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Biological Facts Versus Biblical Literalism
This page consists of an article found on another site combined with a post taken from a Secular Web evolution/creation discussion forum. The article, Things Creationists Hate, is mostly but not completely focused on biology. The post is completely devoted to biology. The post contains twenty-nine examples of biological structures or processes which fundamentalist creationists have a very hard time explaining. There is some repetition between the two sections.
The Things article, in its original form, was not always clear as to whether the information was quoted directly or paraphrased from contributers, so I was not sure how to format some of the information for this page. For any questions about this, please contact the article's author, or see the original version of the article.
For more information on this topic, please see Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Evidence for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature and Organisms that Look Designed.
Things Creationists Hate
written by Jerry Riggins
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 genera 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 or design 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 ot 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!
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.
The Scientific Method
Creationists detest it so much that they've apparently invented
their own, improved version, with the following highly logical rules:
-
Take as a given fact all those parts of the Bible we tell
you to.
-
Use not the null hypothesis; make no attempt to disprove
any creationist hypothesis; report not any negative findings.
-
Quote as authoritative anything a fellow creationist writes,
regardless of his qualifications or subsequent discrediting of his methods
or results.
-
Misquote or quote out of context famous "evolutionists" so
that they appear to admit evolution isn't real.
-
Don't waste
your time with actual laboratory
or field experiments.
All the answers are in the Bible.
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.(It
even detoured into the bowels for awhile!)
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.
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!
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 some time since then it evaporated. Anybody who
says different is a mealy-mouthed evolution-sympathizer.
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:
-
Dinosaurs were too big to go on the Ark, so they got buried
in the mud of the Flood. (How about extinct smaller creatures--and what
about the "fact" that Noah collected pairs of all animals?)
-
Extinct creatures were on the Ark. They died out later.
(How many seismosaurs, T. rexes, mastodons, and megatheria can you fit
on the head of a pin? And why rescue them if their immediate future reads
"extinction"?)
-
Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by Satan and/or
materialistic science.
-
Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by God
to test your faith. (And I will go to hell for falling for a trick pulled
by the Almighty Himself? Doesn't that seem just a bit petty?)
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!
UPDATE! The source of "transitional"
fossils has been revealed! Click here!
Human Embryos
...especially very small ones, actually have tails and
gill slits. So do all mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish embryos.
One would almost think they are related somehow. Thank goodness for modern
Creation Science, which has taught us how to ignore, deny, or find some
rationalization (anything at all will do) to explain away this and all other
evidence of evolution. (Yes, Ernst Haeckel fudged his diagrams
of embryos to emphasize the similarities among the youngest ones. But
he didn't make up the tails and gill
slits. They're there. Look closely at some of your favorite
fetus photos. Quit writing me about this until you've done your
homework.)
Unusual Babies
...with such birth anomalies as being born with a tail,
or covered with fur. Tails are more common than most people realize, since
they are, of course, surgically removed immediately, and often the child
himself is never told. For furry people, refer to the famous Mexican family,
several of whom are circus performers. These would, of course, be some of
the "throwbacks" which creationists assert must, of course, occur if
evolution is real. But since evolution is, of course, not true, the good
creationist, upon being presented the very evidence he demanded, will, of
course, not be fazed in the slightest.
Of course.
A small footnote:
back in the good old days, when everyone was a literal-creationist, and
religion was science (known as the Dark Ages,
with good cause), such babies were identified as the spawn of Satan, and
killed instantly, along with their mothers, who were, naturally,
witches.
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?
Their Own Coccyges
...when examined closely via X-rays or a prepared
skeleton, look disturbingly like the vestigial remnants of tails. They
certainly serve no purpose nowadays (or very little--the few muscular
attachments they still have could easily be re-engineered onto a less
vulnerable structure), and if you've ever
broken yours, you've probably wondered why we were Created with such a
useless source of potential agony. (Besides, coccyx sounds downright obscene.)
Their Appendixes
Same problem as the coccyx, only it's even more likely
to cause the average creationist great discomfort, and occasionally death. The scientifically literate, when cursed
with appendicitis, might bewail the incomplete evolution that has left him
with a useless and sometimes dangerous abdominal organ. Perhaps the
creationist praises his Creator for blessing him with a "cross to bear".
(Part of the Improving the Gene Pool Project: If you're a
young-Earth creationist, the next time you have an attack of acute
appendicitis, or better yet a ruptured appendix, rush with it to the nearest
Peter Popoff Healing Crusade. Stay away from those modern "doctors",
who actually think we're mammals. And for those folks
who have heard that the appendix may serve some role in endocrine or immune
functions, in the words of Carl Drews, "something that explodes and kills
people is definitely a mixed blessing, even if it does help somewhat with
immune functions." Folks whose "god-given" appendixes have been
removed don't seem to suffer from their absence, and I've never met one who
wished he had it back.)
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 suppose men (gasp) evolved the extra rib? Is this a classic case of
cretinist "micro-evolution"?
CREATIONISTS: Why do
you keep writing me to explain how stupid this idea is and how I can't
inherit my father's amputated arm? This isn't my idea. Go rag on your
"brethren"!
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 Devil
created viruses.
- Viruses are
not in the Bible because they are "imperfect".
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.
The Cause of Cancer
And who wouldn't hate that? But I don't mean the
carcinogens that set it off, like tobacco tars, asbestos, or ultraviolet
light; I mean the root cause that makes it possible for things like those to
start cancers growing. And that cause turns out to be evolution in action! A
cancer starts when a carcinogen, or sometimes just a random accident, causes
a mutation in a gene of one cell. That mutation "switches on" genes that are
normally "off", and makes the cell start reproducing wildly, as though it
were an embryonic cell, and not a dedicated part of an adult body. A mutation is one unit of evolution. In this case it
is harmful, but the ability to mutate is so
valuable to DNA--it lets it adapt to new
conditions--that mutability itself cannot be given up, even if it sometimes
produces fatal cancer. It also produces all the diversity of life. It is
perhaps significant (it makes evolutionary sense) that cancers in people are very rare until after their
peak reproductive years.
The Hair on the Backs of Their
Necks
...which stands up at
the very thought that their children might
actually be exposed to an evil-lutionist at
school. When they stop to think why the hair on the backs of their necks should stand up, at that or any terrifying
situation, the only explanation that makes sense is that it's a vestigial
reaction inherited from our mammal ancestors. Other mammals' hair rises in
response to "hair-raising experiences" as a defense. It's a warning sign of
aggression, and may make the animal look bigger and fiercer. We've
apparently given up that signal, maybe in favor of words or other body
language. About the only trace left is that creepy feeling about nape of the
neck and scalp, which is almost impossible for others to see.
-suggested by Ron
Tolle
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).
-suggested by Ron Tolle
Goosebumps
(the bumps, not the books [although many creationists
hate those "occult" books, too]) Goosebumps were obviously "created" to
erect and "fluff up" the hair or fur on a hairy or furry mammal ancestor,
thereby improving its insulation value against the cold. Since most of us
nowadays have so little body hair as to render it useless for insulation
purposes, goosebumps are another vestigial reaction whose tool (fur) is no
longer with us.
- A
creationary epiphany:
Since God wouldn't create a useless bodily function, goosebumps
were originally useful. Adam and Eve had FUR! (For folks who have stockpiled food
and weaponry in anticipation of the Coming Race War, an epiphany is a sudden realization of a great
truth.)
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 the latest giant telescops), 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? 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...
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?
Wisdom
Teeth
Steven Gay reminds us that wisdom teeth are a bit of a
problem for modern humans--and
any parts of our bodies that serve no purpose, are in the way, or are
just more trouble than they're worth are a bit of a problem for creationists to
rationalize. Why would a Master Creator give us more teeth than will fit
in our jaws? I don't think I know anybody who has had all four third molars
grow into place with the others and serve as useful chewing teeth. In some people
they never erupt. My top two grew out, but having no bottom ones to
work against, they were useless for chewing (and a potential source of cavities, hence their
uncomfortable and expensive removal). A great many people simply have to have them
removed or suffer severe dental problems--because modern jaws are just too
small to accommodate third molars. Wisdom teeth make sense as evolutionary
leftovers (probably in the process of evolving away entirely). What sense
can creationists make of them (especially if one lives to the biblically
promised threescore and ten)? (Thanks to the folks who have written
to me to tell me that they have all four functional third molars. All
have noted that they and their dentists recognize that they are rare
exceptions.)
The Last Little Piggy
...the one who went, "Wee, wee, wee!" all the way home.
(For those with deprived childhoods, I'm talking about little toes). They're
one more body part that is in the way, all too easily injured, and, when you
stop to think about it, useless. We don't use them in walking. In parts of
the world where people go barefoot most of the time, little toes missing
through accident or disease are quite common, and don't hinder the person's
mobility at all. Think we need them for balance or something? Our
cloven-hoofed fellow mammals get by with two toes on the ground. Horses
manage to be mighty fast with just one! Predatory mammals generally put four
down. Do we need the extra because we're bipedal? Ostriches are on their
feet all day and can outrun anybody I know--how many toes do they
use?
Think about it:
other primates have prehensile toes. Kids notice right away that monkeys
really have four hands. A fifth digit is pretty
useful if you're scrambling through branches (and secondarily manipulating
objects). Our little fingers are truly useful and probably in no danger of
disappearing. But we quit climbing in trees with our rear "hands" and they
became feet--which explains why they have useless fifth digits.
And while we're
at it...
Doggie toes
What is that thing hanging
off the back of your dog's lower leg? It's his "dewclaw", and it's entirely
useless. On some dogs it's so much in the way that it's surgically removed.
It's not a result of selective breeding, either. Cats have 'em, wolves have
'em, tigers have 'em. What would it possibly be except a now-useless fifth
toe, in the process of disappearing through evolution?
Lower Back Pain
Kate Harrop-Allin asks the perceptive question:
Why should this
condition afflict such a huge percentage of the adult population (I
read somewhere that more working days were lost for this than for almost any
other reason) when we were supposedly
"created" in our present bipedal form?
Other associated
problems with our relatively recently-acquired bipedalism (that other
animals don't seem to have trouble with):
- extreme
difficulty in childbirth
- varicose
veins
- arthritis
....... all of which indicate that we evolved, and
quite recently too, from an animal that was predominantly
quadrupedal.
Humility
I have determined, after extensive surveying,
tabulation, and data analysis, that the average creationist in the U.S.
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.
(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.)
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:
- human footprints
alongside dinosaurs
- human artifacts
found among dinosaur bones
- a geological
column that is almost never in the "proper" order described by
geologists
- proof from all
over the world of a worldwide Flood
- the "NASA
computer" that revealed the "extra day" when the sun stopped to give the
Israelites more time to conquer Jericho
- the deep hole
geologists drilled and then had to fill in hurriedly when they heard the
screams from Hell
- Darwin's
"deathbed recantation" (the "Lady Hope" story)
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!)
Their own eyes
...defeat them doubly. First, creationists trot out that
old saw about how nothing as complex as an eye could evolve in stages, since
a half-eye is no good at all. Darwin himself trounced that one roundly by
merely observing that there are creatures alive today with eyes in all
"stages of development", from a few light-sensitive cells, to a cup-shaped
receptor with no proper lens, to eagle eyes far sharper than ours. Other
creatures seem to get along fine with half-eyes and even 1/100 eyes.
Then for the final
insult, human (the pinnacle of creation) eyes are clearly an engineering
mistake! The retinas are inside out. The nerves and blood vessels come out
through the light-sensitive area of the retina,
producing a blind spot, then spread over the front of the light-receptor
cells, so that light has to get past the fibers into the receptors. Why
aren't the nerves and capillaries behind the
receptors, where they would be out of the way and there would be no need for
a blind spot? Squid eyes are arranged just that
way. Since ours aren't, one is reminded of the maxim that evolution has to
work with the materials at hand, adapting systems already in place, with
results that often seem jury-rigged or needlessly complicated. Would an
Ultimate Engineer make such an obvious blunder, especially having got it
right in creatures created earlier?
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.
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.
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. (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.
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? (Another
one that my creationist emailers have been strangely silent on.)
Their Own Fingers
The problem is, there are five. That puts us firmly in
the mammal "family" (layman's term). All other mammals have five digits per
limb, or the vestigial remains thereof, or we can trace the gradual
shrinkage and loss of digits through the fossil record (as with horses). But
the principal remains: Mammals have five digits--even when there's no good reason. Why should whales
have the bones of exactly five digits buried in their flippers? Why should
bats have wings seeming awkwardly stretched over exactly five fingers?
"Similarity of design"? Oh, come on. The "Designer" found more efficient
ways of making aquatic fins and wings for other creatures.
Same old song:
the commonality of five digits among the mammal family makes sense only if we are all descendants of a five-digited
ancestor. Some of us mammals have good use for five digits, some have
already got rid of a few, and some of us are still stuck with useless ones
(like dolphins). Remember, that's what a family is: descendants of a common
ancestor.
-suggested by Kjetil Furnes
Snake Hips and Whale Pelvises
No, I haven't finally gone around the bend. Although
there's not a trace left on the outside, boas, pythons, and blind snakes all
have completely useless vestigial hipbones buried in their bodies. So do
whales. Now why would an as-is Creation ex
nihilo include creatures with functionless bones that really look like the evolutionary leftovers of lost
limbs?
Sandy Petersen adds the
following: Pythons and boas actually have tiny vestigial claws on either
side of their cloacas, which are [associated with] their useless hips. So
you can pick up any python (I suggest a small one, like my family's pet ball
python), turn it over, and SEE the tiny useless claws that would never ever
be there if snakes had been designed "from scratch".
Chicken Legs
"The lower part of a chicken's legs are not covered by
fur, hair or feathers. What's there? Scales. Is this a sign of their
evolutionary past when they evolved from their reptilian ancestors? I think
this solves the chicken or the egg riddle: the egg came first in the form of
the chicken's ancestors."
-verbatim from Jim Lobach
Male Nipples
My grandfather, down on the farm, used to have a quaint
expression, usually leveled at some lazy individual: as useless as the tits on a
boar. Creationists, think hard and send me a carefully reasoned
answer explaining why God would create both boars and men (and all other
male mammals) with useless nipples (which can even be dangerous--men can get breast cancer). The simple
biological-evolutionary answer is that as embryos we are all structurally
female first, including proto-breast tissue. Only later in fetal development
do the male hormones kick in and modify the feminine genital structures into
the masculine. But we men are left with useless breast tissue and nipples,
which never get the hormonal signal at puberty to develop into functioning
organs. The whole thing seems a messy and cobbled-up system for producing
two sexes. Why in Heaven's name would a Designer worth His salt come up with
so inefficient a system, with useless (and sometimes dangerous) parts left over? (Evidence of our heritage: in
some of our more "primitive" relatives gender is changeable throughout life.
Some species of fish and reptiles can switch genders without the help of a
Danish surgeon. They just respond to environmental cues.)
-suggested by David Pickering...but hey, I was thinking of it too!
Further bad engineering: Testicles which have to
"descend" from their point of origin within the body (where they start out
as ovaries), and sometimes fail to, causing difficulty and embarassment.
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?
-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.")
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.
-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.
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. 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.)
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...
"...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."
"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 394 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.
Blind
Cave Fish
...and other cave critters
that still have vestigial but absolutely useless eyes. Evolution can
be that sloppy, but can a perfect Creator?
-Donald Wilson
The
Lord's Honesty
Don also recalls a
verse in the Bible which he paraphrases as:
"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
The
Missing Laws
David from Alaska
asks:
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
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.
-suggested by Tony Leff
Convergent Evolution
And once again, from down under:
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."
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!
-David Bailey
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 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.
Their Own Hemoglobin
If hemoglobin (the chemical in your blood
that makes it red and carries oxygen) were designed by God, it was
designed to have far too much affinity for carbon monoxide. This great
affinity has resulted in countless deaths.
Carbon monoxide is a colorless and odorless gas. This is, if anything, an
even nastier bit of "design". At the very least, carbon monoxide could have
been given a smell to help warn us (unless the Designer was constrained by
the laws of chemistry--surely no impediment). It remains one of life's traps
for the unwary, with its victims often being infants in poorly ventilated
winter homes. Or perhaps it is just one of evolution's quirks, a chance
attraction which natural selection has not eliminated because there is too
little selection pressure against it. Evolution can play seemingly malicious
tricks (think about it: the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning is such
a recent development in our evolutionary history that we have acquired no
ability to detect it), but could a Perfect Designer?
-suggested by Roger
Scott
Pseudogenes
Pseudogenes (also known as junk DNA) were discovered in
1994. They are remnants of genes that no longer function but continue to be
carried along in DNA as excess baggage. Pseudogenes also change through
time, as they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, and they offer an
especially useful way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships. The more
remote the last common ancestor of two organisms, the more dissimilar their
pseudogenes will be. When the pseudogenes of a human and a chimpanzee are
compared, the differences are relatively few. Slightly more differences are
present when comparing the pseudogenes of a human with those of a rodent.
Yet more disparity is evident between the pseudogenes of a human and
those of, say, wheat. This is compelling evidence for an evolutionary origin
of Homo sapiens.
-from Steven Mahone
Vitamin C
Roger Scott has discovered that God is a dog's best
friend:
Humans must have vitamin C in their
diets. Without it they will develop scurvy and eventually die from vitamin C
deficiency. Apparently we have a pseudogene for producing vitamin C. Dogs,
on the other hand, have the real thing. Their copy of the gene actually
works, and they do not need vitamin C in their diets. They make it
themselves.
Roger believes this shows how much
more God loves dogs than humans. Being omniscient, God knew in advance that
sailors on long sea voyages would suffer terribly, but did nothing about it.
God made sure that dogs on these voyages would not suffer. Ships' mutts were
looked after, but not the sailors.
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:
[In Paul's words] Genesis 1
and 2 do not conflict, provided that you remember that Moses and the
partiarchs 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.
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:
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 order of the
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 1068-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.
And a further suggestion from
Jay Laudig:
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.)
The Tower of
Babel
Along with Noah's Ark and
several other patently silly stories (in the light of modern understanding),
that creationists purport to love, I suspect that they wish they didn't have
to defend such myths as the Tower of Babel. Werner Guilford asks the
following:
The bible
story of why humanity speaks thousands of different languages ranks right up
there with the story of Santa Claus and the stork bringing the
children. A nice bedtime story for the kids, were it not for the
tendency to blame a vengeful deity. Somebody has to set the record
straight and absolve God from all responsibility in this case. Let's give it
a try.
To start with, we have to
make the fairly safe assumption that the Babylonians at that time were not
the most stupid people on the face of the Earth. The assumption is safe,
since they managed to have an empire, albeit a modest one, had a written
language, kept books, etc. So, if they were not stupid, then:
- Why did they want to build a tower and waste a
tremendous amount of resources to peek into the living room of a god they
didn't even believe in?
- Why would they build a
tower in the lowlands when they could get ahead by starting on the top of a
mountain a few hundred kilometers north?
- Why try
building a huge tower in the lowlands [except perhaps for defensive walls]
where every brick had to be made from mud, ?
-
Finally, why would any god not just have a tremendous belly laugh at the
futility of his subjects? [And why has
God not responded similarly to modern skyscrapers--or are we expected to
believe that the pile of mud bricks was way higher? And why would God even
care, unless He actually did live just a few hundred feet overhead, and a
human who reached His home could seriously challenge His supremacy?
RJR]
Well, at least we
can answer that question. There is absolutely no humor in the Bible (or any
other religious text that I know of). It's tough being a god--you are
not allowed to laugh.
And Eric Goodemote adds the tag-line:
It's quite odd that
the Chinese, in their 8000 year recorded history, failed to mention [the
collapse of the tower] in any of their chronicles. Perhaps they were too
busy cleaning up after the global flood, which they also forgot to
mention.
Digitized Natural Selection
Computer scientists (and the big corporations that pay
them), have started doing what nature has been doing all along. To arrive at
some good-enough solutions to some practically intractable problems (the
kind that would take a Cray supercomputer the probable life of the universe
to solve--like the absolute best design for a new airliner), they teach a
computer to try a bunch of random solutions. Most will be worthless or
impractical. Some will work a little better than most. The best ones are
allowed to produce "offspring" with random modifications. Most of these
won't be improvements, and many will be worse than the "parents". A few may
be slightly better, however, and they will be allowed to reproduce for
another "generation". Continue this for enough generations, and the end
product will be a decent solution. It probably won't be the theoretical best
(a quality which couldn't be determined without solving the original
unsolvable problem), but it will be workable.
This is exactly analogous to natural selection, so of course "it can't
possibly work" since "random mutations can only be harmful". Sorry, but it
works so well in nature that it has produced hummingbirds and eagles, and so
well in the R & D department that it is being used to design
aircraft!
The Two
Great Lights
Chris Hobson has a few
quibbles regarding the "two great lights" created early on in Genesis, which
everyone understands to mean the Sun and Moon:
The Moon is in fact not a light at all, but merely
reflects the light of the Sun. It was also created in order to "rule the
night", but actually spends half of the time in the daytime sky, where it is
more often than not invisible. It is not really all that great in
astronomical terms, either, being a mere 2,159 miles in diameter. The sun
does qualify as a light, but again not a very great one, being a tiny,
insignificant little star, just 865,000 miles in diameter. Betelgeuse is
250,000,000 miles in diameter and 15,000 times brighter than the Sun, Rigel
is 60,000 times brighter than the Sun. [If the Sun is "great", then what
term should be applied to stars like those? RJR] Genesis 1:18 states that
one of the purposes of these heavenly bodies is "to separate the light from
the darkness" which I thought God had already taken care of in verse 4. So
in conclusion, of the two great lights, neither of them is great [compared
to objects in the same category] and only one of them is a light. This is
not very good going for a book which is claimed to be literally true and
scientifically accurate.
The
Plantaris Muscle
Dr. Richard Brown of
Bristol, UK, submits the following:
Ever
since I first dissected the Plantaris muscle in the human calf as a medical
student I have been a convinced evolutionist. In the monkey it is a useful
muscle which causes all the digits to flex at once, thus is useful in
swinging from trees by the feet. In the human it is atrophied, may be
absent, and does not even reach the toes, but disappears into the Achilles
tendon.
There is no sensible
reason for its existence in the human except a common ancestry with monkeys.
Try telling that to a
creationist, however. In my experience they change the subject!
The Poor
Fossil Record
Once again,
creationists' logic arises to bite them in the hindquarters:
Creationists often use the paucity of the fossil record
as evidence against evolution, claiming that if the world were millions of
years old, and life on Earth had evolved over such a vast period of time,
then you should expect to find billions upon billions of fossilized
organisms. This, as they are more than happy to point out, is not the
case [but it is a typical creationist straw man -RJR]. But lack of
preservation is exactly what you would expect
under natural conditions, as the chances of a decaying organism hanging
around long enough to be preserved are remote.
However, if the fossil record were
the result of a global flood, then high rates of preservation would be expected, as all organisms were subjected
to the same conditions. Remember that
sedimentation rates were mindblowing fast (fast enough to form the Grand
Canyon in a year!) Analysis of varves also demonstrates that thousands of acres
of sediment would have to have been laid down every second, so organisms
would have been buried before they even had the chance to decay. Under
these conditions you would expect to find
billions of perfectly preserved organisms, but as any creationist will tell
you, the fossil record is actually very poor. Doh!
-Stu Killick
Alternative Creationist Explanations
Every
couple of years it seems there's a new crop of creationist "solutions" to
the problem of why the Earth and universe appear to be ancient, and why
there seems to be a record of evolutionary change. Some appear under the
guise of "scientific creationism", while others just seem to pop out of the
wacky corner. From Velikovsky's fabulous "comet" to visits by
extraterrestrials, nearly everything has been tried to "prove" the veracity
of the Genesis story. Again, the fact that almost anything, no matter how
silly, will be offered up by creationists should indicate that
they are grasping at straws--and that's what they get. Chris, for
instance, has heard the following:
The
Almighty created this world from the remains of other planets where He had
been experimenting. Therefore, all the extinct animals and fossils are
fossils from those test planets. I suppose that He was also careful to
layer them neatly in the strata, in order, from simplest to most complex,
from bottom to top. [This was declared by the same person] who tells
us that the Grand Canyon was carved by Satan himself to confuse us.
Consequently, my amazement and awe of the Adversary's artistic abilities never cease every time I
venture into the Utah and Arizona deserts!
A theological question for creationists: will a person
with such wrong beliefs (not the standard creationist teaching) go to hell
along with us evolutionists? Or will that person be welcomed into the
Presence, because it doesn't matter what nonsense he or she believes, so
long as it's not evolution?
Shark Reproduction
J. E.
Hill has a few questions for the Guy Who created sharks:
Some sharks lay eggs,
such as the horned shark; some sharks produce eggs which actually
hatch inside of them, such as the gray, nurse and whale sharks; some
sharks are placental, having live young, such as the great white and
hammerhead.
This seems so
uneconomical for an intelligent designer or grand creator to spend
his/her/its time on when one would type would have been sufficient. Unless
there is another explanation. Additionally, some snakes, such as the
rattler, also have live young, while the majority of reptiles lay
eggs. How did an intelligent designer determine which would and
wouldn't?
The Joshua Business
Mike,
along with many others, is disturbed by the case of Josua bar Nun vs. The
Sun:
Okay....I will forgive Joshua for describing the Sun
standing still in the sky...poetic license, but I will not forgive him for
saying the Earth stopped rotating on its axis, which would cause
entire continents to buckle and tumble over each other and tidal waves the
likes of which no Hollywood movie could produce. [Don't get it?
Try swinging a bucket of water on a rope in a circle over your head. It'll
be going a few miles an hour. Now stop it quickly by, say, hitting a tree.
What happens to the water? The Earth is mostly covered with water and the
equator rotates at over 1,000 mph. Think about it. RJR] But let's, for the sake of argument,
say that God did this. Let's say that God stretched out his hand
and slowly stopped the axis (totally negating the laws of inertia and
centrifugal force not once but twice [for the restart], in such a way that
no local effects were noted by humans). Why? So that one band of men
could massacre another band of men, women and children whose
land they wanted to steal?
Astronomy
...in general. It's wrong about everything. Starting at
least as far back as Ptolemy, astronomers have continued to describe the
heavens in terms that increasingly have rendered the Genesis cosmology
irrelevant. Things really started to go to hell with Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, and their ilk. Nowadays the things astronomers teach are so foreign
to the Truth and involve such hard math that they're impossible to
understand... oops, I mean they're complete lies. I mean, come on-- the Big
Bang, the speed of light, "light years", the sizes of stars, billions of
years-- it makes my head hurt. You want to know what's in the sky? Read
Genesis! Especially stay away from them "professors" who directly mock
biblical Truth about the skies. One even calls himself The Bad
Astronomer! Don't that tell you somethin'?
Catalysts
"Irreducible complexity"? Bite on this from Aaron
Cosier:
We hear a lot about "irreducible
complexity" from the creationist compound these days. A heavily used example
is the complexity of proteins, their ease of inactivation by single
mutations, and their low probability of "flying together in the vacuum of
space."
But....
many of
these "irreducibly complex" proteins catalyse reactions that every
biochemistry student has mimicked in undergrad practicals with a simple
organic compound, a chelating agent, or a dissolved metal ion. Admittedly,
these substitutes are less specific in their behavior, and generally much
slower, but the fact remains that in a biochemical system many complex
components can have simple substitutes, i.e.
the complexity can be reduced.
These harmless subjects of
high school chemistry and beyond would hardly seem to be dangerous to
anybody's uneducated beliefs, but then, how would they know?
Penicillin...and its
numerous derivatives.
The last fifty years or
so has seen an astounding increase in the amount of penicillin produced
by various means, and a corresponding increase in resistance displayed
by bacteria. A somewhat educated creationist might argue that some bacteria
have always been resistant to penicillin, and were the only ones that could
live near penicillin-producing molds, hence the present resistant strains
are simply the product of a shift in the frequencies of that particular gene
(a bit like the moth colors). A more perceptive person might then ask about
the various synthetic penicillins. While based
on the original penicillin, these are almost uniformly designed (using a
rather haphazard, trial-and-error approach, which works) to be resistant to
the enzymatic activity that confers penicillin resistance. These chemicals
have never before existed on the face of the earth, and yet after a while
bacteria gradually become resistant. Why is it so?
Careful examination of the
genes of these bacteria reveals a disturbing fact--that the sequence of the
gene for resistance is different! That additional copies are present! It
would seem that a basic mechanism of evolution is confirmed by these
observations: that new characters can arise and, if favored, can increase in
numbers.
-Aaron Cosier
Artificial Selection
Neven
Morgan submits an obvious one that I've never got around to writing up, so
I'll let him handle it (this one was a major part of Darwin's case in Origin):
We often hear that "if evolution were true, why aren't
species changing now? Why aren't monkeys becoming humans as we speak? Why
aren't new species evolving? Huh?"
The easiest answer I can think
of is: Have you ever seen various breeds of dogs, horses, etc.? How about
kinds of flowers, fruits, shrubbery? Do you think these were around , say,
4000 years ago? Don't you remember some of them being created just last (and
even this) century? Humans are merely helping evolution by being a strong
factor in selection--and please, don't call purposeful (i.e. by people) selection "unnatural"--I consider
myself perfectly "natural". So if we can create, say, a shih tzu out of
a wolf in such a short time, guess how much can happen in millions and
millions of years. And don't tell me it's different because "people are
doing it on purpose, and nature can't and ergo didn't 'know' what it was
doing"--do you think that our ancestors actually KNEW that by keeping
the animals they would eventually create a Holstein cow?
You've put your
finger on it, Neven. Creationists: why are there no wild
poodles?
Their Own Eye Teeth
...which they would give for just ONE bit of evidence
that would stand up.
Another fact of the human body that cannot be explained
without evolution is the size of
the root of your upper canine teeth. In monkeys, the canine teeth are much larger than they
are in humans, and as such, they
require much larger roots to anchor
them. In humans the canines are now much smaller, but if you run your finger over your upper gums,
you can feel the bump of your
unnecessarily large canine root (even through your lip).
-Michael Arndt
Their Own Children
Carmen
Chaproniere(a former creationist,
as are many contributors and correspondents) serves up this gem:
Creationists are always banging on about 'The
Missing Link.' "Where's The Missing Link? Evolution can't POSSIBLY be
correct without this evidence! If we are related to apes then wouldn't there
be half-man, half-ape creatures roaming the planet?" Well, I suggest that
their own children aren't related to them or to each other either, since
there are no links illustrating the morph in
appearance from one child to another! If I had another child, then that
child would not look exactly like my first at their corresponding life
stages; they may look very similar, but then again they may look totally
different (I look entirely different from my own sister!). Their children in
turn will be different from each other and so on!
Diversification in very few generations
and no "missing links" required!
Colorblindness
From
yet another contributor:
The ability to see colors in humans came from our
"ape" ancestors. It evolved because a good portion of their diet (and the
same goes for our modern cousins) when the fruits, berries etc. were
not in season was leaves and stalks, etc. The most nutritional of these
are the younger or new growth, which is red in a lot of cases instead of
green. The ability to tell the difference would be a plus.
Colorblindness, especially the
difficulty in telling the difference between red and green, is on the rise
in humans. With our ability to raise our own food, it is thought that this
ability is not so important and we are losing it. That's a reasonable
evolutionary explanation for the increasing incidence of
colorblindness. Can you think of a "creationary" one?
Other Cultures
Like those damn Egyptians that didn't seem to notice
a world-wide Flood, though they were around at the time and had a liking for
writing everything down (they'd write down what people wore to parties, darn
it, why would they fail to note a Flood that covered the entire Earth? AND
they were there before and after the time of the Flood, so either they
stayed there, high and dry, or one of Noah's sons, who was not Egyptian at
all, emigrated to the Nile and reinstituted the dead and damned Egyptian
civilization perfectly, including the practices that got them damned in the
first place!). Or the Asian Indians, or the Chinese, or any of the
other cultures that also possessed written histories, yet failed to note any
of the cataclysmic acts of the Judaeo-Christian god. (Satan must have
told them to not write it down... yep... that must be it.)
-Erica Hegebarth
Constellations
From Keith Stump, who knows more than a little about astronomy:
The more extreme
creationists claim that the whole universe is around 6000 years old.
Now this gives us a problem that they have trouble solving: that of
constellations. Since the speed of light can be and has been very
accurately measured, it should not be possible to see objects that are
farther away than 6000 light years. Obviously we can do so, but let us
forget that since it is obviously a satanic scheme anyway. From the
days that the oldest cosmologies were recorded, it is perfectly clear that
the ancients saw the s