Why don’t they...

There was a news item this week about some outfit calling itself "Answers in Genesis" announcing plans to build a "museum" in Kentucky called the "Creation Museum and Family Center" which, in the words of the London Guardian, would cost $14 million and would be "dedicated to telling the nation's schoolchildren that God made the world in seven days and that Darwin is a fraud."

Nothing new there. Religious nuttiness is a deep American trait, and there have always been those willing and able to pry millions of dollars from gullible believers for a variety of dubious projects.

Ken Ham, the fellow behind this latest endeavor, took the oft-traveled path of presenting himself as the David bravely facing the fierce Goliath of the "scientific establishment," and being the first to courageously confront the monolithic atheism of Science with the Truth.

Certainly this is nothing we haven’t heard before. The Internet is crawling with crackpots who claim to be exposing the truth that godless scientists keep trying to hide. Every once in a while one of these characters decides to tackle the question of why scientists would want to hide their particular notion of the truth, and the answers usually involve communism, UFOs, illuminati-style global conspiracies, or all three. "By their nuts ye shall know them." to coin a phrase.

But one thing in Oliver Poole’s Guardian piece made me sit up and pay attention. He wrote, "A recent survey in the magazine Scientific American reported that 45 percent of Americans believe that God created life some time in the past 10,000 years, despite the vast majority of scientists maintaining that life in its simplest form first appeared 3.9 billion years ago and has been evolving ever since."

Forty-five percent? That’s like discovering that most people believe in alien abduction, or alchemy, or cold fusion. I shook my head over the infinite foolishness of people, and sent the piece along with the remark, "You know how, by definition, half of the population is of below normal intelligence? I think we know where they all wound up..."

I kept thinking about that statistic. If true, it represented a cataclysmic collapse in American rational and logical thinking and education. While there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge of the specifics of evolution, the essential framework concept that life evolved over billions of years is regarded as unassailable in scientific circles.

I knew Scientific American had online polls, and that such polls got "Freeped" periodically. By way of example, one of the current polls, rating Putsch on his stewardship of the environment, has 63% of respondents giving him an "A." I wondered if Poole had seen such a poll and not realized that it was a scientifically invalid – not to mention ridiculous – online poll. Investigation validated Poole.

It turned out that while Scientific American hadn’t directly conducted a valid poll, Gallup had, and one of SA’s writers, a Michael Shermer, had referred to that 2001 Gallup poll. The numbers jibed with Poole’s assessment, and a closer look showed it was even worse than Poole had suggested. According to Shermer, 45% believed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so," 37% believed that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process," and only 12% believed that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process."

It gets worse. If people polled chose between either evolution or creationism, without the wriggle room of "split the difference" notions such as the billiard-break theory (God fired the opening shot that caused evolution and sat back and watched his perfect shot unfold) or the hands-on evolutionary theory (all evolutionary change resulted from the direct and immediate will of God), the breakdown was 57% creationism, 33% evolution, 10% unsure.

Scientists complain frequently about how they get beaten up by fundamentalists because scientists can’t sit there and say "what we know is inalterable truth" whereas fundamentalists can, not because they possess truth, but because they believe they do. They take the intellectually unassailable position that faith beats proof any day of the week – and that scientists often don’t even have proof. Fundies enjoy noting that scientific theory shifts as new evidence and knowledge emerges, whereas they are believing the exact same things that illiterate nomadic tribes were saying six thousand years ago, and they present this as evidence that they have the stronger argument.

There’s also the fact that an understanding of evolutionary theory requires a certain amount of skull sweat. It takes at least high school graduate level education to be able to grasp concepts such as mitochondrial drift or how we see examples of macroevolution all the time in the form of mutations, and some mutations prove viable. (The realization that much of the formation of a living multi-cellular organism follows discernable fractal equations made our understanding of why many mutations – such as a third arm, or webbed toes – occur on such a large and complex level.)

Evolution doesn’t rely on faith, but it DOES rely on knowledge and education, both of which require intelligence and the willingness to employ same. For far too many people, "faith" has become an intellectual short circuit. Anything that puzzles or perplexes is considered the province of an unknowable deity, and therefore no further thought on the matter is required. "God did it" is MUCH easier than six years of botany at the local university, or four years of astronomy. If you have God, you can explain the universe without having to use algebra.

There are a lot of religionists out there who DO think, and are willing to tackle the difficult questions the existence of humans and our place in the universe create, but not creationists. They are the antithesis of thought and knowledge.

Further, they hate science, which not only fails to posit the existence of God, but provides no evidence that such a being exists. In a universe over 10 billion light years in diameter (60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles), with six trillion trillion suns, where we see light from objects that had to have begun its journey over 8 billion years ago, it’s preposterous beyond belief to hold to the notion that all that was created 10,000 years ago just for little old us.

The problem they have is that no matter how strenuously they might try to claim that "creation science" is a rival scientific theory and has nothing to do with religion, the fact is that it is pretty much religious, and in the case of the bible, they are pretty much stuck with explaining such things as the "great flood." No matter what else you might want to say about the bible, good or bad, the fact of the matter is that the bible is simply quite weak on matters pertaining to science, the world in general, and the universe. While failing to note that most humans lived in China and India, the bible also fails to mention the Americas, and refers to the earth as having four corners. The sun moves across the sky, and even the existence of snow seems to be unknown in the bible. It teaches that you can cure leprosy by spilling the blood of a live chicken onto the blood of a dead chicken. It describes lobsters as fish.

Creationists are in the unenviable position of trying to find evidence to support literal interpretations of biblical lore. This is their greatest strength, and their greatest weakness.

They depend mightily upon an American taboo against attacking someone else’s religion. Like most Americans, I was taught to take a Jeffersonian approach to the faith of my neighbors, and not concern myself with what they believed provided it neither broke my leg nor picked my pocket.

Now, if creationists were content to teach creationism to their kids and in their Sunday schools, I would just whistle to myself, arch my eyebrows and remind myself that the "pursuit of happiness" included the right to believe all sorts of damn-fool notions, and grin in amazement. And, on this subject at least, keep my opinions to myself.

But creationists aren’t content with that. Armed with their peculiar truths, they have conducted a persistent and well-financed campaign to get their amazing nonsense accepted, not as religious superstition, but as some weird sort of alternative scientific theory.

America is anti-intellectual. This isn’t surprising, given that we teach our kids that it’s OK to hate school. Creationists thrive among the willfully ignorant.

But the weakness at their core is that what they must believe is sheer nonsense. The earth was not created 10,000 years ago, and it was not created in six days. There was no great universal flood that flooded "all the earth" simultaneously, up above the tops of the tallest peaks. (That would mean the waters rose some 29,030 feet above sea level, in order to accommodate drowning Mt. Everest).

Indeed, the flood is a good place to start in deconstructing creationism nonsense. Creationists point to evidence of flooding in most places, and of course, all places on earth have flooded at one time or another. You can find seashells in the Himalayas for the simple reason that some 13,000,000 years ago, the Himalayas were part of a seabed. They stopped being seabed, and it’s a lead-pipe cinch that it didn’t happen in just the past 10,000 years. Creationists have to believe that all areas flooded concurrently, and that evidence showing that different areas flooded at different times (and some have fresh-water fossils and others salt-water fossils) is just inability of scientists to divine truth when they see it.

So let’s pick on the Flood story, and come up with a dozen objections: (PS: I have been told that the use of the number "40" is an old Israelite euphemism that means "a lot." While this does give flood apologists a little bit of wriggle room by eliminating specific numbers, we are striving for scientific accuracy on behalf of creationists here, and "a lot" is a phrase that does not show up on most scientific charts. It also occurs to me that any culture whose number universe consists of ‘37, 38, 39, a lot’ isn’t going to be a scientific powerhouse.)

Assuming that "all the land was covered" is true, that would assume this included Everest. So the flood would have to be about 29,000 feet above current sea level. I’ve read that the total volume of water on earth would cover a perfect globe to a depth of about 6,500 feet. So in order to have the sort of flood the bible describes, you would need to add more than quadruple the amount of water now existing on earth. Where did all this water come from? And where did it go after it subsided?

For the flood to reach that level in "40 days and 40 nights", it would have to come down at the rate of 725 feet PER DAY, thirty feet PER HOUR, six inches PER MINUTE. Everywhere. At once. There’s a valley in Nepal that gets some 800 inches of rain a year, and it all falls in a three month period. I bet they’ve never seen thirty feet in an hour, or even thirty feet in a day.

There isn’t any mention of plant life on the ark, even though most of the animals would have been herbivores. But most of the plant life on earth would have been drowned in salty water in the first few days, and all of it sunk to depths of 8 to 29 thousand feet. When the waters receded, all the forests would be dead, and virtually all other forms of plant life save for those that could float, and survive the type of pummeling 725 feet of rain a day would cause. We don’t know what presently lives at a depth of 25,000 feet, but we know that nothing that lives on dry land could survive those conditions for one minute, let alone 40 days.

The bible isn’t real specific about how long it took the waters to recede, but even if it was 20 years, there would be one hell of an erosion problem. Creationists like to point to the Grand Canyon as an example of this, and that’s fine, except that there’s only one Grand Canyon. The whole planet should be lined with canyons that big and bigger. Mars is, and whatever happened to its water is less than 1% of the scale of what we’re talking here. The whole place should look like a sandstone bank along a southern California highway.

The ark itself is described as 40 cubits long. A cubit is eighteen inches, so the ark was 60 feet, which makes the whole thing about the size of a three bedroom house. Not much room for hundreds of thousands of animals, food for same (and presumably they brought more than two of each prey for the obligate carnivores since few big cats can live 40 days without food).

How did the two tree sloths from South America make it to the ark, which was in the middle east? Tree sloths can travel up to three feet an hour, and not at all on the ground. Or the duck-billed platypuses (platypi?).

How did they restrain some of the less friendly critters, such as the polar bears and the rhinoceroses (rhinoceri)?

All that rain must have severely affected the salinity and ph balance of the water. How did the fish survive? Or were they on board the ark, too?

Given the intensity of the rain, a good deal of the breathable atmosphere should have been literally driven into the water as a type of carbonation. How did the inhabitants of the ark breathe?

Creationists, finally forced to admit that dinosaurs really existed and that God didn’t just stick the bones in the ground as a practical joke, have adopted the fall-back position that the dinosaurs were refused access to the ark. While I can understand why they wouldn’t want two of something like Tyrannosaurus rex that could eat the polar bears on board, it doesn’t explain why they didn’t permit the herbivores, or why none of the aquatic dinosaurs survived.

Genesis states that the first purpose of humanity was to name all the animals. This seems a bit bizarre on the face of it. Can’t God keep track of these things himself? But they presumably made a tally of the arks inhabitants as they boarded, to make sure the armadillos didn’t cheat and get two breeding pairs on board. Didn’t that fulfill the prescription? Didn’t humanity’s raison d’etre expire at that juncture?

If all species on earth came from a breeding stock of two individuals just 6,000 years ago (and given that two isn’t enough to replicate entire species among most larger mammals who have low birthrates) why does the DNA evidence suggest otherwise?

Bonus question: demonstrate how the food chain worked in the ten years following the flood. Since all the trees would be dead, explain how the tree sloths and koala bears managed.

Remember, creationism must prove first that it isn’t utter nonsense. The minute a creationist responds to any of the points above with a variation on "because God magicked it that way," you have won, and the creationist has lost. It’s up to the creationist to use available evidence to show that creationism isn’t just sheer nonsense, and the fact is, they can’t.

If they want to believe in it as part of their religion, they have that right. And it means that the rest of us have the right to not be forced to believe it, or support it with tax dollars. If they want to foist it off as science, then they have to meet the same standards of provability that the rest of science maintains.

As long as they are trying to foist this nonsense off as science, and not as part of a private belief system, you have the right to get in their faces and demonstrate the absurdity of their "theories". Do so.

The middle east was once the cultural and intellectual center of the world. Algebra was invented there, and it sparked the European renaissance, made possible by the weakening grasp fo the church on the major cities in Europe.

Then it fell to religious fundamentalism, and the scientific and intellectual community was suborned to accepting as true only the elements presented in the Koran. The middle east fell from leadership and influence, permanently, and today is of interest only because of its oil reserves and a propensity for violence. Fundamentalism destroyed the intellectual and social leadership of the middle east, and now it threatens to do the same for the United States.

Fundamentalists, striving to validate their beliefs at your expense, aren’t going to see that. God will provide, and all that.

But history shows that theocracies are inefficient, backward, corrupt and usually violent and nasty.

Get in their faces. They have the right to believe what they want. But they will never have the right to tax you to support those beliefs, no matter how much they try to disguise them as science.