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bruces@well.sf.ca.us
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From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August 1993.
F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other
F&SF Science Column #8:
"Creation Science"
In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists.
This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific
tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source
of historical and scientific knowledge.
The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated
matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed
account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the
sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness.
Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of
enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge.
Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble
aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the
structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full
glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists
of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland,
John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin
himself was a one-time divinity student.
Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement
the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published
rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the
1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct
challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple
Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence
heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of
Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the
day in the scientific community.
But convincing the scientific community was far from the end
of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning.
Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of
that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe
that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in
1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace
further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present
human form, less than ten thousand years ago.
So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our
society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than
five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting
divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting
answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity.
Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists.
It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about
fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the
three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth
-- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened
in the first place.
One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain
the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that
the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing
is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's
little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and
few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The
commonest view of the origin of the cosmos is "theistic creationism,"
the belief that the Cosmos is the product of a divine supernatural
action at the beginning of time.
The creationist debate, therefore, has not generally been
between strictly natural processes and strictly supernatural ones, but
over *how much* supernaturalism or naturalism one is willing to
admit into one's worldview.
How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between
the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the
struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and
the age of rocks?
Let us assume, as a given, that the Bible as we know it today is
divinely inspired and that there are no mistranslations, errors,
ellipses, or deceptions within the text. Let us further assume that
the account in Genesis is entirely factual and not metaphorical, poetic
or mythical.
Genesis says that the universe was created in six days. This
divine process followed a well-defined schedule.
Day 1. God created a dark, formless void of deep waters, then
created light and separated light from darkness.
Day 2. God established the vault of Heaven over the formless watery
void.
Day 3. God created dry land amidst the waters and established
vegetation on the land.
Day 4. God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and set them
into the vault of heaven.
Day 5. God created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air.
Day 6. God created the beasts of the earth and created one male and
one female human being.
On Day 7, God rested.
Humanity thus began on the sixth day of creation. Mankind is
one day younger than birds, two days younger than plants, and
slightly younger than mammals. How are we to reconcile this with
scientific evidence suggesting that the earth is over 4 billion years
old and that life started as a single-celled ooze some three billion
years ago?
The first method of reconciliation is known as "gap theory."
The very first verse of Genesis declares that God created the heaven
and the earth, but God did not establish "Day" and "Night" until the
fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense
span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life,
and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were
multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for
the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a
standard six-day Edenic "restoration" around 4,000 BC.
"Gap theory" was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield,
prominent '30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well-
known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others.
The second method of reconciliation is "day-age theory." In
this interpretation, the individual "days" of the Bible are considered
not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time.
Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4,
more than halfway through the process. It's difficult to understand
how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour "day"
without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago,
with matter created on the first "day," life emerging on the third
"day," the fossil record forming during the eons of "days" four five
and six. Humanity, however, was created directly by divine fiat and
did not "evolve" from lesser animals.
Perhaps the best-known "day-age" theorist was William
Jennings Bryan, three-times US presidential candidate and a
prominent figure in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.
In modern creation-science, however, both gap theory and
day-age theory are in eclipse, supplanted and dominated by "flood
geology." The most vigorous and influential creation-scientists
today are flood geologists, and their views (though not the only
views in creationist doctrine), have become synonymous with the
terms "creation science" and "scientific creationism."
"Flood geology" suggests that this planet is somewhere between
6,000 and 15,000 years old. The Earth was entirely lifeless until the
six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam
and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils,
including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC
during Noah's Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth
and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the
possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs,
which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists,
are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent
with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical
patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil
record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea
scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth.
The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology.
Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical
school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their
theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among
hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and
its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M.
Morris (1961). Much of this book's argumentative energy is devoted
to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and
therefore more pernicious day-age theory.
Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that
plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to
survive for "eons" without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day
Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies
-- winged creatures that were products of Day Five.
Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical
testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life
existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah's Flood. Jesus Christ Himself
refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of
Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19.
Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no
Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without
Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical
existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to
lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Jesus.
Taken on its own terms, this is a difficult piece of reasoning to refute,
and is typical of Creation-Science analysis.
To these creation-scientists, the Bible is very much all of a
piece. To begin pridefully picking and choosing within God's Word
about what one may or may not choose to believe is to risk an utter
collapse of faith that can only result in apostasy -- "going to the
apes." These scholars are utterly and soberly determined to believe
every word of the Bible, and to use their considerable intelligence to
prove that it is the literal truth about our world and our history as a
species.
Cynics might wonder if this activity were some kind of
elaborate joke, or perhaps a wicked attempt by clever men to garner
money and fame at the expense of gullible fundamentalist
supporters. Any serious study of the lives of prominent Creationists
establishes that this is simply not so. Creation scientists are not
poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in
quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still
working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.
When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and
leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely
in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and
evident facts of life.
Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.
There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an
orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be
stated though that science should have at least two basic
requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data
where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some
preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should
not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if
one's theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,
openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal
contradictions.
Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-
science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate
miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a
living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of
directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To
simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for
phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of
mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.
Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.
It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.
Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.
This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer
"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.
The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.
This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about
Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be
*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit
equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume
of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522
standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!
Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-
on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the
earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,
including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine
instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems
plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of
the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation
may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of
animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic
animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.
Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge
patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a
radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and
Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that
before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows
before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into
existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that
normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in
pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that
rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was
replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).
The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains
of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists
interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and
also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by
divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a
"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God
caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire
planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in
Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas
were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may
have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation
that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969
years.
The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe
has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.
Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had
the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a
fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a
species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,
nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.
Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would
violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,
creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was
deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The
reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is
because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were
the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.
Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem
laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is
five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward
and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.
*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone
through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry
M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential
creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,
California.
It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on
the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are
accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream
institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has
written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly
newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.
The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from
its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.
In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had
an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.
Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.
The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the
top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent
ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the
thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-
deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that
conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely
flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice-
cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of
undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years
old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute's
efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists
and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.
In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive
equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and
evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be
making valuable contributions to the nation's research effort.
Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,
and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken
scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood-
geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources
of all kinds.
Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.
Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a "great hypocrite," is a
case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded
search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that
there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial
intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any
rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan
boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space
from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth
we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed "signal"
called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of
random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish
intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his
search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a
Creationist!
I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most
important argument that his group had to make about scientific
creationism.
"Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion," he
told me. "It's the science of one religion versus the science of
another religion."
The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called
religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this
message the single most important point they can make; far more
important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific
facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral
entrepreneurs in a battle of world-views. It is no accident, to their
mind, that American schools teach "scientific" doctrines that are
inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a
question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should
quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus
nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline
versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal
souls created in God's Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral
consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value
themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their
freedom.
Science education, for its part, degrades the American school
system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic
institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination-
machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big
Government and Big Science.
Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most
people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation
and evolution. Most people don't really care much if the world is six
billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn't
impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have
done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher
education -- university level or above. They are willing to let Big
Science entertain its own arcane nonsense -- as long as they and
their children are left in peace.
But when world-views collide directly, there is no peace. The
first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,
when high-school education suddenly became far more widely
spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children
openly contradicting God's Word and they felt they were losing
control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in
the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.
In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John
Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his
science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his
case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the
"Scopes Monkey Trial" was a triumph for science education, and it
was a moral victory in a sense, for the pro-evolution side
successfully made their opponents into objects of national ridicule.
Scopes was found guilty, however, and fined. The teaching of
evolution was soft-pedalled in high-school biology and geology texts
for decades thereafter.
A second resurgence of creationist sentiment took place in the
1960s, when the advent of Sputnik forced a reassessment of
American science education. Fearful of falling behind the Soviets in
science and technology, the federal National Science Foundation
commissioned the production of state-of-the-art biology texts in
1963. These texts were fiercely resisted by local religious groups
who considered them tantamount to state-supported promotion of
atheism.
The early 1980s saw a change of tactics as fundamentalist
activists sought equal time in the classroom for creation-science -- in
other words, a formal acknowledgement from the government that
their world-view was as legitimate as that of "secular humanism."
Fierce legal struggles in 1982, 1985 and 1987 saw the defeat of this
tactic in state courts and the Supreme Court.
This legal defeat has by no means put an end to creation-
science. Creation advocates have merely gone underground, no
longer challenging the scientific authorities directly on their own
ground, or the legal ground of the courts, but concentrating on grass-
roots organization. Creation scientists find their messages received
with attention and gratitude all over the Christian world.
Creation-science may seem bizarre, but it is no more irrational
than many other brands of cult archeology that find ready adherents
everywhere. All over the USA, people believe in ancient astronauts,
the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, the shroud of Turin,
the curse of King Tut. They believe in pyramid power, Velikovskian
catastrophism, psychic archeology, and dowsing for relics. They
believe that America was the cradle of the human race, and that
PreColumbian America was visited by Celts, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Romans, and various lost tribes of Israel. In the high-tech 1990s, in
the midst of headlong scientific advance, people believe in all sorts of
odd things. People believe in crystals and telepathy and astrology
and reincarnation, in ouija boards and the evil eye and UFOs.
People don't believe these things because they are reasonable.
They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.
They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional
modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its
ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold
intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.
They believe these odd things because they don't trust what they are
told by their society's authority figures. They don't believe that
what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their
interests as human beings.
The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has
mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in
some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a
hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the
sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox
American Christian theologians and church officials, wary of a
breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.
It may be that the most determined backlash will come not
from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other
fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms
around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi'ite, from
Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant
Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist
world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do
these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made
the West powerful and rich?
Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity -- even though
rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,
and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it
happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves
the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.
As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully
identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective
inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would
scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into
direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and
human interests?
One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly
objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all
the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that
scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,
their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule
in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group --
superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and
rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we
would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the
transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding
and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to
assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them
to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed
success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We
might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were
becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they
transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon
ultra-rationality -- all in the name of progress.
But this isn't science. This is only bizarre speculation.
For Further Reading:
THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and
doctrine.
THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific
Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most
often-cited Creationist text.
MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of
Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris
goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ's virgin birth,
the physical transmutation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, etc.
CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El
Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist
publications.
CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding
Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold
and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant
social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the
past.
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
Literary Freeware: Not For Commercial Use
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From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August 1993.
F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other
F&SF Science Column #8:
"Creation Science"
In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists.
This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific
tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source
of historical and scientific knowledge.
The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated
matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed
account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the
sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness.
Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of
enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge.
Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble
aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the
structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full
glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists
of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland,
John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin
himself was a one-time divinity student.
Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement
the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published
rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the
1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct
challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple
Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence
heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of
Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the
day in the scientific community.
But convincing the scientific community was far from the end
of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning.
Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of
that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe
that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in
1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace
further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present
human form, less than ten thousand years ago.
So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our
society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than
five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting
divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting
answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity.
Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists.
It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about
fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the
three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth
-- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened
in the first place.
One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain
the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that
the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing
is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's
little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and
few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The
commonest view of the origin of the cosmos is "theistic creationism,"
the belief that the Cosmos is the product of a divine supernatural
action at the beginning of time.
The creationist debate, therefore, has not generally been
between strictly natural processes and strictly supernatural ones, but
over *how much* supernaturalism or naturalism one is willing to
admit into one's worldview.
How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between
the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the
struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and
the age of rocks?
Let us assume, as a given, that the Bible as we know it today is
divinely inspired and that there are no mistranslations, errors,
ellipses, or deceptions within the text. Let us further assume that
the account in Genesis is entirely factual and not metaphorical, poetic
or mythical.
Genesis says that the universe was created in six days. This
divine process followed a well-defined schedule.
Day 1. God created a dark, formless void of deep waters, then
created light and separated light from darkness.
Day 2. God established the vault of Heaven over the formless watery
void.
Day 3. God created dry land amidst the waters and established
vegetation on the land.
Day 4. God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and set them
into the vault of heaven.
Day 5. God created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air.
Day 6. God created the beasts of the earth and created one male and
one female human being.
On Day 7, God rested.
Humanity thus began on the sixth day of creation. Mankind is
one day younger than birds, two days younger than plants, and
slightly younger than mammals. How are we to reconcile this with
scientific evidence suggesting that the earth is over 4 billion years
old and that life started as a single-celled ooze some three billion
years ago?
The first method of reconciliation is known as "gap theory."
The very first verse of Genesis declares that God created the heaven
and the earth, but God did not establish "Day" and "Night" until the
fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense
span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life,
and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were
multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for
the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a
standard six-day Edenic "restoration" around 4,000 BC.
"Gap theory" was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield,
prominent '30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well-
known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others.
The second method of reconciliation is "day-age theory." In
this interpretation, the individual "days" of the Bible are considered
not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time.
Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4,
more than halfway through the process. It's difficult to understand
how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour "day"
without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago,
with matter created on the first "day," life emerging on the third
"day," the fossil record forming during the eons of "days" four five
and six. Humanity, however, was created directly by divine fiat and
did not "evolve" from lesser animals.
Perhaps the best-known "day-age" theorist was William
Jennings Bryan, three-times US presidential candidate and a
prominent figure in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.
In modern creation-science, however, both gap theory and
day-age theory are in eclipse, supplanted and dominated by "flood
geology." The most vigorous and influential creation-scientists
today are flood geologists, and their views (though not the only
views in creationist doctrine), have become synonymous with the
terms "creation science" and "scientific creationism."
"Flood geology" suggests that this planet is somewhere between
6,000 and 15,000 years old. The Earth was entirely lifeless until the
six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam
and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils,
including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC
during Noah's Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth
and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the
possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs,
which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists,
are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent
with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical
patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil
record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea
scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth.
The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology.
Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical
school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their
theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among
hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and
its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M.
Morris (1961). Much of this book's argumentative energy is devoted
to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and
therefore more pernicious day-age theory.
Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that
plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to
survive for "eons" without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day
Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies
-- winged creatures that were products of Day Five.
Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical
testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life
existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah's Flood. Jesus Christ Himself
refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of
Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19.
Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no
Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without
Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical
existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to
lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Jesus.
Taken on its own terms, this is a difficult piece of reasoning to refute,
and is typical of Creation-Science analysis.
To these creation-scientists, the Bible is very much all of a
piece. To begin pridefully picking and choosing within God's Word
about what one may or may not choose to believe is to risk an utter
collapse of faith that can only result in apostasy -- "going to the
apes." These scholars are utterly and soberly determined to believe
every word of the Bible, and to use their considerable intelligence to
prove that it is the literal truth about our world and our history as a
species.
Cynics might wonder if this activity were some kind of
elaborate joke, or perhaps a wicked attempt by clever men to garner
money and fame at the expense of gullible fundamentalist
supporters. Any serious study of the lives of prominent Creationists
establishes that this is simply not so. Creation scientists are not
poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in
quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still
working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.
When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and
leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely
in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and
evident facts of life.
Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.
There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an
orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be
stated though that science should have at least two basic
requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data
where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some
preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should
not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if
one's theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,
openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal
contradictions.
Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-
science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate
miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a
living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of
directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To
simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for
phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of
mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.
Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.
It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.
Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.
This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer
"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.
The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.
This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about
Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be
*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit
equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume
of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522
standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!
Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-
on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the
earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,
including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine
instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems
plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of
the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation
may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of
animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic
animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.
Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge
patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a
radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and
Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that
before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows
before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into
existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that
normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in
pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that
rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was
replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).
The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains
of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists
interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and
also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by
divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a
"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God
caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire
planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in
Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas
were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may
have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation
that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969
years.
The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe
has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.
Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had
the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a
fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a
species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,
nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.
Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would
violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,
creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was
deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The
reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is
because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were
the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.
Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem
laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is
five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward
and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.
*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone
through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry
M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential
creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,
California.
It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on
the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are
accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream
institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has
written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly
newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.
The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from
its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.
In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had
an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.
Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.
The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the
top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent
ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the
thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-
deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that
conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely
flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice-
cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of
undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years
old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute's
efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists
and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.
In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive
equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and
evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be
making valuable contributions to the nation's research effort.
Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,
and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken
scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood-
geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources
of all kinds.
Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.
Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a "great hypocrite," is a
case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded
search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that
there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial
intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any
rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan
boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space
from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth
we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed "signal"
called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of
random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish
intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his
search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a
Creationist!
I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most
important argument that his group had to make about scientific
creationism.
"Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion," he
told me. "It's the science of one religion versus the science of
another religion."
The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called
religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this
message the single most important point they can make; far more
important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific
facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral
entrepreneurs in a battle of world-views. It is no accident, to their
mind, that American schools teach "scientific" doctrines that are
inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a
question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should
quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus
nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline
versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal
souls created in God's Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral
consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value
themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their
freedom.
Science education, for its part, degrades the American school
system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic
institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination-
machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big
Government and Big Science.
Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most
people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation
and evolution. Most people don't really care much if the world is six
billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn't
impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have
done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher
education -- university level or above. They are willing to let Big
Science entertain its own arcane nonsense -- as long as they and
their children are left in peace.
But when world-views collide directly, there is no peace. The
first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,
when high-school education suddenly became far more widely
spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children
openly contradicting God's Word and they felt they were losing
control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in
the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.
In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John
Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his
science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his
case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the
"Scopes Monkey Trial" was a triumph for science education, and it
was a moral victory in a sense, for the pro-evolution side
successfully made their opponents into objects of national ridicule.
Scopes was found guilty, however, and fined. The teaching of
evolution was soft-pedalled in high-school biology and geology texts
for decades thereafter.
A second resurgence of creationist sentiment took place in the
1960s, when the advent of Sputnik forced a reassessment of
American science education. Fearful of falling behind the Soviets in
science and technology, the federal National Science Foundation
commissioned the production of state-of-the-art biology texts in
1963. These texts were fiercely resisted by local religious groups
who considered them tantamount to state-supported promotion of
atheism.
The early 1980s saw a change of tactics as fundamentalist
activists sought equal time in the classroom for creation-science -- in
other words, a formal acknowledgement from the government that
their world-view was as legitimate as that of "secular humanism."
Fierce legal struggles in 1982, 1985 and 1987 saw the defeat of this
tactic in state courts and the Supreme Court.
This legal defeat has by no means put an end to creation-
science. Creation advocates have merely gone underground, no
longer challenging the scientific authorities directly on their own
ground, or the legal ground of the courts, but concentrating on grass-
roots organization. Creation scientists find their messages received
with attention and gratitude all over the Christian world.
Creation-science may seem bizarre, but it is no more irrational
than many other brands of cult archeology that find ready adherents
everywhere. All over the USA, people believe in ancient astronauts,
the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, the shroud of Turin,
the curse of King Tut. They believe in pyramid power, Velikovskian
catastrophism, psychic archeology, and dowsing for relics. They
believe that America was the cradle of the human race, and that
PreColumbian America was visited by Celts, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Romans, and various lost tribes of Israel. In the high-tech 1990s, in
the midst of headlong scientific advance, people believe in all sorts of
odd things. People believe in crystals and telepathy and astrology
and reincarnation, in ouija boards and the evil eye and UFOs.
People don't believe these things because they are reasonable.
They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.
They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional
modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its
ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold
intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.
They believe these odd things because they don't trust what they are
told by their society's authority figures. They don't believe that
what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their
interests as human beings.
The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has
mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in
some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a
hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the
sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox
American Christian theologians and church officials, wary of a
breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.
It may be that the most determined backlash will come not
from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other
fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms
around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi'ite, from
Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant
Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist
world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do
these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made
the West powerful and rich?
Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity -- even though
rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,
and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it
happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves
the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.
As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully
identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective
inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would
scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into
direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and
human interests?
One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly
objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all
the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that
scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,
their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule
in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group --
superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and
rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we
would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the
transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding
and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to
assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them
to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed
success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We
might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were
becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they
transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon
ultra-rationality -- all in the name of progress.
But this isn't science. This is only bizarre speculation.
For Further Reading:
THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and
doctrine.
THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific
Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most
often-cited Creationist text.
MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of
Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris
goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ's virgin birth,
the physical transmutation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, etc.
CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El
Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist
publications.
CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding
Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold
and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant
social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the
past.