Young Earth?

Ernest Thoughts

By Ernest ⋅ February 14, 2009 ⋅

I recently had some email correspondence with a young earth creationist. In a previous column, I had stated that the matter of a Deity was an unprovable statement. Three correspondents disagreed. One thought he could prove that God didn’t exist. One used circular reasoning: God wrote the Bible, the Bible says God exists, therefore God exists. The third has a doctorate in a physical science. He sent me a long list of “scientific” reasons to believe that the earth (and possibly, the universe) was created within the past 10,000 years, or so. Some of these “facts” were blatant nonsense, and/or matters of opinion. I checked with a noted geologist on the two items that were outside my field. While rather long, I think that this column is worth reading, since it sheds light on some of the current problems facing America and the world.
Ernest B. Cohen

Dear Dr. ___,

I was intellectually bothered that some young earth proponents seem to fabricate “facts” to support their position. In addition, they alternately accept such scientific principles as radio isotope dating, when convenient, and reject them when the data support an old earth. You had sent me a long list or reasons to accept a young earth, one that was created less than 10,000 years ago. I presume that you believe the entire universe was created at this time. The two specific points that I checked on: radio-active carbon in diamonds (there isn’t any) and explaining away the fantastic number of layers in Antarctic ice cores by multiple freeze-thaw cycles each year (which seemed to have suddenly ceased the moment humans reached the South Pole) are perfect examples of making data fit an existing hypothesis.

My first question to you is: why do you reject scientific theories that almost all other scientists accept? I can think of only two possibilities, but that is trying to read your mind:
1. You take the Bible as the infallible, literal word of God, and therefore accept the creation story as told in Genesis, or
2. You hold that the human soul is a divine miracle, and therefore can’t accept that humans developed by an evolutionary process. That leads you to reject all evolution, and to embrace a young earth, because a young earth is incompatible with evolution.

In either case, you have an emotional investment in that position, which logical argument will not affect. For the first case, you “know” that God wrote the Bible, so it must be literally true. No amount of facts as to the number of people who hold the same view regarding other “Holy Books”, which often contradict the Bible, will sway that view. Did Joseph Smith actually read the golden plates under the hill in Palmyra, New York? Did God use Mohammed as a secretary to write down the words of the Quran? No amount of pointing out obvious problems with the words of the Bible will affect your belief in its literal truth. No amount of discussing the problems of translating ancient Hebrew into Latin, and later into English will bother you. (Was it “a wind from God”, or the spirit of God” that hovered over the waters? The Hebrew word “ruakh” could mean either “wind” or “spirit”.) Even with the Bible, there are some differences among ancient copies. About 20 years ago, I had the occasion to visit Prof. Emmanuel Tov in Jerusalem. He was the editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He showed me, in translation of course, passages from the Hebrew Torah, and the Samaritan Torah, which differed in subtle ways. Which is the “true” revealed text?

Since you seem to accept a young earth, but not a precise age, I must assume that your concern is the soul. If so, you might personally accept an ancient earth, and evolution of the human body, with the Divine miracle being that God placed a soul into humans when they were sufficiently complex to be ready for it. Just as there is no way to either prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural Deity, there is no scientific way to either prove or disprove the existence of a human soul. If you can think of a definitive experiment to answer either question, I would like to be the first person to hear of it! After all, one of the best tests of a useful scientific theory is what experiments and observations it suggests. Most creationists assert that Darwin’s theory of evolution does not lead to either experiments of suggested observations of the natural world, whereas their position, a divine miracle, is the real scientific dead end.

If it is the first case, then there is a problem in that almost all data supports an ancient universe. Did God, the Creator, create light waves traveling through space from distant stars, as if they were in existence for millions of years, at the same instant, a few thousand years ago, that the universe was created? While nobody could ever disprove that, if almost all the observations support an ancient universe, most scientists would accept that as a fact, and try to explain the few observations that don’t seem to be consistent.

The interaction of observations and theory are the backbone of science. When they don’t agree, then more observations and further development of theory are required until the discrepancies are fixed. About 250 years ago, the French scientific establishment was bothered by reports from peasants in southern France of “stones falling from the sky”. Over the many years since, with more reports from more reliable sources, we now accept falling meteorites as a natural event. Going the other way, Einstein predicted that light would have mass, which sounded weird to most Physical Scientists a century ago. When an eclipse of the sun offered an opportunity to test this theory, the observation that light was bent by the sun confirmed the theory. There are many other incidents in the history of science. One, which should be of interest to you, is the idea that the continents are moving along the surface of the planet. Over the past century, this hypothesis has been confirmed with many observations, including recent measurements of rate at which the Atlantic Ocean is widening. Of course, this is another objection to the young earth hypothesis: at the current rate of spreading, the Atlantic Ocean would have opened up less than a tenth of a mile in the last 10,000 years. Again, did the Creator plant evidence of great age in a young universe? Again, what experiments or observations does the hypothesis of a young universe suggest? And if these refute the young earth hypothesis, will you reject or distort the data?

If we go back several centuries, two key scientific beliefs were held sacred by the Catholic Church, since these beliefs seemed to be supported by biblical verses. The first was a flat earth. Note that there still are a few believers in a flat earth. Their explanation of the orbits of artificial satellites is absurd to anybody except other members of the Flat Earth Society. The other belief was a geocentric universe. Galileo was punished for publishing astronomical observations which pointed to a heliocentric universe. Do you believe in a geocentric universe, and if not, why not? Which biblical verses do you accept as “scientific evidence”, and which do reject on scientific grounds? Just as a heliocentric universe makes sense out of almost all astronomical observations, an ancient earth makes sense out of almost all geology, and evolution makes sense out of a wide array of biological facts, as often said by eminent biologists. Note that the main witness for “Creation Science” at the Dover School Board trial had to admit that no study showing strong evidence for a young universe had ever been published in a peer refereed scientific journal.

Young earth believers use Noah’s flood to explain many geological observations. Where did the waters come from? Where did they go? Of course, in the biblical creation story, God “divided the waters over the earth from the waters under the earth”. This can explain the words “opened up the fountains of the deep”, but there are no observations that confirm the existence of great quantities of water either above or below the earth. That is the kind of pseudo science that young earth creationists propose, and which tends to make biblical literalism untenable in the eyes of educated people. When people falsify facts, it is usually a sign of a weak argument.

As a chemist, you know that the periodic table makes sense of chemistry, at least inorganic chemistry. It is true that a few things show up that seem to contradict the periodic table; such as compounds of the noble gases, which were synthesized about 50 years ago. These compounds are all explosively unstable, and require very strong oxidizers, but their very existence is at variance with a simple understanding of the periodic table. Do you, as a scientist, accept the periodic table? Do you do chemical work using the concepts of “phlogostin” and “Caloric”? Why not? Of course, these chemical concepts neither contradict nor affirm the Bible, so maybe this doesn’t bother you.

Recently, I had some medical tests at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. While waiting for the doctor, I read the September 2008 issue of the Economist, a British magazine. It included an article about the evolution of dung beetles. For practical reasons, dung beetles have been introduced into Australia, and also into North Carolina, within the past century. Four different groups of dung beetles have evolved in different ways over this short period of time so that they can no longer interbreed. The ability to breed is the usual definition of a species, so we have a clear example of relatively rapid evolution at work in a multi-celled organism. Of course, things are rarely what they seem: we have quite a few examples of different species that can interbreed. In recent years, as the ice floes are melting and polar bears have been forced onto land, they have been breeding with grizzly bears, usually considered a different species.

Cult leaders can make followers believe in anything, no matter how illogical. Psychics, magicians, and similar quacks can make impossible things appear, and even stump scientists. It takes another magician to unmask the fraud. As I have said recently: “Alchemists turned lead into gold. The gold went into their pockets, and their patrons were left with the lead.” That is why I am concerned about the many attempts teach “creation science” in the name of “academic freedom” and critical thinking. A buzz word used by those who are trying to sneak creation science into the high school curriculum is “theory”, as in the “theory of evolution”. Of course, these people know enough that if they applied the same arguments to the “theory of gravity” or the “helio-centric theory”, they would get laughed out of court. As an aside, teaching about the old controversy concerning the geocentric versus the helio-centric universe would be a better way to explain the scientific method and critical thinking to high school students.

The claim that there are basic scientific disputes over evolution is false. There are many divergent views on the fine details. The simple “one gene controls one biological feature” is rarely true, although Gregor Mendel was lucky with his peas. One gene really does control whether the peas are smooth or wrinkled through its effects on an enzyme that controls the sugar content of the peas. We now know that many traits are controlled by multiple genes, that genes can be turned off and on, so that different organs can form within the body, and small random mutations are quite common. In some cases, genes can jump between life forms. Obviously, Darwin had no idea how the information about traits was transmitted between generations, and some of his contemporaries cited him for this hole in his theory. Now, with the problem of bacteria and insects evolving resistance to poisons that formerly kept them in check, there are very practical results of applying evolutionary concepts to biology. These are some of the recent observations that confirm evolution.

The Catholic church is now backing science. They don’t want to have another “Galileo problem”, where science contradicts religious concepts. Note that the question as to when human life begins is not a scientific matter. The question as to when the growing fetus can feel pain, or have thoughts, is a possible area for scientific research. The question as to whether or not humans posses souls is not a scientific matter, at least with our present understanding of both souls and science. Maybe it will be in the future. The British Mathematician, Turing, proved that anything one general purpose computer can do, can also be performed by all general purpose computers. In that sense, brains are general purpose computers. We humans are far from cracking the problem of self awareness by computers, but as I heard in a lecture at Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic institution, people are working on it. My own best guess is that a computer that mimics a human in the sense that it “knows” what it is, and knows what it is thinking, would have to learn like a human child. If we program a computer with the capability of truly learning, knowing it exists, knowing what it is computing, and understanding its own “emotions” and those of organic computers (brains), would it have a soul? What is the level of complexity that goes with having a soul? If we apply modern breeding techniques to other higher animals, and they behave in very human ways, at what point would we have to accept them as equal to humans? If such newly intelligent creatures became religious, would they have souls? Incidentally, a number of Psychologists are working on the problem of why humans have spiritual needs, including religious beliefs. While the work is at an early stage, there is a Darwinian logic to the evolution of these capabilities evolving in the human brain.

So, in the controversy between science and religion, who picked the fight? When religion sticks to such matters as, “Why is there a universe at all?”, and ethical actions (see the poem, Abou Ben Adhem, written over 150 years ago by the British poet, Leigh Hunt), there is no problem. When religion tries to fight science on the way the universe works, either religion loses, or, what is worse, we all lose. There is a lot of important material on the interface of science and religion, so let’s not muddy the waters with false science.

It has been noted by some, that the attempts to sneak “Creation Science” into public schools is often coupled with an attempt to discredit anthropogenic global climate change. In both cases, evolution and climate change, the general picture is clear, but scientists are still arguing about the details, and actively doing research to fill in the holes. The legislators that have passed these bills in a number of states are both symbolic of an anti-science attitude in parts of America, and are helping to spread it.

It is ironic that the anti-science movement, and the religious young earth believers, have even affected science dedicated to trying to understand the human past. The University of Pennsylvania Museum has cut out a crack team of archaeologists, who have been using advanced technology to decipher secrets of ancient relics. They have used isotope analysis to determine the source of metals in artifacts from many thousands of years ago, and thereby determining trade patterns. They have identified stains on pottery shards, and thereby giving earlier times when we know that humans fermented agricultural products to make beer and wine. These are just some of the facts about early humans which cast light on the origins of our civilization.

America needs dedicated scientist to cope with two current problems. First, our position as a world leader, both economically and as a super power, depended upon being a world leader in basic science, and the technology that grew out of that science. Second, dealing with global climate change will not be easy for America, or any other nation. All of us humans need the best science to understand the details of climate change, and to work out ways to prevent or mitigate it. Sustainability of our advanced affluent civilization is dependent on science: physical science, biological science, and social science. Misguided attempts to replace science with religion can only lead to world collapse. But science and technology, without ethical and moral guidance from religion, can also lead to world collapse. So what is gained by trying to deny evolution and an ancient earth, presumably in the name of religion?

Ernest B. Cohen & Elaine H. Cohen
ernest.cohen@ieee.org

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