Why I Became a Creationist

This is essentially my definitive statement on creationism at present. It critiques

all of the alleged “solutions” which theistic evolutionists set forth and presents
positive reasons for having intellectual peace within a young-earth creationist
view of the world.

Ten years ago, I had just been “converted” to belief in evolution. In one sense, of
course, all of us believe in evolution- it simply means that life changes over time
in predictable ways. What I came to believe in, however, was the Darwinian theory
of evolution, namely, the idea that all forms of life on this planet share a single
common ancestor and that the differences among these forms of life can be explained
by random variation in an organism’s genome and higher rates of survival for those
organisms that had acquired slight, beneficial variations. When I came to believe
in evolution, I was an evangelical Christian. I didn’t know the Bible or theology
very well, but I did believe in Jesus. At first, I saw no conflict between
evolution and Christianity. After all, couldn’t God have created the world through
evolutionary processes? Couldn’t Genesis 1 be an allegory, not unlike the parables
of Jesus?

Since I didn’t see conflict between Christianity and evolution, I came to believe
that many people were turned off from Christianity because of the intellectual
price of having to disagree with virtually the entire scientific community. Along
with a natural desire to be right, this drove me to vigorously promote theistic
evolution among my peers. Once everyone in my personal life was sick of hearing me
talk about it, I started a YouTube channel (Kabane52) to promote evolution. Within
a year, I had made over two hundred videos on the subject. It was my passion, as
anyone who knew me at that time will remember.

Very soon however, I began to realize that evolution and Christianity were not as
easily reconcilable as I thought. Not only that, I had found on the Internet all
sorts of criticisms of Christianity. I had never considered the possibility that I
might be wrong about the Christian faith. Maybe evolution was true and Christianity
wasn’t. Maybe the atheists were right. Such an idea terrified me, but multiple
times, I came very near to atheism. In God’s providence, I soon discovered various
websites and books devoted to demonstrating the historical believability of the
claims of Jesus and the apostles about the Lord’s death and resurrection. If the
resurrection was true, then Christianity must be true. I devoured Lee Strobel’s The
Case for Christ and read a great many Internet articles about the subject. I began
to debate the atheists with whom I had once made common cause against creationists.
Christian apologetics became my new passion- but my questions about how to
reconcile evolution with Christianity remained.

And they remained for years. Even after I had lost interest in evolution entirely,
I still believed the evidence for it and against a global flood was very strong. I
believed (and still believe) that many popular creationist arguments against
Darwinism were based on simple misunderstandings of the scientific data. So I
stayed a theistic evolutionist. But time began to gnaw, and those questions kept
coming back up. Here are three of the most serious issues that emerge in trying to
reconcile Darwinian evolution and an ancient earth with Christianity.

Exegetical Issues

First, there is the question of Scripture itself. Despite occasional claims to the
contrary, the Church has always confessed the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, not
only in doctrinal matters, but in historical details as well. St. Augustine, for
example, says that if he finds what looks to be a contradiction, he assumes that he
has either misunderstood the passage or that there has been an error in copying one
manuscript from another. St. Maximus the Confessor, one of the most influential
theologians of the Eastern Church, goes so far to say that the Bible expresses the
truth of the eternal God as fully as text can express that truth. But the
contemporary naturalistic account of origins doesn’t fit with what the Scriptures
declare.

Day-Age

The most obvious conflict is between Genesis 1 and an ancient earth. Genesis 1 says
that God created the world in six evenings and mornings. With one or two
exceptions, all commentators before Darwin took this passage historically. I tried
to fit this passage with evolution in various ways. At first, I held a “day-age”
view of Genesis 1. According to this view, the days described in Genesis 1 are not
twenty-four hour days, but extended periods of time, comprising millions or
billions of years. At a superficial level, this seems plausible. After all, the
Hebrew word yom does occasionally mean “age” rather than “day.” In Genesis 1,
however, this is an impossible reading. Each day is marked by an evening and a
morning which are distinguished by periods of darkness and light. Moreover, the
order of events in Genesis 1 do not follow the conventional scientific account of
the world’s origins. For example, according to conventional science, birds appeared
on the scenes long after land animals, having evolved from dinosaurs. Furthermore,
the sun is created on the fourth day, after plants have been created. Conventional
scientists, of course, say the sun existed before the Earth formed.

Some day-age interpreters attempt to argue that the days are actually overlapping
and that the “creation” of the sun on the fourth day simply refers to it becoming
visible after the dissolution of a permanent cloud-cover over the Earth. Frankly,
such interpretations are so obviously strained it’s a wonder anyone can live with
the cognitive dissonance. There’s no indication that the days overlap, and that
Israel’s work week is modeled on God’s proves definitively that they do not. It
would also be impossible to understand what constituted an evening and what
constituted a morning on this view. So I had to abandon this view and try to find
another.

Days of Proclamation

The next view I took is a little known reading of Genesis 1 known as the “Days of
Proclamation” intepretation. According to this view, God’s own declaration of His
intent to create occurs in six days, but the actual events of the creation occurred
an indefinite time later. That is, it is a misunderstanding of the literary
structure of Genesis 1 to see the actual events as transpiring within a single
week. While this at first appeared to resolve the issues with the day-age
interpretation, it soon became apparent to me that this reading was fraught with
even more problems. For one, it is clear in Exodus 20 that the actual events of the
creation took place within the creation week. The Lord does not simply say that He
“declared His intent to create” in six days before resting on the seventh. Instead,
He states that He actually created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested
on the seventh. Additionally, it makes no sense to speak of a week of seven twenty-
four hour days before the formation of the Earth within the framework of
conventional science. This is because the days are marked as twenty-four hours in
virtue of the Earth’s rotation. On the Days of Proclamation view, there was no such
Earth to mark the days on the first day of the week!

Days of Consecration

The next view I took was a relatively new viewpoint, developed by evangelical
biblical scholar John Walton. Walton’s view is that ancient Near Eastern creation
stories, including the story of Genesis, were not concerned so much with describing
the material organization of the world. Instead, they were concerned with the
ritual consecration of preexisting matter into a Temple. Walton notes that in
various ancient cultures, festivals for the dedication of the temple took six days,
so that the god would “rest” in the temple on the seventh day. He then reasons that
this is likely what is being described in Genesis 1. Out of the three explanations
I have just listed, Walton’s is clearly the most defensible. Yet I realized that
even this view was massively problematic. First, Walton’s strict distinction
between material and ritual organization cannot be defended. Solomon’s Temple was
built in seven years, clearly drawing on this pattern of seven for the construction
of a temple.

Second, Walton’s view makes meaning ancillary to the actual world. For Walton, God
creates the matter out of which the world develops ex nihilo and then allows it to
develop according to the patterns he designed at the beginning of creation.
However, it is not until God consecrates the world that created things are imbued
with meaning. On the fourth day, we are told that God made the heavenly lights in
order to rule the day and the night and to mark festival times. This is why the
Bible so frequently uses the symbols of heavenly lights to talk about political
changes. Yet, this meaning is not artificial. God created the heavenly lights
precisely to symbolize the rule of His Son over all things. Symbolism, then, is
inherent in the world, not imposed onto it. This world is God’s world from top to
bottom.

Third, and most problematically for Walton, the sequence of events in the speeches
of Exodus 25-31 mitigate against his reading of Genesis 1. The tabernacle is a
miniature world. Because of this, God dictates the instructions for the tabernacle
in seven speeches, corresponding to the seven days of creation. Understanding these
instructions can help us grasp the meaning of the creation days. We are told in
Genesis 1 that God created the “heavens and the earth” on the first day. The
heavens refer to God’s throne room above the firmament, the earth refers to the
matter which God will organize in the six following days. If this interpretation is
correct, then Walton must be wrong, because Genesis 1 describes the creation and
organization of matter. In the first speech of the tabernacle instructions, all of
the material for the building of the tabernacle is gathered together. In the six
speeches which follow, this material is organized into a functioning sanctuary.
Hence, Walton is incorrect. Genesis 1 refers to the creation of the material world.

Framework Interpretation

Related to this idea is Meredith Kline’s “framework” view, that Genesis 1 is a

literary framework designed to communicate the meaning of creation rather than to
describe its history. In support of this contention, advocates of the framework
view point to the literary correspondence of the first three days of creation with
the second three. On the first day, God creates light, and on the fourth day, God
creates heavenly lights. On the second day, separates the skies from the oceans,
and on the fifth day, God creates birds for the skies and fish for the oceans. On
the third day, God creates grain plants and fruit trees, and on the sixth day, God
creates man who will transform these plants into the sacramental foods: Bread, Oil,
and Wine. The argument here, however, is a non-sequitur. I fully agree with the
literary pattern I have just described. But this doesn’t mean the text isn’t
historical! As I mentioned above, God is the God who created the world to reveal
His truth. The meaning of the six days is contained in the historical creation
itself, and the Holy Spirit inspired Moses to reveal this meaning in a rich
literary structure.

As an analogy, consider the story of the resurrection of Jesus in John 20.

According to John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene looked inside the Tomb and saw two
angels sitting on either side of the tombstone, and when she saw Jesus, she thought
he was the Gardener. John doesn’t just tell us these things to give us brute facts.
He is making a theological point. The order of the narrative of John follows the
order of the furniture of the tabernacle, beginning with the Bronze Altar and Jesus
identified as the sacrificial “lamb of God” and climaxing here, with the two angels
in the Tomb corresponding to the two cherubim who carried God’s throne in the Holy
of Holies. We are being told that Jesus is the incarnate God who sat enthroned
between two angels in the Temple. Likewise, we are told that Mary thought Jesus was
the Gardener because Jesus is, in fact, the Gardener. He is the true and Last Adam,
the one who restores the Garden of Eden and glorifies it into a City. But neither
of these theological truths mean that the historical events didn’t occur! Mary
really did think Jesus was a routine gardener, and there really were two angels
inside the tomb. Because all history is God’s history, history itself contains
theological meaning, and the biblical authors were inspired to reveal that meaning.
This is why the Bible can teach us how to interpret the world and history.

The Global Flood

These exegetical problems are true across the biblical text. A person who holds to
conventional science cannot believe that the Flood of Noah was global. Conventional
geologists have supposedly refuted such an idea, and many Christian thinkers are
trying to play catch-up. In order to reconcile conventional geology with the
biblical text, I had to believe that the Flood was local. The justification for
this view was in the translation of the Hebrew word erets. This word is translated
“earth” in Genesis 6-9, but it can be translated as “land.” Hence, it seems rather
easy to make Noah’s Flood local. In reality, however, it is impossible. Not only
does the text say that “everything under the high heavens” was destroyed, its
literary structure corresponds with Genesis 1, which no person doubts refers to the
entire world. If one carefully studies the text, one will discover that Genesis 7
actually reverses the creation week step by step, and it ends with the ark
“floating on the face of the waters” just as the Spirit “hovered over the face of
the waters.” Genesis 8, then, follows the creation days forwards, starting with day
one and ending with a Sabbath sacrifice offered by Noah. This literary structure
reveals the meaning of the Flood story, but it also demonstrates decisively that
the Flood must be global.

Long Lifespans

On top of this, the long ages lived by the patriarchs of old contradict
conventional scientific views of humanity. According to Genesis 5, before the
Flood, it was normal to live to nearly 1000 years old. In Genesis 11, those ages
are cut in half, and then the Tower of Babel cuts these ages in half again. Since
Peleg was named for the division of nations at Babel, we know that the sudden shift
in ages after Peleg corresponds with the Tower. After this, the ages gradually
decline to present rates. Some have tried to limit the “problem” to Genesis 1-11,
arguing that there is a substantial difference in genre between Genesis 1-11 and
the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. In reality, however, if one rejects that
which contradicts conventional science, then one continues to have problems in the
patriarchal narratives. Abraham lives to 205 years old, and Jacob lives to 147! It
is only with Joseph that ages begin to approach their present rates.

The basic conclusion is that if one believes in the Bible, it is very difficult to
agree with conventional science.

Theological Issues: Death

The problems, however, are not merely exegetical. They are theological. That is,
they deal not just with the meanings of particular biblical texts, but with the
structure of Christian theology itself. Christianity holds that God created a world
which was free of death and sin. Because all life comes only from God, in order for
the creation to be free of death, it must be united with God. Man is the Image of
God. That is, he reflects the glory and life of God into the world and the praises
of the world back to God. The world was made as an infant world, but it was not
made as a corrupt world. Man was supposed to grow in communion and relation with
God and bring the creation up with him. Instead, Adam turned away from God, thereby
cutting off the communication of life to the world. Hence, everything began to die,
including man himself.

It is clear that this poses a substantial challenge to the conventional account of

Earth history. Evolution requires death to work. Certain individuals within
populations must die selectively in order for beneficial genes to be passed on at
higher rates. If there was no death for billions of years, nothing could have
evolved at all. Furthermore, the fossil record is a record of dead things. If it
was laid down before the creation of man, then death preceded the Fall. How does
one explain death before the Fall if one believes in evolution and an ancient
earth?

Spiritual Death

My first “solution” was simple: the death brought by Adam into the world was
spiritual death, not bodily death. After all, salvation means for our soul to go to
heaven rather than for our bodies to. I soon discovered, however, that this was a
massive theological blunder. According to the Scriptures and the Christian faith, a
human person is not just a soul. He is soul and body. This is why Jesus Christ was
raised bodily from the dead. When He ascended into heaven, He did not somehow
abandon His human nature! Instead, by joining divinity with humanity, He made it
possible for our whole persons to share in the life of God, body and soul alike.
Thus, St. Paul speaks of our hope as the “redemption of our body” which will come
at the return of Christ. Jesus speaks of us sharing in the “resurrection of life.”
We shall have glorious bodies like His glorious body.

Death, then, must refer to bodily death.

Just Human Death

The next solution was to try to argue that the death described in Genesis 2-3 and
Romans 5 was simply death for humans. The first humans would be apes to whom God
gave souls, and they were promised immortality unless they sinned. This ignores,
however, the fact that Man is the Image of God. Because man is the Image of God,
man reflects the life of God into the creation. The condition of man determines the
condition of the world. This is why Paul says in Romans 8 that the “creation waits
with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God.” If man could live
forever even while the world dissolved, why would it be any guarantee for the world
that man will be raised from the dead? Paul’s argument only makes sense if man
communicates the life of God to the world. If this is the case, however, then the
curse of death pronounced on man necessarily includes the creation for the first
time. Nothing died before man sinned. Nothing suffered before man sinned. Psalm 8
tells us that man is the ruler of the cosmos. The hope of the cosmos is in man.

Historical Fall Outside Chronological Time

My final option was to argue that man, indeed, is responsible for all the death and
suffering in the world, even before his own existence. In order to argue this, I
suggested that Adam’s fall, in a sense, took place “outside of time.” When Christ
returns, time will be transfigured into eternity, understood not as an endless
sequence of moments, but understood instead as the instant reciprocation of all
movements of love by one person to another. This is a technical theological point,
but it has to do with the Trinity. God exists eternally, meaning not an infinite
regress of sequential moments in the past, but that the Son returns the love of the
Father as soon as the Father loves Him, and vice verse. Paul says in 1 Corinthians
15 that God becomes “all in all” after the return of Christ. Everything becomes
filled with Him, and this is the case with time itself. If this is the case, I
reasoned, then it might be true that the Fall does not stand in sequential
relationship with death, but instead, stands “above it.” Adam’s mode of existence
was different than ours and thus did not stand in the same relation with time.
Unfortunately, this argument collapsed on account of its retrojection of
eschatological time into the beginning. According to the Scriptures and Christian
theology, God created the world to gradually grow up into His own fullness. This
would be the case even apart from the Fall, since Adam and Eve were created naked:
as spiritual babies. Eventually, they would become robed in glory just as God is
robed in glory.

If this is the case, then, I could not argue that Adam’s relation to time was the
same as our own will be after the return of Christ. This would mean that the world
was in fact created mature, and that our entrance into eternity is not only a
feature of the world at its final stage. Since this is false, however, my account
of Adam’s fall with respect to time must be incorrect.

Theological Issues: The Primacy of Paganism in Darwin’s World

One more set of theological problems emerged relatively late in my reflection on

this issue. If one studies the cultures surrounding Israel, one will find that they
share many things in common with the worldview of the Old Testament. For example,
all cultures surrounding Israel had temples and covenants. The temples often
displayed profound similarities to Israel’s Temple in the Old Testament, including
three sections referred to as a Courtyard, a Holy Place, and a Holy of Holies. The
covenants made between nations and their kings read very much like the covenant
between Yahweh and Israel recorded in the book of Deuteronomy. The difference, of
course, was that Israel was monotheistic while these pagan cultures were
polytheistic and idolatrous.

The problem emerges as one considers how many conservative scholars interpret this
pattern of similarities and differences. According to scholars like Wheaton
professor James Hoffmeier, we need to see the Old Testament as a polemic against
paganism. That is, God inspired the biblical authors to imitate the pagans in many
things. The pagans were the first to offer sacrifices, the pagans were the first to
build temples, the pagans were the first to make covenants. God is late to the
party, as it were, and He imitates the forms of pagan culture. What this does,
however, is render paganism to be the primary framework for human thought and
religion. Paganism becomes primary, and the true pattern of religion and worship
becomes secondary. This is a necessary way of viewing things if a person is a
theistic evolutionist, because according to the conventional chronology of the
ancient world, man began to build cities in 8000 BC, and Israel did not begin to
exist until around 1700 BC with Abraham at the very earliest.

If one takes the Bible at its word, however, then the Tower of Babel occurred
around 2000 BC, and Abraham was called only 200 years later. This necessarily means
that historians of the ancient world have incorrectly reconstructed ancient
chronology. That is, they do not understand which people and events and cultures
were contemporaneous with each other. A biblical view of history solves the problem
described above, because we recognize that Noah and his children knew the true God.
There is much evidence that people outside Israel continued to worship the true
God, which I describe below. The similarities between Israel and pagan cultures is
not because paganism came first. Instead, on a biblical framework, pagan religions
are corrupted forms of the true religion which had been given to Noah. Sacrifice
began in Genesis 4, and Noah offered sacrifice. This is why people offer sacrifice
not just in the Near East, but from ancient China to ancient America. Noah knew how
to build a temple, and people across the world build temples with three parts: not
just in Israel and its surrounding cultures, but as far away as Mesoamerica.
Mesoamerican temples even display similarities with Egyptian and Near Eastern
temples.
The only way, then, to vindicate the biblical view of human culture, where
monotheism comes first and polytheism second, is to affirm a biblical and
creationist view of history. As an evolutionist, I had no answer.

Thus, there was simply no solution at all to any of these problems. Theological
problems were just as serious and insurmountable as exegetical problems. I was
fully convinced of Christianity on other grounds, so I simply set the question
aside, assuming that there was an answer I had not yet discovered yet. I knew,
however, that I would have to deal with this eventually.

Why Creationism?

Miraculous Features of the Chronology of the Bible

What first gave me real pause about the truth of conventional scientific theories
as to origins was studying the theological writings of James B. Jordan. Jordan is
not well-known, but I truly believe he is one of the greatest biblical scholars in
the history of the church. Jordan understands the necessity of paying attention to
all of the details in Scripture. Paul tells us not only that all Scripture is
inspired by God, but that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine. Hence, every
detail has theological meaning. What surprised me was that Jordan was a young-earth
creationist. Not only was he a creationist, but he affirms the importance of
biblical chronology. The Bible, when it is carefully studied, actually gives us a
complete chronology from the creation of the world to the coming of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, some Christians, even creationists, have stated that there was no
intent to provide such a chronology, and that the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11
might well have gaps. As Jordan pointed out, however, whether or not there are gaps
in the generations, there are no gaps in the chronology, because the age of the
father at the birth of his son is given. This makes it a chronological “lock.” But
what struck me was how significant numbers theologically began to emerge when one
took the chronology seriously. For example, exactly 3000 years after the creation
of the world, the Temple of Solomon was constructed. Exactly 1000 years later, the
Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70. The fall of the Second Temple marks the end
of the Old Covenant which began when God created Adam. The Old Covenant, in both
its Noahic and Mosaic forms, was regulated by animal sacrifice, a central
sanctuary, and distinctions between clean and unclean. When the Second Temple fell,
this entire order ended, and the significance of this event is described in the
symbolism of the book of Revelation, which mostly concerns this period. What is
amazing is that from the Creation to the fall of the Second Temple is precisely
4000 years, or 100 generations. How could this be coincidence? God gave us this
chronology so that we can search out the meaning of history.

Memories of the Flood

Even so, this discovery was nothing compared to what I found next. According to the
Scriptures, Genesis 1-11 describe the history which all humankind shares in common.
If this is the case, one might expect all nations to have mythological traditions
concerning this period of time. It had been my assumption that this was not the
case. It is widely known, however, that Flood stories are one of the most pervasive
features of mythological traditions. In a move of either ignorance or rank
dishonesty, most contemporary biblical scholars explain the origin of the biblical
flood story in terms of other flood stories circulating in the ancient Near East.
For example, the Epic of Gilgamesh describes a global flood similar in many
respects to the flood described in the Bible. Utnapishtim builds a boat, the gods
flood the world, he sents a raven out near the end of the flood, and he offers
sacrifice after he emerges from the ark. Noting these similarities, many biblical
scholars say that the story of Noah is derived from the story of Utnapishtim in the
Epic of Gilgamesh.
Floods Happen Everywhere?

If the Bible is telling a historical narrative, however, then one should expect
other cultures to have memories of the global flood. There is a way to test which
explanation is correct. If flood stories similar to the biblical story are
distributed across the planet, then the best explanation is that the flood is a
historical event. It is common knowledge that such stories are distributed across
the planet, but the most common explanation is simply that “floods happen
everywhere.” What I discovered when I began to read the stories themselves,
however, is that this explanation is completely insufficient. If these many stories
originated independently, then one should not expect detailed, particular
similarities. But we find such similarities. For example, the Cree tribe of
American Indians in Canada tell of a global flood, at the end of which the flood
hero sent forth a raven and a wood pigeon, obviously similar to the story where
Noah sends forth a raven and a dove. The Hawaiian tradition calls the flood hero
“Nu'u” and describes how he offered a sacrifice to the gods after emerging from his
ship, just as Noah did after emerging from the ark. The same is true of literally
thousands of flood stories around the globe. The similarities are too specific and
detailed to be the result of chance.

Missionary Influence?

Recognizing this problem, some critics have attempted to explain the prevalence of
flood stories around the globe by pointing to missionary influence. But this is
clearly desperate. Some of the stories are far too paganized and corrupted to be
the result of missionary influence, while still displaying similarities to the
biblical story. One Mesoamerican flood story records that some persons offered a
sacrifice to the gods which displeased them, leading the gods to turn some people
into monkeys. This is plainly a corrupted form of the original biblical story, but
it is too corrupt to have been the result of hearing the story from missionaries.
Furthermore, are we really to believe that missionaries vigorously preached the
story of the Flood across the globe, leading literally all cultures to tell stories
of a global flood? This problem is intensified by the fact that we know such
stories were circulating before missionaries, even outside the ancient Near East.
For example, we have an Old World Indian flood story from 700 BC, displaying many
particular similarities to the biblical account.

Other difficulties abound. For example, across the Southeast United States, Indian
tribes tell flood stories which feature, not a bird, but an otter emerging from the
boat near the end of the flood. The otter descends to the bottom of the sea and
brings forth land. This is true across hundreds of miles in the America Southeast.
It is close enough to the biblical story to require some sort of genetic
relationship, but explaining this relationship by missionary influence is
impossible. In order for missionary influence to explain it, independent missions
to many different Indian tribes would need to generate local variations on the
narrative of the flood. Each of these tribes would then need to corrupt the story
in the exact same way. This defies all probability. Much simpler is the explanation
that this particular “otter variant” of the flood story derives from a much earlier
Native American account of the Flood which had changed the raven to an otter. As
the tribes spread across the American Southeast, each carried this variant with
them.

Memories of the Tower of Babel

I was simply stunned at the force of this evidence. I had never truly grasped the
weight of the argument from flood stories before. But there was even more to
discover. I found that this situation is true across the stories of Genesis 1-11.
For example, the story of the Tower of Babel is remembered across the planet. Some
Aboriginal Australian tribes, for example, tell of a story of a great tree which
was blown over by a gust of wind, after which all nations were confused in
languages and scattered across the planet. Native American tribes tell the same
story, including the great gust of wind. Indeed, as one looks across the planet for
stories of the origin of languages, one finds these two pervasive features:
something tall, such as a tower or a tree, and something like a blast of wind.
Interestingly, the blast of wind is not recorded in Scripture. Where, then, did it
come from?

The Jewish historian Josephus independently transmits traditions about the biblical
narrative not recorded in Scripture. He tells us that one night, God sent a
miraculous gust of wind which destroyed the Tower of Babel. When people awoke, they
found that they could no longer understand each other. We therefore discover that
not only do people groups remember the story of the Tower of Babel, but that the
traditions they remember included additional historical information about the Tower
which is not given to us in Scripture. The same is true of the creation of man: one
Native American tribe remembers that God made a woman from the dust of the ground,
put her to sleep, and made a man from her side!

Original Monotheism

And the same is true of worship of the true God Himself. Winfried Corduan, in his
book In the Beginning God: The Case for Original Monotheism critiques the
prevailing view of the origins of religion. Most anthropologists argue without
evidence that polytheism and animism precede monotheism. The evidence, however,
indicates otherwise. When anthropologists study tribal cultures, they often find
that despite the practice of animism, the cultures transmit secret and highly
guarded traditions of a creator God who is the supreme lord of the world and who
once communicated with these tribal people. Sadly, they remember that at one point
he ceased communicating with them. Christian missionaries often find that tribes
have a prophecy of a day when missionaries will come and restore knowledge of the
true God.

But it’s not just true in tribal cultures. When we study the ancient world, we find
that all ancient cultures originally worshiped the one true God. The original
religion of ancient China focused on One God, whom they called Shang-Ti, the
Emperor of Heaven. Shang-Ti was kind, loving, just, and merciful. This is
significant, because pagan gods do not have these attributes. Pagan gods in many
cultures are capricious and much more interested in themselves than they are in
man. But this is almost never true for the high god in these cultures. When
colonists arrived in the Americas, some of them found that Algonquin tribes
worshiped a person whom they called the “Great Spirit.” The Great Spirit loved
mankind, commanded men to love one another, ordained that one man and one woman
marry for life, and had once send a flood to punish the world for its evil. Here is
a story the Skokomish tribe of Washington state recites, as summarized by Mark
Isaak, a critic of creationism:

The Great Spirit, angry with the wickedness of people and animals, decided to rid
the earth of all but the good animals, one good man, and his family. At the Great
Spirit’s direction, the man shot an arrow into a cloud, then another arrow into
that arrow, and so on, making a rope of arrows from the cloud to the ground. The
good animals and people climbed up. Bad animals and snakes started to climb up, but
the man broke off the rope. Then the Great Spirit caused many days of rain,
flooding up to the snow line of Takhoma (Mount Ranier). After all the bad people
and animals were drowned, the Great Spirit stopped the rain, the waters slowly
dropped, and the good people and animals climbed down. To this day there are no
snakes on Takhoma.

Whenever we study tribal and cultural traditions, we find that their own cultural
memories correspond with the history described in Genesis 1-11. Genesis really does
tell the true history of mankind, even though modern man has forgotten it.

Scientific Issues

Bad Creationist Arguments

Still, this left me with one issue, the most difficult of them all: namely, the
scientific evidence. Contrary to the beliefs of some creationists, the case for
evolution and an ancient earth is not stupid or worthless. There are arguments for
both that deserve to be taken seriously. Even though I am a creationist today, I am
still a critic of most creationist arguments, for the simple reason that most
creationist arguments are bad. It is very important for our credibility as
Christians that we be careful in which arguments we use and which arguments we do
not use. Consider one argument, that evolution contradicts the second law of
thermodynamics, because the second law of dynamics states that “everything tends
towards disorder.” This is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all,
“disorder” is not being used in its colloquial sense, but in a technical sense
which means that there are differences in temperature which are exploited in order
to accomplish motion, what physicists call “work.” Second, the law does not state
that everything tends towards disorder at the same rate. Instead, given that the
universe as a whole is a closed system (something which I do not accept), the order
in the whole system will decrease. However, the distribution of energy in the
universe changes constantly, so that there can be localized increases in order.

Likewise, the concept that the entire fossil record was laid down by the Flood of
Noah is untenable. This does not explain the particular order of fossils that we
discover in the ground, especially for what paleontologists call Cenozoic, or
Tertiary rocks. Paleontologists divide the Earth’s history into three periods,
corresponding to three different layers of rock. There are Paleozoic, or Primary
rocks. These contain fossils from the Precambrian and before. Above this, there are
Mesozoic rocks, containing fossils from the Cambrian to the end of the Cretaceous,
when the dinosaurs are understood to have gone extinct. Finally, there are
Cenozoic, or Tertiary rocks, where we find mammals, most birds, and ourselves. The
difficulty with the older creationist view that all of these rocks were laid down
by the Flood is that we only find humans at the top of the rock layers, and we find
remnants of human civilization, which would be completely wiped out by a global
Flood. Why do we only find humans at the top?

Intelligent Design

There are two issues which ought to be distinguished. First, there is the issue of
evolution by means of mutation and natural selection. In contemporary science,
there is a small movement of scientists following the “intelligent design”
movement. These scientists do not necessarily reject common descent, but do believe
that life exhibits features of design. I found that, despite widespread criticism
from mainstream scientists, many of these proponents of design make an excellent
case. Michael Behe argues that much cellular life exhibits evidence of “irreducible
complexity.” That is, such life is composed of a great multitude of parts, but if
you remove even one of those parts, the entire system ceases to function. Since
natural selection operates by small, slight modifications, it is difficult to
explain how such systems could have evolved directly.

Evolutionary scientists such as Ken Miller have noted that ostensibly irreducibly
complex systems such as the flagellum do have precursors, but those precursors did
not operate as a flagellum. Miller cites the Type 3 Secretory System, which uses
only ten parts of a forty-part flagellum. While it does not operate as a flagellum,
it does function as a mechanism for injecting poison into other cells. Behe has
responded in two ways. First, the evidence indicates that the Type III secretory
system actually descends from the flagellum and not the other way around. Second,
it is nigh impossible to explain how a system could move forward by natural
selection if it changes function each time it acquires a new part. If selective
pressure is refining a particular system, it is refining it with respect to a
particular function. Miller’s argument, while sounding persuasive on the surface,
has little depth. I found that in actual debates with proponents of intelligent
design, evolutionary scientists did not have as clear as an edge that they claimed
in the public square.

The Age of the Earth

This still left the most significant scientific issue: the age of the earth. Sadly,
many arguments for a young earth simply do not stand up to scrutiny, and are made
with people with little to no familiarity with the scientific literature or the
scientific evidence. We Christians need to have a better standard than this. We
have no reason to fear. All truth is God’s truth. If we are rigorously committed to
the truth, then we will find far better arguments than if we are not.

The New Creationism

What I discovered, however, was that there is a modern movement of a different kind
of creationist scientist. These scientists are interested in doing science because
they want to study God’s world in the light of what God has spoken in Scripture.
Instead of being motivated by a desire to “refute evolution”, they were committed
to formulating a coherent model which could describe the world in creationist
terms, leading to productive insights. Furthermore, these scientists were critical
of older creationist work which took a disrespectful, polemical tone against those
who disagreed. Included in this group are scientists like Kurt Wise, Leonard Brand,
and Todd Wood.

The Floating Forest

Kurt Wise, educated in paleontology at Harvard University, is one of the most

creative thinkers in the modern creationist movement. He noted that the sequence of
plants in the fossil record was exactly what evolution would predict. Plants began
at their shortest and least complex and gradually became taller and more complex.
He noted, however, that the order of plant fossils also described an order of
plants which lived in the sea to plants that lived in the land. Asking whether any
such ecological order was present in the modern world, he realized that this order
is exactly what one finds in “quaking bogs.” A quaking bog is a small, floating mat
of plants which becomes thicker as one moves towards the center. In the center, one
finds trees which actually grow on this mat and whose roots extend into the water.
The roots, therefore, are not deep, but extend below the mat and expand outwards.
What Kurt Wise discovered is that the order of plants in the fossil record reveals
that before the Flood, there was a massive quaking bog the size of a continent,
which Wise calls the “floating forest.” Indeed, the trees that one finds in the
fossil record are actually hollow, which made them lighter and more able to float
on this large mat. While hollow trees are extinct today, other sorts of hollow
plants have survived in quaking bogs. Furthermore, the well-known “fish-with-legs”
fossils are found in this context. These appear to be, not evolutionary
transitions, but animals which lived on the floating forest and were therefore
capable of walking around on the plant mat and swimming below its surface.

RATE Project

Scientists associated with the RATE project have also made substantial progress in
understanding why radiometric dating methods tend to give old ages. Radiometric
dating works by measuring the relative amounts of certain chemicals in rocks.
“Radiometric decay” is when one chemical gradually turns into another chemical over
time. This occurs at a constant rate, so, if one sees the relative amounts of the
chemical in a rock, one should hypothetically be able to find when the rock formed.
However, whenever radiometric decay occurs, helium is released into the rock.
Helium is a leaky chemical, meaning that it escapes the rock relatively quickly. A
certain amount of radiometric decay will always generate a certain amount of
helium. Hence, if all of this radiometric decay occurred millions of years ago, it
should nearly all be gone. If it happened at a different rate a few thousand years
ago, there should be a predictable amount of helium left in the rocks. What the
scientists working on the RATE project did is to take these rocks and predict
precisely how much helium should be left in them, given the creationist model. They
published the predictions before receiving the results of the experiments, and then
they sent the rocks to secular labs so that secular scientists could do the
experiments. The creationist prediction was confirmed with flying colors.

Magnetic Field

The same is true with respect to the decay of our magnetic field. Our magnetic
field is decaying at a particular rate. Given the present rate of decay, the
magnetic field would be prohibitively strong just 20,000 years ago. In order to
deal with this conundrum, secular scientists have developed a “dynamo” theory of
the magnetic field which allows for its strength to increase and decrease over
time. Reversals of the polarities of the magnetic field, in this model, can only
occur over a period of about a thousand years. Russell Humphreys, a creationist
physicist, developed an alternative model for the magnetic field, based on a young
age for the earth. According to Humphreys, the magnetic field is generated by the
circulation of electrons in the mantle of the earth. Humphreys’ model allows for
reversals of the field to occur in as little time as two weeks. When he developed
the model in the 1980s, he predicted that short-term reversals of the field would
be observed. Only a few years later, his predictions were confirmed. Additionally,
NASA published predictions about the rates of planetary magnetic fields given the
dynamo model, which would then be measured by the Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe.
Russell Humphreys published predictions based on his own model shortly afterwards.
When the measurements were made, NASA’s predictions were falsified and Humphreys’
were confirmed.

New Models for Flood Geology

I further discovered that problems with older creationist models were not true of
newer creationist models. Take the issue of the entire fossil record being laid
down by the Flood. Contemporary creationists no longer believe this. Instead, they
argue that the Paleozoic layers were laid down before the Flood, largely on the
third day of creation, that the Mesozoic layers were layed down in the Flood, and
that the Cenozoic layers were laid down as the Earth rocked back from the
geological upheaval of the Flood. This is evidenced by the fact that many of the
so-called transitional fossils are found in the Cenozoic. There is actually a good
series of horse transitional fossils. However, creationist biologist Todd Wood has
developed a model for extremely rapid diversification of animal and plant life
after the Flood. According to Wood, God created all “kinds” (called a baramin in
creationist literature) with natural potentialities for diversification. There are
various “switches” in the animal which turn on and off certain features. God made
life so that it could develop and change, but the mechanism of this change is not
primarily mutation and natural selection. Wood’s argument accounts for much of what
we see in the late fossil record, and this newer model of the Flood solves many of
the older problems with Flood geology.

None of this is to say that creationist scientists have solved all of the problems
with young-earth models. Not by a long shot. But it is to say that the amount of
progress made by traditional Christian scientists, given their small number and
relative lack of funding, is impressive, and is very promising as to the ultimate
profitability of a scientific model faithful to Scripture.

The paradigm shift that I have experienced has been profound. While I most
certainly believed in Jesus while I accepted evolution, accepting evolution
prevented the full realization of a thoroughly Christian worldview. A fully
Christian worldview accounts for beauty, and asserts that the reason for the form
of plants and animals is not simply survival value, but its aesthetic value. A
fully Christian worldview does not make paganism primary. It asserts that human
history begins with true worship of the true God, and it begins again with the
renewal of that worship under the Second-Father, Noah. Coming to accept creationism
has led to a profound reconfiguration of my worldview, and happily, it has led to
the dissolution of virtually all doubt about the truth of Christianity. The sun
really shines, the birds really sing, God really loves me and Jesus truly rose to
renew all things.

How glorious are thy works O Lord. In Wisdom hast thou made them all.

---------------------------

Responses to Common Arguments for Theistic Evolution

This is a condensed response to a variety of theological and exegetical moves made
by Christian proponents of the conventional scientific paradigms concerning Earth
history and the history of life.

Exegesis and Biblical Theology

Genesis 1-11 is different in nature from Genesis 12-50, suggesting that Genesis 1-
11 is best read as an ahistorical parable.

No, it isn’t. The difference between Genesis 1-11 and 12-50 is merely the pace at
which the narrative progresses. But the features found in Genesis 1-11 are found
elsewhere in the Bible in clearly historical narratives. The end of Ruth with the
genealogy of David is clearly based on Genesis 5 and 11. Moreover, the history of
Genesis 1-11 flows directly into the history of Genesis 12-50. The extraordinary
lifespans in Genesis 5 and 11 have decreased by the time of the patriarchs, but the
lifespan of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are much higher than present lifespans, with
Abraham living nearly two centuries. In fact, the genealogy of Genesis 11 shades
into narrative with the story of the migration of Terah. There is simply no reason
to take Genesis 1-11 as anything other than a compressed historical narrative. On
the relationship between history and symbolism, see below.

Genesis 1 is not intended as historical narrative, but as theology- it exhibits a

high literary structure designed for theological emphasis.

This is a non-sequitur. The entire Bible is carefully crafted literature. The book
of Exodus is historical, yet the entire book is structured chiastically. The poem
in Exodus 15 exhibits fine literary design, but commemorates historical events. In
the Bible, theology flows out from history. The history of the creation reveals the
theology of the creation because the God who endows it with meaning is the same God
who oversees history. The story of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus at a Garden is
fraught with theological overtones of Adam and Eve, but this is no justification
for dismissing the meeting as history. Besides, even if Genesis 1 itself was not
historical, young age creation would still be true on account of the rest of
Genesis 1-11: a global flood would leave a geological mark, and if such a mark
cannot be found in the conventional reading of the sedimentary record, the record
itself must have been misinterpreted: thus there is no justification for holding an
ancient earth.

The Fathers exhibited great diversity on the question of Genesis 1-11.

No, they did not. The great majority of Fathers read Genesis 1 historically and
criticized those who did not. See, for example, St. Basil’s criticism of Origen in
his “Hexameron.” Origen was attempting to mold the text to fit his philosophically
preconceived belief that the cosmos was eternal. Even St. Augustine, who read
Genesis 1 as a pure literary framework, only did so because he thought Sirach
implied an instant creation, which it does not. Augustine is the sole major
exception. Moreover, none of the Fathers read Genesis 2-11 ahistorically. St.
Augustine even ridiculed those who believed that an allegorical meaning to Genesis
2 and Genesis 6-9 undermined its historical force, and he attempted to calculate
the dimensions of the ark in order to refute pagan critics who ridiculed the flood
story.

Genesis 1-11 displays exceptional similarity to other ancient Near Eastern

narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, which were certainly not intended to be
historical.

Two problems. First, the similarities that Genesis exhibits with Near Eastern
stories are similarities that it also exhibits with Chinese, Native American,
Egyptian, and Slavic traditions- in fact, it share similarities with the traditions
of almost every culture. This is because the events recorded in Genesis are
historical and all peoples preserved a historical memory of the creation, the fall,
the global flood, and the tower. Some of the similarities with Native American
traditions are even closer than the similarities with the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Second, there is no evidence at all that the Epic of Gilgamesh and similar stories
were intended to be read ahistorically. Such a presumption only comes from the
modern instinct to “demythologize” which is wrongheaded both when it comes to
Scripture and when it comes to other ancient sources.

Genesis 6-8 could describe a local flood.

In short, no it could not. First, the narrative is crafted in order to recapitulate

the creation week of Genesis 1- first narrating its destruction in Genesis 7 and
then its resurrection in Genesis 8-9. The reestablishment of the covenant with Noah
is what constitutes Noah as a new and greater Adam, the ruler of the cosmos. The
ark is structured as a miniature universe, thus incorporating all of the animal
kinds created in the beginning. The author repeatedly emphasizes that everything
was killed, and that all the earth was covered. If you do not believe that Genesis
6-9 describes a global flood, I challenge you to come up with any description which
could possibly convey a global flood instead of a local one. The text is so clear
that there is not a single exegete before modern geology who suggested that this
described anything but a global flood.

The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, like other biblical genealogies, could contain
gaps. After all, the word “father” can mean “ancestor” rather than direct father.

While it’s true that other genealogies in the Bible contain some gaps, the
genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are unique in that they give the age of the father
both at death and at the birth of each son. This is critical, because the provision
of the age of the father at the birth of the son is absolutely necessary for the
construction of a precise chronology. Even if one postulated that the genealogies
contained gaps, this does not mean that the chronology does: even if the son
described is a descendant rather than a direct son, the age of the father given at
his birth does not change. Indeed, there is not a single commentator who ever read
these chronogenealogies as anything less than history before the advent of modern
geology and the conventional chronology of the ancient world. St. Augustine, who is
cited as a remote precedent for an ahistorical reading of Genesis 1, carefully
constructed a chronology from the creation to his own time based on the biblical
text, as did St. Bede and many other Fathers. Finally, the note that Arphachshad
was born two years after the flood (Genesis 11:10) is clearly provided in order to
facilitate a chronological link between Genesis 5 and 11.

Death

Genesis 2-3 describes man as naturally mortal, but who needs to regularly partake
in the tree of life in order to gain immortality.

This equivocates on what “nature” is. Man’s nature is in the Imago Dei: thus, man
is naturally immortal. But it’s true that such immortality only exists because of a
direct and active communion between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man.
However, this is irrelevant: the question is whether God created a universe already
estranged from Himself, or whether He created a universe in communion with Himself.
Scripture is clear on the latter: the estrangement of man from God was a novelty
resulting from the Fall.

Genesis 2-3 and Romans 5 only mention the death of humans.

While this is true explicitly, understanding the biblical view of the relationship
between man and the world entails that the corruption of creation cannot exist
separately from the corruption of man. As man goes, so goes the cosmos. This is why
in Genesis 6-9, animals are only saved because they are joined with Noah on the
ark. This is why whenever Israel is commanded to devote a people to destruction,
they are likewise commanded to devote their animals to destruction. Man, as the
Image of the God who made the cosmos as a living icon of Himself, is a microcosm of
the world. He is the vessel through which life is passed to everything else. Thus,
the revelation of God’s resurrected children in Romans 8 means that the creation
itself will be “set free.” St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 describes the resurrection
of birds and beasts (Paul identifies them as a kind of “seed”, which goes into the
earth and dies but is resurrected) in conjunction with the resurrection of the
Image of God, man.

Genesis 1-3 describes a good creation, but not a mature, glorified creation.

This is absolutely true, but it means nothing as to the death of animals. The
creation was good but not mature because man was good but not mature. Man, as the
“generations of the heavens and the earth” (that is, the son of heaven, the Spirit,
and earth, the dust of the ground) is the means through which the world grows in
communion with the Spirit. Man was good but naked- not ready for glorification and
enthronement. But he still would not die: so also with the creation. The creation
was good and incorrupt, but it still awaited glorification. The very fact that man
was not yet mature but still did not die demonstrates that incompleteness does not
entail death and undermines the old-age argument.

There are some ancient and medieval precedents for the view that animal death
preceded the fall.

This is true, and there are even some modern young-age creationists who share this
view. However, that animal death is the result of the fall is by far the majority
position among Christian authors in the ancient and medieval period. Ultimately, it
is not simply a question of finding a precedent, but analyzing whether a position
can be theologically sustained.

Science and Theology

St. Augustine says that Christians should not pontificate in ignorance about
science.

Indeed, and they should not. If a Christian knows nothing about evolutionary
science, He should simply believe the words of God but not attempt to argue on
scientific grounds. His childlike faith should be in God, not the scientific
community. But recall that St. Augustine himself responded to critics who ridiculed
the flood story not by arguing that the flood isn’t a historical narrative, but by
measuring the dimensions of the ark and making detailed arguments for its
historicity. If a young age creationist wishes to speak about contemporary science,
he should, with faith in the words of God, study what evolutionary scientists argue
and also study what the best in contemporary creationism have written. Creationism
has improved significantly over the last thirty years, and has pivoted away from
cheap apologetics towards the construction of detailed scientific models in concord
with the data. If a Christian does not know the answer to a scientific problem,
there is no shame in admitting that: there is, however, shame in disbelieving the
words of God because one does not know how to resolve a scientific problem.

There are two books- the book of nature and the book of revelation called the
Bible- and the two cannot conflict.

While it is true that nature, properly interpreted, cannot conflict with Scripture,
it is a mistake to equate contemporary scientific paradigms with nature. Moreover,
it’s a mistake to refer to nature as a “book”, because nature is not written with
words. Nature is sensory- especially visual. It is almost impossible to correctly
and precisely interpret pictures without the aid of words. The visual world of
nature is read in light of the actual words written in Scripture. In other words,
nature is a picture-book whose words are the Bible. Just as Jesus said that His
parables confused the unbeliever, so also the visual revelation of God confuses the
unbeliever. I absolutely agree that science rightly done cannot conflict with
Scripture- but Scripture serves as the essential framework within which we
understand everything, including the natural world.

Science is methodologically naturalistic- thus creation and intelligent design are

pseudoscientific.

Philosophers of science recognized decades ago that the “demarcation problem” is

both trivial and impossible to resolve. There simply isn’t a definite “scientific
method.” Scientists pursue what they do for all sorts of different reasons and with
a great variety of methods. Moreover, naturalism is a mistake even when discussing
regularities of nature. The regularities of the cosmos are not because it is a
machine which God lets run on its own, but because it is a piece of music
constantly played and upheld by God in terms of regular, mathematically beautiful
patterns. Finally, there is a distinction between historical science and
“operational science.” Ken Ham (of whom I am not a fan) is by far not the only
person to suggest this. In fact, it is widely recognized in contemporary philosophy
of science. Historical science is an attempt to reconstruct history with scientific
tools. This is a legitimate scientific enterprise, but it is methodologically
unique. Ultimately, “methodological naturalism” is a useless rule because it
artificially excludes potentially true explanations arbitrarily. What if,
ultimately, intelligent design were simply true? Then methodological naturalism
would prevent scientists from actually discovering the truth about the world. And
if intelligent design is false, then that will be vindicated simply by argument and
evidence, not because an arbitrary rule ruled it out from the beginning.

In short, the question is not “is it science” but “is it true.”

Science and Religion are two “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” of knowledge.

It is instructive that the man who constructed this model (NOMA), Stephen Jay
Gould, did not believe in God. Ultimately, it is wrong because it is simply false.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam make a host of claims about the real world- the
same world investigated by disciplines such as science and history. Only if
“religion” is defined as a set of abstract ideas can NOMA be valid. But many things
which we call “religion” include much more than a set of abstract ideas, and
biblical theology emphasizes strongly that God deals in terms of blood and dirt,
sun and stars. He is known because He has made Himself known in terms of the world
He made and continually interacts with.

Christians used to believe that a geocentric cosmos was true because of a literal
interpretation of Scripture- we should learn from their mistake.

Science can play a role of leading us to carefully examine the text of Scripture so
that we can see if we have interpreted it correctly or whether we are insisting on
something the biblical authors themselves did not insist on. Ultimately,
geocentrism seems to me to be something the Bible simply says nothing about. It’s
not about reading passages about the sun moving allegorically. We speak the same
way today. The sun really does move across the sky. If you stand in place and your
finger follows the sun all day, your finger is going to move. The question is
simply “from what frame of reference are you speaking?” Indeed, contemporary
physicists don’t hold geocentrism to be false because the sun is the center of the
solar system, but because they hold that there is no absolute center. It is all a
matter of frame of reference. When we are standing on Earth, we use it as a frame
of reference.

When it comes to conventional models of Earth history and the history of life, it
is right to let these questions spur a discussion and analysis of what the biblical
text truly says. But when we do examine the biblical text honestly, for reasons
described above, we come to the conclusion that the Church has read the text
correctly. It truly does narrate a historical creation week and a historical global
flood. Thus, we must take our thoughts captive to Christ and trust Him.

Conclusion

I spent eight years as a passionate theistic evolutionist who regularly engaged in

scientific and theological debates with creationists. As time went on, I gradually
became disillusioned by common theological moves made by proponents of theistic
evolution. In the months before I finally became a creationist, I spent time
arguing with other theistic evolutionists, suggesting that even as I shared their
position, their arguments for it were exegetically, theologically, and
philosophically bankrupt. I admitted that I ultimately did not know how to
reconcile the two, and I prayed to God for help. I believe that He was the one who
led me to this position, and I have a deep spiritual and intellectual peace in the
place I have arrived. It feels as if a longstanding and deep inconsistency has
finally been resolved. I no longer feel stretched between two fundamentally
different world-pictures, one where God is remote and distant and one where God is
very closely involved. I have a much deeper and intuitive sense of the intimacy of
God with the creation. I encourage those wrestling with these issues to pray
regularly for divine assistance in their thought and reasoning. Under the
“Creationism” tab on this blog, you will find a number of detailed articles
addressing various aspects of this problem, as well as a list of recommended books
on addressing scientific questions from a position of intellectual honesty and
rigor. Thanks for reading.

-------------------

On Geocentrism
Hello Kabane. First of all, let me say that as a former theistic evolutionist, I’ve
come to repudiate this stance thanks, in part, to your writings on the topic. So,
my question is: what’s your opinion on geocentrism? Do you believe it has the same
Biblical and Patristic weight as Young Earth Creationism?
Congratulations on your transition! I am delighted to hear that you have come to
agree with creationism.

As far as geocentrism goes, there are multiple dimensions to this question. First,
does it have the same Biblical and Patristic warrant that young-age creation does?
The answer to that is simply no. Even if geocentrism is true, it does not have the
same warrant that young-age creation does. In order to understand this, one must
distinguish between a belief that is held incidentally and a belief that structures
one’s worldview. One might simply suggest that the Fathers were geocentrists
incidentally- that is, they were geocentric because there was no reason not to be,
but it did not deeply affect their system of theology. By contrast, young-age
creation clearly plays a structural role in the Christian worldview. The heart of
Christianity is the story from Adam through Israel to Jesus Christ. Adam was
created as a spiritual child in a good world- incorrupt but not incorruptible. He
still had the potential to fall and become corrupt, in contrast to our final glory
where our wills are fixed in goodness and we have no potential to turn away from
God and divine life. Adam was called to follow God’s commandments and mature into
glory, where he would be exalted above the angels as God’s viceregent. Jesus
Christ, then, not only undoes the fall of Adam, but takes us to glory. Theistic
evolution collapses the distinction between incorruption and incorruptibility.
Without question, Adam had life only because He partook of the grace of the Holy
Spirit, but the point is that God did not create the world in estrangement from
Himself. Moreover, as Adam was the Image of the Logos through whom the world was
made, He was a microcosm of the cosmos, and life would be funneled through humanity
to the rest of the creation. This is why when Adam falls, the entire creation
partakes of the curse. It follows necessarily that the state of the world mirrors
the state of humanity, so that like Adam, the world was created incorrupt but not
incorruptible. Hence, there was no death, even among animals (the question of plant
or cell death is a qualitatively different matter because the Scriptural definition
of a living thing means a thing which has blood), which completely rules out the
conventional account of the history of life.

But what of geocentrism? Does it hold the same status? No, it does not. Perhaps
geocentrism is consistent with the Christian doctrine that the Earth is the special
home of humanity and the divinely elected place for the incarnation of the Son. But
while it is consistent with this view, it does not necessarily follow from it.
Moreover, one must distinguish between absolute geocentrism and relative
geocentrism. Absolute geocentrism holds that the Earth is at the exact center of
the cosmos, so that the sun revolves around it. Relative geocentrism holds that the
Earth revolves around the sun but that our solar system is very near the center of
the cosmos, given the relative size of our star system and the cosmos as a whole.
This position is defended by many young-age creationists who would not be
considered geocentric in the former sense, such as physicists John Hartnett and
Russell Humphreys. They argue this position based on arguments for quantized
redshifts, which suggest that our system is near the center of the cosmos and that
galaxies are structured as concentric shells radiating out from the center. They
add to this argument with the so-called “Axis of Evil”, a clear pattern of
magnetism where the poles of the cosmos are centered very near our system. Both of
these arguments suggest that the Earth is a special place but do not require that
the Earth be in the absolute center of the cosmos.

What of the biblical arguments for geocentrism? Here, I simply do not see a very
strong case. Typically, advocates of biblical geocentrism point to biblical
passages describing the sun as “rising” and “setting” But we moderns still speak
this way, even though most of us are heliocentrists! The question is not whether
one is speaking literally or allegorically, truthfully or phenomenologically. It is
simply one’s frame of reference. Point your finger at the sun, and if you keep it
pointed throughout the day, your finger is going to move. The sun truly does move
across the sky- literally. It is a matter of one’s frame of reference. Sometimes
the passage saying that the Earth “shall never be moved” is cited. This is a silly
misuse of the passage, which is speaking of God’s covenantal faithfulness to uphold
the world, not whether the Earth literally moves or not. It is similar to language
in the prophets speaking of God “shaking the Earth” when He reorders the nations of
the world, throwing down rulers and lifting up new ones. Others speak of the
primacy of the creation of the earth in Genesis 1, but this is not logically
inconsistent at all with a heliocentric view- obviously, God was acting during the
creation week in ways different from the normal upholding of the world. Trees grew
up in a single day, for example. Others still will cite the narrative where the sun
“stands still” in Joshua 10, but this falls under the category of one’s frame of
reference. As I read the Scriptures, I simply see no passages relevant to whether
the Earth is in the absolute center of the cosmos. For more, I recommend James
Jordan’s article on geocentrism.

Further, one must consider that general relativity entails that there is no such
thing as absolute motion which is experimentally relevant. The only motion that can
be detected is the motion of two bodies relative to one another. Creationist
cosmologist John Byl believes that the Earth is the absolute center of the cosmos
but that it is not experimentally relevant because of general relativity. This
position is completely consistent with the scientific data. Even those who hold
that it is not the absolute center acknowledge that the question is not absolute
motion, but frame of reference. It is simply arbitrary whether one speaks of Earth
or the sun as one’s experimental frame of reference. So in a way, the very question
is scientifically outdated, relying on classical physics rather than relativistic
physics. Some geocentrists such as Robert Sungenis argue that relativity is wrong
and the Earth is the absolute center in an experimentally relevant way, relying on
Tychonian cosmology rather than Ptolemaic- Tycho Brahe suggested that the sun
revolves around the Earth but that the planets revolve around the sun.

Finally, it is notable that while every Saint who lived after Darwin and commented
on the subject (and many did) condemned the notion loudly, this does not appear to
be the case with the rise of heliocentrism.

So in short, no, I do not think geocentrism is of the same status as young-age

creation, even if true in some sense.

---------------------

The Nature of Young Age Creationism

As is typical in the modern age, the question of young age creationism is usually
articulated in a very sloppy manner. Those who attempt to explain what it is and
why people hold it simply do not think or speak precisely and carefully. So what is
young age creationism? Is it science? Is it a “religious belief”? Is it history?

It’s actually rather simple. Young age creationism is a belief about the history of
the cosmos in general and the Earth in particular. A young age creationist believes
that the cosmos came into existence approximately 6,000 (or 7,500, adhering to the
LXX chronology) years ago based on the dates given by the inspired Scriptures. Why?
Because reality is one: there is not a separate “religious sphere”, “historical
sphere” or “scientific sphere.” While theology, philosophy, and science generally
use different tools, the truths arrived at by each of these means must cohere and
interact. So as a young age creationist, I believe that God has, in Scripture,
revealed true information about the history of the Earth fundamentally incompatible
with conventional historical scientific models in biology, geology, and cosmology.

This true information clearly has profound scientific implications. But it’s
important to be precise about what we are speaking of here. Many persons dismiss
the relevance of Genesis 1-11 because it is not a “science textbook.” This is the
result of a failure to think through the nature of science. The experimental
sciences like particle physics and chemistry deal with quantifying repeating
patterns and their interrelationships. The historical sciences such as paleontology
or archaeology applies the knowledge of these repeating patterns to develop tools
which are used to investigate the history of the cosmos, the planet, and human
civilization.

Of course Genesis is not a “scientific textbook.” But it reveals true historical

information, and this historical information can be investigated by scientific
tools.

Is this genuine science? Doesn’t science have to operate without presuppositions as

to its ultimate conclusion? Here, it’s important to remember that what is
classified as science will ultimately depend on one’s philosophy of science.
Unfortunately, many scientists are unaware of the philosophy of science and thus
repeat irrational memes about the nature of science that float around our culture.
Science has a metaphysical and philosophical basis. It presumes that:

-There is a world outside our own mind.

-This world operates in repeating patterns.

-These patterns are intelligible to the human mind.

Such metaphysical presuppositions should, rationally speaking, cohere with one’s

other presuppositions and one’s worldview as a whole. However, these
presuppositions are utterly inexplicable on materialism. I have gone into this in
more detail elsewhere, but recognizing our unique creation as the Image of the
Logos is the precondition for the intelligibility of anything at all. I am not
claiming that a materialist cannot think a rational thought, but that he has no
philosophical basis for doing so.

However, the understanding of human persons as Images of the Logos is one part in a
larger worldview called Christianity. Christianity comes as a package-deal, and
part of that package is the divine inspiration and inerrancy (I have gone into this
elsewhere) of the Scriptures. Since these Scriptures reveal information about the
history of the Earth incompatible with conventional scientific views about the
history of the cosmos, these views are false, and thus, an accurate scientific
model should be constructed that conforms to the revelation of the God who made us
in His image.

But this doesn’t actually mean that we know the answer in advance. There are many
different possible models consistent with divine revelation. Affirming a young age
for the world and a global flood soon after the Creation does not tell us whether
that flood operated through runaway subduction and catastrophic plate tectonics, as
proposed by geophysicist John Baumgardner. It does not tell us whether there was a
floating continent before the deluge, as proposed by paleontologist Kurt Wise. It
does not tell us which layers are flood layers and which were deposited by residual
catastrophism after the flood. There are plenty of interesting questions to
investigate within the framework of young age creation and diluvian geology.

So, what is young age creation? It is a perspective on Earth history grounded in

objectively true divine revelation from the Logos of God, and it serves as a
framework for empirical investigation into the history of the Earth using the tools
of contemporary science.

-------------------

Why Do I Care About Evolution?

Why do I care what people believe about Genesis? Why do I write so much about
creation and evolution?

In large part, this comes from my own personal experiences. When I was thirteen, we
had a class at my evangelical church about science and Scripture. By far the
dominant position expressed there was that of theistic evolution, and I quickly
became passionate about the issue. I listened to Ken Miller’s lectures and read his
books. I produced over 300 videos about the subject on YouTube. And I found my
faith slipping away from me. When I looked at the world, I saw a world produced by
billions of years of blind chance. Oh, sure, I knew “ways” to reconcile evolution
and Christianity. But intuitively, something seemed off. The world of Darwin just
did not look like the world of the Christian gospel. Those doubts weren’t always
severe. I eventually became much more interested in Christian apologetics. It was
important that my faith was challenged so that I could know it more deeply.

But still, the question nagged. A voice would always say “you’re just playing a
game. You’re living in a fantasy-world.”

Sometimes it would become horrible. My stomach would literally hurt as intuitively

perceived at a deep level that Darwinism contradicted the fundamental tenets of the
gospel. But still- I loved Jesus, and that was the only thread that kept me holding
on much of the time. Again and again I would cry out for Him to save me from
apostasy. And one day, two or three years ago, I said quietly, “Lord, if evolution
is false, I want to know.” I had come to respect creationists for their theological
consistency. When I began to study the writings of James Jordan, I realized the
incredible beauty and miraculous nature of the Scriptures. Whereas I had struggled
with Old Testament criticism in the past, Jordan opened my eyes and showed me how
profoundly rich the Scriptures are, and how profoundly stupid the “wisdom of the
wise” concerning Scripture is.

And Jordan was a creationist. I was really surprised by this, since I had never
encountered a creationist who was actually theologically reflective. It was at this
point that the thought truly entered my mind that evolution might, just might, be
false and creationism was true. didn’t know how I would ever square that circle,
since the scientific evidence seemed to be so against it. But one day, I saw a post
from a friend about Flood stories. So I decided to look them up.

I couldn’t believe what I found.

I found that the idea that “floods happen everywhere” explains the data is
laughably absurd. Native American flood stories record details like ravens and
doves being sent out from the ark. I found such stories even before profound
missionary influence had affected these people. Old World Indian stories record the
same details in 700 BC, both geographically and culturally isolated from the Near
East. Not only that, I found the same was true across Genesis 1-11. The creation.
The fall. The flood. The tower of Babel.

I continued to wrestle with the question. The uncertainty was killing me. But one
day, I got on my knees and said “God, I want to follow the truth. Show me the
truth.” The next morning, I woke up and found that I believed it. And it sunk in.
It finally sunk in, and I remember crying out in tears:

Oh my God, Christianity is actually true! It’s not a myth! It’s true!

You see, for the eight years I believed in evolution, doubts were a constant part
of my life. Naturalism was always creeping up behind me, whispering that there was
no meaning or purpose, that there was no Jesus who loved me or for me to love. For
eight long years I was always, in some sense, on the fence, whether that was in the
front of my mind or in the back of my mind. My own coming to creationism had all
the characteristics of a “conversion experience.” I woke up and saw that the sun
really shone, that the birds really sang, that God really loved me and that He was
deeply involved with the world. And I’ve never looked back.

That’s why I care. I want you all to see the beauty of the world and the love of
God revealed in the true world. Not the dark, greyscale world of materialism, or
the muddled, colorblind world of theistic evolution.

Christianity is more true than you could ever have hoped or imagined.

----------------------

Recommended Works on Creation/Intelligent Design

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I first became interested in theology when I became
a passionate Darwinist at 13 and nearly became an atheist, though I remained
theistic evolutionist. You can find my embarrassing YT videos at
www.youtube.com/kabane52. Anyway, through a long series of events, I came back to
creationism. Having once been an anticreationist, I can say that I know a little
more about evolution than do most creationists. Most creationist literature is very
bad, especially the stuff before the 90s. The 90s saw a new generation of
creationists who were much more careful, honest, and rigorous, and abandoned the
implicit positivism and embraced presuppositionalism. It also saw the birth of
intelligent design. I figured I’d provide the books that I found to be most helpful
here. These have all helped to transform my thinking on science and God’s world.

Young earth creation:

Faith, Reason, and Earth History by Leonard Brand. I’m not sure if the 3rd ed. is
out yet, but it should be coming out soon if not. This is the best book I’ve ever
read on the subject. Brand is a 7th Day Adventist biologist who has also published
in paleontology. He’s also well-read on the philosophy of science, which is
extremely important in responding to the childish view of science (i.e. that it’s
always self-correcting) held by most Darwinists. This book was seminal in that it
was one of the first to urge a more respectful tone in critiquing evolutionary
science and in insisting that creationists always be careful with their arguments,
and honest with the data, admitting what they don’t have the answer for so they can
actually pursue research in the area.

Faith, Form and Time by Kurt Wise. Kurt Wise is a paleontologist, trained at
Harvard under Stephen Jay Gould no less. This is a lovely introduction to
contemporary creationist work on geology, paleontology, and biology. Wise is
insistent that creationist theorists must learn to “think weird” in order to
understand the fossil record, and he’s produced a number of well-evidenced “deep-
weird” ideas, such as the “Floating Forest” (ala Perelandra) before the Flood.

The New Creationism by Paul Garner. This is a good survey of neocreationist (post-
90s) model building.

Understanding the Pattern of Life by Todd Wood. Wood pioneered statistical

baraminology, which seeks to explain and distinguish the original created kinds
which God made. This book explains how the method works and its implications.
Creationist baraminology has plenty of theological implications. It shows that God
created a world in seed form, and had naturally imbued species with the potential
for diversification. Wood also explores biogeography from a post-flood perspective,
which helps to answer how kangaroos got to Australia and related questions.

Earth’s Catastrophic Past, 2 vols, by Andrew Snelling. Snelling is a professional

geologist and has been very important in developing creationist models. Much of the
first volume could have been left out, but the longer second volume provides a
detailed survey of present creationist modeling. Somewhat technical.
Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe by Steve Austin. Austin is a hard-rock
geologist who applies creationist modeling to one particular location. Somewhat
technical.

These are the ones I’ve read. There’s a 2 volume technical exploration of the RATE
(Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) project, which was very successful and saw
a number of successful creationist quantitative predictions. But it’s too technical
for me and for non-scientists.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to read good creationist books and not
bad ones. There are many bad creationist books, and they helped to reinforce the
notion that creationists are dishonest and not really doing science.

Evolution/Intelligent Design

ID folks have a variety of views on universal common ancestry and a few are young
earth creationists. These books seek to justify the inference that life is designed
and critique naturalistic explanations for the development of life.

Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer looks at the Cambrian explosion and examines
whether evolutionary processes are sufficient to explain the origin of the
information necessary to build the novel body plans within the timescale required
(about 10 million years, given the conventional dating). Meyer is a philosopher of
science who has kept well up to date on the relevant literature. It’s detailed, but
very interesting reading, and you’ll learn a lot about the wonderful and
sophisticated design of life along the way.

Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer. Does the same thing, but for the origin of
life. Here, naturalists don’t even have a theory, and the situation becomes worse
for them every year.

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton. This is a classic for a reason.

This jumpstarted contemporary critiques of Darwinism. Denton is a Platonist and
structuralist, who sees the evolutionary process as inherently teleological. Denton
eviscerates the traditional arguments for Darwinian evolution, and the chapters on
homology vs. analogy are worth the price of the book. Turns out that homologous
structures (i.e. the structure of the arm and hand in fish, bats, humans, and other
creatures), classically cited for common descent, are often shaped by different
genes and follow different developmental pathways. This was one of the central
arguments for evolution and common descent, and its collapse is monumental.

The Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe. Better known for introducing the concept of
irreducible complexity, here Behe provides a rigorous analysis of what Darwinian
evolution can actually do. Because of the observation of malaria in the wild and E.
Coli in Richard Lenski’s laboratory, we now know what Darwinism can do over
millions of generations and trillions of organisms. This is a key point- the
essential factor for Darwinism is not timescale, but the number of generations.
Malaria over the past few millennia has had the equivalent of hundreds of millions
of years of generational time for large animals. E. Coli, directly observed by
Lenski for 30 years, has had that equivalent generational time of a million years
for humans. The experimental evidence demonstrates very sharp limits for Darwinian
processes.

Darwin’s Proof by Cornelius Hunter. I just started this one, but I’ve read a number
of Hunter’s articles. Hunter is very good on showing the theological basis for
Darwinian arguments (i.e. assuming what God would or would not have done) and on
exploring the nature of Darwinian predictions. Darwinism has made a host of
predictions, most of which have been falsified.
Philosophy of Science

If you’re going to publicly defend a position like intelligent design or

creationism in the modern world, you need to know the philosophy of science.

Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by WL Craig and JP Moreland.

Has several good chapters on the philosophy of science from a Christian
perspective.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Provides ammunition against

those who naively assert that science is “self-correcting” and that “peer review”
is the gold standard. He shows how anomalies have to accumulate over extended
periods of time before paradigm shifts actually occur. Paradigm shifts are more
like violent coups, in that those who take over quickly begin to behave in an
authoritarian fashion, just like their predecessors. Fascinating in its own right,
and highly relevant to why contemporary science is in trouble.

Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. This is Kuhn on steroids. Feyerabend argues that
there really is no singular “scientific method.” Instead, science progresses when
scientists individually pursue all sorts of different paths, for their own reasons.
Sometimes great discoveries are made by those who held a position against
prevailing evidence, or pursued a research program because of a hunch, or for
religious reasons. This eviscerates most of the methodological criticisms made
against ID/creationism (i.e. it’s motivated by faith, not science, and so on).

Other

The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin. A book about how physics came to stagnate
in the past three decades. The last section is about the sociology of science and
how it stagnates progress, and that is where it holds relevance. Smolin does
ritually denounce ID once or twice, but besides that, it’s highly congruent with
what design theorists have asserted about their unfair treatment. Smolin knew
Feyerabend personally and was substantially influenced by his work.

Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake. This book (called The Science Delusion in the
UK) is a tantalizing look at the paths of discovery open once materialism is
finally tossed into the trash bin. I read this before I became a creationist, and
it played a substantial role in opening my mind to unconventional ideas about
science such as YEC and ID. Sheldrake is brilliant, creative, and very well
credentialed, having once worked at Cambridge University.

The Presence of the Past by Rupert Sheldrake. On Sheldrake’s concept of “morphic

resonance” where everything in nature resonates with everything else to the degree
to which they are similar. Beyond fascinating, and likely has a great deal of
relevance to the rise of new species within the animal baramins after the Flood,
the development of new instincts after the Fall, and the drop in lifespan after the
Flood. I suspect that the massive amount of death which took place in the Flood
caused a resonance of death in the human race which drove down lifespans.

Outside the Gates of Science by Damien Broderick. On the history of

parapsychological research, the data, and the skeptical response. Like Smolin,
Broderick ritually denounces ID a couple of times, but it provides an extremely
helpful case study on dogmatic skepticism to anything which rebuts materialism.

Parapsychology and the Skeptics by Chris Carter. Same premise as Broderick’s.

The Music of Life by Denis Noble. Not creationist or ID, but points forward to a
more holistic view of living organisms rather than the reductionist view advocated
by the molecular biologists of the past several decades. Such holism indicates
design powerfully, and learning about it inspires deep reverence for the beauty of
the world.

Anyway, I hope you guys find some help here. Finding good resources on this subject
is difficult, given all of the false information circulated by Darwinists and old-
style creation science.

-------------------

How Successful Has Scientific Naturalism Really Been?

Cornelius Hunter, in his book Science’s Blind Spot, critiques the common
understanding of the trajectory of science. The usual understanding of the history
of science is that naturalistic explanations (that is, explanations in terms of
presently repeating patterns of activity) have progressively been found to be
sufficient to produce that which used to be thought evidence for specific and
intentional design. But is this true? Was methodological naturalism born out of the
consistent results of empirical inquiry? The answer is no. It was not.

Methodological naturalism developed out of theological and metaphysical premises.

After Newton, it became common to understand the cosmos as a giant machine, so that
God became the great engineer, producing a machine fully capable of functioning on
its own. As I discussed elsewhere, this is not actually what Newtonian theory
implies, and a musical view of nature is superior to a mechanistic view.
Nevertheless, the mechanistic view took hold and became popular. Because God was
seen as a great engineer, many theologians and philosophers came to believe that if
God had to routinely “intervene” in His world, this would detract from His glory.
After all, if an engineer makes a machine that he always has to adjust, then he’s
not a very good engineer.

This view of God and nature was advocated by Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and
Gottfried Leibniz, before any of the major historical scientific theories about the
origin of cosmological and biological order were formulated. The rule of
methodological naturalism was developed to conform to a bad metaphysical
interpretation of Newtonian theory. It was not caused by any pattern of empirical
discovery. Other theological premises were used to buttress the naturalistic
assumption in the historical sciences. One critical factor was the use of random
design as a null hypothesis. Early cosmological speculations about the naturalistic
origin of our solar system were grounded in the view that if God had created the
solar system as it is, then there is no reason for the planets to rotate or revolve
in the same direction. If design was true, then God would have randomly distributed
the direction of planetary revolution. In biology, the argument was that life
should have no distributed pattern. In other words, there’s no reason for there to
be clusters within clusters, a class of birds with subclasses. Because God would
have randomly distributed similarities and differences, a naturalistic explanation
is superior.

Of course, such a theological premise is simply unprovable, and the purpose of the
pattern of life is an excellent subject for theological reflection. Perhaps instead
of asking the question rhetorically and assuming naturalism, we should have asked
it seriously and turned to biblical symbolism. Proverbs would be a good place to
start- God taught Solomon wisdom through birds and beasts. God is a God of order
and beauty, so contrary to this sloppy theological assumption, we ought to expect a
pattern in cosmology and biology. This is an area ripe for theological and
philosophical investigation, not the presumption of naturalism.

Theological assumptions like this provided the basis for naturalistic speculations
in the historical sciences. Why is the Earth’s geology shaped like it is? The
answer, given these theological arguments, must lie in repeating patterns
observable in the present, applied in the past. This requires long ages for
sedimentation and erosion, and we infer deep time, millions of years of past
history. This is why uniformitarian geology was adopted so readily by Christians.
It had nothing to do with an accumulation of evidence which refuted the biblical
history of the Earth. Instead, it was due to unbiblical assumptions about God and
His nature adopted by Christian theologians.

With a long history for the Earth now adopted, the Fall disappeared from relevance
as an explanation for natural evil and dysteleology. Natural evil thus became
another justification for adopting naturalistic hypotheses in biology. In order to
get God “off the hook”, as it were, it was assumed that such natural evil was
merely the necessary result of God’s setting up of a machine to produce biological
order. As you can see, unbiblical assumptions about God compound each other,
producing a series of other unbiblical assumptions.

All of this led to the adoption of naturalism in the historical sciences. It was
almost entirely based on bad metaphysics, not good physics. Metaphysics preceded
physics.

And the track record? Hunter first points to the nebular hypothesis for the origin
of the solar system. According to the nebular hypothesis, our solar system formed
out of a hot disk of rotating matter. At the center was the sun, and matter became
hotter the closer it was to the sun. Gas giants could not withstand the heat, and
so developed only in the outer portions of our solar system. Rocky planets could
take the heat, and so developed in the inner portion of our solar system. Matter
pelted the surface of these rocky planets, creating their crustal surfaces. Such a
hypothesis has faced a wave of anomalous data, including rotations and revolutions
of planetary systems opposite what was predicted, which, ironically, had been the
very basis of adopting a naturalistic hypothesis in the first place! Astronomical
observations in the last several decades have confounded the problem, as it has
been discovered that most star systems with planets have gas giants in the inner
portion of the solar system, and the rocky planets which do exist are much larger
than predicted.

The predictions are a failure. But now that methodological naturalism is firmly in
place, it doesn’t matter. These become research questions rather than an indication
that the paradigm is flawed. We will discover the true theory in the future, so the
story goes.

And in biology? Darwin and other evolutionary theorists argued not based on the
knowledge of how complex systems and anatomical features came to be, but on the
impossibility of design. Why would God create a pattern of similarities and
differences, rather than a random distribution. Why would there be natural evil? It
was assumed that He wouldn’t, so naturalism was the only alternative. But
evolutionary theory, too, has made scores of bad predictions. Common descent
predicts a rigorously structured nested hierarchy, where similarities between two
organisms are the result of descent from a common ancestor with that shared
characteristic. But phylogenetic trees routinely contradict each other, and it has
now been discovered that convergence is common- the same complex systems, such as
echolocation, must have evolved multiple times. Moreover, evolution predicts that
homologous structures are made possible by the same genes and take the same
developmental pathways in fetal development. This, too, has been falsified.
Homologous structures are often made possible by different genes and take different
developmental pathways.

So the predictions are falsified. But with methodological naturalism firmly in

place, we know that this is just a research question. A better historical
scientific theory will be developed in the future.
And in geology? “The present is the key to the past”, Lyell taught us. Or so we
thought. Over the past several decades, neocatastrophism has taken hold, where long
periods of stasis are interrupted by global catastrophes, such as a meteoric impact
bringing about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Furthermore, instead of the
sedimentary record being the result of the long, gradual accumulation of sediment
over millions of years, today’s geologists are forced to conclude that there are
brief periods of heavy sedimentation followed by millions of years of no
sedimentation. This is because if you radiometrically date the top and bottom
layers of a sedimentary feature, you should be able to predict the annual rate of
sediment by dividing the amount of sediment by the number of radiometric years.
This predicts a sedimentation rate of .01 meters per year. The observed rate is 100
meters per year.

So the predictions are falsified. But because we have to adhere to methodological

naturalism in the historical sciences, this is only a research question. In the
future, a better model will be developed which will explain the anomalous data.

We’ve been told that to suggest design as an explanation in cosmology, geology, and
biology is a science stopper, that it’s a God-of-the-gaps argument, and that the
relentless progress of science has overtaken all previous such arguments. This, for
example, is the orthodox answer to the challenges facing origin-of-life
researchers. Over the past sixty years, virtually no progress has been made in
explaining the origin of life naturalistically. Instead, the more is understood
about life, the worse the problem gets. But there simply must be a naturalistic
explanation, because that’s what the history of science indicates: naturalistic
explanations work. In fact, whenever the many anomalies of historical scientific
theories are discussed, we are assured that they will be resolved in time because
other historical scientific theories have been so successful.

But when we look at these theories, we have to ask: which ones? And the answer is
that virtually none of them display the success they are supposed to have had. Each
of these models showed anomalies from the beginning, and the anomalies remain. When
we actually look at the history of science, the alleged success of naturalism in
the historical sciences turns out to be a phantasm. In reality, naturalism turns
out to be a failed paradigm. Promissory notes are only meaningful when there is a
precedent of fulfillment.

Response to brief critical comment: Without specific examples of things that are
simplified to the point of error, one cannot respond to that part of the comment.
As to the other part of the comment- whether it is crypto-Kabbalist or not is
neither here nor there, but whether it is true. And while my view of creation might
be false, it’s not arbitrary- it is rooted in the doctrine that the divine Logos is
present in all creatures as their archetypal principle of existence.

-------------------------

Music or Machine?
Did Newton introduce us to a mechanistic view of nature?

No, he didn’t. That’s a metaphysical interpretation of Newtonian theory. In fact,

the mechanistic view of nature and the musical view of nature are perfectly
equivalent in terms of their coherence with the empirical data. Let’s try to parse
out the logic which undergirds the mechanistic inference which swept Western
culture after Newton.

The essence of a mathematical description of the world is that the world behaves in
certain regular patterns, patterns which can be quantified so precisely that one
can predict a future event based on a deep knowledge of regularities in past
events. This was taken by many in the Enlightenment to mean that the world is a
machine, and that the regularities of nature were the result of a machine operating
as it was designed to operate. God became a superb engineer, who had engineered
nature to behave in this way and who then turned it on.

But machines are not the only objects whose behavior can be quantified and
predicted. Musical pieces also operate in this manner. A piece of music has its own
internal coherence. It operates in terms of its own regular patterns, notes which
bear a particular relationship with one another in order to create a whole greater
than the particular notes. There is a deep connection between music and
mathematics, so that you can quantify the relationship among different notes and
even predict the probabilities of other notes following.

The difference between a mechanistic view of nature and the musical view of nature
is how one interprets God’s relationship to the world. On the mechanistic view, God
at most becomes the engineer who turns it on. On the musical view, however, God is
the person who plays the music. God is constantly and intentionally acting to
realize the music of His mind in concrete patterns. This reveals how silly it is to
speak of God “intervening” in nature. If a musician is playing an original piece of
music, is he “intervening” when he begins to play the same tune in a different key,
or when the tone of the music changes? Of course not. He’s both the person who
composed the music and whose constant action is necessary for it to be realized.

When one understands this, one realizes how ridiculous it is to say that Newton or
any physicist “explains the world without God” when they develop a theory. It’s not
an “explanation” in the sense that God is an explanation. These theories quantify
regular patterns. If one wants to use the word “explain” in its most precise sense,
then physical theories don’t so much explain the world, but describe it with
precise accuracy and understanding.

----------------------

Why Genesis 1-11 Matters

Genesis 1-11 matters because the world-picture inhabited by the rest of the Bible
is set up in the primeval history. Artificially separating Genesis 12-50 (and the
rest of the Bible) from the primeval history creates readings of the text which are
profound misreadings, and which incite all sorts of hermeneutical confusion. I want
to demonstrate three things in this post. First, I want to demonstrate that the
division between Genesis 1-11 and Genesis 12-50 is artificial. Second, I want to
demonstrate that the problem of Genesis 1-11 extends beyond these chapters. Third,
I want to demonstrate that a historical reading of Genesis 1-11 is necessary for a
proper biblical hermeneutic.

1. Dividing the Primeval History from the Call of Abraham is Artificial

In modern intellectual Christian circles, it is typical to hear that Genesis 1-11

is essentially a literary construct designed to critique surrounding Near Eastern
paganism and provide the context for the election of Abraham’s family. In other
words, the point of Genesis 1-11 is not to describe the early history of the human
race, but rather to emphasize monotheism over paganism and to demonstrate the
catastrophic condition which the human family has found itself in- and how Abraham
will ultimately resolve that. I’ll address the Near Eastern context in point three.
For now, however, I want to point out just how difficult it is to separate Abraham
away from the primeval history. Superficially, it looks easy. You have the creation
of the world, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and then a chapter division: and then
Yahweh calls Abraham. Nice and neat. The problem is that the story of Abraham
begins before chapter twelve.

(Genesis 11:23-32) And Serug lived after he fathered Nahor 200 years and had other
sons and daughters. When Nahor had lived 29 years, he fathered Terah. And Nahor
lived after he fathered Terah 119 years and had other sons and daughters. When
Terah had lived 70 years, he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Now these are the
generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered
Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in
Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was
Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of
Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child. Terah took Abram his son
and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son
Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the
land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah
were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

Notice the pattern here. Abram comes out of Ur with Terah, stays in Haran until
Terah dies, and then moves into the promised land. This is a type of the exodus,
where Israel comes out of Egypt, waits for the older generation to die in the
wilderness, and then conquers the promised land. Seeing these chapters together is
important if one is to understand the theological point of the story.
Problematically, however, the world-picture evident in the time of Abraham is not
the world-picture we are familiar with. While the ages have declined from the
antediluvian world, they are still extraordinary by modern standards. Terah dies at
205. And the call of Abraham is placed in the context of a specifically dated
genealogy. Just as Noah was ten generations from Adam, so Abram is ten generations
from Noah. Furthermore, the genealogy is absolutely without gaps. This is evident
in the way that the age of the father is provided at the time of the birth of the
son. This is the precise information needed to develop a chronology, which appears
to be the intent. But even if there were two or three generations between a father
and a son (which I do not believe), the ages do not disappear, so that the
chronology cannot be escaped.

Thus, the story of Abraham, which theistic evolutionists overwhelmingly want to

affirm as historical, is intimately woven into the story of Adam to Noah to Babel.
To affirm Abraham as historical and deny the other elements is manifestly
inconsistent and has absolutely no warrant from the biblical text.

2. The Problems of the Primeval History Persist into Genesis and the Rest of the
Bible

Information found in the primeval history becomes significant as we read the story
of Abraham. For example, Abraham first goes into exile in Egypt in Genesis 12.
Later, he will go into exile in Philistia. According to the Table of Nations, Egypt
was the progenitor of the Philistines, so that the Philistines are Egyptian in
biblical theology. Is the Table of Nations true? Were all the nations known in the
ancient world really generated from the sons of Noah? If not, then it is
inconsistent to read the story of Abraham historically, because the story of
Abraham depends in large part upon this information. The problems don’t stop there.
Ezekiel, in prophesying the Battle of Gog and Magog, names seven nations first
known to us from the Table of Nations. That information depends on the historicity
of the Table, because when we map those nations out, they appear as a circle in the
north- which has immense theological significance. But that significance depends on
Genesis 10 being more than a literary construct.

Going further, the ages of the patriarchs are extraordinary by modern standards.
Abraham dies at 176 years old, and Isaac dies at 180. Jacob dies at 147, until ages
decline to about modern standards with Joseph, who dies at 110. Before the Flood,
man lived to about 900 years old. The first people born after the Flood lived to
nearly 500, until after the Tower of Babel (with Peleg, who dies at 215) the ages
are cut in half and continue to decline. What’s interesting is that the decline
progresses believably beyond Genesis 11 into the end of Genesis. We are not dealing
with a different historical realm in Genesis 12-50. We are simply being given a
closer look at the history which was condensed in Genesis 11.

The ages have theological significance which depend on their historicity. Consider
a theological theme throughout the Old Testament. According to the Torah, a person
guilty of manslaughter must hide in a city of refuge until the death of the high
priest. Once the high priest dies, they are free. Likewise, it is when Aaron dies
that Israel begins to conquer the promised land. If one takes the chronological
information in Genesis seriously and historically, then Isaac dies the year before
Joseph is released from prison. To read such numbers as literary constructs
actually destroys much of the theology of the book. Genesis 1-11 is often seen as
myth, but if this is so, then Genesis 12-50 is a period between myth and history.
Interestingly, such a period also is documented outside the Bible. Very early king
lists from the ancient world display kings with abnormally long reigns- by our
standards. Such reigns make sense, however, if soon after the Flood, people were
still living much longer than we do. Furthermore, the names of the early sons and
grandsons of Noah appear all over the world as deities. This is because of their
extraordinary lifespan- Shem, the son of Noah, lived well into the life of Abraham,
for example. It’s no surprise that when paganism took root, men began to worship
such long-lived people.

Going further, I want to suggest that a historical reading of Genesis 1-11

reconfigures the way one reads Genesis 12-50. Among modern Christians, it is very
common to see Abraham called into a world which was entirely pagan. A god who
hadn’t spoken in millennia called Abraham to restore the knowledge of God to the
world. The difficulty with this reading is that it simply has no justification from
the text. For example, what is Melchizedek, a priest of El Elyon, doing blessing
Abraham? El Elyon is well known from Near Eastern literature, and in later
literature he is highly pagan- getting drunk, having sexual relations, etc. But as
with many cultures around the world, El Elyon in his original form appears to be
the true God- just as ShangDi was the true God in China, and the Great Spirit was
the true God in ancient America. A pattern of gradual decay where the attributes of
the high god change and anthropomorphize, is well known across the globe.

It appears, however, that in the life of Abraham, the identity of God was known
across the Near East. This was soon enough after the Flood that the pristine,
original monotheism had not yet entered an advanced state of decay. One might even
argue that Melchizedek is Shem, the son of Noah. If this is the case, then
Jerusalem was the second city founded after the Flood- after Babylon. This provides
a new context for the typological war between Zion and Babylon throughout the
Bible. I’ve argued here that understanding Melchizedek as Shem’s throne name is
justified from Scripture and provides a number of important, biblical-theological
insights.

3. A Historical Reading of Genesis 1-11 is Necessary for a Correct Hermeneutic

In modern biblical commentary, even Christian commentary, it is very common to see

the Old Testament in polemical terms. For example, John Walton argues that a Near
Eastern person would see the Serpent in Genesis 3 as a “chaos character” and read
it in that light. I suggest instead that the whole idea of a Dragon-Serpent as the
embodiment of chaos, found in the Near East, is a corrupted historical memory of
the fact that the Dragon-Serpent incited the Fall. This explains why, in creation
myths across the planet, a cosmic tree is often described alongside a serpent. In
one Native American Myth, the flood hero actually allows himself to be destroyed by
the serpent-king: but in doing so, he destroys the serpent and resurrects the
world. What a beautiful type of our Lord! Consider another example: Genesis 1
teaches that man is the Image of God. Walton goes to other Near Eastern and
Egyptian accounts to determine what the “image of God” means. In most of these
accounts, the image of God belongs to the king alone. If one takes Genesis 1-11 as
history, by contrast, one will not understand the “Image of God” as a pagan idea
which was rebutted by an Israelite polemic. Instead, one will understand the pagan
idea as a corrupted memory of the original truth.

Such problems appear all over a hermeneutic which fails to take Genesis 1-11
historically. For example, it’s well known that the biblical covenant structure
parallels early Near Eastern covenant structures. This has been used (correctly) to
argue that the book of Deuteronomy must have come from the time of Moses and not
from Assyrian covenant structures, since the form of the covenant had changed
significantly by that point in time. Problematically, however, if one does not take
Genesis 1-11 seriously, then one will see the origin of the covenant structure as
entirely pagan. God merely “condescended” and adapted a pagan covenant structure.
There is therefore no reason to search for theological meaning in the structure
itself. It was a simple pragmatic measure on God’s part. By contrast, if one takes
Genesis 1-11 seriously and historically, then one will realize that this divinely
revealed covenant structure must have been known to Noah, even as it was not
inscripturated. The covenant structure appears all over the Near East (I have not
investigated whether it is similarly present across the planet) because that is
where Noah and his sons landed and built their first civilizations. We are
therefore inspired to seek theological significance in the structure of the
covenant itself.

The problem is the same when it comes to the commandments in the Pentateuch. It’s
well known, for example, that there are lots of connections between the sacrificial
rites of Leviticus and the rites of other ancient cultures. Interestingly, this is
not merely the case in the Near East (as is usually assumed) but is the case across
the globe. As an example of this problematic hermeneutic, Jacob Milgrom reads
Leviticus 16 as a polemic against the Babylonian New Year, since the rituals share
so many similarities. One, therefore, only looks for significance in the ritual
where it departs from the Babylonian New Year. Paganism is primary, and Israel’s
religion is fitted into that context. By contrast, a historical reading of Genesis
1-11 reveals that Noah was familiar with the sacrificial rites. He was familiar
with the distinction between clean and unclean animals (though the actual
prohibition of eating unclean animals comes at Sinai and is exclusively a
commandment for Israel under the old covenant). One ought to look for the symbolic
meaning of the Day of Atonement within biblical theology and not in its corrupt
forms in the Near East. The same is true for the so called case-laws. Are the case-
laws an adaptation and condescension to other Near Eastern codes? Or are they the
inscripturation of primeval revelation which was known throughout the ancient
world. If one takes Genesis 1-11 historically, then it’s the latter. Noah was made
king, and Shem likely governed Jerusalem with righteousness for centuries, so that
righteous laws were known and corrupted by later codes like Hammurabi.

The Sinai covenant, then, is the inscripturation of these laws, and the
incorporation of them into a covenantal agreement with Israel. The laws are not
themselves polemics.

Finally, we ought to consider the Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon.
Throughout the ancient world (both inside and outside the Near East) Temples look
suspiciously like Israel’s Temple. If one does not take Genesis 1-11 historically,
then Israel’s Tabernacle becomes a polemical device. It was the pagans who actually
developed sacrificial worship, priesthood, temples, and altars: the true God simply
took what they invented and made His own version. What this means is that the
significance of the symbolism becomes limited to where Israel’s Tabernacle and
Temple differ from their pagan counterparts. Where they are the same, that is
simply “condescension.” Where they are different, it is “polemic.” A great deal of
the beautiful symbolism of the Temple and Tabernacle that run throughout Scripture
is then completely lost, as the world absorbs the text of Scripture. I submit that
the text should absorb the world. God was truly known to the ancient world, and his
revelation shaped all ancient cultures, which is why there is similarity to the
Bible within those cultures. But if we are to understand the Scriptures, then we
must not take those cultures as primary and the biblical culture as secondary.

Conclusion: Avoiding Worldview Slippage

The result of rejecting the historicity of Genesis 1-11 is what I have called
“worldview slippage.” Worldview slippage is the result of inhabiting two
contradictory world-pictures at once. According to the Bible, every tree and stone
and star and animal symbolizes God in a particular way. Man walks upright because
it orients his head to heaven and symbolizes his dominion over the cosmos. He
possesses unique hair on his head because it is his crown of glory. Woman is the
glory of man, the glory of glories. Polygamy postdates monogamy. Polytheism is a
corruption on monotheism. Such assumptions are fundamental to biblical theology as
a whole, and taken together, they seal up the world as God’s world. God’s world is
beautiful, and intentional, and purposeful. Man is Homo Adorans and paganism is a
misdirection of man’s fundamental nature. These truths are fundamental to
Christianity, which is why attempting to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity
creates so much cognitive dissonance. Consider the contrasting Darwinian picture.

According to the mainstream, secular history of the world, the Earth existed for
billions and billions of years without man. For hundreds of millions of years, it
was dominated by bloodshed and death. If one went back in time to see such a
period, little purpose would be evident. Species came and went. Eventually, one
species of primate evolved, and this primate, while intelligent, was fundamentally
a hunter-gatherer. He was animistic, seeing various spirits in nature, and often
polygamous, with one man taking a harem of women for himself. Then, 10,000 years
ago, the climate changed and man, all over the world, independently began to build
cities. The implication of this is that man is not fundamentally a cultural, city-
building, monotheistic creature. The Bible paints the story of man as a story of
glorifying a Garden into a City. Man is not fundamentally a hunter-gatherer. Man is
not fundamentally animistic.

For years, I experienced the results of worldview slippage. I wanted to see beauty
in the world, but such beauty had to be constantly qualified, as the inner purpose
of an organism was merely to survive and reproduce. Beauty was an incidental
feature of this process. The sun may be thought of as a symbol of God, but that was
an imposition of symbolism from the outside in, not an emergence of symbolic truth
from the inside out. The world absorbs Christianity, and one has to make a
strenuous effort to take every thought captive for Christ. I’ve often heard
Darwinists argue that creationism causes doubt and apostasy because of its
absurdity. I’ve found the opposite. If there’s one characteristic I’ve noticed in
theistic evolutionists (myself especially) it is that they are always doubting.
There is the constant, nagging presence of cognitive dissonance over two
fundamentally contradictory world-pictures.

As unfortunate as it is for our intellectual credibility, there is truly no easy

way to reconcile Darwinism and a secular history of the world with a Christian
worldview. A fully Christian worldview requires one to inhabit a proper world-
picture, and that world-picture is set up in Genesis 1-11.

---------------------

Human Mythology and Genesis 1-11

Part of a response to a comment on YouTube…

I do, however, understand the real fear of cognitive dissonance created if one
professes the young-earth creationist position. I understand this better than most
people, having been raised young-earth, turned TE (and passionately so- check out
my other channel, Kabane52 haha) and eventually, little by little, returned to YEC.
Trust me. I was absolutely stunned that I had been convinced of young-earth
creationism. But let me sketch out why I did it:

A. I concluded that the consensus narrative of mankind’s origins had to fudge the
common threads that run through human mythology. I’m sure you’re aware of the fact
that stories of a global Flood are present in hundreds of the worlds cultures. When
I was a theistic evolutionist, I dismissed this with a combination of “floods
happen everywhere” and “missionary influence.” But when I began to study the
primary sources myself, I realized that this simply could not be the case.
Independent origin is ruled out because the similarities are simply too particular.
For example, there is a much higher concentration of Flood stories (even from
Native American tribes) where the number of people saved is eight. There are loads
of stories where an animal is sent out near the end of the Flood to detect land-
very often this is a bird or even a raven and dove. One curious thread I found
repeatedly was that the Flood hero witnessed the raven eating corpses off the side
of the Ark. This detail isn’t in the Bible, but it’s found over the world- I
actually later found that this is a Jewish tradition first recorded in the Second
Temple period. There is no way that missionaries discovered and preached an obscure
Jewish tradition.

Another point against missionary influences is the way the similarities and
differences in Flood stories are diffused across the world. For example, across
hundreds of square miles in Native American territory, tribes tell of the otter
which was sent off the boat near the end of the Flood and found land at the bottom
of the sea. This is impossible to explain along the lines of missionary influence-
are we to believe that missionaries vigorously preached Genesis 6-8 across America
and all the tribes corrupted it in the same way, independently? The better
explanation is that the bird sent off the boat had become an otter, and various
tribes then diffused across America carrying the otter variant. This is the case
for loads of such variations. The common idea that global Flood stories are
explainable by “Floods happen everywhere” collapses with the slightest
investigation.

On this, the best book is Charles Martin’s “Flood Myths.” Martin knows the original
Sanskrit and has studied this in some depth. Other than the awful appendix on Flood
geology, this is a great work. Available here:

http://api.ning.com/files/vTOeg0D1LU*9INHw7ZPoiF0Gfzk91*Zt5CUk9usGwDDg2YhbeOD-
wwOvAzHhSAf0BpQefLV4qcXktE1MujxVBeTB28g8cKJg/FloodLegends.pdf

TalkOrigins, ironically, also has a great compilation of Flood Stories:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html

But this isn’t just the case for the Flood. Similar stories exist across Genesis 1-
11, the only portion of biblical history purportedly shared by all mankind. Take
the Tower of Babel. I’ve found lots of examples of a story of a great tower or tree
at which the world’s languages were created. Many of these stories say that the
tower or tree was shaken or blown over by a great gust of wind. I later found out
that Josephus records a Jewish tradition that the Tower of Babel was blown over by
a gust of wind. Remarkable, eh? The same is true of worship of the singular God
revealed in Scripture. One gets the impression that all mankind had once worshiped
the ethically monotheistic God of the Church in its primitive history, and this is
confirmed strikingly. Check out Corduan’s book “In the Beginning God.” A good
review of it here:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2015/02/original-monotheism
My point in writing all of this is to show that it’s not an isolated case. Whenever
one pursues human mythology and the tales cultures tell about their origins, there
are always remarkable points of convergence with Genesis 1-11. Just think about how
many heroes have a foot-wound, or end up placing their foot on the head of snakes
or dragons- straight out of the promise of Genesis 3. The Seed will crush the head
of the Serpent, and in the process, the Seed will get His heel bruised.

--------------------

Review of Flood Legends by Charles Martin

Part of the reason I changed my mind about the historicity of the Flood was because
of the distribution of Flood myths across the globe. Mainstream collections of
flood myths are helpful insofar as they document the sheer volume of such stories,
but irritating insofar as they absurdly insist on an independent origin for most of
these stories. One still reads in mainstream biblical commentaries that the
biblical story is derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh- that might work if such myths
were uniquely concentrated in the Near East. Unfortunately for higher critics, that
is simply not the case, though they carefully conceal this fact from their
devotees.

Even as I found the distribution of flood stories enormously interesting and

persuasive, I still distrusted the great majority of young-earth creationist work
on this matter. Ultimately, I do agree with the goal of young-earth creationist
science- if Christianity is to be the foundation of our thinking in every area of
our life, then we must admit that the present scientific consensus is wrong and
needs to be carefully reconstructed according to Christian presuppositions.
Unfortunately, young-earth creationists tend to ignore the “careful” part of that
phrase and endlessly make bad, outdated arguments that do more harm to their cause
than good. It is for that reason that I came to this book with fairly low
expectations.

I can now happily report that such low expectations were unwarranted. Despite its
short length, Charles Martin has done a marvelous job at focusing on the
implications of the distribution of flood stories across the planet. He
acknowledges when his case is not completely airtight, but demonstrates
convincingly that mainstream anthropology simply has no reasonable explanation for
why such stories are found across the world. He decisively proves the absurdity of
independent origin for these stories: if these stories all emerge from separate
events, then why do they share so many incidental similarities? If Native American
flood myths emerge from a separate local flood than does the biblical story, then
why do both share the unusual and unnecessary detail of sending out a bird to
detect land near the end of the Flood?

In order to ensure that his case is sufficiently detailed, Martin decides not to
focus most of his attention on explaining all of the flood myths. Instead, he
chooses three stories- the (Old World) Indian story, the biblical story, and a
South American story. Martin is capable of reading the original Sanskrit, so he is
fully able to discuss the Indian story in detail. Martin notes how many
anthropologists argue that the biblical story originated from the flooding of the
Black Sea, while the Indian story originated from the regular flooding of the
Ganges River. He annihilates this bizarre explanation, showing how the details of
the stories coincide too precisely to be explained by independent origin.
Especially interesting was his examination of how the various stories preserve
details which are no longer necessary: for example, the South American story
includes the flood hero gathering all kinds of food into his ship, even though the
flood is only a week long. There is no need to gather so much food if the flood was
that short- the only reasonable explanation for the inclusion of such a detail is
that this story has been corrupted from its original form where the detail made
sense. In the biblical story, the flood is a year long, so that gathering all kinds
of food is necessary.

Most helpful was his exploration of how various threads of the story could evolve
(irony intended!) through an extended game of telephone. For example, in many
Native American flood stories, it is not a raven who is sent out to detect land,
but an otter. The critical thread is the “land detection” thread. Other stories
include the bird thread without the land detection thread. A few- even from Native
Americans- include both. At the end of the book, Martin analyzes the particular
features of the geographic distribution of flood stories, showing how as man spread
across the globe after Babel, he took the story of the flood with him, and how as
you trace it in particular directions, it coherently changes in distinct ways.

This is probably the best work I’ve yet read on flood stories, because it doesn’t
attempt to explain them by independent origins (as the secular history of the world
would require). Read it- and see how far the rabbit hole goes.

------------------------

Can a Theistic Evolutionist Believe Romans 1?

Blake asked, concerning my last post:

Why the dichotomy of creation/ID = God directly created life and Darwinian
evolution = God indirectly created life? The dichotomy itself and both its
conclusions still assume a deist framework.

This is simply not the case. While it is true that everything in the universe is
accomplished by God in one sense, there is a distinctive class of acts which the
Scriptures set apart because can only be accomplished by God and lack a sufficient
secondary cause. That latter portion is important, because these acts in particular
are used to demonstrate that denial of God’s reality and activity in history is
foolishness. The problem becomes most acute with the question of design, because
Romans 1 says that design is the preeminent way in which man knows that God is
real- the only way such things could have come about is through God’s creative
activity. Neo-Darwinism destroys or at least significantly weakens the force of
this argument- far from only being explained by God’s creative activity, the world
becomes peculiarly explainable without God, which is why I think theistic
evolutionists tend to suffer from intense periods of doubt. I certainly did, and
every other TE I’ve spoken to suffers similar periods).

Part deux:

Blake responded:

I think this is still working in a modernist framework where god is just one
primary cause among other causes. God’s creator-ness is about his relationship to
his creation. If one thinks trinitarian-ly about creation, then this dichotomy
explodes.

The problem with this view is that it creates problems with all sorts of things
that Christians have freely talked about for the entire history of the tradition.
Let’s return to the question of design. What if I saw an atheist drop a rock?
Imagine the conversation that might ensue:

Me: I saw you dropped that rock.

Atheist: Yep, dropped a rock.

Me: So why don’t you believe in God?

Atheist: Not sure how that is relevant.

Me: Well, you releasing that rock from your hand was the secondary cause, but God
is the primary cause. So God exists!

Atheist: I drop rocks all the time. This doesn’t prove anything.

Me: Ah, but God is the primary cause every time you drop a rock!

Atheist: And you know that how?

Me: Because God exists!

And that’s the problem. The only way in which we know that God stands as primary
cause behind everything that occurs in the cosmos is because we believe that God
exist. One cannot use those things which have a secondary cause to demonstrate
anything to one who doesn’t accept God’s reality. If the apparent design in the
world was produced by Darwinian means, then it’s the same sort of thing. The reason
that the Bible uses the argument from design and not the argument from a dropped
rock is because secondary causes sufficiently explain the dropped rock, while they
do not explain design in the cosmos.

One might reason from the argument from contingency that an existent world apart
from God makes no sense, but in that case, the argument from design disappears from
relevance as a distinct argument. Why doesn’t the Bible use the argument from
contingency if this (and possibly the kalam) are the only ways we reason from the
universe that God exists? I submit that the Bible uses the argument from design
because the argument from design is uniquely powerful, if and only if we deny the
sufficiency of secondary causes to produce apparent design in the world.

God is certainly not one primary cause among many. He is the sole primary cause of
everything that occurs in the world. Every cause within His world is secondary. One
can reason from the fact of existence that God exists (the argument from
contingency or the cosmological argument) but this isn’t quite the argument that
Romans 1 uses. St. Paul (and those throughout the Christian tradition) appeals the
quality of those things that exist.

And one more:

What I’m saying, though, is that God isn’t a “cause” at all. Drawing somewhat off
of Origen, and Athanasius in response to him, the creation of cosmos isn’t the
first thing on a timeline. Creation is making the timeline possible. If that makes
sense.

I think this begins to get onto a different subject. My point is that the argument
of Romans 1 assumes that design in the world we see is obvious, and it is obvious
precisely because it can be explained only as the result of God’s handiwork. Even
though God is the primary cause of all things that occur, such things we call
“miracles” are qualitatively different than such things as dropping a rock. Romans
1 places the created order in the former category, while Darwinism places it in the
latter. Your point deals more with the nature of God’s causality. My knowledge of
the Bible is better than my knowledge of the Fathers, but I do know that Origen was
attempting to reconcile a notion of an eternal universe with Christianity, a
synthesis which was ultimately condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. I cannot
comment on St. Athanasius, because I’m not sure what you’re referring to. But I
would affirm that there is a first moment in creation, even as I affirm that God
stands above the whole succession of moments. See here on a Trinitarian philosophy
of time. Not sure if it is relevant.
---------------------

Conservative Theistic Evolutionists

Theistic evolution, when it is applied consistently, is fundamentally corrosive to
Christian doctrine.

By no means am I claiming that all or most theistic evolutionists are apostates.

Nor am I claiming that all or most will become apostates. On the contrary, I know
many who know and love Jesus Christ. What I am saying, however, is that theistic
evolution is inherently unstable, that it contains within itself the seeds of
theological liberalism, and that for those who are willing to think seriously
through its implications, it will ultimately destroy the Christian faith. The most
prominent model of such a person is likely Peter Enns. Peter Enns started out as a
professor of biblical studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. He strongly
affirmed theistic evolution, and even worked for BioLogos. Yet, Enns perceived that
if evolution was true, then it demanded a thorough rethinking of Christian faith
and life. If there is one true world, and evolution is part of that world, then:

1. Death is not contingent. Death is part of the universe. It has always been part
of the universe. Man did not bring death into the world because death was always in
the world.

2. Sin is part of what it means to be human. What it means to be human gradually

developed over millions of years as successive generations became more adapted to
their environments. Part of that adaptation was sexual promiscuity, since it
ensures that your genes are spread more widely. Another part is violence against
other communities, since that ensures a higher probability that your own community
(and thus, genes) will survive.

Another route one could take towards #2 is to assert that such tendencies are
limited to our bodies, but not our souls. But this leads inevitably towards
Gnosticism, since Christianity asserts that God is the creator of soul and body in
His image and likeness. If one’s Christianity is reshaped around the above two
propositions, then I’m afraid there’s very little left, as there is for Enns, who
is a sad, dejected man. But let’s take this a little further:

What does theistic evolution imply about the Bible?

Conservative theistic evolutionists desire to section Genesis 1-11 neatly away from
the rest of Scripture and to assert specious differences in genre between Genesis
1-11 and Genesis 12-50. We are then informed that we are very poor readers of
Genesis if we do not recognize such a difference in genre. Yet, ancients such as
Josephus recognized no such difference. Jesus and the apostles apparently believed
that Adam and Noah were real people. Both Jews and Christians have a long tradition
of building a chronology out of, in part, the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11.
Moreover, Abraham’s descent is traced right back to Noah, the same Noah who
experienced a global flood.

Others try to reinterpret Genesis 1-3 and Genesis 6-9. Frankly, such attempts
barely deserve discussion. Every interpreter that lived before the 19th century
recognized that the Flood of Genesis 6-9 is a global flood. The text is designed to
recapitulate the seven days of creation so as to present the same world that was
made in Genesis 1 to be torn apart. All the high mountains were covered. Noah
builds the ark as a miniature world and gathers all the animals in the big world
into the little world. Is it true? Or is this false?

What about Genesis 1? Though some evangelicals have attempted to assert that it was
never intended as historical because of its literary design, everything in the
Bible is designed as literature. Symbolism communicates truth about the real world.
The creation is a living allegory of Jesus Christ. The text of Scripture expresses
the truth about Christ precisely in that it expresses the truth about the world in
which He is symbolized. If Genesis 1-11 are intended as history, and Genesis 1-11
are false, then the whole history of salvation begins to fall. The chronology of
the ancient world, based on the idea of an “agricultural revolution” in 8000 BC,
presses away the Bible. Attempts to find room for the exodus (read the account of
the plagues: Egypt was destroyed) in the conventional chronology are sad and
doomed.

The accounts of the patriarchs are intimately woven into the details of Genesis 1-
11, and the exodus is dated with respect to the patriarchs. Even David and Solomon
are dated with respect to the exodus, and the kings are dated with respect to David
and Solomon. It is here, with the kings, that conventional biblical scholars see
Israel’s history as emerging from the dark mists of myth. But the meaning of the
Davidic kingship only makes sense in light of what came before. Jesus’ story only
makes sense with respect to the story of Israel.

An analogy would be Doc. Ock’ from Spiderman: the artificial sun he created was
inherently unstable. He could use his arms to maintain control of the instabilities
for a short period of time, but soon enough, the instability was going to break out
of the containment chamber and bring the city down.

Darwinism is antithetical to everything the gospel is about. It is a dead end.

---------------------

More on Theistic Evolution

One has to consider the question of whether modern scientific conclusions about
common descent, Neo-Darwinism, and the age of the cosmos are in tension with
Orthodoxy. There’s no particular reason why this is impossible. It may well be that
they are in tension with Orthodoxy. The problem is that whenever one tries to
discuss this question, one is met with bizarre rants about how “you’re accusing me
of not being Orthodox” or “you’re intellectually unserious.” Well, maybe I am
accusing you of not being consistently Orthodox, and maybe I am intellectually
unserious. If the former, then refute the accusation. If the latter, then
demonstrate the vacuous nature of my position.

I’m going to perform a bit of low-level psychoanalysis here, but bear with me,
because this is based on reflection on my own time as theistic evolutionist. I
think the reason why so many people become emotional over this question is because
they are more intellectually confident in the truth of modern science than they are
in Orthodoxy. I remember quietly admitting to myself, several years ago, that this
was true for me- I also swore that I would never admit that to anybody else. But if
someone asked me what would happen if I discovered that evolutionary science and
Christianity were compatible, I would avoid the question. Why? Because I knew I
would reject Christianity and not modern science. I encourage theistic
evolutionists to reflect on this question for themselves. If you knew that
Christianity required young-earth creationism, would you reject Christianity? If
so, don’t you think there is something wrong with that? If your answer is that this
is an incoherent question because there’s no conflict between Christianity and
evolution, remember that the easiest person to deceive is yourself- and also see
the links below.

What to do, then? I encourage theistic evolutionists to do three things. First,

please read seriously the proponents of intelligent design, and read their critics
as well. This is not so simple an issue that you have a “creationist claim” on one
hand and a one-paragraph “debunking” on the other. Here’s an example. Michael Behe
has argued that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex because if you
remove one part, it ceases to function as a flagellum. As such, it cannot evolve
directly (and he always includes that word). Kenneth Miller has argued that if you
remove some parts of the flagellum, you do not have a functionless system, but a
type-three secretory system (a system which injects poison into other bacteria), so
irreducible complexity is false. Darwinists tend to cite Miller as having
“debunked” irreducible complexity and move on. The problem? They’ve never actually
read the arguments back and forth.

Had they read the argument, they would realize several things. First, Behe noted
that such systems with sub-functions exist in the original book (Darwin’s Black
Box) and argued that any indirect pathway is highly implausible. Curiously, in
every case where Miller quotes Behe on this issue, he always leaves out the word
“directly.” I’ve seen this done enough that it looks to me like purposeful
deception. Second, most specialists (including Scott Minnich, a microbiologist who
actually helped discover the T3 system) believe that the T3 system is a derivative
of the bacterial flagellum, not a precursor system. Why have most Darwinists never
heard the counterarguments? Because they assume that there can be no
counterargument.

This is an argument which can be followed by most non-specialists of reasonable

intellectual capacity. So follow it. Read both sides, not just Darwinian propaganda
(such as that found on the so-called Index to Creationist Claims).

Second, I ask that you contemplate seriously the theological issues associated with
accepting modern scientific theories about the origin of species and the age of the
cosmos. I have gone into the hermeneutical and structural reasons to reject any
attempt to evade the claims of Genesis 1-11 here. I have discussed further
theological issues in “post 2″ here. Every theistic evolutionist I have talked to
(including myself, until a few months ago) and read does not have real answers to
these objections. Instead, they have poorly thought out arguments designed to
ensure that they do not have to face the uncomfortable questions. Harsh words, yes,
but the quality of every theistic evolutionist “solution” to the theological
problems are tremendously poor.

Third, pray about it. Seriously. If you’re right, then God knows you are right. If
you are wrong, then God wants you to change your position. Indeed, I myself prayed
about this question a year ago (because a young-earth creationist asked me to) and
here I am. God will do what God does.

-------------------------

The Universal Extent of the Flood

This was in response to a question where I was asked whether the global language in
Genesis 6-9 might be merely phenomenological language. Couldn’t a large local flood
also explain the flood stories distributed across the world?

1. I’m not very much into the idea of merely phenomenological language, because it
tends to reify the world from one particular perspective in opposition to others,
which become metaphorical or not quite real. The sun really does move across the
sky, after all. There’s nothing unreal or metaphorical about saying that. That the
Earth is dependent on the gravitational field created by the sun for its movement
is a way of looking at the sun from a particular perspective. The principle of
relativity does say that there isn’t actually any “absolute motion” in the cosmos.
When we say that the Earth revolves around the sun, we are speaking of the relative
gravitational interactions between the two bodies.

2. I’m not sure how the text could communicate a global flood, if the language it
is using isn’t sufficient already. It says that all the high mountains were
covered- water fills any body it inhabits, and this would simply be impossible if
the flood was not global. The flood is a decreation event, and it recapitulates the
creation week in order to emphasize that point. The covenant made with Noah
promises that there will never be any such flood again, and of course, there have
been large local floods since.

3. It’s clear from extrabiblical flood stories that the stories are about a flood
which is global in extent.

4. For the stories to be carried all over the globe if the flood was a large local
flood, then the flood would have to be local in geography but universal in that it
killed all people except Noah and his family. This is a position held by some old-
age creationists. Given the conventional history of the Earth, however, humans had
spread all over the globe tens of thousands of years ago. Moreover, the
conventional view says that humanity radiated across the planet from Africa, not
the Middle East. This is very problematic if you want the flood to be
anthropologically universal but geographically local. Even if one holds that gaps
are possible in the chronology of Genesis 5, it defies belief to hold that the gaps
are so massive that you can get 50,000 years out of the 1,656 presented in the
text.

5. Still, even if there are gaps in the genealogy (which I don’t believe) there
cannot be gaps in the chronology, because the age of the father is given at the
birth of the son. This, with Genesis 11, is the only genealogy in the Bible which
has this feature, indicating that chronological information was part of the intent.
I’ve written a short piece here on the nature of biblical chronology:

http://kabane52.tumblr.com/post/135268015335/chronology-and-covenant

Here is the whole biblical chronology:

http://kabane52.tumblr.com/post/107633188040/a-chronology-of-the-bible

6. If the flood happened tens of thousands of years ago, then we need to account
for Babel. According to the conventional view, people were entirely hunter-
gatherers until 8000 BC. However, Babel indicates that civilized culture preceded
the radiation of humanity across the globe. If this is the case, it’s hard to
explain why civilization doesn’t appear until 8000 BC if Babel was a historical
event after an anthropologically universal flood (thereby setting it, at the very
least, 50k or so years ago). If one rolls with the conventional view of population
genetics, then mitichondrial Eve lived about 180k years, ago, which intensifies the
problem.

In short, I think that a local flood interpretation necessitates a number of

contortions and/or revisionist views of science. Because part of the purpose of
old-age creationism and a local flood is to reconcile the conventional scientific
view with biblical history and theology, I think this at least partially defeats
the purpose.

----------------------

Chronology and Covenant

Each time God matures the covenant, there are two things provided: a history with
commentary which evaluates the previous iteration of the covenant, and a
chronological datum which links the previous covenant to the new one being formed.
This happens with the

1. Noahic. Retrospective is in Genesis 1-6, chronology is in Genesis 5.

2. Abrahamic. Retrospective is Genesis 9-11, chronology is in Genesis 11.
3. Mosaic. Retrospective is the book of Genesis, chronology is the 430 years dated
in Exodus 12.
4. Kingly. Retrospective is the book of Judges, chronology is the 480 years named
in 1 Kings.
5. Return. Retrospective is the book of Kings, chronology is the running chronology
of the dynasty of David.

But what about from the return from exile to the arrival of Christ? The New
Testament provides no history of the return period, nor does it provide a
chronological datum. At first glance, this appears to be missing.

But on second thought, it’s not. It’s provided, but with a twist: the book of
Daniel gives us the retrospective in advance, in the prophetic history provided in
Daniel 11. Is there commentary on this history? Yes, but it’s not as obvious as the
commentary provided in previous books. The commentary on this history lies in its
chiastic and typological structure. The history of the 62 Weeks is presented as a
recapitulation of Israel’s earlier history, with kings of the North and the South
at war. Discerning its typology provides the theological commentary.

The chronological datum comes in Daniel 9. With the seventy years of Jeremiah
(which links Kings to the return) complete, Gabriel appears to give 490 more years
from the return to the new covenant.
--------------------

A Chronology of the Bible

Note the theologically significant numbers throughout.

Creation: 3930 BC

Death of Adam: 3000 BC

Flood: 2274 BC

Birth of Abraham: 1922 BC

Call of Abraham and Descent into Egypt: 1847 BC

Birth of Isaac: 1822 BC (100 years after birth of Abraham

Jacob born: 1762 (160 years after birth of Abraham)

Jacob’s sons go into Egypt: 1632 BC

Exodus: 1417 BC [430 years after Egyptian sojourn begins]

Conquest begins: 1377 BC [40 years after exodus]

Conquest completed: 1370 BC

Land brought to rest: 1367 BC [480 years after call of Abraham]

Saul enthroned: 1021 BC [see Acts 13:21)

David enthroned in Hebron: 981 BC

David enthroned in Jerusalem: 974 BC

Solomon enthroned: 941 BC [40 years after David]

Temple begins: 937 BC [Temple begins 480 years after exodus. 12x40]
Temple finished: 930 BC [3000 years after creation, 487 after exodus]

Palace Complex Finished, Davidic-Solomonic Covenant Complete: 917 BC [500 years

after exodus]

Solomon dies: 901 BC [40 years after reign begins]

Shisak sacks Jerusalem: 897 BC [Temple sacked 480 years after conquest begins, 40
years after Temple building began]

Death of Josiah: 527 BC [840 years after land brought to rest, 70x12]

Nebuchadnezzar conquers Palestine: 524 BC

Temple Abandoned by God: 510 BC

Temple Destroyed: 505 BC

Decree of Cyrus: 457 BC [70 years after desolations begin. 960 years after exodus.
80x12, 24x40, 48 years after Temple destroyed, 12x4]

Temple Rebuilt: 435 BC [70 years after its destruction]

Christ born: 1 BC [3000 years after Adam’s death]

1000th Anniversary of David’s Enthronement in Jerusalem: 26 AD

Beginning of 70th Week (Christ’s public ministry begins): 27 AD

Middle of 70th Week: 30.5 AD [487 years after Cyrus’ decree, matching the 487 years
from exodus to Temple]

End of 70th Week: End of Year 33

Gospel Proclaimed Openly in Rome: 59 AD [1000 years after Solomon enthroned]

Destruction of Jerusalem: 70 AD [40 years after death of Christ, 4000 years after
creation. 100 generations.]

---------------------

Review of “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”

Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is a classic for a reason. After a
period of openness towards skepticism of Darwin in the 1960s, there was a revival
of Darwinist orthodoxy in the 70s and 80s. Other than those involved with young-
earth creationist organizations, there was very little in terms of an attempt at a
scientific critique of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Michael Denton’s book changed
that, and it provided the foundation upon which later proponents of intelligent
design would build. Most notably, Michael Behe, author of the famous (or infamous)
“Darwin’s Black Box” traces the beginning of his evolutionary skepticism to this
book. In my estimation, Denton’s book absolutely deserves its classic status.

The book aims at a comprehensive critique of Darwinian evolution. The essence of

Darwinism, suggests Denton, is continuity. Darwinism suggests that life is
fundamentally continuous, and that in principle, the gaps between living organisms
can all be bridged, and were all bridged at some point in the past. By contrast,
Denton holds to the discontinuous, typologist view of biology propounded in the
19th century by Richard Owen. Denton marshals a great deal of evidence, both
theoretical and empirical, to buttress his case. He points out that for many
organisms, even conceptualizing an intermediate is impossible. For example, the
structure of a bird feather is such that its particular features are all required
for it to fulfill its function at facilitating flight. The wing itself is a similar
feature- anything which was adapted for faster running or gliding would look very
different from a wing adapted for bird flight. Birds have a host of other
anatomical adaptations allowing them to function as they do- their lungs are
different, their bones are hollow, and so on. What possible intermediates could
there be?

The gap in conceptual possibility is correlated with a gap in empirical data, which
is a significant point, and demonstrates that the conceptual gap is not simply due
to lack of ingenuity on the part of evolutionary theorists. The fact is that the
relative few morphological intermediates suggested by paleontologists are at best
mosaics of traits. The distinction between a mosaic and an intermediate is subtle,
but crucial. The question facing evolutionary theory is how to build a new complex
organ or anatomical trait. In order to answer this question empirically, we should
be able to detect a series of intermediate fossils which show a trait or set of
traits in development. But this is not actually what we find. What we find are sets
of anatomically mature traits mixed together. The avian features of Archaeopteryx
are perfectly avian, even as it possesses other reptilian features. What we ought
to be looking for is a specific trait that is intermediate.

The discontinuities on the anatomical level are paralleled by a remarkable pattern

of discontinuities on the molecular level. This is what Denton describes as an
equidistant pattern of similarity and difference. Human and fish hemoglobin is
separated by an identical degree of difference to fish and amphibian hemoglobin,
which suggests that these organisms do not cluster in the expected pattern.
Instead, we find groups of organisms which are irreducibly different from one
another, and the degree of difference (23-24% in the case of hemoglobin) among
these organisms is nearly mathematically perfect. The explanation for this stunning
fact, Denton suggests, is little more than a tautology. Evolutionary biologists
have posited a “molecular clock” which is the constant rate of mutational change
over time. Yet, the only evidence for such a clock is the pattern of equidistant
differences in organisms. Such a molecular clock is also hard to reconcile with the
different rates of generational turnover among different organisms. The hitjob
review by the “National Center for Science Education” appeals to a constant rate of
mutation among the germ cells, which do not depend on generational turnover. This
misses the obvious point that natural selection and genetic drift operate at the
level of the population, not individual organisms, and that especially selection
depends on the whole creature and not individual germ cells. Furthermore, it is
nearly inconceivable that a rough molecular clock would generate such a
mathematically precise distribution of protein similarity across so many different
groups.

The chapters on homology are worth the price of the book. Darwin rested a
substantial portion of his case on homology, suggesting that it was impossible to
explain why so many “unnecessary” features like the pentadactyl limb were
distributed across so many organisms unless it was the result of descent from a
common ancestor. Denton points out that Darwin’s critique depended on
functionalism, where the only purpose of an organ or anatomical feature is better
fitness. Denton is a structuralist, so that the living world is pervasive with
nonadaptive order. But the critical point Denton makes is that this kind of
homology is not really what is predicted by Darwinism. If the pentadactyl limb is
really unimportant in terms of fitness, then why is it so highly conserved? One
would expect local variations in branches of the evolutionary tree. If evolution
can transform the pentadactyl foot of a mouse into the pentadactyl wing of bat, why
not vary the pentadactyl structure itself? On Darwinism, one would expect such
variations, requiring only that they cluster in a nested hierarchy.
The other problem with using homology as evidence for Darwinian evolution is that
anatomical homology is often not correlated with genetic or developmental homology.
If the similarities among organisms were mostly the result of descent from a common
ancestor, then one would expect the same genes to regulate the same features, and
one would expect homologous features to take homologous developmental pathways.
This prediction has been falsified by the data: different genes often regulate the
same features, and homologous features often take different developmental pathways.
Furthermore, there is plenty of homology which cannot be explained by common
descent. For example, echolocation (and the genes that regulate it) allegedly
developed multiple times on the evolutionary tree: at least twice in bats and at
least once in cetaceans. This is merely called “convergent evolution” without
specifying a mechanism for such specific and sophisticated convergence.
Essentially, homology is evidence for common descent except when it isn’t. Homology
was perhaps the most critical evidence marshaled by Darwin in support of his
theory: its breakdown is a massively significant event.

There are a few problems with the book: I think Denton is too dismissive of some
intermediate sequences, such as the whale sequence. I don’t think he treats notions
of Lamarckian inheritance fairly, and some of the biology is outdated. Denton wrote
before the revolution in epigenetics, and he views the genome as a complete
prescription for the whole structure of an organism. The influx of genetic data in
the modern day has given rise to the “missing heritability problem” where much
biological inheritance is unaccounted for, even in whole-genome sequencing. Some of
what Denton says about protein folds has also been falsified: since some identical
polymers fold differently to produce different proteins, the folds cannot be
specified by the codons: it requires an additional layer of specified information,
presently of unknown origin. Yet these developments do nothing to detract from
Denton’s central point. On the contrary, they buttress it. Life, as Denton
predicted in this book, has been found to be more complex the more it is studied,
not less. And standard Neo-Darwinism is as empty-handed as it was when Denton
wrote.

I commend this book to anyone interested in a genuine and rigorous scientific

critique of Darwinian orthodoxy.

----------------------

The Nature of the Nested Hierarchy

A reader asked me to comment further on what I meant when I stated that the sort of
nested hierarchy we see in life is not the sort predicted by common descent. This
is an important topic, because the nested hierarchy is one of the key predictions
of the theory of universal common descent, which posits that all organisms descend
with modification from a single common ancestor. A population of organisms will
become geographically isolated from one another, and each population will
accumulate respective variations. According to Darwinism, these variations are
sorted by natural selection: those variations which benefit the organism are
positively correlated with the offspring the organism bears. This replicates the
variation so that it spreads through the population, and this pattern repeats
throughout the history of life. This creates a branching tree pattern, and this
pattern predicts a certain distribution of similarities and differences throughout
the living world.

This is an important point, because many creationists seem to think that “common
design” is identical in its explanatory content to “common descent.” Not so. Common
descent does predict similarities, but it predicts certain kinds of similarities.
For example, what if we had a leaf growing out of our heads? This would be a
similarity to another living organism, but the kind of similarity would be fatal to
common descent. Here’s why. According to the theory of common descent, two
organisms are similar when their common ancestor had a particular trait. This
ancestor passed its trait onto its offspring, and both organisms, being descended
from this original ancestor, possess the trait. After that original ancestor
diverged into separate populations, those respective populations accumulate
variations separately, and they should not share traits which their common ancestor
did not possess.

This is why a human being with a leaf growing from its head would be fatal for
common descent. Common design would explain it, but common descent would not. A
designer can mix and match traits across the living world. He is not limited by the
branching tree pattern of common descent.

I said that such a feature would falsify common descent. In reality, however, there
are many such features in the living world. Biologists call this phenomenon
“convergent evolution.” By calling it convergent evolution, they are not actually
explaining the data. They are simply naming it in evolutionary terms, because they
do not propose a special mechanism which causes similar traits to evolve separately
across the evolutionary tree. Evolutionary convergence is not limited to features,
but extends to genes. The same gene that makes possible the human vocal range (and
thus speech) is present in parrots, even though the alleged common ancestor of
humans and parrots did not have this gene. It looks like God was mixing and
matching traits. The same is true of bats and whales: both have highly similar
echolocation systems. This is a highly sophisticated trait, and would we really
expect this to evolve twice? Especially for bats, wouldn’t it be simpler to make
their eyes more sensitive to light instead of building an echolocation system from
scratch? The problem extends deeper than this. Phylogenetic work done on bats
reveals that even in bats, the system would have had to evolve multiple times. This
simply defies belief.

Thus, we see that homology is explained by common descent, except when it is not.
Moreover, the kind of homology we see is not what we would predict, given
evolutionary processes. Darwin operated within the tradition of functionalism, when
a biological feature was only perceived to be important if it had a pragmatic role
in the organism. Aesthetic value or conformance to a transcendent form was not part
of the explanatory toolkit of English biology. This led Darwin to posit that
apparently ancillary features, such as the pentadactyl limb (present from us to
bats to whales) is a result of common descent. Why would God mold the same
fundamental structure to perform such different functions? But Michael Denton
raises a serious problem with this. If the pentadactyl limb is simply the result of
common descent, why does it exhibit no variance on any branch of the evolutionary
tree? After all, is it really likely that no branch would acquire benefit by adding
another bone to the limb, or adding another finger? What one would expect, given
common descent, is for a clustering of variants on the pentadactyl structure,
rather than its strict conservation. That it is strictly conserved actually
indicates design rather than homology. God designed the animal world not purely for
function, but for aesthetic value and in conformance to the transcendent forms. The
number “five” has symbolic value in Scripture. That this is the result of design
rather than descent is confirmed by the fact that homologous features are often
coded for by different genes and built by different developmental pathways. This
strongly indicates teleology, that there are similarities among organisms because
that similarity is part of the goal. If it were homology, we would expect broadly
similar developmental pathways built by the same genes.

Finally, we find that certain similar organs which must have evolved separately
actually cluster together as if they did not. Take the simple eye of mammals and
the compound eye of insects. As humans, we perceive the underlying unity between
these two sorts of eyes. Both are located on the same relative place in the
organism, and both are used for the same function. Think of it as two different
operating systems running on two different kinds of computers. We understand them
both to be united, but they developed independently and run differently. The unity
between the simple and compound eye is conceptual and abstract. This led
evolutionary biologists to make the obvious inference that they must have been
designed separately. The difficulty is that they are placed on the same relative
position on the organism by the same Hox genes! Hox genes are responsible for
placing different biological features in their proper place on the organism. They
do not code for the specific form of the biological module. If you took the Hox
gene in a mouse eye and used it in the human genome, there would be no
developmental difference. This was predicted by common descent. The problem is that
if the common ancestor of mammals and flies did not have an eye, as required by an
evolutionary nested hierarchy, the Hox genes should have developed separately. But
they cluster.

The clustering, thus, is conceptual and abstract. This cannot be a pattern

generated by common descent. Instead, it indicates that the kind of nested
hierarchy we see is the result of the divine design according to the transcendent
forms. Thanks for reading.

------------------

Evolution and the Nature of Scientific Prediction

Why is scientific prediction important for confirming a theory? What, exactly, is
prediction, and can a false theory generate true predictions? If so, how is
prediction valuable in the first place?

First, I believe there is some confusion about the nature of prediction, because it
can be used in subtly different senses. In one sense, common in physics and
cosmology, prediction is used in its most literal sense: an event which will take
place in the future. In economics, for example, an economist will predict how the
economy will perform in the next fiscal year. In physics, Einstein’s special theory
of relativity predicted what would be seen in a future total solar eclipse.
However, prediction is often used to describe something related, but slightly
different. That is, a theory can predict future discoveries which are already
present. Here’s what I mean. The theory of common descent predicts a certain
distribution of fossils in the ground. However, these fossils are already present
in the ground- the prediction is that we will come to realize this with further
discovery, not that it will actually become true in the future. The practical
effect of both sorts of predictions are basically the same, but I have seen this
cause confusion among some.

Second, why is prediction important? Prediction is important because the goal of

scientific theories is to explain the organizing principles of reality. Here’s a
simple example. If I gave you the numbers 2, 3, 5, and 7, these are points of data.
The theory would answer the question of what unites them. If one understands the
theory, then one will be able to correctly predict the next number in the set,
since one gains this knowledge not from direct apprehension of the next number, but
through the grasp of the organizing principle of these numbers. In fact, these are
prime numbers- numbers only divisible by one and themselves. Once one understands
the nature of prime numbers, one predicts that the next such number will be 11, and
when one checks a chart, the prediction is confirmed. Since one was able to apply
the concept of prime numbers to anticipate the data, one’s understanding of the
concept is very likely correct.

There’s another reason why prediction is important. It becomes difficult to

evaluate a theory when scientists begin to add epicycles. Ptolemaic geocentrism
accurately predicted the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, even though it was
false. How? Because the movements of the heavenly bodies were directly observed,
and when the data contradicted the theory, the theory was simply revised after the
fact, observers simply added an epicycle: a circle which moves around the
circumference of a larger circle. While this accounted for the data, the model was
wrong. While the model posed as a theoretical framework, it was not actually a
theoretical framework: it merely described observations in other terms. A parallel
to this can be seen in contemporary evolutionary theory. According to the theory of
universal common ancestry, biological similarity exists on account of descent from
a common ancestor. Two organisms share a trait because they share an ancestor who
had that trait. This is a simple concept, and it makes predictions. It predicts
that if the purported common ancestor of two organisms did not have a trait, those
two organisms should not share that trait.

In fact, this prediction is wrong. Both traits and genes are shared between
organisms whose ancestor is not thought to have had this trait. For example,
marsupial and placental mammals, because of the substantial difference in their
reproductive systems, are thought to have diverged very early in the history of
mammalian evolution. A very serious difficulty is presented by the fact that
marsupial mammals often have a placental “match.” For example, there is a marsupial
anteater and a placental anteater. Their body plan and lifestylle is in many ways
identical. How does the theory of common descent account for this? Well, it
accounts for it in the same way that Ptolemaic geocentrism did: by adding
epicycles. Instead of explaining the data, the data is simply described in terms
which appear to be theoretical. In this case, the epicycle is called convergent
evolution, which means that two lineages converge on the same cluster of traits.
The problem is that this isn’t an explanation at all. It simply asserts evolution
and refers to the anomalous clustering as “convergence.” There is no explanatory
framework for such convergence.

Third, under what circumstances do false theories generate true predictions? Apart
from faux-predictions such as those described above, can false theories be
genuinely predictive? I think it is very rare that false theories are genuinely
predictive. Without very careful thinking, however, it is possible to confuse two
closely related theories so that a prediction derived from one is thought to be
derived from another. As an example, I will use the purported chromosomal fusion in
Human Chromosome #2. There is some dispute as to whether there really is evidence
of fusion here, but for the moment, I will assume that there is. In short, this is
the situation: the great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, while humans have only
23. This could pose a problem for human-ape common ancestry, since a discordance in
the number of chromosomes would prevent reproduction, and the deletion of a pair of
chromosomes would kill the embryo. Hence, the necessary hypothesis is that the
ancestor of humans originally had 24 pairs of chromosomes, like the great apes, and
there was a fusion event which reduced this to 23 while preserving the genetic
information.

Evidence of end-to-end fusion appears in Chromosome #2. This was cited as a

critical piece of evidence in the Dover Trial on intelligent design and evolution.
At first glance, it appears to be a powerful argument. The theory of common descent
predicted a specific feature of the human genome. But let’s think carefully about
this. First, what does evidence of a chromosomal fusion demonstrate? It merely
demonstrates that the last common ancestor of all humans (for creationists, this is
Noah) had two chromosomes fused end to end. There’s nothing in a creationist model
which rules out a genuine fusion event. A chromosomal fusion also says nothing
about whether the last common ancestor of all humans shared a common ancestor with
apes.

A chromosomal fusion, thus, is a necessary condition of common descent, but not

actual evidence of common descent. The argument here is simply a failure to reason
carefully and precisely. But let’s reflect on this a little further. Isn’t it a
little too coincidental that the necessary condition of common descent just so
happened to be met, even before we were able to investigate the matter
experimentally? This, I think, is the intuitive force of the argument, even if the
conclusion does not follow deductively from the premises. In fact, however, I think
the difficulty here results from the confusion of two related concepts. The first
is the distribution of similarities and differences among living organisms. This
broadly conforms to a nested hierarchy (clusters within clusters), though not the
kind of nested hierarchy predicted by common descent (more on this another time).
Common descent is a theory developed in order to explain the distribution of
similarities and differences among organisms. One could also explain the
distribution by suggesting that nested hierarchy is a common feature of design.
Empirical differences between common descent and common design include violations
of the nested hierarchy, such as those described in my above discussion on
“convergent evolution.”

We thus note that within the nested hierarchy of life, there are clusters within
clusters. We then notice that within these clusters, one of the properties which
appears in clusters is genetic information. Don’t think of genetic information as a
blueprint or recipe for a living organism. Instead, think of it as a hard drive
with various programs. The genome is not a comprehensive and singular program which
governs an organism. Instead, it is a tool used by an organism, and two organisms
with nearly identical genomes can have widely disparate attributes depending on
patterns of expression. Denis Noble compares the genome to an organ: each gene is a
pipe, and the organism is the song. Two songs can be played by the same organ and
yet be totally different because of different patterns of notes being played in
connection with one another.

The reason I mention this is because old-style reductionist genetics identifies

genetic similarity with organismal similarity, when these two things are quite
different.

This is my point: we already know, from plenty of other data, that humans cluster
with the great apes in terms of their position on the nested hierarchy. We know
this from various properties relating to their body plan. Even if we knew nothing
about genetics, we would still know that humans cluster with the great apes. Since
we know this, we can easily predict that traits not yet investigated will also
cluster, broadly speaking. Hence, one can predict that the number of chromosomal
pairs in humans will cluster with the great apes, which requires a chromosomal
fusion event. It is the nested hierarchy which predicts a chromosomal fusion.
Common descent is a second-order theory in order which purports to explain the
nested hierarchy, but a chromosomal fusion is not specifically a prediction of
common descent.

One might argue that a nested hierarchy implies common descent, but even if this is
the case, it means that the alleged fusion is not an additional argument, but a new
way of restating an old argument- the truth is that the evidence for human
chromosomal fusion says absolutely nothing new about human-ape common ancestry.

We’ve seen that scientific prediction is valuable because it confirms that a

theory accurately models an organizing principle which generates data, rather than
simply being a restatement of data. We’ve also seen that restatements of data
sometimes pose as predictive theoretical frameworks, and it’s particularly easy for
this to occur when a theory is modified in response to data. Ideally, when a theory
is modified in response to data, it should predict more than the data it is
accommodating. If it fails to generate such new predictions, it is an epicycle.
Evolutionary theory has many such epicycles- convergent evolution, an imperfect
fossil record, punctuated equilibrium, and so on. Finally, and very importantly, it
is critical to distinguish between predictive patterns of data and a predictive
theory. If one detects a pattern in the data, one can predict that the pattern will
continue to hold as new data is uncovered. A pattern of data is explained by a
theory, but a prediction derived from the pattern is not identical to a prediction
derived from the theory. A prediction derived from a theory can be identified when
it predicts disparate phenomenon whose unity is not immediately apparent. An
obvious example would be Newtonian gravity. Newton posited that the same force
which keeps us on the ground also keeps the moon floating above us. These are two
apparently disparate phenomena, so that it cannot be said to simply describe a
pattern of data.

Thanks for reading.

----------------------

Hominid Fossils and Creationism

In response to this question:

Hello sir. Would you please share your view on the alleged evidence for human
evolution? What is a reliable creationist book that faithfully discusses this
issue? Thank you very much.

Thanks for the question. I think there has been a problem in the creationist and
intelligent design literature in that many come to this question simply seeking to
vindicate what they perceive to be the “traditional” understanding of human
development and origins, rather than coming to the data and asking what new
information we can learn from these fossils- from within a creationist perspective.
I cannot recommend anything more highly than Todd Wood. He blogs here:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/

His book Understanding the Pattern of Life is a somewhat dated, but still superb,
explanation of contemporary creationist baraminology- the science of classifying
the created kinds originally made by God. In other words, it seeks to discover
which sets of species are descended from a common ancestor and which are not. The
ultimate goal is to classify all living organisms and fossils in their proper
baramin (a combination of the Hebrew words for create and kind). This is important
because humans are no less part of this than any other creature. Wood argues that
traditional Darwinian mechanisms of evolutionary change are not sufficient to
explain the speed of diversification after the Flood, where approximately 8,000
baramins from the ark diversified into thousands of species within three centuries.
There are certain non-Darwinian, inherently teleological mechanisms of change,
mechanisms which are triggered when animals enter empty environments or otherwise
are forced to rapidly adapt.

The human baramin includes all creatures descended from Adam and Eve. All bear the
Image of God and thus have the capacity for rational thought. Yet, just as other
baramins have many species, so also it is possible that the human baramin has many
species under its umbrella. Even though the modern human baramin is monospecific,
it’s clear that this was not always true. This is why you had creatures like Homo
Erectus and Homo Neanderthalensis. And that’s just the species most similar to H.
Sapiens. You had H Floresiensis, the “hobbit” man with a tiny skull of 500 cc. Yet,
legends on the island of Flores speak of such a race of small people, indicating
that these hobbit men survived until the past couple of centuries- and the
traditions clearly speak of them as having clothes and language, the telltale signs
of humanity, language being an indelible marker of rationality and abstract
thought. Scientists have discovered that it is the structure of the brain, rather
than its size, which counts. The most recent find, Homo Naledi, is perhaps the most
exciting. Two separate burial sites have been discovered. This means that these
tiny men buried their dead- this is something only people do. Yet, they bear many
of the signs thought to have been characteristic of apes. But here’s the kicker: by
conventional dating, they are extremely recent, a mere 250,000 years ago. This is a
sign that the creationist model is on the right track: a burst of diversification
after the Flood, which constitutes the Cenozoic fossil record. Humans diversified
from a central point in the Middle East- and in fact, at Dmanisi, a mere stone’s
throw away from Ararat (relatively speaking), you have a single population of
hominids with huge variation in structure- had these fossils been found separately
in separate locations, they would be identified as widely divergent branches on an
evolutionary tree.

Here’s the long and short of it: we need to move past the dichotomy of
“evolutionary origins” and “creationist ideas in the 19th and early 20th
centuries.” We’ve found lots of new information. This is all compatible with a
creationist model- indeed, I think it ultimately supports a creationist model. But
just as there are many different views in conventional science as to the nature of
evolution, there are many different creationist models compatible with the biblical
revelation. We need to approach this new information with excitement, understanding
that our models will develop and grow as they directly engage with the data, even
as they remain faithful to the words of God.

So, as for books? You can’t beat Understanding the Pattern of Life for
baraminology. Kurt Wise’s Faith, Form, and Time deals with this, as does Paul
Garner’s The New Creationism. I can very cautiously suggest the Discovery
Institute’s Science and Human Origins, with the exception of Casey Luskin’s chapter
on the fossil record, which I perceived as warmed-over propaganda- not
intentionally, mind-you, but it suffers from the problems I described at the
beginning of this piece.

--------------

Creationism as it stands
I’ve been a young-earth creationist for about a year now. And nothing has really
moved me to consider going back to theistic evolution. As it stands, young-earth
creationism was the final piece of the puzzle- evolution was the outstanding
“thing” that just didn’t fit into a world which seemed to overwhelmingly testify to
the lordship of Jesus Christ. After I investigated the traditions in all human
cultures strongly paralleling Genesis 1-11, that sealed the deal. There was no way
that such traditions could have originated independently. They go back to a common
history for the human race. I have waited to hear a response from critics, and all
I have heard is the old ad hoc justifications: missionary influence, “floods happen
everywhere” (do towers create languages and nations everywhere as well?), and so
on. For those who have studied the primary sources, they only persuade true
believers.

How do things stand from a scientific point of view? We can split scientific
creationism (not used as a pejorative) into two categories:

1. Intelligent design. This is a movement composed of scientists and laymen seeking

to overturn naturalism within the scientific community. It’s a mixed bag. On one
hand, you have folks who want to just make it an antievolution show, with Darwinian
science being endlessly demonized. I’m not well-disposed towards this approach. It
always leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, and rather mistrustful of those who
promote it. On the other hand, you have real scholars such as Michael Behe (who has
not been rebutted successfully, and who has addressed all of his critics in
detail), Richard Sternberg, Bill Dembski (whose philosophical expertise is a real
gem here), and so on. Ultimately, however, the movement is not explicitly Christian
or presuppositional, so the real scientific revolution will be engineered by our
friends in group two. I actually suspect that as they make progress, they can pull
some ID scientists to defect and consider that modern science might be wronger than
they had ever imagined.

2. Young-earth creationism. As with ID, this is split into two categories.

a. Old-style. These young-earth creationists essentially claim that if scientists
weren’t deluding themselves, the young age of the cosmos and the Flood model for
the Earth’s history would be immediately obvious. This is a very, very bad path.
There is good data behind an old cosmos and (to a lesser extent) common descent.
That doesn’t mean it’s true, only that there are real questions. Pontificating in
ignorance of the data helps no one.

b. New-style. Since the 1980s we’ve seen a proliferation of creationists with

professional degrees. This has enabled them to start the work of actually building
coherent models within a biblical framework. This has produced some real results,
such as Kurt Wise’s “floating forest” theory, which suggests that there was an
antediluvian continent sized quaking-bog: and that this explains a great deal of
fossil evidence. Catastrophic plate tectonics (an accelerated version of
conventional plate tectonics) spearheaded by Wise, Austin, and Baumgardner, is also
extremely promising. Perhaps the best example of good research being done by young-
age scientists is the RATE project, which ICR sponsored to investigate radiometric
dating. This project has done excellent work on “leaky helium.” The details are
somewhat technical, but the long story short is that they made mathematical
predictions based on a young earth before experiments were done. The samples were
sent to high quality secular labs and the predictions were confirmed.

My basic assessment of modern young-earth science is that while the models are
relatively successful in making successful predictions and cohering with the data
on the ground, they have many internal problems. For example, catastrophic plate
tectonics and rapid radioactive decay produces enough heat to boil off the oceans
and melt the Earth. Fair enough- but there are some observations that are genuinely
best explained by these models. The external coherence indicates that the solutions
to the internal problems will present themselves with time, honesty, and hard work.

c. There’s a bit of a mixture between old-style and new-style creationists. Todd

Wood is probably the “purest” new-style creationist, in that he is always POd with
other young earthers, and never engages in “apologetics.” His interest is only in
the data. In some ways, Kent Hovind is the “purest” example of old-style
creationist. His arguments are 100% bogus and he doesn’t care to learn. Most are a
mix. Andrew Snelling is a good example: he is a professional geologist and has done
some very, very good work. But often his rhetoric is more old-style than new-style.
Kurt Wise is probably the middle way here. Let’s see some more Kurt Wises!

3. Now, one more note. Young-earth creationists need to do some study in theology.
Studying theology will help understand the creation. I still see ridiculous
statements like “ultimately, this Earth will be destroyed.” For me, the joy of
creationism is that God made a purposeful and beautiful world that He has called us
to renew in Christ, a project He has sworn to complete. Even (or perhaps
especially) for scientists who are well-studied in the data, I see kindergarten
level “go to Heaven when you die” theology. There needs to be more sophistication
here. Young-earth creationism will not be compelling unless the worldview within
which it nests is compelling. Joe Francis of the Masters College is most
encouraging on this. He is a biologist who did studies on biological analogies in
Leviticus in order to figure out why God created the distribution of similarities
and differences that He did.

So, for those who are still on the fence:

1. Read James B. Jordan on “Creation in Six Days” and biblical chronology. Jordan
exegetically eviscerates the theistic evolutionary and old-age positions. Jordan is
also a good biblical theologian.

2. Read the best work in young-age creationism. This means Kurt Wise’s Faith, Form,
and Time, Paul Garner’s The New Creationism, Leonard Brand’s Faith, Reason, and
Earth History, and Todd Wood’s Understanding the Pattern of Life.

3. Study Flood stories. Get the primary sources. Read the anthropologists who
documented these traditions. James Frazer’s The Great Flood is a classic. From a
Christian point of view, Charles Martin’s Flood Stories is unparalleled. You can
find it free online. There is no way to explain the common traditions matching
Genesis 1-11 apart from the historicity of this text. Period.

4. Pray about it. I prayed about it before I ever seriously thought I could
reconsider theistic evolution. Here I am.

------------------------

What’s Next for Creationism?

The anomalies are starting to accumulate with old-age models for the history of the
Earth just like they have accumulated for Darwinism. That Neo-Darwinism is dying is
not that controversial, really. Plenty of scientists are trying to work on a new
theory of evolution, and there are a number of scientists revising the way they
understand common descent. We need to remember that the people critiquing
intelligent design and creationism are really not the majority of the scientific
community: most of the scientific community just doesn’t think about these issues
or care all too much, because they have much more specific research interests.

Concerning the young-earth issue, two things are notable in the past 15 years or
so. First, there has been young-earth creationist research published in mainstream
scientific journals. Not all that much, but some. For example, the RATE Project (on
radiometric dating) published a paper in a secular journal where they explicitly
mentioned the young-age implications of their work. They presented at a conference
where they were received respectfully and the quality of their research was
acknowledged. Likewise, Leonard Brand and Art Chadwick have published in the
mainstream geological literature about megatrends in paleocurrents in Paleozoic and
Mesozoic layers, which is where directional clues in the rocks are correlated over
huge geographic distances. This is very strong evidence that these layers were laid
down by a global Flood. Brand and others have also published extensively in the
mainstream literature on the Coconino Sandstone in Grand Canyon, arguing for an
origin by a flood, though its global extent is not specified.

The second event that is very significant is the accumulation of two critical
anomalies. First, the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. They have now
done so in fossils conventionally dated to be over 100 million years old. At first,
the hypothesis was that this was a rare event facilitated by the presence of iron
which slows decay. Now it has been discovered by breaking open fossilized bones
(before, everyone assumed that there couldn’t be anything in them, so they didn’t
break them open) that soft tissue and red blood cells are actually extremely common
in dinosaur fossils. There is no hypothesis on the table to explain this from an
old-age perspective. I have seen old-age geologists admit that this is the one
piece of evidence which they acknowledge is a good young-age argument.

The second anomaly is the discovery that intrinsic c14 is found in almost all
deposits containing organic matter. Since c14 has such a short half-life (about
6,000 years by present rates), there shouldn’t be any in the rocks if they were
buried hundreds of millions of years ago. There has been extensive research devoted
to the question of eliminating contamination, and all possible sources have been
ruled out. Nevertheless, geologists call the usual intrinsic c14 the “baseline
contamination” because it is assumed to be contamination.

I predict that in the next 20 years (if our civilization doesn’t undergo radical
death and resurrection, which it might), you will begin to see secular geologists
proposing radically new models for the history of the Earth and the stratigraphic
record, just like contemporary biologists are proposing radically new models of
evolution. You have already seen glimmers of this in the development of
“neocatastrophism” which abandons strict uniformitarianism and acknowledges
periodic catastrophes (like the meteor impact which allegedly killed the dinosaurs)
and rapid formation of some geological features.

I also predict that more and more young-age creationists will begin to enter the
academic world, and that some supporters of intelligent design will cross the fence
and become young-age creationists as they see the development of mature scientific
models within a biblical framework. It is an exciting time to be a young-earther.

---------------------------

The Big Picture on Creation

If one takes arguments for and against evolution and an ancient earth one at a
time, one can risk losing sight of the big picture. For example, when one considers
the question of intermediate forms, one can get lost in the sea of purported
intermediate forms cited by advocates of common descent. Here are a few points
which I think set the tone for this issue as a whole:

-Discontinuity is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to life. While there
are some good examples of apparent intermediate forms, these are the exception.
Over and over again, completely new body-plans appear without any precedent at all.
Common descent also requires that the forms which bridged different structures in
life all went extinct. Discontinuity is obvious in the contemporary living world,
but it is also the rule in the fossil record. Sometimes evolutionists will cite the
imperfection of the fossil record, but this is a bad explanation, and here’s why.
If the lack of a pattern of continuity is an artifact of the fossil record, why do
we have many fossils representing the same discontinuous forms? If the fossil
record were really so imperfect, we should find that a species is represented only
by one fossil.

-The sophistication and complexity of life increases, not decreases, the more that
is learned about it. Darwinists promise that they will explain all of this in the
future, but the situation is getting worse, not better. There are no models at all
for the evolution of a sophisticated molecular machine or a complex organ. If we
had models for some but not others ,a promissory note would be justified. But the
fact is that we do not. And none of this was predicted by Darwinism.

-The more we learn about biology, the more we learn that biological forms are
optimized for their function, given physical constraints. If vestigiality and bad
design counts against design, then optimal design should count for it. Moreover,
examples of bad design tend to get explained as time passes and more is learned.
The same is true of so-called “junk DNA” and vestigial organs.

-The Primary and Secondary layers, thought by creationists to be laid down by the
Flood, exhibit huge patterns, with the same rocks being laid down across hundreds
of square miles. They also exhibit what has been called “megatrends” where rocks
are oriented in the same direction across huge areas. The same is not true for the
Tertiary layers, thought by creationists to have been laid down after the Flood,
during the period of residual geologic upheaval.

-Whenever time and resources are given for a research project within young-earth
models, huge progress is made. The RATE Project made several quantitative
predictions based on the hypothesis that radiometric decay was highly accelerated
during the Flood year. For example, they successfully predicted the amount of
helium left in rocks (radiometric decay gives off helium, which leaks quickly out
of the rock) based on their young age model.
Has every problem been solved? Not even close. But when we look at the big picture,
the trend is clear.

----------------------

The Good and the Bad of Creationist Scientists

This is a list of creationist scientists who have the official Kabane seal of
approval. Most of them have PhDs, but not all of them. I’ve also left off some PhD
creationists because I find their work sloppy and representative of the worst in
creationist thought. I’ll comment on some of them at the bottom. The reason I post
this is because creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis and Creation
Ministries International are only as good as the papers they publish. They are not
a monolith. They have published superb articles and terrible articles alike. The
key is to know who you are reading and what he has done.

I haven’t listed everyone, since I’m sure there are some creationist scientists I
have yet to discover, and there are some I know of who I haven’t read. This does
not include proponents of intelligent design, but only young-earth creationists. So
here we go:

The good:

1. Kurt Wise. Paleontologist, educated at Harvard, studied under Stephen Jay Gould.
He’s one hell of a creative thinker, and that is exactly what we need: people who
are willing to “think weird” about difficult problems. I wrote Dr. Wise when I
first became a creationist asking for guidance on how to find quality scientific
work from creationists. He wrote an extensive reply, which I will forever
appreciate. Without his guidance, I would not have known where to begin.

2. Todd Wood. Biologist. Wood is absolutely insistent on rigorous scientific

research, and gets very grumpy at the bad creationist habits I discussed yesterday.
Wood pioneered statistical baraminology, and his goal is to understand why God
created the distribution of organisms that He did. One thing which makes Wood
unique is that he is more theologically reflective than most creationists, who tend
to have a rather standard evangelical Baptist theology.

3. Leonard Brand. Biologist and paleontologist. He’s an Adventist. Adventist

creation science developed independently of other Protestant creation science, and
it has a different culture, one which I prefer. Brand insists on being respectful
towards those who work with a different model and publishing in the mainstream
literature whenever possible. For this, he is respected by his colleagues and has
even published work in the mainstream literature which has implications of a young
earth (though these implications are not drawn out in the papers themselves).

4. Art Chadwick. Like Brand, an Adventist. Has done remarkable work on megatrends
in paleocurrents, showing how various data converge to indicate that there were
huge patterns of directionality across hundreds of square miles in Paleozoic and
Mesozoic rocks: though not in Cenozoic (which begins after the dinosaur fossils
suddenly stop appearing) rocks, which indicates the Cenozoic rocks are postflood.
This is one of the best arguments for a Flood framework for understanding the
geological record, and Chadwick has published this data in the mainstream
literature.

5. Joe Francis. Microbiologist. Francis is theologically reflective, and does

research on the original good purpose of parasites and predators. Some of this work
is hugely insightful. I was very impressed by an article he wrote on why God
created a pattern of similarities among organisms, drawing on the principles
underlying the sacrificial system, that animals symbolize people. This sort of
biblical-theological reflection is absolutely necessary if we are to understand
God’s creation.

6. Marcus Ross. Geologist. He’s a relative newcomer, and he hasn’t written that
much, but he’s written some very good material on the geology of the Flood and
methods for discovering the Flood/postflood boundary.

7. Paul Garner. This is the one person I recommend who does not have a PhD (he has
a Masters). He does extensive fieldwork with other scientists and wrote the
wonderful The New Creationism, which surveys contemporary creationist model-
building.

The Pretty Good:

These folks have generally provided some very good scientific work, but I have
other problems with them generally not related to their science.

1. Andrew Snelling. Hard-rock geologist. Snelling published the massive Earth’s

Catastrophic Past which is essentially a textbook of contemporary creationist
geology. It’s a must-read. He’s provided enormous help in developing a creationist
model for Earth history, which is catastrophic plate tectonics. This model was
developed with Kurt Wise (above) and John Baumgardner (below). My problem with
Snelling is that his tone towards those who disagree is essentially that of Answers
in Genesis: too polemical, not clear enough about genuine ambiguities and problems
in the data. His theology is basically that of your average Baptist.

2. Steve Austin. Sedimentary geologist. Known for Grand Canyon: Monument to

Catastrophe which is an excellent text applying creationist geology to explaining
the origin of the Grand Canyon. He’s done a great deal of primary field-work and
made discoveries published in the mainstream literature. His problems are identical
to the problems I described in Snelling.

3. Russell Humphreys. Physicist. He’s best known for developing his white hole
cosmology, which explains the arrival of distant starlight by relativistic time
dilation. It’s a brilliant theory, but personally, I believe it to be incorrect.
Even so, Humphreys’ work with the RATE project was invaluable, and he developed a
young-earth theory for the magnetic field which makes a number of quantitative and
qualitative predictions, all of which have been confirmed. This is one of the great
successes of modern creationism.

4. John Baumgardner. Geophysicist. He was instrumental in developing the

catastrophic plate tectonics model, and he wrote a computer program to test the
geologic implications of such activity. This model is actually used by many
conventional geologists to model the movement of plates. So much for creationists
not contributing to science! The problem is that he can be rude sometimes.

The Bad:

There are many bad creationists, and unfortunately, these tend to be the most
prominent.

1. Kent Hovind. His PhD is fake, his
five year old, and his arguments are
he’s doing it for money. Ultimately,
simply tragic. The man knows nothing
disservice to creationism.
“dissertation” read like it was written by a
so bad that I have genuinely wondered whether
I don’t think he is, but his popularity is
about science and has done a catastrophic

2. Tas Walker. I could be persuaded to change my mind, but I am saying this on the
basis of a few papers I have read from him about the boundary between the Flood and
the postflood period. They were very low quality and held on to the discredited
notion that the geologic column is not real. The geologic column represents
patterns which can be correlated from all over the planet, as Snelling proves from
a creationist framework.

3. Jason Lisle. Lisle is a PhD astronomer, but he doesn’t seem very interested in
actual science, which means model-building. For example, his idea about distant
starlight is that the speed of light travels infinitely fast when it travels one
way and at the standard rate when it travels the other way. This is actually fully
compatible with relativity, but it is completely untestable. There’s no model here.
There are many cosmological features which are waiting to be explained in a
creationist framework, such as why many galaxies look to be colliding with other
galaxies. Lisle’s answer? “I see no reason why God could not have created them in
place.” Well sure, He could have. But the task of science is to explain patterns in
ways other than “brute fact.” This is a philosophical preference, true, but I think
the preference is in line with the nature of God who loves it when we study His
world and with the history of science. Despite his PhD, his preference seems to be
just listing off a series of young-age proofs or evidences. We need a theory and a
model, not this 1970s style apologetics. His one redeeming factor is that he’s
given a lot of cool talks on fractals in mathematics and the concrete world and
their theistic implications.

4. David Menton. Menton is a biologist, but his habits basically are those of
Lisle’s. Where’s the model building? Doesn’t seem to be there. Additionally, he
tried to prove that humans and chimps are only 76% genetically similar, which is
nonsense. The standard figure of 98-99% is correct. You can only get such a low
figure by stacking the deck. Imagine if I added one nucleotide to the center of the
genome. It would move all nucleotides after that point by one step. Now, if you
line up the chimp and human genomes, those nucleotides, despite corresponding
precisely to a sequence in the chimp genome, will be dislocated relative to it. If
you count things like that as differences, then you can get Menton’s figure. Very
early in my time as a creationist, I tried to listen to a lecture of his on the
Lucy fossil. I turned it off 15 minutes in because it made me so angry. A pattern
of disrespect towards conventional scientists, awful quote-mining, and no actual
theory.

5. Ken Ham. Ken Ham knows nothing about science. The “Were you there” tack is
baloney, since science is never about restating observations, but providing
explanatory frameworks for them. He was annihilated needlessly in his debate with
Bill Nye. He is disrespectful and dismissive of those who disagree, and he never
admits where the creation model needs more work or is deficient in explaining a
particular feature or set of features. Also, he directs huge sums of money to
building a life-size replica of the ark and very little to actual scientific work.

6. Jonathan Sarfati. Sarfati is a lot like Lisle and Menton in his aims and
approach. The difference is that he is more prolific in his writing. While he has
scientific credentials (in physical chemistry), he appears to me to be more of a
polemicist than a scientist. I don’t see him contributing to the production of an
internally consistent model of creation that coheres with the data. Just lobbing
bombs at the other side.

I’m sorry to be so negative about such prominent advocates of my own position, but
if one wants to avoid the notion that creationism is anti-science, creationists
should do science. Solomon tells us that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter
and the glory of kings to search it out. God wants us to take joy in investigating
His majestic and beautiful world. Doing science means building your own model, not
just tearing down other models. Thomas Kuhn notes in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions that failed theories are never abandoned until there is a workable
alternative model.
We can thank God that there are enough creationists who do science to build a
nascent creation model. It’s very young, but it’s already made some testable
predictions which have been confirmed. We need more people like that.

-----------------------

Problems in Contemporary Creationism

I’ve written a lot over the past couple of months on creationism and evolution, and
why young-earth creationism is at the very least a rational position to take. Here,
I want to explore some of the problems I have with contemporary creationism,
especially on the popular level. My views are shaped by the seven years I spent as
a theistic evolutionist. I’ve seen theistic evolution from the inside, so I know
that some of what is written about theistic evolutionists are just wrong. Not only
are they wrong, they do damage to the creationist position and make it very
difficult for people to cross the aisle:

1. The approach of the mainstream creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis

and Creation Ministries International is far too combative. Theistic evolutionists
are spoken of as if they universally did not care about Christ. I do believe
theistic evolution is a compromise, but we don’t always need to refer to them in
polemical terms. Refusing to use the term “theistic evolution” and always using the
term “compromisers” is about as useful as referring to Muslims as “Mohammadans” in
dialogue and debate with them.

2. There is too much of a focus on apologetics and not enough of a focus on

research. This has improved greatly in the past twenty years, but there’s still a
lot of work to be done. Most people have the impression that “creation science” is
faux science because it sets out to prove a conclusion one has already assumed from
the outset. While I think there are reasons to be a creationist apart from
scientific evidence, this isn’t what contemporary creation science is- though,
frankly, it is an accurate characterization of creation science before the mid
1980s. Contemporary creationist science doesn’t focus on proving that creationism
is true. Instead, these scientists work on building a positive model for science
within a creationist framework. Instead of harping on how evolution doesn’t explain
the diversity of life, biologists like Todd Wood focus on how a biblical worldview
can explain biology. Some of the most promising work is here: biogeography (an
account for why organisms are where they are on Earth) is being developed from a
creationist perspective, which does explain how marsupials got to Australia. A
positive geological model like catastrophic plate tectonics can and does make
testable predictions, many of which have been confirmed. This is very exciting
stuff!

Still, many creationist organizations still seem to be primarily out to prove

creationism true. Apologetics is important. But the foundation for good apologetics
is always good scholarship. There are still things (like apparent in situ dinosaur
nests) which the creation model hasn’t explained. There’s no reason to be afraid of
that. Questions like this are what make science fun. But we need to admit where
there are problems. We can be greatly encouraged that with minute resources, many
of these problems have been solved. Much older creationist work is implicitly
positivist, implying that the scientific evidence is completely unambiguous. Old-
earthers are very guilty of this too.

3. Related to this is the way that money is spent. Projects like Ark Encounter have
demonstrated that creationist organizations are very capable of raising huge sums
of money. Money is what creationism needs most, but not money for popular
attractions like this. Funding needs to be sent to serious creationist research
projects run by real scientists. Projects like the RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age
of the Earth) have been tremendously fruitful and gone a huge distance in solving
problems with the creation model. There are gobs of low-hanging fruit out there,
and funding can also be directed towards creationist geology, cosmology, physics,
and biology graduate students-grad school is expensive. There are so many
interesting questions. We need better-funded research projects and more creationist
scientists to work on them. How do we explain distant starlight? What about the
heat problem for catastrophic plate tectonics and accelerated radioactive decay?
Can we do experiments on nesting under flooding conditions? This only scratches the
surface. How about more extensive hybridization experiments? Better computers for
better modeling? There’s tons of stuff here. Why is so much money being spent on a
life-size model of the ark?!

4. Creationists need to realize that some theistic evolutionists and old-earth

creationists would really like to be young-earth creationists, but feel compelled
by the scientific evidence to their position. This was how I was before I became a
young-earth creationist. This is why being demeaning towards such people (by
calling them names like “compromiser with the world”) is massively
counterproductive. Back when I was a theistic evolutionist, that told me that
young-earthers didn’t have any substantive response to the real scientific problems
I believed the creation model faced. Since becoming a creationist, I have helped
15+ other people join me. And I don’t know how many others were helped by my
articles and didn’t mention it. It really wasn’t that hard. The key was simply to
identify with the person in question, acknowledge that there are real scientific
issues, but then point them to very serious creationist scholarship. Since most
creationist work is bad, critics of creationism who swim in a sea of the crap don’t
have a reason to think there is anything but crap. It’s up to us to point them to
it and treat them with respect. To be sure, there are dogmatic theistic
evolutionists who aren’t even interested in the discussion and will never cut the
condescension. But there are many with an open mind, waiting to be convinced.

-------------------------

Geology and the Global Flood

As I have read old-age arguments against young-age creationism and flood geology, I
have noticed a very interesting and very significant pattern. Arguments against
flood geology are mostly about specific problems with specific geologic features.
For example, they will argue that young-age creationists cannot explain limestone
deposits, in situ dinosaur nests, and sandstone. These are true challenges, though
a great deal of creationist research has focused on the Coconino Sandstone in Grand
Canyon, and my view, solved the problem. Creationists will respond to old-age
arguments and try to explain how such features could have been deposited in a
global flood. This is basically the shape of the argument.

My issue with the way this argument is framed is that it fails to take into account
large-scale patterns of sedimentation we find in the fossil record. Just like
arguing over specific intermediate forms like Archaeopteryx distracts us from the
fact that the order of appearance in the fossil record is almost totally random
with respect to the predictions made by cladistic analysis, arguing about specific
features in the geological record distracts us from the big picture that we see
when we look at global patterns of sedimentation.

Generally, professional creationists hold that the Paleozoic and Mesozoic rock
layers were laid down by the Flood. This is everything from the Cambrian to the
last dinosaur fossils in the Cretaceous. The rocks that are conventionally dated to
65 million years ago to the present are called Cenozoic rocks, and they are thought
to have been laid down in the first few centuries after the Flood. This is because
catastrophic plate tectonics predicts that even after the waters receded, the Earth
was still enduring residual catastrophism. The plates still moved quickly relative
to their present day. Volcanoes were enormous relative to their present strength.
This produced huge volumes of sediment which buried many animals in place.
What is remarkable is the pattern of evidence we see in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic
rocks. That these patterns are not observed in the Cenozoic rocks is hugely
significant, because conventional geologists hold that basically the same
sedimentary and geological processes as operated before continued to operate
throughout the Cenozoic.

What do we see?

1. Absolutely enormous sedimentary features, spanning hundreds of square miles.

Coal seams in these rocks are massive, spanning many different states, nations, and
even continents. The same is true for chalk beds, likely produced by massive algae
blooms (because of all the dead organic material in the water) in the latter
portion of the Flood. We see nothing like this today. Instead, we find that
sediment is being laid down on a local level, and different patterns of
sedimentation span a very small geographical area. These same small patterns of
sedimentation are what is observed in Cenozoic rocks.

2. Directional trends in paleocurrents. This is one of the most interesting data.

When one looks at a rock, a fossil, or a sedimentary feature, you can deduce
certain directional features. A rock could be turned in one direction, or eroded in
a certain fashion which indicates its position and condition when it was buried or
formed. At present, these directional data are basically random, and for obvious
reasons: animals fall down and die in different positions, rocks slide in different
ways, and so on. But this is not true of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks and fossils.
Leonard Brand and Art Chadwick have collected half a million different paleocurrent
data and noted that there are huge directional trends spanning hundreds of square
miles. These two have published this data in the mainstream geological literature!
This is easily explicable on the flood model, where these currents are understood
as the result of large-scale currents in water. It is completely opaque on the
conventional model. As with before, these features disappear in the Cenozoic.

3. A nearly total biostratigraphal break between the Mesozoic rocks and the
Cenozoic rocks. This is typically attributed to a mass extinction of dinosaurs, but
the convergence of this break with the other two features I have just described
suggests an alternative explanation. When I was first considering creationism, I
was under the impression that creationists still believed that virtually all of the
geologic record was laid down by the Flood, and the most significant problem was
the correlation of fossil animals with living animals. If the Flood totally wiped
out all mammal life, why would these mammals migrate so consistently to the land
above the sediment where their fossil relatives were buried? It simply made no
sense.

On the neocreationist model, this is because Cenozoic rocks are not deposited by
the Flood. And what’s remarkable is how there is a complete break in the
distribution of animals in the Mesozoic rocks and the distribution in the Cenozoic
rocks. This is consistent with a global flood, where the biosphere was completely
and totally reorganized in the Flood and the recovery from the Flood. This is also
where the best transitional sequences are found, such as the horse sequence.
Creationist biologists like Todd Wood argue that such sequences are real: they
record the burst of postflood diversification. Critics like to call this “hyper-
evolution” and suggest that creationists believe in more evolution than they do.
The reason this is false is because the mechanism is different. Wood and other
baraminologists make clear that the mechanism of rapid diversification is inbuilt
potentialities in an organism. This is why so many organisms have genes conserved
(which means that they have not been destroyed by random mutation) which are turned
off. Blind cavefish actually have a perfectly functional gene for seeing eyes: it
has simply turned off. The mechanism of epigenetic change is an area of active
research, in both the standard model and the creationist model.
What I have found is that these “big picture” issues are precisely the issues not
discussed by critics of young-age creationism. I searched several long-lasting old-
age blogs for discussion of Brand and Chadwick’s data on paleocurrents. None of
them even mentioned it. Instead, it focused on specific features hard to explain
within the framework of flood geology. For me, this is highly suggestive. The old-
age model has to explain large-scale patterns in the data. If it is capable of
explaining one-hundred specific features but completely fails in explaining the big
picture, this is a big, big problem.

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