On Creationism

I came across this book in a discussion with Joe Hinman; it is freely available on line here . The author is one of the founders of Liberty University. It is a history of the world - assuming creationism is right. I thought it might be fun to read it. It starts unconventionally by saying God created a whole bunch of stuff before the creation week: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is a summary statement that includes all that went before the first creative day (i.e., heavens) and all the Creation of the next six days. Time and space begin in Genesis 1:1. Fall of Lucifer He does this to make room for the fall of Lucifer, of which he say: The fall of Lucifer occurred before the seven days of Creation. He goes on to say of angels: Only three are specifically named in Scripture: Lucifer, Michael, and Gabriel. That is not actually true; Lucifer is never named as an angel. It is symptomatic of his approach to the fall of that supposed angel, which is to say, he grabs v...

To be fair, this is based on a magazine article published in 1909, nevertheless,I feel fairly safe saying the science is from the nineteenth century.  The blog post is here : A new edition of Wallace book, Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism, is out now, edited by science historian Michael Flannery.  It is worth pointing out that Wallace published a book, Darwinism , in which he defended much of Darwin's ideas, and was itself foundational for neo-Darwinism, as it moved the theory away from inheritance of acquired characteristics . However, Wallace did hold to teleology, i.e., that evolution was directed. This is, of course, what appeals to the creationists at the DI... And is what over a century of subsequent science has rejected. It is worth remembering that a lot of scientists are Christians and followers of other religions, so hard to imagine why they would reject teleology - unless that is what the evidence points to. More from the blog:...

We can see evidence of glaciation all over the world, so we can see with our own eyes that there was an ice age. Even some creationists have to admit that, and so Answers in Genesis have inventing an Ice Age (with capitals!). They offer this great timeline to help us understand what actually happened: https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/am/v8/n2/ice-age-map.pdf So we have the Flood in 2350 BC, then three generations to the Tower of Babel, about 2250 BC, and the start of the Ice Age, which then lasts six generations, to about 2000 BC, when Abram was born. That is a very quick Ice Age. Back in reality, the last ice age started 2.5 million years ago, and is still going (we are in a warmer, interglacial period). What is fascinating is how fast stuff happens in this time line. The Elephant-Kind Mastodons first appear after two generations (around 2285 BC I guess), evolved from the elephant-kind on the ark, and woolly mammoths just two generations after that. That is s...

This is just a link to a very well-written article at Biologos about the origins of creationism in Seventh Day Adventism, and a supposed prophet called Ellen White. http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Giberson-scholarly-essay-1.pdf

Where did all the water come from to make the flood? One creationist theory is that it came from a comet. When you pick a rock off the ground you have to expend energy to lift it, and the rock gains gravitational potential energy (GPE). Let go of the rock, and it falls; it loses GPE, but gains kinetic energy because it is moving. It will also warm up due to air resistence. The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us energy is conserved, so as the rock drops and loses GPE, all that energy must be converted to kinetic energy and heat, and when the rock lands ultimately all the kinetic energy will be converted to heat too. GPE can be calculated from: GPE = m x g x h ... where m is the mass, g is the acceleration due to gravity and h is the height. If the rock weighs 1 kg (m=1), and falls 1 m (h=1), and at the Earth's surface the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 m/s/s (g=10) then it must lose this much energy: GPE = m x g x h = 1 x 1 x 10 = 10 kJ Ultim...

This is something I have never seen creationists address. For science, the geological column represents a progression over deep time. Fossils found at the bottom will be older than those at the top, and evolution explains how those fossils are different. It is worth noting that the geological column is to some degree a construct of man. It is a synthesis of numerous partial columns across the world. However, there is a consistency to them that allows them to be merged into one complete geological column. Many creationists accept this and provide various rationales for the sorting of fossils, for example here , here and here - usually based on gross simplifications of what fossils are there, and ignoring that plant fossils are seen all through the column, for example. However, what this page is about is how isotopes are distributed. Scientists use radiometric dating to determine the age of rocks, one such method uses potassium-40, which decays to argon-40. When the rock is fo...

This was inspired by the web page: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/ee/what-is-science To help us understand that science has practical limits, it is useful to divide science into two different areas: operational science and historical (origins) science. Operational science deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present and leads to the production of useful products like computers, cars, and satellites. Historical (origins) science involves interpreting evidence from the past and includes the models of evolution and special creation. Sure. It is useful to divide science into science we like and science that contradicts our personal interpretation of Genesis 1, then we can just pretend the latter is not real science. Recognizing that everyone has presuppositions that shape the way they interpret the evidence is an important step in realizing that historical science is not equal to operational science. Because no one was there to witness the past (except God), we mu...

A recent post at Answer in Genesis gives an good insight into how creation science works. It all starts from: First, we know God’s Word is true and there was a global Flood. And investigation goes like this: The Bible states there was a worldwide Flood. We see plants today. Therefore plants survived the Flood.  In other words, they assume their basic premise, and do what they can to manipulate the evidence to support their under-lying assumption. It is like science in reverse really.

So the web site claims, anyway. This is based on twelve events in the creation narrative being in the right order. 1. Light separated from darkness 2. Creation of the earth covered in water 3. The separation of the dry land from the seas 4 – 6. The creation of plants in a particular order – grasses, plants with seeds and fruit bearing trees 7. The placing of the heavenly bodies in relationship to the earth. This is often explained as the clearing of the atmosphere (from one composed mostly of water vapor and carbon dioxide to one with more oxygen due to plant photsynthesis) enough to see these creations. 8-11 The creation of animal life in a particular order – fish, birds, modern land animals, live stock 12. The creation of man It is amazing what contortions some people will go through to convince themselves they are right. Right here we see: Missing bits out The author conveniently skips day two altogether. Genesis 1:6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the ...

This is a response to an article by Duane Gish, on the web site of the Institute for Creation Research. Gish was one of the big names in creationism, and had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, so we would expect him to be quite an authority. He pasted away in March of this year. The article is here.The section titles are taken from that document. http://www.icr.org/article/177/ I. The Universe and the Solar System Were Suddenly Created. This is an astonishing claim.  Sure, the universe suddenly appeared (whether created or not), but not the solar system. Curiously Gish offers zero evidencve to support his claim that the solar system was suddenly created. With regards to the universe, he cites the Second Law as proving God did it, which I have taken apart previously . II. Life Was Suddenly Created.  He bases this claim on the fact that there is a certain point in the fossil record before which there are no fossil - which is exactly what you would expect. He claims the first...

If you hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible, the creation account in Genesis 1 is quite a problem. Let us look at how creationists attempt to surmount some of the issues. Dumbing Down http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/day-age.html I would first like to point out that God has not revealed the entire creation process in the Genesis creation account, but only that which is particularly relevant to mankind. Many events in the creation account of the Bible have been intentionally left out (unicellular life forms, dinosaurs, etc.), I believe, because they would have been difficult to express in the Hebrew language, and would have lead to confusion, since they would not have been understood through the vast majority of mankind's existence (i.e., only understandable in the last two centuries). On the surface this seems perfectly reasonable, but is it? Ancient man was not stupid. he was just as bright as we are. The difference is that we have two centuries of scienc...

Last post I looked at Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. This post I will look at the second creation account Genesis 2:3 onwards. This shows clear stylistic differences; in the King James version, the creator is Lord God, not God, and in the Hebrew this is God in the singular, Yahweh. What we have is two creation myths merged together, and the match-up is not great... 4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. Setting the scene; there were no plants yet - though is could be understood to mean that the seeds were in the ground at this point. Mankind was not around to cultivate plants, nor was there rain t...

The first few chapters of Genesis are the bedrock of creationism, so I thought I would examine chapter 1 (and a bit of chapter two) in some detail. Day One 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Creationists sometimes like to draw a parallel here to the Big Bang, particular verse 3. Does that work? In what sense was the Big Bang when light got divided from the darkness? In fact most commentators believe the separation of dark and light refers to the cycle of day and night, as verse 5 makes clear. Hmm, does that work any better? Day and night are a result o...

A common fallacy among creationists is that Pasteur disproved abiogenesis. Here are some examples: One of Pasteur’s first major scientific contributions was disproving the supposed spontaneous generation of living things (such as bacteria) from non-living organic matter. (However in spite of this disproof, spontaneous generation is now considered to be the foundation of the evolutionary view of the origin of life if “millions of years” are added). http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v4/n1/creation-germ-theory Louis Pasteur destroyed the belief that life could be created from inanimate substances. http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/short_history_02.html However, Louis Pasteur was in the very process of proving that spontaneous generation of cellular life was even more illusory than the flat earth. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v23/n1/life The Law of Biogenesis is real, and accepted as true by all scientists. Evolution cannot be true, because it is agai...

A few more issues about the claims of a global flood... More Provisions Noah's troubles are not over once the ark has hit land. He cannot just let his lions go off and find food straightaway. The first prey they bring down will be one species extinct. And lions kill about five times a week, I think. Noah will have to keep feeding the carnivores until the prey species have got sufficiently established that they can (as a species) survive being hunted. How long will that take for zebras, for example? I would guess decades. A Change of Heart for the Eternal Unchanging... God apparently lives outside of time, is eternal and unchanging. So it is rather amusing to read that after the flood he changes his attitude. 21 And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. ...