See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

“By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”
~ AnswersinGenesis.org (http://www.answersingenesis.org/about/faith)

Of all the jaw-dropping statements made by Christians, this one takes the cake. Answers in Genesis is one of the biggest and most popular apologetics websites, giving Christian arguments in favor of the flood, the 6-day creation, the 6,000-year-old earth, and dinosaurs living with humans. But I believe that this statement in their “Statement of Faith” completely removes any integrity from its authors.

This quote is saying that before the folks at AnswersinGenesis.org look at any evidence, before they think about or approach the problem at all, they have already decided the outcome. They completely base their findings on their own preconceptions, preemptively plugging their ears and eyes and accepting only what they already assume. Their is no worse way to pursue truth than that.

The criticism I make here has been responded to by some, claiming that going off the authority of the Bible is no different than going off the authority of science. But science doesn’t operate off of authority. Claims in science aren’t true merely because someone said they are. The conclusions of scientists are based on evidence, and the evidence remains for all to see. Scientists know that their ideas must stand to the scrutiny of other scientists, who may not share their preconceptions. The way to do this is to make the case strong enough on the basis of evidence so that preconceptions don’t matter.

The history of science is filled with scientists accepting ideas contrary to their preconceptions. Examples include the reality of extinctions, the reality of meteors, meteors as causes of mass extinctions, ice ages, continental drift, bacteria as cause of ulcers, and of course, evolution. Scientists are not immune to being sidetracked by their preconceptions, but ultimately go where the evidence leads.

Scientists make a deliberate effort to remove subjectivity from their work, and do a good job in general of removing bias. They do such a good job, in fact, that what creationists really object to is the fact that scientists do no interpret evidence according to certain religious preconceptions.

- Evan

An Open Mind: seeking truth rather than knowing it

It has been commonly assumed that life started in some ‘primordial soup’ of chemicals on the planet, and that somehow these chemicals begat life. How life began was still a mystery, but this ‘primordial soup’ idea seemed the most plausible. However, on February 3rd, the 80-year-old theory involving the origin of life was overturned. Quoting the linked article, the primordial soup idea could not provide the “sustained driving force to make anything react, and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist.” The new idea is that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where there is bountiful energy and already-existing chemical processes that resemble what today’s cells use for respiration.

One goal of reasonable people is to never become attached to your beliefs about the world in any way. If we do this, we can easily and happily accept new and better ideas, discarding the old. This is how science works: being able to converge on truth by letting the evidence speak for itself. It can be a slow process sometimes - in this case an 80-year process - but it is sure and steady.

One reason I reject religion is its inability to find truth. There is no objective guide to what is correct and incorrect in religion; things cannot be falsified. So when someone has a new idea, who is to say whether they are right or wrong? This is why there are so many sects of all the different religions instead of a single unified one. How can we know which ideas are right? There are many competing ideas in science too, but they will be resolved eventually, just like all the other debates before them.

When we compare science to religion as far as a branching tree of ideas, we can visualize that religion, since the beginning, has branched off constantly, wandering about and creating thousands of incompatible and unverifiable ideologies, and has so far discovered nothing about the world. Visualizing the creation and discarding of ideas in science, we can see that science converges on itself, slowly weeding out the incorrect ideas and replacing them with good ones. New branches of ideas are common, but unless observations continue to validate their claims, the branch disappears entirely. If the new idea is validated, the entire scientific community accepts the idea and jumps on the train. Using this objective and evidence-based method, science has been our one and only way of making discoveries about the world.

To me, humbly and slowly approaching the truth by studying the world is better than having a faith-based belief that you already know the truth. Which one sounds better to you?

- Evan

We Humans on the Ancient Earth

The human line hails from humble origins. An unsurprising fact, since most life does. The rise of humanity from a lemur-like creature to an ape-like creature to an upright-walker to today’s humans is a remarkable story, one far more imaginative, universal, ancient, and more solidly based in fact and observation than any religion. If God were to have a way to create life, evolution would be a far more amazing and beautiful way to do it than making things instantly appear as they are. Evolution gives living things a history, an ancient and glorious heritage.

The Earth is a greater thing than us. It has been around for 4.5 billion years, and has been teeming with live for 3.5 billion years of that. The Paleozoic era alone is 325 million years long (570 - 245 million years ago), and is even divided into seven smaller periods, each lasting from 30 to 70 million years (thumbnail the image right to view it larger). To really think about and comprehend these numbers bewilders me. Each period in Earth’s history sees further development in living things, with scores of brand new species and scores of extinctions from the previous period. The relatively rapid change that evolution is capable of guarantees a great amount of variation, increasing with time. As Carl Sagan once said, evolution “makes life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”

Using the theory of evolution and comparative anatomy, our picture of hominid evolution is quite complete. The “missing link” is no longer missing. Those claiming a lack of transitional fossils in evolution need only look at our own hominid tree (and other very complete transitions like those of horses, whales, and tetrapods) to see a smooth progression from ape-like species into more human-like species over a period of 6 - 7.8 million years.

(See the full site here)

When we look at nature - at plants, animals, fish - we see beauty. The evidence shows us that all this beauty evolved over time, over billions of years. The overwhelming ancientness of life places us as a very young and fledgling line. After all, the first known civilization of humans was Sumer, dating back to 5400 BC, and only 10,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. These are very small lengths of time compared to even the smallest period in the Paleozoic, a mind-blowing 30 million years. In fact, the entire hominid line has only been around for about 0.2% of the history of life. Humans may be the first life with higher intelligence, but we are demonstrably not the reason for the Earth’s existence.

This fact however does not make our existence meaningless. The same beauty that we see in nature is also present in us: we came about in the same way. We are part of life’s grand story, and we are special in our intelligence, imagination, and drive. To be part of nature, not just an observer of it, is enthralling, fascinating, and, dare I say it, mystifying.

- Evan

The Universe: one big family

This is the story of the universe, according to science:

1) The Beginning: 14 billion years ago, everything in the universe was contained in a single infinitesimally small point. This point, smaller than an atom, had an infinite density and contained all the matter, space, and time of the universe. The point began to rapidly expand, and as the volume of the universe increased, the heat decreased, and atoms were able to form. The first atoms consisted of mostly hydrogen and helium, since these are the lightest, simplest elements. Through the force of gravity, these atoms began to accrete and accumulate in progressively larger and larger clumps.

2) Creation of Elements: Especially large clumps would be stars, which would get so massive that the matter on the inside of them experienced insanely high pressure from gravity. This pressure produced incredible heat, so much heat that the hydrogen and helium atoms were moving fast enough to overcome their repulsion to one another, and began to crash into each other and fuse. Bigger, heavier atoms began to form. Stars that were very high in mass were able to heat their cores enough to create every element up to iron (fusing iron takes more energy than it gives out), and if one of these stars died in a supernova explosion, the massive heat of the explosion was able to create even heavier elements than iron. The dusty, gassy remains of these dead stars were the building material for new solar systems. Our sun and planets formed through the same gravitational accretion process, and each had on it many elements, including those of life: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.

3) Life Stirs: After our planet cooled and formed its huge bodies of water, organic molecules began to form naturally form. There are a few different ideas on how life first began, and none are confirmed, but the following is the most plausible. The first life forms could not have been anything like a cell today; modern cells are far too complex. The first life may have been a single self-replicating molecule, a predecessor to RNA. In the water, there were organic molecules which had one end that was repelled from water and one that was attracted. This led to naturally forming spheres. If self-replicating molecule got caught up in on of these spheres, it would be protected and had a better chance to reproduce. These were the first cells: a self-replicating molecule surrounded by a layer of other molecules.

4) Adaption and Complexity: Single-celled organisms ruled Earth for billions of years. The most dominant form during this time was cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These algae are responsible for putting a significant amount of oxygen on the planet, and the presence of oxygen caused a diversification of life. Some cells could now metabolize oxygen, which was more energy-packed. The first multicellular life was colonial, then some cells in the colonies began specializing in one thing. These were the first organs. To talk of our own evolution in detail would be too lengthy, but it had operated on the same naturally selecting powers as the unicellular life before it. The tree of life (for humans) goes as follows:

Bacteria --> Colonial multicellular --> Polyps --> Fish --> Amphibians --> Reptiles --> Mammals --> Tree-dwellers --> Early hominids --> Humans

5) Our Place: According to science so far, life on Earth is literally one big family. All life today are very distantly related cousins; we are all offspring of previous organisms. However, life itself is made of atoms created in the cores of high-mass stars. So the cosmos, while not alive, are by definition our family, because they gave rise to life. Despite any overtones of silly new-age mysticism, the universe is literally all one. We are part of the universe, not merely observers.

- Evan

Trees Grow Out of the Air

Richard Feynman is a renowned physicist, known for his lectures and interviews, and known in the physics world for his contributions to quantum mechanics and particle physics. In his interviews he often enjoyed talking about everyday objects or occurrences that are “fun to imagine” on the atomic level. There is a “Fun to Imagine” series of Feynman clips on YouTube, and I’d like to share one in particular that blew my mind. In the beginning of the 5-minute video, he speaks of how fire works, then he goes on to explain how a tree works. It’s the tree segment that I will paraphrase:

People think that trees grow out of the ground. In actuality, trees grow out of the air. The substance of a tree is mostly carbon, which comes from the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide goes into the tree, and the tree changes it, kicking out the oxygen, and uses the carbon as the base of all the new material it creates. The tree also uses water from the ground, but that water rained from the sky. There’s a little from the ground, some minerals and such, but most of the actual substance of a tree comes from the air.

We mentioned that carbon dioxide is changed by the tree to retrieve just the carbon. How is the tree so smart as to manage to separate the carbon from carbon dioxide? Ah, life! Life has some mysterious way! No - the sun is shining, and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks the carbon free. So it takes sunlight to get the plant to work.

What an amazing world we live in. As Feynman himself said, “nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, it’s never gonna let him relax!” My explanation can’t give the video justice, you’ll just have to watch it yourself!

- Evan

School Science Projects > Creationism

Remember when you were in elementary school and you had to do a science project? The steps of your project were to line up with the scientific method, which was taught to you in science class. Here were the steps:

- Ask a question
- Do background research
- Construct a hypothesis
- Test your hypothesis (perform an experiment)
- Analyze your data
- Draw a conclusion

Creationism claims to be scientific. The main argument of creationism is that life appears designed, and is too complex to have arisen naturally. Therefore, the Christian god designed all life. The problem with this is that they skip all the actual science of the scientific method. I have never heard a creationist hypothesis (in the form of “if I do this, then this should happen”), and I have never heard of any creationist experiments or collected data. So let’s plug creationism into the scientific method:

- Ask a question: From where did life originate?
- Do background research: Life is very complex, it could not have arisen naturally (even though evolution has shown that it can), and the Bible says God created life.
- Construct a hypothesis: *missing*
- Test you hypothesis: *missing*
- Analyze your data: *missing*
- Draw your conclusion: God did indeed design and create all life.

The sentence “if life is complex, then God created it” is not a hypothesis, let alone a theory. It is not testable, because God is an immaterial being that does not show himself in any knowable way. There is no known sign or mark that he would leave on material things to show that he has intervened. The only things that are testable are physical realities.

From this, we can safely say that your science project in elementary school was more scientific that creationism (if you did it right!).

- Evan

The Appeal to Ignorance: religion's secret weapon

Ever since humanity’s beginnings, religion has been inserting knowledge where there previously was none. Needless to say, so far no religion has ever been correct about the workings of the universe. For thousands of years, science has advanced its understandings, theories, and methods, while religion has retreated. During the heyday of ancient Greece, no one knew what the sun actually was. This was a spiritual question back then, because not only was it a complete mystery, but the sun was the giver of all life. So the Greek religion claimed that it was Helios, the sun god, riding across the sky in his chariot. No one knew what the seasons were, so their mythology said that the goddess of summer and growth had her daughter stolen by Hades every year, causing winter, then returned to her later, reinitiating summer. Christianity is no stranger to propagating incorrect ideas that align with its theology (i.e. geocentrism, young earth, creationism), so why should we trust Christianity’s claims of today?

The only thing that Christians can do is appeal to ignorance in an attempt to increase the validity of their claims. Even a successful dismantling of evolution and the big bang would merely reduce us to a state of ignorance about life and the universe, it wouldn’t validate some other claim. Today’s religious people move from absolute ignorance to absolute knowledge by saying that because we don’t know the answer, it must be God.

The problem is that “we don’t know” should be the end of the conversation. “We don’t know” in no way justifies any claim about the subject, so it cannot justify religion. On top of this, criticisms from the religious against scientific theories more often than not reveal an ignorance of the theories, research, and methods themselves, and are not even valid criticisms. Such statements include:

• evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity

• carbon dating is a lie and shouldn’t be used to tell the age of the earth

• saying that life evolved is like saying a tornado assembled a jet in a junkyard
  

• if crocodiles and ducks are related we should see half-crocodiles, half-ducks today

Not only are these false arguments, but even if they were valid, they would say nothing about whether religious claims are true, only that our science has problems. Christians believe that if science is wrong, then their religion is right.

This also happens at the macro level in Christian theology. What is the meaning of existence? Why is this universe the way it is? It must be God. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. But why must it be God? Is there an actual reason besides “it couldn’t be anything else”? No there is not. The fact we cannot begin to answer some of these questions yet in no way validates belief in God. When it comes down to it, there is no actual positive evidence that God has done any of the things that Christian theology claims. The dependence of Christian apologetics on these so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments is staggering, and is one of my main reasons for not being religious.

- Evan

Egocentric Us: the denial of science

Because human experience is the the only thing we know, most religions often place humanity as the reason for all existence. This idea manifests itself in monotheistic theology. We are claimed to be God’s ultimate creation, and are at the focal point of the universe. If this isn’t true, then how do we explain the church’s tendency to deny scientific discoveries that take away this self-proclaimed importance? Such discoveries as heliocentrism (sun-centered instead of earth-centered solar system), elliptical planetary orbits (instead of perfect circles), sunspots on the sun (instead of a flawless, life-giving orb), the age of the universe and of the Earth, the big bang, and evolution have all been met with fierce and passionate opposition by the church and their followers. Notice that like evolution, heliocentrism at its time was thought to be an idea that made humans seem worthless. But today it is an accepted fact, one that doesn’t detract from how great humanity is. Why can’t evolution and the big bang be the same?

When looking at the universe, there is nothing that suggests that it was all made for us to live in. We are literally a speck on a speck on a speck, and there are vast forces and immense objects out there that push our world to the sideline. Even the events on our planet are enough to make the same point. The forces of nature that are out of our control (earthquakes, weather, melting polar ice) don’t care whether we live our die (unless you believe that God is the one that intentionally kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people per year with natural disasters).

The randomness of genes is another example of how the universe wasn’t made for us. Uncontrollable birth defects produce disturbingly deformed newborns (Google-image it if you dare). This is easily explained by the randomness of genetics, but very difficult to explain with a god that personally creates and shapes each living thing. Some humans are born with debilitating or painful genetic defects that make life much more difficult to bear. The idea that the people affected by these unfortunate circumstances are being taught a lesson by God is a poor excuse for the pain and suffering that they go through. What specific lesson would they be learning that someone without these horrible experiences couldn’t also learn? The randomness and naturalism of the universe is much more accommodating to what we see than a planned universe that was built for us to live in.

Today’s population believes in both heliocentrism and the worth and meaningfulness of human life. Because of the underlying theme of their theology, the church believed that heliocentrism made humanity seem worthless; they believed it kicked humans off to the side. I think the same thing is happening today with naturalism. Just like heliocentrism, naturalism doesn’t detract from the specialness of humanity and human experience, it’s just a belief that reflects reality more accurately.

- Evan