Mr. Moderate

I wrote yesterday about the lack of logic it requires to simultaneously believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, and that God created humans much as we are today at one time in the past 10,000 years. It would seem from the USA Today poll that roughly 22% of all Americans believe both ideas to be definitely or at least probably true. Yesterday’s post was about the total illogic involved with that 22% of Americans believing both ideas to be true.

In this post I would like to take seriously the idea, expressed in that same poll, that 66% of all Americans believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Ever since Bishop Ussher produced his Bible chronology that “deduced that the first day of Creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23, 4004 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox,” back in the 1650s, people who desired to take the Bible literally have asserted that no fact produced by science can possibly contradict the idea that God created everything that now exists about 6,000 years ago. Some modern young-Earth creationists, disturbed at chronologies of Egyptian civilization that seem to be unbroken to much earlier dates, have accepted that Ussher might not have computed everything exactly right, and they are willing to push back the creation of the universe to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, but no further than that.

The typical young-Earth creationist thus holds an intellectual position asserting that nothing existed of the entire universe 11,000 years ago, and that any scientific fact asserting a contrary opinion is bogus as modern science has no way to comprehend just how God acted when God created the universe “within the last 10,000 years.”

And, it is true that modern science is grounded upon the idea that, when studying matters of the ancient past, the presumption is that natural processes worked in long ago times much as they work today. So, for instance, if we analyze the half-life of a radioactive element and determine through scientific analysis that the particular radioactive decay process produces a half-life of 500,000 years, and that the particular sample in question has been through two such half-life periods, we might then assert that this sample material is accordingly 1,000,000 years old. An intelligent young-Earth creationist would note in response that there are no scientific records of these facts from long ago, the technology to make these measurements is a very recent invention, and that science has no real justification for presuming “that natural processes worked in long ago times much as they work today,” particularly when things get back several thousand years ago when God was actively creating the Earth.

Science has developed several “clock mechanisms” for measuring time over past eons. Among these are radiocarbon dating (which is based upon the half-life discussion, above), mitochondrial DNA mutation rates (for measuring the evolutionary history of biological cell development), and Einstein’s observation that the speed of light is fixed (allowing us to tell precisely how long ago a beam of light or other electro-magnetic radiation left some particular object or position in space if we can otherwise compute its distance from Earth). Young-Earth creationists necessarily deny that any of these mechanisms produce accurate results as they are all based upon the same assumption: that the world worked in the distant past much as we see it working in modern times.

It is virtually impossible for science to refute a young-Earth creationist because the fact is there are no accurate scientific records from thousands of years ago. One of the earliest known scientific experiments happened about 2200 years ago when Erathsthenes measured the circumference of the Earth. However, the unit of measure he used (the “stadia”) is an unknown value today, making interpretation of his work impossible. In essence, there is little to nothing that would qualify as a “scientific finding” which survives from more than 3,000 years ago. Thus, the young-Earth creationist would argue, modern man has no way of knowing whether things worked the same way more than 3,000 years ago, and no way of disproving the creation of the universe by God about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

So, in the worldview of a young-Earth creationist, science is limited to studying and understanding processes that occur in the here and now, and is naturally prohibited from studying and understanding processes that occurred in the long ago and far away. This stance is justified by the young-Earth creationist as there are no records to establish that things really did work the same way then as they do now. Finally, on this basis, the young-Earth creationist claims that science is grounded in a set of religious beliefs about the universe that contradict the religious beliefs of the young-Earth creationist, and accordingly, it is wrong to teach science to children without giving equal time to young-Earth creationism.

And at that point, the battle for public acceptance is firmly joined. And woe to America that 66% of our population now believes “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” It is now easy to understand the insanity of Kansas changing its standards for science teachers every two years as the majority position on the school board changes. How long will it be until other parts of America vote to toss out the “religious ideas” that underlie modern science?