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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Creationism—Is It Scientific? Creationism—Is It Scientific? THE controversy between those who expound an evolutionary origin for man and those who hold to the Biblical origin by creation has not ceased to simmer or boil for over a hundred years now. Last year it boiled up again in a federal court trial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The point at issue was a state law requiring that “creation science” be taught in the public schools along with evolution. The law was held to be unconstitutional, and the decision was widely hailed as a victory for evolution. Scientists, theologians of various denominations, schoolteachers and the American Civil Liberties Union joined hands in assailing the law. It was defended by other scientists, theologians, schoolteachers and the state attorney general. The trial and the ensuing decision were widely publicized in the news media, attracting international attention. The claims and counterclaims by witnesses ranged from established facts to absurd opinions. It is understandable that the average person might be left confused as to what the outcome means. Did the judge’s decision mean that evolution is now a fact? That the human race is millions of years old? That the Bible is wrong? That we should no longer teach children that God created man? Before drawing any such conclusions, let us look into the issues involved. What is this “creation science” that was on trial? Is it scientifically based, or, as its detractors assert, is it a facade for sectarian religious dogma? What Is Creation Science? Supporters of creationism wrote a definition that was incorporated in the Arkansas law and inserted in the judicial opinion. It includes the scientific evidence that there are limits to the changes within the kinds of living things that were originally created, and that mutations and natural selection do not suffice to change one species into another. It also asserts that the earth and everything that lives on it are the result of a recent act of creation, and that all the geologic strata with their fossils resulted from a single worldwide Flood. The framers of the law were careful to omit any reference to God or the Bible, in order to avoid constitutional bars against teaching religion in the schools. However, their writings and the testimony given at Little Rock revealed that the creation and the Flood referred to are those described in the Bible book of Genesis. Furthermore, although the time of creation was not spelled out in the law, they acknowledged that “recent” means perhaps 6,000, in any case not more than 10,000, years ago. Evolution’s Faults Shielded Unfortunately for the creationists, their efforts in the trial to expose the weak points of evolution were frustrated. Such shortcomings have long been apparent to open-minded students. We mention them only briefly here. The evidence from experiments on mutations was not emphasized in the trial. Overwhelmingly, the results of such research are that mutations lead only to degeneration of the genetic pattern, producing defective specimens. They do not create new organs or new functions. They never lead to new species. The facts are contrary to the evolution theory and support the corollary principle of creation, stated in Genesis, that every kind of plant or animal can produce only its own kind. But this strong argument was neglected. Furthermore, the geological record does not contain the continuous gradation of fossils from one species to another, which Darwin’s theory would require. Rather, it shows that new species appear suddenly, in the sedimentary column, without any connection to older forms. Even the evolutionists are currently embroiled in arguments about a new theory, called punctuated equilibrium, which admits that the long search for missing links has failed. The sudden appearance of new species is really strong evidence for creation and against evolution. But it was not a factor in the trial. Why did the creationists not use it to advantage? They could not because they do not associate different geologic strata with different epochs of creation, but profess that they were all formed at the same time, when Noah’s Flood subsided. Being fettered by this non-Biblical doctrine, the creationists could use the fossil evidence only to tear down evolution. But they were reminded that it was not evolution that was on trial; it was creationism. Creationism’s Faults Exposed It was this aspect of the creationists’ thesis, tied to their doctrine of recent creation, that got the spotlight in the trial and in the news about it. Their teaching that the earth and even the universe are less than 10,000 years old contradicts all the findings of modern science. They are so far out of step that they invite ridicule from scientists. Geologists can point to their measurements of geologic processes that extend far beyond that narrow time frame. Ocean sediments have accumulated over far more than 10,000 years. The time to build mountains and wear them down is measured in millions of years. For continents to drift apart and form oceans takes hundreds of millions of years. To say that all of this goes back only 10,000 years is simply absurd in the eyes of geologists. Astronomers are equally outraged. They are accustomed to think not only of planetary cycles that take days or years but also of long aeons of time for stars and galaxies to form. They deal with such vast distances that even light, traveling at 186,000 miles (300,000 km) a second, takes billions of years to reach their telescopes. They estimate the distance to the Magellanic Clouds in the southern skies, our nearest neighboring galaxy, to be over 100,000 light-years. If this were created only 10,000 years ago, as the creationists hold, we would still be waiting 90,000 years for the first glimmer of light from it to reach us. In the northern hemisphere, on a dark night good eyes can make out the Andromeda nebula, the light of which takes 1,500,000 years to reach us. Obviously it must have been there longer than that. No wonder the American Astronomical Society went on record in January with a resolution applauding the Arkansas decision. Physicists also protest that it is impossible to squeeze their studies into a time span of a mere 10,000 years. They point to radioactive elements like uranium and thorium that have lives measured in billions of years. The accumulation of distinctive isotopes of lead, which are the end products of radioactive decay, shows that some of the oldest rocks in the earth’s crust must have lain undisturbed for as much as 3 or 4 billion years. And their interpretation of the red-shifted light from distant galaxies, out at the edge of the visible universe, sets its beginning from 10 to 20 billion years ago. Is This Science? How can creationists reconcile such evidence with their dogma that everything started just a few thousand years ago? When God created the rocks with uranium in them, did he also put in the right amount of the special isotopes of lead that would make them look a billion years old? When he made the Andromeda galaxy, did he also fill the path to the earth with light waves, all along its 10 thousand million billion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles, so we would not have to wait to see it in the sky? Would the God of truth purposely insert such illusions in his creation just to deceive us? Such reasoning reminds one of the story told of the little old Fundamentalist lady who was being shown through the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. She did not believe the park ranger’s speech about the huge reptiles that had once lived there and whose fossilized bones she was seeing. She offered another explanation for them: “The Lord put them there to fool you.” Speaking of dinosaurs, where do they fit into the creationists’ scheme of things? In their view, human beings and dinosaurs and every other kind of animal, extinct or extant, lived on earth at the same time before the Flood. They were all swept away together in a grand mélange by the Floodwaters. How, then, do they account for the orderly sequence of fossils in sedimentary rocks, starting with simple forms of life in the lower strata and followed by increasingly diverse and complex creatures in higher strata? They can only offer a set of implausible and contradictory theories as to how all kinds of plants and animals could have been sorted out of the potpourri of carcasses and laid down in separate layers. Trying to defend their arbitrary structure of “creation science” with such weak, strained hypotheses, they were soundly rebutted by the scientists’ testimony at Little Rock. They were left without any credible claim to being scientific. Creationism Discredited The best-known scientist who testified for the creationists was Chandra Wickramasinghe, who was brought from Wales to appear at the trial. He and the British astronomer Fred Hoyle have advanced an unorthodox theory that rejects the doctrine that life evolved on earth. They say that life started in outer space and fell to earth on comets or meteorites. He testified that the complexity of genetic patterns makes it impossible for them to have formed by chance. So, he concludes, they must have been designed by an intelligent Creator. But his testimony boomeranged on the creationists when he said that no rational scientist could believe the earth is less than a million years old. Based on the testimony given, both by the challengers and the defenders of the law, the judge could hardly do otherwise than find that creationism is not scientific. It was clearly exposed that its proponents do not arrive at conclusions by the scientific method of gathering all the evidence and then fitting it to a hypothesis. Instead, they start with a fixed sectarian interpretation of Genesis and seek evidence to support that. Contrary evidence they try to ignore, or, when they cannot, they invent unlikely explanations for the evident conflict with hard facts. The Arkansas law was an ill-advised effort to get their views of creation into the public-school curriculum. Then does the failure of creationism mean that creation is only a fiction? Does it mean that the Bible is not true, or does it mean, rather, that a narrow, misguided interpretation of the Bible is wrong? We shall discuss the difference between creation and creationism in the next issue of Awake! in an article entitled “Evolution, Creation, or Creationism—Which Do You Believe?”
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