Although Darwin’s is the name irrevocably linked in the public mind to the concept of human evolution, he was very far from the first to have evolutionary ideas; even among the ancients there were those—not excluding the author of Genesis, with its ordering of the emergence of living creatures—who showed glimmerings of evolutionary concepts, however wide of the mark. In the useful historical sketch included in the third (1861) and later editions of Origin of Species, Darwin mentions Aristotle’s Physicae Auscultationes. Lucretius, in the first century BCE, spoke in De Rerum Natura of the concept of past extinctions, an important element of the mechanism of natural selection. But not all of the relevant speculations of the ancients seem with hindsight quite so enlightened: In the sixth century BCE Anaximander believed the first humans had been born, full-grown, from the wombs of fish, and it was attributed to Empedocles, a century or more later, that he believed the precursors of the first creatures were their separately emergent limbs and organs, which eventually came together rather as if forming colonial organisms.
In the eighteenth century the Comte de Buffon argued that God had created the universe but had thereafter left it on its own to evolve, living things included, according to the natural laws he had created as part of the package. Buffon’s notions can be seen as a precursor to Lamarckism. In the early nineteenth century the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck put forward a more substantive major evolutionary theory, one which still has a few adherents today. Where Darwin would invoke natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckism hypothesized that characteristics developed by individuals during their lifetimes could be transmitted to their offspring: If a weightlifter developed huge biceps, his children might expect to inherit that feature. Lamarck’s theory could be summed up as: characteristics acquired during an individual’s lifetime can be inherited by the individual’s offspring.
What’s puzzling about Lamarck’s scheme is that it seems to focus only on useful characteristics—longer necks to help giraffes reach higher leaves, and so on. But most of the changes we acquire in our lifetimes are disadvantageous. Wouldn’t the children of elderly parents have bad backs, fallible memories, and an inborn urge to tell people to get off their lawn? More seriously, a major problem for the Lamarckian notion of heredity, and one that exercised many fine minds, was the matter of circumcision: If a culture has for centuries or millennia been circumcising its boy children as a matter of course, how come those pesky foreskins keep reappearing in each new generation?
Lamarck continued to have followers even after the publication of Origin of Species in 1859. In the US in the latter part of the nineteenth century the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, enthusiastically promoting evolution to a not always receptive populace, had the Lamarckian notion that evolutionary changes could be effected in one’s offspring by willpower alone. Somewhat later, in 1920s Austria, Paul Kammerer produced a string of experiments that seemed to show acquired characteristics could indeed be inherited; he committed suicide when one of these was exposed as fakery.3 In the USSR the science of genetics was crippled until the mid-1960s because genetics ran counter to the crank biological ideas of Trofim D. Lysenko, which included an extreme form of Lamarckism.
Returning to Darwin’s precursors, another of interest was his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who expressed his evolutionary ideas primarily in Zoönomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (1794). These notions were not dissimilar from those of Buffon; however, Erasmus Darwin acknowledged instead the ideas of Lord Monboddo, the Scottish polymath and eccentric. The great difference between Monboddo’s evolutionary scheme and Buffon’s was that, where Buffon refused to contemplate that mankind might be cast from the same mold as the other primates, Monboddo was insistent this was the case, to the point of describing the anthropoid apes as Man’s Brothers.
Arguably a far more important precursor than any of these was the anonymous 1844 bestseller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (after his death in 1871 the author was revealed as the Scottish writer, publisher, and scientific dabbler Robert chambers). At least until the end of the nineteenth century this continued to outsell Darwin’s Origin. Tennyson’s famous lines from canto 56 of his poem In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)—
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed
—often cited as a commentary on Darwinism, in fact predated the publication of Origin of Species (1859) by a decade, and was likely inspired by Vestiges. chambers’s book was a sort of compendium of those modern scientific theories that concerned transmutation—such as the evolution of stars and the changes within species over time. (chambers was, bizarrely, inspired to write the book by conversations he’d had with phrenologists.) It’s widely believed the popularity of Vestiges helped Darwin’s theory gain acceptance ten years later.4
It is very obvious, then, that evolutionary ideas were much in the air for most of the first half of the nineteenth century.5 Why then was Origin such a sensation? Richard Holmes, in The Age of Wonder (2008; p. 451), points to the answer:
[W]ith the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of “deep space” and “deep time,” fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis—as yet. That is why Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. . . . The process of evolution by “natural selection” replaced any need for “intelligent design” in nature.
A major difference between Darwin’s scheme of evolution and the earlier ideas along similar lines is that he saw no purposeful directedness in evolution, no teleology. There was no force, supernatural or otherwise, guiding evolution toward higher and higher forms—in fact, the notion of higher forms was itself misleading: a snail is as much a marvel of nature as is a human being. It’s tempting to say that this was his great conceptual breakthrough: the recognition that evolution at its core relied on randomness, that it wasn’t aiming toward some future goal.
This lack of directedness is a point missed by many of the less educated opponents of evolutionary concepts, who often cry, “How come monkeys aren’t still evolving into human beings?”6 Leaving aside the fact that no scientist has ever said we came from monkeys, the real answer is that there’s no reason for monkeys to evolve in this direction. What monkeys are likely to evolve into is different monkeys.
In Darwin’s Gift (2007) Francisco J. Ayala maintains that Darwin’s great idea wasn’t evolution, which is really just a byproduct, but the mechanism by which organisms and their organs can be so well “designed” for their niches: natural selection. In such a light, the nineteenth-century chorus of objections to Darwinism can be seen as coming not so much from Creationists, although these certainly added their voices, as from those who perfectly well accepted evolution but couldn’t credit natural selection as a workable mechanism for it. And their objections weren’t necessarily stupid: challenged to explain how natural selection might function—how those favorable characteristics might be transmitted from one generation to the next—Darwin was stumped, veering sometimes toward Lamarckism and elsewhere toward his own, wrong hypothesis, pangenesis.7 It was only with the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel’s theory of heredity that natural selection began to make perfect sense.
In large part, though, the rejections of evolution, whether from theists or scientists, were expressions of a gut reaction—a repugnance toward the notion that glorious, near-godly mankind could be, not just kin to the loathly beasts, but a product of randomness. (The process of natural selection is not random, in that undesirable mutations die out quickly while desirable ones may persist, but the trivial mutations that are the grist to natural selection’s mill, while not completely random, are largely so within the limits of what genetic changes can accomplish.) This started long before Darwin formulated his and Wallace’s theory. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the French naturalist Georges Cuvier argued vehemently against the protoevolutionary notions then being put forward, proposing instead that each species was the product of a separate Creation; he even echoed Empedocles (and foreshadowed the modern IDers) by claiming that each organ was the result of a special intervention by the Designer.
Like Buffon, the German naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer, writing in the same year that Origin was published, could conceive the evolution of other life forms but not of humans. This is still a prevalent view, even though it’s hard to see how any pet owner, witnessing the countless similarities, could sustain it. (A relative once explained the difference to me: “We don’t lick our butts clean.”) Sir Richard Owen, the supposed pillar of British paleontology, also attacked Darwinian notions, though this seems to have been more because he feared being eclipsed.
A famous antievolutionary idea was advanced by Philip Henry Gosse in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857). Gosse believed the earth had been created in 4004 BCE, and he set out to reconcile this with the evidence being produced by geologists, astronomers, and paleontologists for events that had taken place long, long before. Moreover, he had to consider the weighty matter of the navel (omphalos is Greek for “navel”). There had been major theological debates as to whether or not Adam had one. Gosse was on the side of those claiming he did, and went further: Adam had been born fully grown and with nails and hair, both of which would normally require prior growth.
Gosse solved his dilemma by proposing that God created the world, the universe, and Adam as if they’d had a previous history. He had planted the fossils in the ground as a part of his scheme. The evidence of the astronomers and geologists, far from demonstrating the immense antiquity of things, was instead a remarkable exposition of the masterful completeness of God’s artifice: Each new piece of evidence they unearthed was a tribute to the Creator’s conscientious craftsmanship. Nothing the scientists found implied that events had occurred prior to the Creation, in 4004 BCE.
Clearly, a theory like this can never be either proved or disproved—indeed, it could be used to support a claim that the Creation occurred just five minutes ago, with God having carefully constructed all our memories to mislead us. The theory begins to stumble, of course, as soon as we start to wonder why God should trouble to play this prank, as even Gosse’s contemporaries pointed out; charles Kingsley wrote to him that “I cannot . . . believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.”8
Among those who superficially accepted Darwinism but sought to “improve” it by reintroducing strong Lamarckian elements was the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who abhorred natural selection’s overtly mechanistic thrust. In books like L’Evolution Créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution) he attempted to marry Darwinism with his own theory of consciousness. To the biological side of this coupling he brought the ancient concept of the élan vital, an immaterial force that directs the progress of life. This innovation was not much appreciated by biologists; as Julian Huxley pointed out, it was rather like telling a railway engineer the reason his engine worked was an undetectable élan locomotif. But it seemingly went down well among nonscientists. In the preface to Back to Methuselah (1921) George Bernard Shaw expressed at length his support for the notion of Creative Evolution, the élan vital, and Lamarckism in general by contrast with natural selection and its nasty mechanistic functionality.
It’s hard to take seriously the rival evolutionary theory offered by the US zoologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. In his scheme, new types of life forms had emerged periodically through some form of spontaneous generation. When they first appeared they were confined to a single locality; they had very generalist characteristics and possessed a mysterious attribute called “race plasm.” As they spread away from their original territory, specialist adaptations to the template occurred in response to the new environments the creatures found themselves in, giving rise to species; the effectiveness of the adaptations depended on the quality of the “race plasm.” Osborn, a racist of the Aryan school, invented the concept of Dawn Man, an entirely unevidenced primordial species from which Nordics had descended, with all the other races owing their ancestry instead to shambling “apemen” like the Neanderthals. The idea that the different races might have arisen from separate ancestors was not a new one; called polygeny, it had been long discredited. The form embraced by Osborn and others, orthogenesis, for a while had some minor influence.
It is often not realized that for a while around the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it looked as if Darwin’s theory would be rejected by science: Its acceptance was certainly on the ebb. What would eventually turn the table back in favor of Darwinism was the discovery in 1900 of Mendel’s theory of heredity, his work on which had been lurking forgotten in dusty journal pages for three and a half decades. Once genetics9 was married to natural selection, Darwin’s theory seemed inescapable; but it was some time before that happened. For much of the first half of the twentieth century it wasn’t evident to biologists how natural selection and genetics meshed together—how they were the two essential complements in explaining how evolution functioned. It took the pioneering work of a dozen or more great geneticists—notably including J. B. S. Haldane—to achieve the fusion, as summarized in Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942).
A rival theory of evolution that sprang up as the nineteenth century passed and the twentieth century began was likewise given additional impetus by the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on heredity. This was mutationism, the idea that evolution proceeds not via the slow accumulation of minuscule changes, as Darwin insisted, but through abrupt discontinuities—i.e., rare individuals that, through mutation, differ radically and advantageously from their parents. Obviously, these mutations would have to be capable of transmitting the new characteristics to their offspring.
Mutationism’s supporters were by no means fringe scientists. Foremost was Hugo de Vries, whose Die Mutationstheorie (1901) popularized the idea. He backed up his case with his own studies of the evening primrose, maintaining that among these flowers true-breeding mutations appeared frequently. Later studies demonstrated that de Vries had been somewhat (not entirely) overstating his claim. Even as the theory fell from favor, the word “mutation” was adopted into genetics, where it soon gained its modern meaning.
Something shared by Mendel’s theory of heredity and the theory of evolution by natural selection is that, despite the fact that between them they were to revolutionize our understanding, neither were appreciated at the time as anything beyond humdrum. Mendel’s work outlining the laws of heredity was left to rot for over thirty years. And the reaction of the Linnaean Society to the presentation in 1858 of two crucial papers by Darwin on the origin of species and one by Wallace can be summarized by the comment made by the society’s president, Thomas Bell, when giving his review of that year:
The year which has passed . . . has not been unproductive in contributions of interest and value, in those sciences to which we are professedly more particularly addicted, as well as in every other walk of scientific research. It has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so as to speak, the department of science on which they bear.10
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Not all theologians had difficulty accepting that humans had evolved from lower forms of life. It was perfectly reasonable to some that God could have worked indirectly to concoct his finest creation. This was put with peculiar elegance by Augustus Hopkins Strong of the Rochester Theological Seminary in his christ in Creation and Ethical Monism (1899; p. 169): “The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to its creation.” This attitude of compromise between religion and evolutionary science is still prevalent, in various forms, today.
Many old-earth Creationists—and obviously all IDers, too—have adopted what they regard as a sort of halfway stage between Creationism and Darwinian evolution. Confronted by the profuse evidence of evolutionary adaptation going on in the world around us, they concede that microevolution is a reality—that adaptation occurs within species—while rejecting the possibility of new species arising through adaptation, or macroevolution. In reality, the acceptance of microevolution is, ipso facto, an acceptance of macroevolution, too. There’s no abrupt transition line between the two processes. A further difficulty for the stance is that macroevolution—the production of new species—has been observed in action in the real world.
Perhaps remembering how ill its attempts at denialism had fared during a previous scientific revolution, the Roman Catholic church adapted rather more readily than some of the other denominations to the notion of natural selection. A decree issued in 1909 relaxed the doctrinal necessity for Catholics to believe the days of the Creation, as described in Genesis, were literally that: days. The interpretation “period of time” became acceptable, thereby allowing for the vast eras required by evolution. For decades the Catholic church and its officers tacitly assumed the validity of evolution while making no statement one way or the other. On October 23, 1996, though, Pope John Paul II came out of the closet on the subject. This wasn’t an admission that God played no part in the process. He cited Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis to stress God’s role: “If the human body take its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.”11
Although there was some initial nitpicking among the faithful as to the exact reading of John Paul’s statement, it became clear he meant exactly what the Creationists dreaded: The Roman Catholic church fully accepted natural selection as the mechanism for human evolution.
On July 7, 2005, however, Cardinal christoph Schönborn published in the New York Times an op-ed called “Finding Design in Nature” that appeared to support ID.12 Since Schönborn was close to Benedict XVI, who’d been elected pope just three months earlier, this article was widely interpreted as signaling a radical change of tack by the Catholic church. According to Damian Thompson in his 2008 book Counterknowledge (p. 32), it was fairly soon discovered that Schönborn had been assisted in writing the op-ed by Mark Ryland, a senior fellow of the heftily misnomered Center for Science and Culture, the Discovery Institute’s prime disseminator of ID propaganda (see page 180). It seems all too likely Schönborn allowed himself to become a victim of said propaganda; and indeed he was soon backtracking.
Far more definitive was an article carried in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on January 17, 2006, by Fiorenzo Facchini, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bologna. Facchini spelled out the principles of Darwinian evolution and didn’t mince his words about ID: “It doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified.” (At the same time, he insisted there was a role for a designer in our spiritual evolution.) On January 31, 2006, addressing the Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida on the subject “Science Does Not Need God, or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution,” the Vatican Observatory Director, Father George V. Coyne, heavily underlined the church’s position:
I would essentially like to share with you two convictions in this presentation: (1) that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while evoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God, makes her/him too small and paltry; (2) that our scientific understanding of the universe, untainted by religious considerations, provides for those who believe in God a marvelous opportunity to reflect upon their beliefs. Please note carefully that I distinguish . . . that science and religion are totally separate human pursuits.13
Naturally, Conservapedia® is full of articles deriding evolution, which it regards as still “just another theory” that must seek to prove itself against the established default explanation, Creationism. Since this is a perspective that doesn’t play too well in the greater world, Conservapedia’s editors have had to resort to some sophisticated arguments in support of their position . . . such as that old kindergarten favorite: “You’re fat!”
Hence the appearance of articles like “Evolutionists Who Have Had Problems with Being Overweight and/or Obese”14 and the special feature “Atheism and Obesity,”15 with sections like “Lesbianism, Atheism, and Obesity” and “Picture of an Overweight Atheist christopher Hitchens.”
As if that weren’t intellectual ammunition enough, there’s “Essay: Does Richard Dawkins Have Machismo?”16 which presents the burning question: “Is the atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins a man filled with courage, truth, and conviction or a man who is a cowardly pseudo intellectual pantywaist?”
Arguing with Creationists is not always easy. A Facebook exchange that exemplifies the problem went viral at the end of 2010. The original post:
** Fact—If the earth was 10 ft closer to the sun we would all burn up and if it was 10 ft further we would freeze to death . . . God is amazing!!
One of the commenters tried to introduce some science to the conversation:
to anyone wondering, that’s not true. 1) Earth’s orbit is elliptical and the distance from the sun varies from around 147 million kilometers to 152 million kilometers on any given year. 2) Every star has a habitable zone that is affected by the size of the star and its intensity. The sun’s habitable zone is about 0.95 AU to 1.37 AU. . . . Earth’s orbit could be decreased by 4,500,000 miles or increase by 34,000,000 miles and still be in the habitable zone. 3) if your claim was true any moderately sized earthquake could have taken us out of the habitable zone. sorry.
To which the original poster replied:
Okay thats cool and alll but don’t ever comment on my status telling me that i am wrong everrr again. I didn’t ask you did i? Answer: NO17
Michael Swanwick, in his time-travel novel Bones of the Earth (2002), brilliantly captures the goalposts-shifting rhetorical technique of the modern Creationist. “If time travel is real,” writes the author of the fictitious tract Darwin Antichrist, “then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?” (p. 122).
Arguing online or in print is one thing, arguing face-to-face another. In his entertaining essay “Fighting for Our Sanity in Tennessee: Life on the Front Lines” (2001), evolutionary biologist Niall Shanks tells the tale of being invited to debate the young-earth Creationist Duane Gish. Shanks’s suspicions that he was in some way being set up were aroused by Gish’s insistence that he, Shanks, go first in the debate.
Accordingly, Shanks borrowed videos of some of Gish’s earlier debates to try to get some tips. He discovered that Gish’s presentation never changed: Whatever his debating rival might have said, Gish’s “response” was identical. Shanks therefore prepared a presentation in which he introduced each point he knew Gish was going to make, and demolished it.
But he went further. He stole all of Gish’s jokes and one-liners, too . . .
One assumes Gish was presenting his case as a scientific one, not as a matter of theology or faith. In his essay “Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Entropy” (1973), Henry Morris, one of Creationism’s great figures, likewise invoked some hard science:
Not only is there no evidence that evolution ever has taken place, but there is also firm evidence that evolution never could take place. The law of increasing entropy is an impenetrable barrier which no evolutionary mechanism yet suggested has ever been able to overcome. Evolution and entropy are opposing and mutually exclusive concepts. If the entropy principle is really a universal law, then evolution must be impossible.18
Using exactly this argument, we can demonstrate that it’s impossible for a baby to arise from the fusion of an undifferentiated sperm cell with an undifferentiated egg cell, and for an adult to develop from a baby. Since both processes indubitably do happen, there must be something wrong with the argument. This leads us to an interesting difference in modes of thought between real science and Creation Science. The Creationist is here claiming evolution of any kind—whether of life forms or of stars—is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (the “law of increasing entropy”). Of course, evolution isn’t; but, were it shown this was so, the approach of real science would be to question the second law of thermodynamics—just as, for example, Einstein questioned Newtonian gravitation. On the one hand, we can see stellar and organic evolution happening; on the other, we have a theory, an authority. Science seeks a resolution and, if one can’t be found, re-examines the authority. By contrast, the Creationists’ approach is an appeal to authority—with the second law standing in for the authority they’re actually invoking.
For more hard science, here’s the explanation of the Noachian Flood, as offered by Carl E. Baugh of the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas:
The voice of God (whether by direct vocal intervention or by indirect vibrational disruption) at microwave energy level penetrated the great water reservoir beneath the earth’s granite crust. With microwave’s unique effect on water, this agitated medium rapidly disrupted the planet’s subterranean structure which housed the designed nuclear reactors and internal foundations.
The violent heated waters ruptured the granite crust and sent hot jets of steam upward through the thin firmament suspended above the earth. This action opened channel windows in the crystalline canopy and caused its collapse. The mass fell as liquid rain in the temperate zones and dropped as ice at the poles. Subsequent expulsion of water and chemical elements from earth’s disrupted interior saturated the surface floods and trapped living organisms as fossils in sedimentary deposits.
Gravitational attraction of the moon brought the global body of floodwaters into resonance. Cyclical tidal action deposited organic and inorganic materials into conformable sedimentary layers. The vast majority of the “geologic column” is adequately explained by a single year of global flood activity.19
An interesting feature of the museum is the pair of hyperbaric chambers in whose interiors Baugh has recreated what he believes to be a replica of the harmonious environment of the primordial earth before Eve arrived, bringing sin and death with her. Baugh expects that dinosaurs will soon begin spontaneously to emerge in these biospheres.
Another tourist magnet, Dinosaur Adventure Land, in Pensacola, Florida, was founded in 2001 by Kent Hovind, one of the more colorful recent figures in young-earth Creationism. As Jim Gardner has summarized, Hovind “is the cause célèbre of the monumentally ignorant creationism movement, because he has the nerve to stand up and say publicly what normal people seek medical attention for thinking in private.”20
That dinosaurs and humans must have coexisted is a major plank of Hovind’s quaint cosmology, because he recognizes that six thousand years simply doesn’t allow enough time for the dinosaurs to have been extinguished in the Flood before Homo sapiens came on the scene. Besides, it says in Genesis that God created the first humans just a few days into the whole tableau. Moreover, we know humans were around before the Flood because otherwise Noah wouldn’t have been there to build the Ark.
In Hovind’s version, the Flood happened when God sent a giant ice meteor hurtling toward the earth; much of it broke off to form the craters of the moon, Mars, etc., but much came crashing to earth in the polar regions in the form of ultracold snow, which froze the mammoths so quickly they didn’t have a chance to run away. Speaking of the Ark, since Noah saved two of every creature aboard it, that doughty vessel must have included all varieties of dinosaurs, as well, so there could very well still be dinosaurs alive today, only we don’t know about them. Or do we? Just to cover all asses, as it were, Dinosaur Adventure Land contained a presentation featuring the Loch Ness Monster.
Unsurprisingly, Hovind’s views have been derided—when noticed at all—by scientists and many others. What is surprising is that among the latter have been quite a few of his fellow young-earth Creationists. Clearly there are different degrees of crazy.
In January 2007 Hovind was sentenced to ten years in prison, having been found guilty of fifty-eight federal crimes concerned with tax evasion and illicit bank transactions.
The Creationist group Answers in Genesis (AiG) opened its own Creation Museum at Petersburg, Kentucky, in May 2007. In December 2010 the organization announced it would open its theme park, Ark Encounter, in Kentucky in 2014—an enterprise in part funded by taxpayer dollars. Most excitingly, AiG officials appear to have promised that their Ark will contain real dinosaurs!
A recurring problem for people like Hovind and AiG is to explain how Noah managed to get sample pairs of dinosaurs onto the Ark—after all, brachiosaurs were big. AiG’s Ken Ham has offered a solution: The wily mariner got round the problem by choosing young dinosaurs! Being only partially grown, they took up less space.
The Australian-born Ham is another of young-earth Creationism’s luminaries. He has the frequent debating tactic of asking the rhetorical question: “Were you there?” If you weren’t there to witness the beginnings of all things, according to Ham, you have no way of knowing the Genesis account is untrue . . . which means it is true.
In May 2007, the Australian Creationist organization Creation Ministries International (CMI) asked Ham and his AiG colleagues the pertinent question “Were you there?”—or some variant thereof—before the Queensland Supreme Court as they sued to try to find out why so much of their funds had been devoted to paying Ham’s and others’ expenses. The suit was eventually settled “amicably.”
But perhaps most colorful of all the current crop of young-earth evolution deniers is the New Zealand-born evangelist Ray Comfort who, frequently in conjunction with ex-child actor Kirk Cameron, has demonstrated a publicity flair most of his rivals must envy. Together, the pair released a hugely popular YouTube video of themselves discussing a banana, their point being that surely this fruit cannot have evolved but must have been designed by God, for otherwise how could it accommodate so conformably to the human hand and unzip so niftily for eating? Primatologists pointed out that humans habitually open bananas from the wrong end, the far better technique being the one employed by our close primate relatives: pinch the other end hard so the tough bit comes off, then squeeze out the banana’s contents like toothpaste from a tube. Obviously it was with chimps, not us, in mind that God designed the banana.
A further antic by Comfort (whose recent books are published by WND Books, the publishing arm of Far-Right organization WorldNetDaily) was the production in late 2009 of a new edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species as a free giveaway for schools and colleges. This edition found room for a rambling fifty-page foreword by Comfort in which he explained why silly old Darwin had got it all wrong, but (despite the claim on Comfort’s Living Waters website that “[n]othing has been removed from Darwin’s original work”), Darwin’s preface, glossary, and four chapters of his original text, which, as biologists were swift to point out, just happen to contain arguments that Creationists have traditionally had difficulty countering, were omitted.
Comfort’s blog Atheist Central revealed, in his November 6, 2010, posting, this strange claim:
The name of Jesus christ is the most despised name in history. If you disagree, then name one other historical figure who has his name used in place of a cuss word. How about wicked men like Hitler, Judas, or Rasputin? None were despised enough to use their name in such a way.
That’s because, when you yell “Jesus!” on stubbing your toe, you’re invoking the deity. Most of us don’t invoke Hitler.
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Heres a problem you can’t answer. Why did evolution stop? Why don’t human people have wings? I think your badly misguided. You should look for real answers in the Bible, not evolutionist propaganda. Jesus wasn’t a monkey, he was the Son of God. A God that also made you in his image. That image is sacred and should not be mocked with evolutionist fantasy. If you won’t pray for your salvation, I will.
—“Saturday hate mail-a-palooza,” Daily Kos, October 30, 201021
On October 24, 1996, David W. Cloud of the Fundamental Baptist Information Service released a document rebutting Pope John Paul II’s then-recent declaration of support for Darwinism. At first Cloud’s rebuttal—called simply “Pope Supports Evolution”22 —seems the usual trite, muddleheaded stuff, but the devil (or whoever) lies in the details. For example:
Genesis says the world was created perfect, then fell under sin and God’s curse. This is consistent with everything we can observe. Everything is winding down. Everything is proceeding from order to chaos. Everything is corrupting. Evolution would require the exact opposite.
Perhaps this argument was what Concerned Women for America’s spokeswoman christine O’Donnell was thinking of when she said: “Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.”23
But back to Cloud:
[I]f evolution were true . . . [w]e would have a world filled with monsters and unpredictable madness, part one thing and part another, a fish becoming a bird, a frog becoming a rat, a lizard becoming a bird, partially formed beaks which do not yet have a purpose, partially formed feet, partially formed wings, partially formed eyes, partially formed brains.
We would? Is it just a matter of subterfuge that those wacky evolutionists have omitted all this good stuff from their textbooks? Cloud’s ideology seems to have rendered him less able than the average ten year old to understand what the principle of evolution by natural selection actually means.
Cloud, like other christians who deny evolution for fundamentalist reasons, does so essentially because God explained in Genesis how humans came into being. Unfortunately, God told two different, mutually incompatible Creation stories in Genesis. Since both can’t be right, we have to conclude God’s an unreliable witness.
But the choice is broader than between these two. The second edition of David A. Leeming’s Encyclopedia of Creation Myths (2009) runs to two volumes and discusses over two hundred different versions of the Creation. In the Creation myth of the Bakuba people of central Africa, for example, in the beginning there was just darkness, water, and a giant called Mbombo. The sun and stars came about when Mbombo got a stomach upset and vomited them. The sun evaporated a lot of the water, revealing dry land. Later, Mbombo upchucked again, his vomit this time being all of the earth’s living things, us included. The Masai have a myth that the first humans emerged from the severed leg of some other creature. The leg swelled as it decomposed, until finally it burst, releasing a man on one side and a woman on the other. The Wapangwa people of Tanzania have the myth that the earth originated as a vast ball of feces produced by white ants. How dare you insult someone’s religion by rejecting any of these!
The church of Jesus christ of Latter-day Saints, while accepting the Genesis account, has a different interpretation of it. In the Mormon view, the matter of which we and everything else are made is eternal. However, despite being eternal, it has not always had its current forms; in order to gain these it has had to be organized. When God created the world, then, he didn’t create it out of nothing but instead organized matter that was already in existence. Likewise, when creating Adam, he organized matter to form a container for Adam’s soul, which already existed. Souls originated long before the earth did, when Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father procreated to generate untold numbers of spirit offspring—i.e., souls. Depending on how good or bad we were at this stage in our existence, we have a good or a bad time of it in our earthly incarnation. Thus, the Emperor Nero was obviously a virtuous fellow because . . . no, that can’t be right.
It would be a mistake to think the only breed of fundamentalists to bitterly oppose evolution are christians. There are strong schools of Creationism among adherents of the other major religions too.
THEREFORE DARWIN;
IS THE WORST FASCIST THERE HAS EVER BEEN,
AND THE WORST RACIST HISTORY HAS EVER WITNESSED.
—“Harun Yahya,” “Darwinism Is the Main Source Of Racism,” 200924
In a sense, Creationism has always been rife in the Islamic world. Since the Qur’an is accepted as the indisputable word of God, and since the Qur’an contains a (very sketchy) account of the Creation, the discussion ends there. At the same time, Creationism has not until relatively recently been an issue in Islam except perhaps among scholars. It would be a simplification to say that, in essence, Muslim scholars ignore evolution while the general Islamic populace remains ignorant of it, but only just.
The group almost single-handedly responsible for changing the Muslim world’s indifference to evolution is the Bilim Arastirma Vakfi (BAV; the name translates as “Science Research Foundation”), founded in Turkey in 1990 by the radical Islamist, virulent anti-atheist, and conspiracy theorist, Adnan Oktar. Although the BAV is internationally the more prominent of the two major organizations Oktar has created, the other, Millî Degerleri Koruma Vakfi (“Foundation for Protection of National Values”), founded in 1995, is significant domestically; it promotes a rightwing, conservative religious agenda analogous to that promoted by most US groups whose names feature “Family” or “Values.” Oktar has a daily two-hour television show on which he promotes, Pat Robertson-style, his often highly offensive views.
Following publication of his first book, Yahudilik ve Masonluk (1986; “Judaism and Freemasonry”), Oktar served nineteen months in prison because of its inflammatory antisemitism; later he was to blame his imprisonment on a plot by Freemasons determined to stop him from writing about them. The Freemasonic plot didn’t work. Oktar’s Global Masonluk (2002; “Global Freemasonry”) is a ferment of conspiracy theory. Not only are Freemasons mounting an attempt to impose an atheistical One World Government, they’re also deceiving the rest of us into thinking Muslims do bad things. A sample from Oktar’s associated website, globalfreemasonry.com:
Freemasonry, the system of the antichrist25 that holds the world under its sway and is leading the whole planet toward irreligion, wants to give a false impression of Islam by pretending to be christian. In order to achieve that aim it seeks to train terrorists who appear to be Muslims.
Oktar’s 1995 book Soykirim Yalani (“The Holocaust Lie”) is a work of Holocaust denial that would be hilarious were its subject less grim. It seems odd he should mount an exoneration of the Nazis, because elsewhere he excoriates Darwin and evolution for being responsible for, among other things, Nazism. Perhaps, confronted by Jews, Darwin, and Nazism, he just couldn’t decide which he hated the most.
Soykirim Yalani was published, like all of Oktar’s books, under the pseudonym “Harun Yahya.” It’s hard to know quite how many books “Harun Yahya” has published, many of them cheap productions designed to be given away free to luckless citizens and college students; some estimates put the number around two hundred, and the “Harun Yahya” website claims three hundred. It’s believed that for some years now “Harun Yahya” has been less Oktar’s personal pseudonym than a collective house name for upward of thirty BAV members (although Oktar claims otherwise).
The collective’s magnum opus to date has been Yaratilis Atlasi (2006; translated as Atlas of Creation, the title under which it is now more generally known), nearly eight hundred large-format pages packed with paired photographs comparing living creatures with fossils in an endeavor to show there’s no difference between them—that claims of modern forms having evolved from earlier ones are a sham. (Two further massive volumes followed in 2007.) Thousands of copies were sent out free to educators worldwide. A few Western biologists, including Richard Dawkins, reviewed it, finding it full of elementary errors of identification, examples of captions declaring two images near identical when they quite clearly aren’t, and, most worryingly, copious evidence that “Harun Yahya” does not understand (or chooses to lie about) the very basics of the scientific theory “he” is doing his best to expunge from human consciousness.26
Oktar presents himself and the BAV as the acceptable face of Creationism, but the authoritarian streak is broad and clearly visible. When in 1999 he was brought to trial on the grounds that the BAV was a criminal organization and that he personally had used bribery, threats, and intimidation, the case eventually had to be abandoned because so many of the witnesses inexplicably withdrew their testimony. Among other charges were that attractive young female BAV adherents were being used as sexual decoys to attract rich men, with the encounters being secretly filmed for purposes of blackmail—and to discourage the women themselves from leaving the BAV should they ever choose to do so. It is hard to escape the view that the BAV isn’t so much an antiscientific movement or even an ideological/religious movement as a cult, with heavy Mob overtones.
Adnan Oktar is far from the only Islamic Creationist. Another of note is Mustafa Akyol, an individual with no scientific credentials who has nevertheless somehow managed to parlay his way into being called as an expert witness in Creationist trials worldwide, like the 2005 hearings in Kansas when the State Board of Education and its State Board Science Hearing Committee deliberated inserting ID into the school science standards along with a statement that evolution is “just a theory” rather than established fact. (The measures were passed, but in 2007 they were overruled when religious conservatives lost their majority on the State Board of Education.) Akyol thinks rejection of evolution on both sides of the east/west divide offers a unique opportunity to bring those two sides together, and is thus a good thing:
[T]here are some westerners who say we know that materialism is a philosophy but science doesn’t really support that philosophy; science can also support theism, the fact that there is a God. So when Muslims recognize this they can stop looking at the world in terms of west versus the east; so we can have a dialogue with the west.27
So if we simply unite in ignorance and falsehood we’ll all live happily ever after—a policy that didn’t work some centuries ago when Islamic science, once the splendor of the world, plummeted into a pit from which it has still not emerged.
What grounds are there for optimism about Turkey’s fight against a retreat to the Dark Age? The European Union may hold the key. Turkey is eager to become a part of the EU and cannot understand why there is so much resistance within the EU to the idea. In large part, yes, it’s because the EU is unlikely to admit any nation that seems so sluggish in cleaning up its human rights record. But another reason may well be the growing political desire, not just among average Turks but within government circles, to reject all the advances in human understanding and welfare associated with the Enlightenment in favor of a worldview that better belongs to the Middle Ages. Among the most significant players in bringing this sorry state of affairs to pass is the BAV. In 2007, Nicolas Birch reported the BAV’s Tarkan Yavas as claiming the real reason Turkey’s application to the EU was going so badly was that “Darwinism breeds immorality, and an immoral Turkey is of no use to the European Union at all.”28
In March 2009, as the rest of the developed world geared up for the Darwin anniversary celebrations, the editor of Turkey’s equivalent of New Scientist, Bilim ve Teknik (“Science and Technology”), was sacked for planning a cover feature about Darwin. Turkish teachers have been suspended for giving instruction on evolution, even though doing so (alongside Creationism) is part of the country’s school standards. The activities of the BAV have the tacit and often not-so-tacit support of senior government figures. And, as Aykut Kence observes, “Turkey is the only secular state in the world that has creationism in its science textbooks.”29
The most distressing aspect of Turkish Creationism is perhaps that the Turkish Republic was founded with such high ideals. Rightly or wrongly, it is claimed that Kemal Atatürk wrote the chapters on evolution in the school textbooks introduced after his successful revolt against theocracy; certainly that would have been consonant with what he hoped for from the nation he founded.
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Although the classical rabbinical teachings offered a form of Creationism that sounds like its fundamentalist christian counterpart—for example, their own calculations led the rabbis to think the world was about six thousand years old—in general, Jewry had little difficulty adapting itself to the idea of evolution and the long timescales it demanded. Today evolution is accepted by almost all Jewish denominations as compatible with Judaism, albeit often in a version that allows room for a Creator to have started the whole thing off. There is also a strand of Jewish thought that gives credence to what is confusingly called Intelligent Design; this is not the ID of christian fundamentalists and the Discovery Institute but a bolting onto the back of evolution of ideas concerning evolution’s purpose and goal. In a sense this is a denial of the theory of evolution by natural selection, one of whose major thrusts is that evolution has neither purpose nor goal. This Jewish compromise seems much like its christian equivalents.
There are also those who, like Muslims who interpret passages in the Qur’an and claim they describe the latest discoveries of science (see page 46), make attempts to match up the Genesis account with what science has revealed to us about origins. A doyen of this approach is Gerald L. Schroeder, whose books on the topic are Genesis and the Big Bang (1990), The Science of God (1997), The Hidden Face of God (2002), and God According to God (2009). An extensive demolition of the first two of these (with a short note about the third) is Mark Perakh’s “Not a Very Big Bang about Genesis” (1999; revised 2001).30
Schroeder’s first concern is to match the Genesis story’s six days of Creation with the fact that science has revealed the universe to be some 14 billion years old. In his first book he calls upon the Special Theory of Relativity, pointing out that the measure of time’s passage depends very much on the frame of reference in which you happen to be: The faster your frame of reference is moving, the more quickly time will seem to be passing in a frame of reference that’s “stationary.” So, if God were moving around at very high velocity all the while he was creating the universe and guiding its evolution up until the creation of Adam, it’s conceivable that each of the days he experienced was equivalent to billions of years undergone by the universe. At the moment he created Adam, according to Schroeder, God decided to leave his prior frame of reference and share Adam’s—i.e., to experience time’s flow at the same rate as we do now.
This piece of speculation in no way demonstrates that science and the Torah are essentially telling the same story, since there’s no evidence to support, just for starters, the notion of a near-light-speed-traveling deity.
In The Science of God Schroeder tries a different Relativistic tack, abandoning the Special Theory in favor of the General Theory. Time-dilation effects occur not just through high velocity, as per the Special Theory, but also in gravitational fields, as per the General Theory. Schroeder posits that immediately after the Big Bang the universe consisted solely of energy; there was therefore no gravity. Soon, though, energy started being converted into matter (via E = mc2), meaning there was progressively more mass in the universe and therefore increasing gravitational forces. The universe’s clock has thus been slowing down ever since the Big Bang (at least until the creation of Adam); Schroeder carefully calculates that the universe’s first “day” lasted 8 billion years, its second 4 billion years, and so on. Adding up the results of his calculations, he arrives at the same figure for the universe’s age as the Torah’s “six days”—what a surprise!
In both of these scenarios, on creating Adam, God abandons his previous frame of reference to adopt the same one as Adam’s. A pertinent question is: Why? It’s a question Schroeder fails to answer.
Other Jewish apologists for the Creation myth have included the fourteenth-century Rabbi Isaac of Akko. Like most of the old-earth Creationists seven centuries later, he took succor from the passage in Psalms that reads: “A thousand years in your [i.e., God’s] eyes is like a day gone by.” If we regard a God-day as being worth one thousand years of our time, then one of God’s years will be 365,250 of our years. Rabbi Isaac also calculated the earth’s age as 42,000 years. If you multiply 42,000 by 365,250 you get a figure that’s a bit over 15 billion years, which is not too far adrift from science’s reckoning.
As modern Jewish apologists like to point out, that’s impressive. The only trouble is that the earth, whose creation is the one Rabbi Isaac was talking about, is only about 4.5 billion years old.
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Hindu theologians don’t have to bother about trying to equate evolution with a young earth, since it’s a basic tenet of Hinduism that the world/universe and ourselves have been in existence forever. This presents different dilemmas, of course, since there’s no room for evolution if humans have been present since the start and in the same form as they are today.
One way of denying scientific information is to pretend that it’s telling you something else. The late-nineteenth-century Hindu philosopher Vivekananda (born Narendranath Dutta), who believed himself a scientific figure despite his resolute faith in reincarnation, attempted to perform this trick on the newly emergent Darwinism. There was, he claimed, a natural tendency for species to evolve toward higher ones: Just as apes had within them the potential to evolve toward human status, so were we in the process of evolving toward the Absolute. This ineffable natural principle obviated any notion of accommodation to the environment, so certainly wasn’t Darwinism; and it certainly wasn’t Lamarckism either, since any characteristics the newborn might have acquired came not from previous generations but from the individual’s previous incarnation(s). Yet it suited Vivekananda to pretend his ideas were but a hairsbreadth from those of the European evolutionists.
A little later, the Bengali nationalist Aurobindo Ghose produced a variant evolutionary idea that once again bears little relation to either Darwin or nature. Evolution, Aurobindo proposed, was the process whereby the World Spirit worked toward fulfillment via “progressively higher levels of consciousness, from [inanimate] matter to man to the yet-to-come harmonious ‘supermind’ of a socialist collective,” in the words of Meera Nanda.31
The modern face of Hindu Creationism is no product of the Indian subcontinent but, rather, of the US. At the forefront is the Hare Krishna movement, which has supported fundamentalist christian groups in the latter’s efforts to get Creationism or ID taught in schools. But the real buzz is Vedic Creationism, as promoted by Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, authors of such extraordinarily huge books as Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (1994) and Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory (2003). These texts give the impression of complete authoritativeness as they dissect, one by one, countless pieces of evidence that archaeologists supposedly regard as integral to the story they have constructed of our prehistory; with the official version thereby demolished, the hole in our knowledge can be filled by the version of prehistory devised by Cremo and Thompson—which is that humans like ourselves, and human societies similar to the ones we know today, have been in existence for some two billion years. Obviously this must be true, because the establishment account isn’t.
Archaeologists in droves have pointed out that the examples of archaeological evidence chosen as weak points by Cremo and Thompson are those very same items that archaeologists don’t rely upon, because they know they’re weak.
Central to the conceit of Vedic Creationism, which is derived from the Vedas and various other ancient writings, is the notion of atman, pure consciousness, which transmigrates through eternity in countless cycles of births and rebirths. All living creatures are devolved from atman; they are material forms adopted by atman. Physical evolution is not just rejected by the Vedic Creationists but regarded as an unimportant notion beside the truly significant matter of spiritual evolution. In this element we can see that, for all the pretensions to science of Cremo and Thompson, really the argument they’re putting forward is a religious one.
The Hare Krishna movement has realized the raison d’être of the ID movement is primarily to try to get Creationism into US classrooms, and that, if ID opens the door, then Vedic Creationism has good grounds for claiming equal treatment. There’s thus some degree of cooperation between the two movements, each declaring the “science” of the other has merit even though the two schools of thought are actually completely incompatible. Presumably the fact that both are anti-Darwinian is enough to satisfy believers that really they’re saying the same thing.