| | Boxer, Sarah. "Will Creationism Rise Again?"
Discover 8 (10): 80-85, October l987. [Subtitle:
The foes of evolution arm themselves for another
fight, convinced that God and what they call
science are on their side.]
[Boxer is a staff writer for Discover.]
This summer the United States Supreme Court
squelched the latest attck on biological evolution
by creationists, who believe that God created Earth
and life a few thousand years ago. In a 7-2
decision the justices resoundingly rejected a
Louisiana act requiring public schools that teach
"evolution science" to also teach "creation
science."
Justice William Brennan wrote in the majority
opinion that the state improperly sought to "employ
the symbolic and financial support of government to
achieve a religious purpose." Scientists,
educators, and civil libertarians cheered,
proclaiming an end to a war that had begun in 1925,
when the Scopes "Monkey Trial" led to laws that
forbade the teaching of evolution.
But are the celebrations premature? Does the court
ruling really mean that creationists have been
defeated?
"What else can they do?" says Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a longtime
champion of evolution and dogged foe of creation
science. For all intents and purposes, he says,
"it's all over."
But creationists, skilled at inventive
interpretation, read victory in the defeat. "The
decision itself was a decision against forcing
teachers to teach creationism in public schools,"
says Kenneth Cumming, a prominent voice for
creation science. "The opportunity to teach
creation is still there, it's still alive."
Wendell Bird, lead attorney for the creationists in
the recent court case, says that the decision
leaves open the right of teachers to teach "a
variety of scientific theories." There is also no
proscription against pressing textbook publishers
to include creationist accounts of the origins of
the Earth and biosphere. In the end, Cummings
says, there will always be another way to bring the
question back before the court--an increasingly
conservative court at that. The next development,
he predicts, will be a legal challenge "just like
the Scopes trial," but in reverse. A pro-
creationist teacher will teach creationism in a
public school--this in itself is perfectly legal--
and someone, a fervent atheist perhaps, will try to
stop him. In anticipation of such a fight, a
Creation Science Legal Defense Fund has even been
established. Ultimately the case would wind its
way through the courts and, if Cummings and his
colleagues have their way, give the creationists
the last hurrah.
Such optimism is based on a long-standing history
of survival and adaptability. All along,
creationists have been unusually adept at altering
their course to suit the winds of political change.
The Scopes trial took place in a time of strong
antiscientific sentiment. In 1935 the Religion and
Science Association, the first organized creation
science group, was formed. Three years later there
was a second group, the Creation-Deluge Society
(also known as the Society for the Study of Natural
Science). Despite the word science in their names,
these organizations were avowedly antiscientific.
They portrayed Scripture, spirituality, and
conservative values as the forces of good; science,
materialism, and modernism as the forces of evil.
Then, in 1968, when the Supreme Court rejected the
precedent that had been set by the Scopes trial and
ruled that laws banishing evolution from public
schools were unconstitutional, the creationists
changed their tune. They began to use not only the
word science but also its grammar and vocabulary.
Rather than argue that the biblical story of
creation should be taught as the word of God, they
said it should be taught as a science, as evolution
was. Using a tried-and-true debater's ploy to
justify this "balanced treatment," they didn't try
to prove that creationism was scientific but
instead crafted arguments to show that evolution
was equally unscientific. The creationists became
polished and slippery debunkers, picking apart the
evolutionary literature, pointing out gaps and
missteps. They were, and still are, a tough lot.
Now, once again, "creation scientists"--there are
said to be between 700 and 6,000 people who fit the
bill--are adapting their tactics to suit changing
times. The fundamental precepts remain the same.
Strict creationists have never strayed from the
belief that a few thousand years ago a Creator set
aside six days and in that time made the world and
every kind of animal and plant in it, just as is
written in Genesis. They still contend that man
was always man, dog dog, and cat cat. As for the
Earth's mountains, great stratified canyons,
petrified forests, beds of fossils, and deposits of
coal and oil, these cannot be the work of billions
of years because Genesis says the Earth is just a
few days older than life itself. All the Earth's
features were actually wrought by God's worldwide
flood and other, more recent catastrophes.
The new creationists are affirming their roots,
proclaiming that the Bible is "the true truth."
Rather than lashing out at the opposition, they are
building what they call a new kind of science to
buttress the Bible. In reality, however, what they
do is not science at all. The biblical truth comes
first; the science, come hell or high water, is
tortured to fit.
Nestled in a small mall on a dusty frontage road
that parallels U.S. Highway 67 in Santee,
California, is the unofficial nerve center of the
creation science movement, the Institute for
Creation Research (ICR), an affiliate of Christian
Heritage College. ICR has a library, a few
classrooms, and a small museum, but not much else
in the way of scientific accoutrements. It is home
to creationists old and new.
The older generation spend most of their time
reading, writing, debating, teaching, and making
missionary voyages to such places as Mexico,
Barbados, and South Korea. This group includes
ICR's founder, Henry Morris, who has a doctorate in
hydraulics from the University of Minnesota, and
Duane Gish, its sharpest debater, who holds a Ph.D.
in biochemistry from the University of California
at Berkeley. They insist that science itself is
responsible for their creationist beliefs and that
if the scientific evidence pointed toward
evolution, they would follow.
"If," says Gish, "there were intermediate forms in
the fossil record [fossils that are bridges between
existing types, such as a creature that was half
lizard, half bird, or the long-sought missing link
between man and ape], then I'd have to be an
evolutionist."
They are skilled polemicists. Ask them about
creationism and they'll tell you about evolution.
"We interpret what others are doing. We use the
facts they produce to show that evolution is not a
reasonable scientific conclusion," says Gish, whose
book is tellingly titled not Creation? The Fossils
Say Yes! but Evolution? The Fossils Say No! Gish,
Morris, and their colleagues think they can
legitimize their beliefs by showing that
evolutionary science is fallible. And so they wait
for the inevitable faltering step or admission of
weakness and then pounce. It is an easy pastime,
because science is a history of missteps and
revisions.
The new creationists, on the other hand, ignore the
evolutionists and strike out on their own, offering
convoluted observations of the natural world to
bolster biblical accounts.
Gerald Aardsma, who earned a doctorate in physics
at the University of Toronto and just joined ICR in
January, sees evidence everywhere for Adam and
Eve's fall from grace. "Why else," he asks, "would
the world contain repugnant things--a queen bee
that murders her sisters, baby fish born that won't
survive?" And what, asks Aardsma, is the second
law of thermodynamics, which says closed systems
tend to become more disordered, if not evidence
that the world we live in is winding down, as God
said it would? "If we found that everyone was
perfect and we could build a perpetual motion
machine, then we could say there was no Fall."
But, he adds, that's just not so.
Of all biblical concepts, none is more central to
the new creationists than the age of the Earth,
which the Bible puts at about 6,000 years. So a
key task of the new creation scientists is to
explain away the best evidence for the earth's old
age--its canyons, mountains, and so on--without
contradicting the Bible's contention that the Earth
is young. The job isn't easy. The creationists
have to conjure up incredible catastrophes that can
do millennnia of work in a day.
The biblical flood, of course, is the catastrophe
of choice. In one stroke this event accounts for
mountains, stratified canyons, and fossils of
creatures that modern man has never seen. John
Morris, son of the ICR founder and a biologist
trained at the University of Oklahoma, is searching
for evidence that the Flood occurred. He regularly
leads field trips to Mount Ararat to search for
Noah's Ark and to the Paluxy River in Texas to
study fossilized footprints that he believes prove
that man and dinosaur once coexisted.
At Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin, who has
a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, is
searching for evidence of the Earth's youth in a
flood that occurred there. When the volcano
erupted in 1980, part of the mountain slipped into
a lake, and water sloshed up the other side,
washing hundreds of trees into the lake. Soon the
bark slipped off the logs and they sank, forming an
organic mat on the lake bottom. Austin believes
that this mat will turn into coal in just a few
years, not the 65 million years posited by even the
most conservative geologic scenarios. So far,
though, there's no coal to be found in the lake
bed.
Austin is also trying to show that a flood can make
petrified forests. Such forests are often observed
to be stacked vertically, one on top of the other.
The best explanation, paleontologists believe, is
that as one forest was fossilized, another forest
grew over it and later turned it to stone. But his
interpretation poses an obvious problem for
creationists, because such a succession would have
taken more millennia than the Bible says the Earth
has seen.
So when Austin saw the logs sinking near Mount St.
Helens, he got an idea: while most logs sink
horizontally, others, ones with very heavy roots,
say, might sink vertically and become petrified in
that position. If this could happen, Austin
suggests, the layers of petrified forests could be
interpreted as evidence not of an old Earth but of
a worldwide flood.
Like Austin, Aardsma is trying to prove the youth
of the Earth. He says he can demonstrate that
radiocarbon dating, which shows life to be at least
tens of thousands of years old, is not reliable.
His argument is as dazzlingly coherent and
inventive as the plot of a spy novel--and far more
improbable. First, he points out that even though
radiocarbon dating is supposed to go back 35,000
years, its accuracy has been checked only as far
back as 3,000 B.C., through the independent dating
of mummy wrappings. And this, says Aardsma, is the
first clue that radiocarbon dating is not as neat
as it seems.
All living organisms contain carbon, and a known
proportion of it is rendered radioactive by the
bombardment of cosmic rays. In radiocarbon dating,
the age of fossils is estimated by determining how
much radiocarbon is left in them. The fossils with
the least are the oldest. This dating method works
because the radioactive carbon continues to decay
at a predictable rate long after the organisms die.
So why does Aardsma say it can't be trusted for
dates before 3000 B.C.? Before the Flood, he
explains, which occurred between 3500 and 2500
B.C., all the water that would innundate the Earth
to a depth of 30 feet was held in a vapor canopy
above the atmosphere--this being the waters of the
heavens, which God separated from the waters of the
Earth. This vapor canopy, he says, "would have
shielded the lower atmosphere from the cosmic
radiation [that produces radioactive carbon] by a
factor of three and thus reduced the amount of
radioactive carbon found in creatures that lived
before the Flood."
Given this argument, fossils with very little
radioactive carbon left may not be old at all.
They may simply come from a time when the Earth was
shielded from cosmic radiation. So radioacarbon
dating is completely unreliable. This neat little
story not only sabotages radiocarbon dating, it
also ties together three biblical events: the
recent creation of the Earth, the separation of the
waters of the Earth from the waters above, and the
Flood.
Aardsma concedes that it will be hard to prove the
presence of an antediluvian vapor canopy. "It's
possible that the idea of a vapor canopy will be
falsified," he says. If it is, though, he's not
going to toss out the Flood story. In a fashion
characteristic of the new creationists, Aardsma
says his conclusion would not be that the Bible was
wrong, but that his interpretation of it was
flawed. "I must be misunderstanding what's written
in Genesis. I've not made the plain sense
interpretation of Scripture. So I'll forsake that
path." In other words, any particular model of a
universal flood--a vapor canopy falling from the
sky, say--may be falsified, but the idea of the
Flood cannot be.
Kenneth Cumming, who has a doctorate in biology
from Harvard, is every bit as daring as Aardsma,
but like debunkers Gish and Morris, he delights in
pulling out the well-worn arguments against
evolution when guests come. Picking up a gigantic
replica of a quarter that serves as a paperweight
on his desk as ICR, he Socratically offers his own
version of the classic argument from design.
"Who made this?" Cumming asks. Man did. "How do
you know?" Because it looks like other man-made
quarters. "Are you more complex than this
quarter?" Yes, of course. "Then you must have
been made by something even more intelligent than
man himself--God." Q.E.D. Maybe a heap of garbage
can be created by random processes, he says. Not
people, though, not even doubters.
Cumming admits he lost his scientific
respectability when he cast his lot with the
creationists. And Aardsma, the epitome of the new
breed at ICR, says, "I don't care whether the whole
scientific community thinks I'm a fool." As he
sees it, establishment scientists in the United
States "will look just as silly" years from now as
the scientists who once said there were no such
things as meteorites. He believes that when he
interprets Scripture correctly, science will bear
him out. "What I'm asserting is that you will
never find science proving Scripture wrong," he
says.
Scripture, says Aardsma, is like having the answers
to a set of math problems before you start to solve
them. "You can work on a problem, but it's a great
consolation having the answers in the back of the
book." Consider the Bible's claim that man is
responsible for his sins even though God is
infinitely sovereign. This statement seems to
contain a logical contradiction. But Aardsma
thinks the paradox disappers if you assume it's
true and use the mathematical concept of infinity
to help you understand it. In mathematics, he
explains, if you substract any finite number from
infinity, you are still left with infinity. So,
"you can give man a finite amount of oontrol of his
life and that doesn't diminish the infinite
sovereignty of God."
The new creationists, in attempting to make
scientific hypotheses based on Scripture, seem to
take some awesome leaps, not of faith but of
interpretation. Events that are described
concisely in the Bible--the six-day Creation, the
Fall, and the Flood--beget strained and twisted
scientific scenarios. The Fall becomes the second
law of thermodynamics; the water above the
firmament becomes a vapor canopy; the Flood becomes
the vapor canopy falling to Earth.
Aardsma's own words, however, show best that there
really is no science in creation science: "I don't
build my world model on current scientific
consensus. I am better off saying 'God has spoken'
and resting my faith there."
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Origins Talk RBBS * (314) 821-1078
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405 North Sappington Road
Glendale, MO 63122-4729
(314) 821-1234
Also call: Students for Origins Research CREVO BBS
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