Brian Baxter *

September 2003

Imagine for a moment that you were the proud possessor of an infallible science textbook. Imagine further that you could contact the infallible author of this textbook at any time and receive guidance as to the book’s correct interpretation. With a system like this in place, you’d be pretty right, wouldn’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t keep putting your foot in it, blundering along all over the place and having to post long lists of your egregious errors on your Internet site. Now would you?

Answers in Genesis (AiG), Australia’s major creationist organisation, has such a textbook. It’s called the Bible, and its omniscient author is readily contactable through the medium of prayer. Now, everyone knows that God wouldn’t steer you wrong, so why does AiG need a web-page like www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp ?

This page contains an ever-expanding list of creationist arguments which AiG feels have passed their use-by date. These are divided into arguments which ’should definitely not be used’ (26 of these as at February 2003) and a further ten arguments which ‘are doubtful, hence inadvisable to use’.

AiG seems to think that its credentials as a respectable scientific research body are significantly improved by these admissions of past error. After all, ‘evolutionists continually revise their theories because of new data, so it should not be surprising or distressing that some creationist scientific theories need to be revised too.’

Barley, Charlie! There is no comparison between the constant refining of established scientific theories and AiG’s devastating attack on its own past. As will be seen, science may be pruning the roses but AiG is taking a chainsaw to its whole garden. With our list of ex-arguments in hand, let us revisit some creationist publications and conferences of earlier times and see if anything has been left standing.

The rise and fall of moon dust

Until 1997, AiG was known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF) and its flagship magazine was called Ex Nihilo (now entitled Creation). If we look through Ex Nihilo of February 1984 and chop out the bits dependent on abandoned arguments, this august journal looks like the puppies have been at it. Out goes the ‘Ordovician Hammer Report’, including a photo of the hammer found in 400 million year-old rock. According to AiG’s current thinking, items such as ‘gold chains found in coal’ are henceforth to be treated with reserve, bordering on disdain.

‘Moon dust’ also got a run in this issue, although AiG was already beginning to back away from this argument. Its current position is that:

For a long time, creationists claimed that the dust layer on the moon was too thin if dust had truly been falling on it for billions of years …But early estimates of dust thickness] were wrong … So the dust layer thickness can’t be used as proof of a young moon …

All references to ‘original scientific research in Paluxy River in Texas revealing human footprints in the same rock stratum with dinosaur tracks’ also have to go. Here, though, AiG wants to save something from the wreck:

Some prominent creationist promoters of these tracks have long since withdrawn their support. Some of the allegedly human tracks may be artefacts of erosion of dinosaur tracks …

But they’re not giving in without a fight:

However there is much evidence that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

AiG now regards as officially ‘doubtful’ the proposition that the speed of light has decreased over time (c decay). In that case they will also have to turf out Andrew Snelling’s blatant acceptance of Barry Setterfield’s work in this area:

That there is still a systematic pattern to the radiometric dates coinciding with the observed sequence of rock units has been explained by Setterfield as due to the decay in the speed of light …

And before we leave the February 1984 issue, does AiG still seriously maintain that aboriginal Australians practise a large number of Jewish customs, retaining traditions of Creation, Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel? Perhaps this offensive argument is one more that they could add to their list.

Collapse of the canopy

None of the other Ex Nihilos I looked at fared much better than the previous example. The October 1984 edition featured recent dinosaur sightings in the Congo, now presumably relegated to Paluxy status. Paluxy itself was pushed to the limit by CSF luminary Ken Ham:

Research by creationists such as Dr John Morris, Dr Clifford Wilson and Dr Carl Baugh has established that there are [human] footprints there that cannot be carvings.

Oh dear. Not only has Paluxy gone, but so has Carl Baugh. AiG’s position on Baugh is that ‘he’s well meaning but … he unfortunately uses a lot of material that is not sound scientifically. So we advise against relying on any “evidence” he provides …’

Back in 1984, Ken Ham’s article burbled happily on, telling us all about the aftermath of the deluge, when:

… the water canopy the Bible implies existed around the earth’s atmosphere up to the time of Noah’s Flood was gone.

Sorry, Ken, but the ‘water canopy’ argument has now been classified as ‘doubtful, hence inadvisable to use’, which rather undermines your entire position. Ham proceeded to identify Job’s ‘Leviathan’ as having been ’some form of fire-breathing dragon’; and asserted that ‘it could even be true that the Loch Ness Monster (if Nessie really exists) is a variety of Plesiosaur’. Again, the plesiosaur is persona non grata at the moment, with the dead one allegedly found near New Zealand (actually the decayed carcass of a basking shark) also on AiG’s hit list.

After the required excisions, this issue of Ex Nihilo now resembles a piece of Swiss cheese. Perhaps we should toddle off to a creationist conference or two in the hope of discovering some ‘infallible truths’.

Light relief

We might skip the Creation Science Weekend held at Moss Vale in June 1983, centring as it did on the work of Barry Setterfield, now on the nose, but then the ‘brilliant astronomer/physicist/full time Christian worker who is responsible for what is possibly the most sensational research discovery in the whole Bible/science field’ ie the slowing of the speed of light. Unfortunately, we’ll also miss a showing of the film Footprints in Stone, set around the Paluxy River: a ‘fast-moving documentary which shatters the widely-taught geologic table of evolution’.

Surely we’ll have better luck at the CSF Summer Institute held in Melbourne during January 1985. John Mackay (shortly to become a CSF ‘unperson’), kicked off proceedings by asking the question: can science investigate the past? Briefly, said Mackay, ‘the answer is No’. Perhaps this is an infallible truth as it does not appear on AiG’s dump-list, but the audience may as well have gone home after this, so replete was the conference with now-discarded creationist arguments. Clifford Wilson banged on about Paluxy, while Barry Setterfield told everyone about c decay and moon dust, ‘another pointer to a “young” creation.’

It’s the same story with most creationist conference reports, dating right back to the 1970s. Most of these ‘theories’ are really more like ‘wild surmises’, in which a momentarily surprising observation is rapidly exaggerated out of all proportion to its significance. Audiences at these lectures and seminars wasted huge amounts of time and money listening to pseudo-scientific ideas with very brief half-lives.

Gish and the Second Law

A case in point is Dr Duane Gish’s lecture tour of Australia in 1975. Gish was at that time Associate Director of the Institute for Creation Research in California and his visit was organised by the Evolution Protest Movement, a precursor of CSF/AiG. A key element of Gish’s argument on this and many subsequent occasions was the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

Gish maintains that … evolution is less scientific than creation because it contradicts some of our best-established natural laws. If the particles-to-people evolution theory is true, matter must have the inherent ability to self-organise … into even higher and higher levels of complexity …The Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the basic laws of science, describes just the opposite tendency. All natural, spontaneously occurring processes result in a loss of order. The universal tendency is to go from the complex to the simple, from order to disorder. Evolution would require just the opposite.

Creationist bodies elaborated the argument over the years, so that the Second Law was postulated as having begun to operate when Adam and Eve fell from grace in Eden. But guess what now appears on the AiG’s ‘Definitely Don’t Use These Arguments’ list?

‘The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall’. This law says that the entropy (’disorder’) of the Universe increases over time, and some have thought that this was the result of the Curse [of God on Adam and his heirs ie humanity]. However, disorder isn’t always harmful. An obvious example is digestion, breaking down large complex food molecules into their simple building blocks …A less obvious example to laymen might be the sun heating the Earth … Finally, all beneficial processes in the world, including the development from embryo to adult, increase the overall disorder of the universe, showing that the Second Law is not inherently a curse.

This concession cuts a swathe through the content of innumerable creationist lectures and conferences. Although the above is a variant on Gish’s long-discredited argument, the creationist message has always been that: (a) there was nothing good about the Second Law, and that it involved inevitable decay; and (b) that its operation entirely precluded the process of evolution. AiG supporters cling fondly to their pet theories - a recent issue of Creation refers to readers ‘pining’ for their old moon-dust argument - and they’ll be howling at the moon for this one.

Gish also regularly claimed that transitional forms proposed by evolutionary theory were ‘non-existent, since gaps between the higher categories of plants and animals are systematic.’ This situation directly supported creationist theory and contradicted evolution.

AiG is now backing away from such claims at the speed of light - or at least a decayed version of it. ‘There are no transitional forms’ is now defunct:

Since there are candidates, even though they are highly dubious, …[We should say] instead: ‘While Darwin predicted that the fossil record would show numerous transitional fossils, even 140 years later, all we have are a handful of disputable examples.’

From a historical point of view, and despite the qualifications attached to it, I would class this as a major retreat by AiG. Over recent years it has been most interesting to observe this group gradually incorporating the language of evolution into its ideology. It may come as a surprise to some Skeptics to learn that ‘creationists accept natural selection as an important part of the Creation/Fall framework’, that ‘new species have been observed to form’ and that in some situations ‘beneficial mutations’ do occur. Despite the spin which AiG imparts to statements like these, one wonders how much more ground they can yield without attracting charges of apostasy from sterner souls within their movement.

Conclusion

Since creationism is a pseudo-science, it should come as no surprise to learn that most of AiG’s ideas are wrong. However, it is a little surprising to see the group carefully gathering its gaffes together and posting them on the Internet. Writing in the unrelated field of Holocaust Studies, Robert Jan van Pelt has drawn attention to the ‘crazed positivism’ of believers:

The assumption that the discovery of one little crack will bring the whole building down is the fundamental fallacy of Holocaust Denial.

Creationists, too, seek little cracks in the structure of evolution, which ultimately form the basis of blooper-lists like the one I have looked at here. Still, they shouldn’t have to worry for too much longer. Harking back to 1986, we have it on the authority of Prof. John Rendle-Short, former Chairman of CSF that:

… It is now clear that on the scientific level the theory of evolution is rapidly losing ground. Some non-creationists predict that it will be abandoned within 20 years.

So that would be in 2006 then.

References

Creation, various issues

Ex Nihilo, various issues, esp. February and October 1984

Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial (Granta. 2001)

Life, the Universe and Everything … Supp. to Creation Science Prayer News April 1983

New Life, 14 August 1975, 17 January 1985, 6 February 1986

(This article was originally published in The Skeptic Autumn 2003 (Vol. 23, No. 1).
Republished with permission.)