On Creationism

I find I am increasingly consumed with the ‘creation v. evolution’ debate, and I thought I’d put a few thoughts down here tonight that I’ve been mulling over. I have to say outright that they are not favorable to the creationist side, but that I am not closed to the idea. As Carl Sagan is famous for saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I simply don’t see any of this type on the creationist side.

An Argument for Biblical Literalism

Before I get into the issue of creationism itself, I will first proffer an argument for its scriptural validity for christians. This entire debate, after all, is central to the problem of religions making claims about the physical world that it is theoretically possible to verify by empirical investigation. If the creation account is only to be taken as a myth, then the entire debate is really a moot point.

Young-earth creationism is the claim that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and that God created the earth and all it contains in 6 days (He purportedly rested on the 7th day.. so I wouldn’t count it as part of creation week). Fundamentalists pick this age for the earth for a good reason. In the first few books of the Old Testament, lineages following from Adam can be traced to Noah (Genesis 5), from Noah to several lines of descent (Genesis 10), and on down the line to the birth of Christ, which was around 0 BC. All of these descent lines generally provide an idea of how old each generational father was when he had a kid, and when he died. A good example of this is Genesis 5:3-8…

3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:
7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:
8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

If you take Adam as the initial father of all humanity, and trace the overlap of all these timelines, then the recorded generations in the Bible imply that Adam was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ.

This, I think, creates a problem for those that would take the Bible seriously in determining church and/or personal doctrine, but would treat the creation story as a myth. It begs the question, why would these lineages be written down in such a manner of fact way? Why preserve fictional family trees? If it is only a myth that is to be treated as, say, a metaphor for man’s gaining consciousness through the evolutionary process, then the creation story alone would suffice to serve this purpose. However, given that the authors of these books did write in lineages as well, I would posit that they meant the creation story to be taken seriously, given a concurrent belief that the scriptures themselves are the Word of God.

If you have some alternative explanation that can somehow make it tenable to treat the creation story as metaphor for the physical evolutionary process, then I have open ears. I can’t think of one myself. In the meantime, I think it is safe to go with the proposition that if you take the Bible seriously at all, then young earth creationism is the most tenable position.

[update 2007-01-10]

I did a bit more research into the genealogy of Christ out of pure curiosity. I made the weak assumption that someone in the SDA church of which I was raised in had done their homework. There appears to be some gross discrepancies in the generational counts from the Matthew/Mark/Luke versions of Christian genealogy. This raises the interesting question of whether someone has figured out a tenable resolution for why these discrepancies exist. If not, the SDA church definitely has some soul-searching to do since a core tenet is the faultlessness of the Bible.

While I did not get to completely go through checking all the details of these genealogies / counting up the years etc., I made some notes that will be a good starting point when I have time again to go through it. In the mean time, I would have to say that this argument for biblical literalism is shaky at best.

[update 2007-03-04]

I happened to run across an article about the Ussher Chronology on Wikipedia today while investigating some things related to the Scopes Trial. According to the article, this is the most commonly accepted (though not the only) scholarly look at the chronologies of the Bible that attempts to infer the age of the earth. This study was conducted in the 17th century. It appears to be the primary source for the idea that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 BCE (a common citation of young-earth creationists).

Personally, I would not take this date to be accurate, considering some of the methods required to infer it. Most notably, there are several places where chronologies have gaps, or different versions of the Bible that have differing genealogies that can vary the timeline by as much as 1500 years. There is a definite upper limit to the age of the earth, as can be inferred from these accounts, which is perhaps why I’ve heard creationists use the figure of roughly 10,000 years instead of 6,000 – just to be on the safe side, assuming that all longer accounts of a particular section of history are considered true.

In any case, it is fairly clear to me that the Bible cannot be used as an accurate historical reference for dating events, considering the wide variations in translations / versions produced over time, and the internal inconsistencies within each of those versions. I’d say that this argument can be fairly put to rest as nothing more than young-earth creationist propaganda. The Bible is not inerrant in this respect, and should not be considered a good reference point.

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So How Do Creationists Explain This..?

Rather than trying to disprove the myriad arguments for creationism, I would rather start with some interesting genetic experiments done recently. There are interesting implications for the beliefs of creationists.

This is a clip taken from a lecture given by Ken Miller at Brown University that is 4.5 minutes. I would highly recommend seeing the whole lecture, but if you don’t have the time, then at least watch the 4 minute clip. The whole lecture (117 minutes) is here:

A short rundown of this clip:

• Humans have 46 chromosomes in each cell, 23 from each parent
• All other modern hominid species (apes) have 48 chromosomes, or 24 from each parent
• If apes and humans are descended from a common ancestor (as evolutionary theory claims), then there must be an explanation for why this is. There are only a few plausible ways this could have happened, since if an entire chromosome disappeared, then we likely would have died off fairly early
• One hypothesis: the human genetic line at some point had a 2 unique chromosomes (of the set of 24) fuse into one. This leaves us with 23 chromosomes total.
• It is common knowledge in genetics that the ends of chromosomes have sequences of DNA called “telomeres”, which are essentially just location markers – they indicate the beginning/end of that chromosome’s DNA.
• If the previously mentioned hypothesis is true, then if we sequence all the chromosomes from a human, we should find one with a patch of telomeres in the middle, where two chromosomes fused.
• This is exactly what we found when we sequenced the human genome.

I think this is an absolutely gorgeous example of the predictive power of scientific theories, and of evolutionary theory in particular.

Implications, Motivations…

But what does this result of the human genome project mean to creationists? After all, God can make us any way he wants.. even if it ends up looking like evolution is a plausible alternative. Fundamentally though, why would He do this? It is clearly unnecessary to have those chromosomes fused, as it is simply a matter of the tail ends being stuck together – there is no significant coding information in telomeres by themselves that would change our biology. We can only be left to guess as to why a creator God would do this.

At the same time, this example gives good reason for why evolutionary theory is used as an explanatory/predictive model of biology in the modern day – because it works. This does not necessarily imply that evolution, and the corresponding storyline of all life descending from a few initial pieces of primitive life, is in fact the way that we came to be. On the contrary, and as I mentioned before, God can create in any fashion he wants. I just have to say that it is rather curious that he would leave such tell-tale marks of evolution.

What motivations could he have for doing this? An obvious one to an atheist is, spite and/or whimsy. Christians, however, do not take kindly to this characterization. I would ask christian readers to respond: why do you think God would create in this manner?

[update 2007-01-10]

I would like to, at this point add another beguiling feature of our universe as created by an intelligent being:

A Young Universe That Looks Old

Given the biblical literalism / creation story is accepted as assumed before, the creation week was a literal 6-day period. This implies that if all stars were created in place, we would not be able to see anything beyond the ~6,000 lightyear distance boundary. This leaves us with three options:

1. The universe was created in a manner similar to the cosmic expansion/big bang model, but much, much faster than we thought. I’m sure there’s plenty of cosmologists that cringe at the thought of this since, it probably violates a lot of the math underlying the formation of the universe – things that result from a formation that takes billions of years rather than a few minutes. The pace of formation no doubt would change many things, and I would venture a guess that the cosmic background radiation would be a bit different.

2. The universe was created in the manner as described by our best scientific understanding, with an age on the order of a few billion years. This is completely discordant with the idea of creationist theory, and is therefore a direct conflict with the creationist ideology if it is in fact how things happened.

3. The universe was created in six days, but God placed the photons emitted from stars in pathways so as to make it look like the universe was created in a manner as described by our best scientific understanding (billions of years old). This bypasses the problem of transmission time, but creates the question of why God would create the universe in such a manner as to be completely physically decieving as to how it was formed.

Again, this raises questions as to the motivations behind why the universe or the structure of life itself on this planet appears to be of ancient origin, yet was supposed to have been created in a comparatively miniscule time period. Why would god go to such lengths to “cover up” the physical consequences of a young universe? Option #1 allows for things to stay quasi-plausible and still within a scientific framework, but it still undoubtedly violates a lot of principles of physics, which again comes to the problem of why god would invoke exceptions of physics in order to make a young universe look old.

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