Creationism in the service of climate change denial

Update 25 October 2023: Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisiana) was today elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Johnson, who is heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry, is an occasional guest author for Answers in Genesis, and is on record as saying that he does not believe that human activity is the cause of current climate change.

Changes in global surface temperature over the past 170 years (black line) relative to 1850–1900 and annually averaged, compared to CMIP6 climate model simulations of the temperature response to both human and natural drivers (red), and to only natural drivers (solar and volcanic activity, green). IPCC/Efbrazil via Wikipedia

Young Earth creationist organisations are united in rejecting the secular science of climate change.  This science, they say, incorporates the study of positive feedback loops as demonstrated by data from Ice Age cores (true). But all of this is part of the secular science that regards the Earth as ancient (also true) and is therefore unsound (no comment). The creationist organisations are left with the task of explaining the Ice Ages, which they do with a degree of ingenuity worthy of a better cause. This in turn leads to a creationist climate science, in which positive feedbacks are ignored. It follows that conventional climate science can be discarded, and our current concerns rejected as alarmism.

This conclusion fits in well with the aims of the right-wing organisations with which the creationists are intertwined. One frequent commentator on environmental matters in Answers in Genesis  is Calvin E. Beisner, founder and CEO of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which exists to oppose any environmental constraints on industry, and Beisner’s work has been praised by the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute. The Cornwall Alliance itself is deeply linked to creationist theology, and its Statement of Faith commits to separate creation of a historical Adam and Eve, original sin as a historical fact, and “the bodily resurrection of the just and unjust, the everlasting punishment of the lost, and the everlasting blessedness of the saved.” The conservative commentator Jay W. Richards, Senior Fellow of the evolution-denying Discovery Institute, is a Fellow of Heartland and a former adviser to Cornwall. But the political agenda of creationist organisations is a major topic in itself, to which I shall return.

We must also remember that while there is no commercial interest in denying evolution, denying the need for action on climate is a well-funded industry, to whose voluminous output the creationist climate change deniers have full access.

Trump’s plan to overcome California’s water shortage

Not a “concept of a plan,” but the plan itself its entirety. All he needs to do is to tell the Canadians to turn on the tap.

If you have friends in water-starved Nevada or Arizona, make sure they know of this.

They have millions of gallons pouring down from the North with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down, and they have a essentially a very large faucet. You turn that and all of that water goes into the aimlessly into the Pacific and if they turned it back all of that water would come right down here and right in to Los Angeles

The Clergy Letter Project and the 2024 US Presidential Election

The Clergy Letter Project, supported by over 17,000 religious leaders in all 50 US states, exists to promote the understanding and celebration of science in the context of religion.  It has refrained from making an endorsement in any election, but this year has issued a statement urging its members to take into account the difference in the positions of the two parties on a number of issues, including climate policy, the value of truth, and the universality of human dignity. The complete statement is as follows:

The 2024 presidential election may well be the most important election of our lifetimes, and The Clergy Letter Project’s religious leaders strongly urge all eligible voters to carefully examine the positions and attitudes of the contenders with respect to both religion and science.   Many of the prominent differences between the two major party candidates for president involve values central to the mission of The Clergy Letter Project: respect for truth, for science, for diverse faith traditions, and for the dignity of all persons. These values are not upheld when policy positions elevate one religion over another, either explicitly or implicitly, with regard to health care, climate change, education, immigration and more.

Climate Policy: One crucial difference is climate policy. Each year there is growing scientific evidence that human induced climate change is already seriously impacting many parts of our country and the world. Unless climate change is treated as the existential threat that it is, it will have a devastating impact on both our country and the world in the coming years. Care for the vulnerable, the poor and disenfranchised, lies at the heart of our diverse faith traditions, with many communities already suffering from the consequences of climate change.  The differences between the two major party candidates on this and on many other issues are clear and profound.  

The Value of Truth: Both religion and science recognize and promote truth as a foundational value for all their endeavors. While politics has seldom been the best place to find truth, lack of respect for truth and the constant use of deception to advance a political agenda must be recognized and rejected.

The Value of Human Dignity: The Clergy Letter Project has regularly spoken out forcefully, from both religious and scientific perspectives, about how all human beings are worthy of respect and fair treatment, how we are all part of one species, and how attempts to divide us are counterproductive and immoral.   Because the results of this presidential election will have such immense consequences for our country and for the world, The Clergy Letter Project urges voters to cast their votes for the team they believe will likely yield the most positive results for our social, moral and environmental well-being.

Creationism As Conspiracy Theory – Revisiting The Peppered Moth

I wrote this 10 years ago, before the term “conspiracy theory” became all too common. Events since then have only reinforced my original opinion.

Comparison of carbonaria and typica mounted against post-industrial treetrunk, 2006. Licenced under GFDL by the author, Martinowski at nl.wikipedia.

The peppered moth provides a textbook example of industrial melanism and its reversal. Once a classroom classic, then much criticised, and finally rehabilitated through further observation, the story also shows how real science works. The response of the creationist and “Intelligent Design” community provides a textbook example of a conspiracy theory in action, with cherry-picked quotations, allegations of collusion and fraud, and refusal to acknowledge new evidence.

This moth comes in two main varieties, mottled pale (typica), and dark-coloured (carbonaria). The dark form was first noticed, as a rarety, in 1848. Then came widescale industrialisation and grime. By 1895, 98% of the peppered moths in Manchester were dark, and in 1896

The difference between skepticism and denial; Darwin, Wilberforce, and the Discovery Institute

Bishop Wilberforce, in 1860, was a skeptic, praised by Darwin for the skill of his questioning. Today’s creationists, not least the Discovery Institute, are denialists, endlessly asking the same questions as he did, although they have long since been answered.

Yes, Bishop Wilberforce really did ask T.H. Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” whether he would prefer an ape for his grandfather, and a woman for his grandmother, or a man for his grandfather, and an ape for his grandmother. And Huxley really did say that he would prefer this to descent from a man conspicuous for his talents and eloquence, but who misused his gifts to ridicule science and obscure the light of truth. This and more at the very first public debate regarding Darwin’s work on evolution, only months after the publication of On the Origin of Species.

I first wrote the above paragraph in 3 Quarks Daily in 2017, shortly after Richard England had published on the way that the events had been described in the Oxford Chronicle, the fullest contemporary account available of the encounter. That account refuted doubts that had been raised ¹ by some historians, and which I had seen referred to by creationists, wishing to minimise the episode or even to regard it as legendary. These doubts were based largely on the absence of the episode from the account in the gentlemanly Athenaeum, but England convincingly showed that the Athenaeum had practised censorship.

I am writing about this again today in response to an article in the mendaciously mistitled Evolution News, mouthpiece of the neocreationist Discovery Institute, by Robert Shedinger, Professor of Religion at Luther College, Iowa. Shedinger has discovered a second career dissing Darwin. He is best known to readers here for his recent book, Darwin’s Bluff, where he argues that Darwin’s voluminous unpublished notes demonstrate his inability to support his views, and the article I am discussing is an extract from that book. We must therefore regard it, not as a mere passing comment, but as the author’s considered opinion.

Unlikely Allies: Biology Teachers and Creationists

I am writing in response to the article Bridging ideological divides: Why Christians still disagree about evolution and what we whould do about it, by Hans Madueme and Todd Charles Wood, Scientia et Fides 12(1), 2024, 189–213; open access here.

This article is written by two young earth creationists, who take 25 closely argued pages including 93 references to show complete misunderstanding of the relationship between observation and interpretation in evolution science, in order to claim a false epistemic symmetry between this science and the theological perspective which forces them to reject it; a more sophisticated version of the “two pairs of spectacles” thesis that has been with us since George McCready Price. So why am I bothering to review this article? And why, to my own surprise, do I find myself welcoming its appearance?

For three reasons. Firstly, because the authors, unlike “creation science” young earth creationists, accept the validity of the science in its own terms, rather than claiming that it is inferior to their own fantastical offerings. Secondly, because they lay out extremely clearly (and self-revealingly) their own epistemic position. And finally, because their recommendations, made regarding conversations within the evangelical community, are applicable (and indeed to some extent already applied) to the very practical problem of how to teach evolution science in places with a faith-based culture.

Why historical science is the best kind of science

There are sciences, such as physics and chemistry, where we can perform experiments. There are other sciences, such as the science of planetary motion (and astronomy in general) where we cannot do this, but we can still carry out repeated observations in well-controlled circumstances, and devise theories with whose help we can make definite predictions. All of these are what I will call rule-seeking sciences. At the other extreme, we have sciences such as palaeontology and much of geology, which one might call historical sciences.¹ With these, the aim is not so much to establish general rules, as to unravel and explain the specifics of what happened in the past. It is usual to regard the rule-seeking sciences as the most rigorous, to which the others should defer. This shows a deep misunderstanding of how science works, and, time and time again, when historical and rule-seeking sciences have come into conflict, it is historical science that has triumphed.

Deep time made visible – Ooh-Aah Point, Grand Canyon

A few examples. The rocks clearly show (for detailed arguments, see e.g. here) that the Earth, and by implication the Sun, must be at least many tens of millions of years old. Lord Kelvin, the leading physicist of his time, argued that this was impossible, because using all sources of energy then known, the Sun could not have kept going for more than some twenty million years. There was nothing wrong with Kelvin’s reasoning, apart from the small fact that there was a massive source of energy (nuclear fusion) of which he had no inkling.

The fossil record shows catastrophic discontinuities, most famously the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs, for which there was no physical explanation at the time when they were discovered.

Donald Trump in his own words

You know I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff

Here’s a compilation of quotations that I first posted back in September 2016. I know he sounds much more coherent than the 2024 version, but remember that he is eight years older now, so perhaps we need to make allowances.

All men are created equal – that’s not true. When you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse. Secretariat doesn’t produce slow horses. I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer. Do you believe in the gene thing? I mean I do. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in.

Trump indicating his cerebral superiority

Well I think I was born with a drive for success. I was born with a certain intellect. The fact is you have to be born and be blessed with something up there. God helped me by giving me a certain brain. It’s this [tapping his head], it’s not my salesmanship. This – you know what that is? I have an Ivy League education [True, sort of: he spent his last undergraduate year at Wharton, the business school of the University of Pennslyvania, whis is Ivy League], smart guy. I have like a very very high aptitude.

I mean, like, I’m a smart person. You’re born a fighter, and I’ve seen a lot of people who want to fight but they can’t. Some people cannot genetically handle pressure.

I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.

Yes, he really did say all this, and I verified it at the time at https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-eugenics_n_57ec4cc2e4b024a52d2cc7f9, and watched the recording then available.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

Toilet Train Your Tyrannosaur

Millions drowned, but they deserved it. Be like Noah, and be saved.

It is easy to laugh at the idea of Noah’s Flood as a historical account, with all the animals (including, according to the main creationists organizations, extinct animals such as dinosaurs) on board the Ark. That would be a big mistake. In contemporary Young Earth creationist thought, the story has come to rival in importance belief in the creation account itself, while the Flood is seen as a foreshadowing of the approaching Final Days. As shown below, much ingenuity has been expended on making the story plausible. How were eight people able to manage so many animals?

Well, we know that Middle Eastern people were experts at animal husbandry, so perhaps Noah’s family had kept a pre-Flood menagerie to train them. Clearing out waste seems like an insuperable problem, but this could have been overcome by ingenious engineering, combined with training the animals to use chamber pots for their urine, and to defecate in designated areas (this according to a book praised in the Arc Encounter pocket guide). As to why the story is so important, it shows God dividing humanity into the Saved, and those who deserved to be drowned, and the entire Ark Encounter experience is an invitation for visitors to see themselves as among the Saved, then and in time to come.

According to the anthropologist James Bielo, such places as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter provide sacred infotainment, in which visitors imagine that their own lived experience is Bible-based. This requires an illusion of authenticity, with no concern for biblical accuracy. Thus, when Bielo sat in on the planning stages of the Ark Encounter video trailer, he found much concern over the appearance of the pegs being used to hold the Ark’s planks together, which looked like something you could buy at a modern DIY store. That mattered because it didn’t fit the illusion. But no one really cared that Noah was incorrectly described as “righteous,” rather than the highly ambiguous “righteous in his generation,” which is what the Bible actually tells us. Ken Ham had okayed the script, so it must be fine theologically. Ken Ham, founder and at the time CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner of the Ark Encounter, is zealous in his support of one particular version of biblical literalism, but such zeal does not leave room for even the possibility of ambiguity.

Tactical voting 2024

Be kind to your canine companion; get a postal vote

In 2019, I advised voting tactically for whichever candidate with a winning chance in your constituency had the least bad policy on Brexit. In 2024, the stakes seem somewhat different. I assume at this point that an overall Labour majority is virtually certain, so priorities are rather different. In happier times, as those who know me will realise, I would be celebrating the collapse of the Tories, but as it is I see serious dangers in a situation where something like a quarter of the electorate changes its preferences within five years, and voting patterns in Europe reinforce my impression.

Voting intentions via Wikipedia (UK average). Click to enlarge; visit site to update

You can get advice on tactical voting here, and no doubt many other places closer to polling day. However, that may not be the most important consideration. (Of course, you need to register to vote. if not already registered, you must do this before midnight 18th June. The process is easy, and you can do it here. You will need to download a copy of your signature. To vote in person at a UK election, you need to show photo ID, but you do not need this for a postal vote.)

If the Faragist Party has any real chance of winning in your constituency, the leading priority is to shut them out, even if that means voting for a party that you would otherwise never consider.

In my own view, the best possible outcome of the election would be to see the LibDems outnumber the Conservatives, and find themselves the official opposition, but I fear that this is exceedingly unlikely. If, nevertheless, you agree with me that a strong LibDem presence is desirable, and if the LibDem candidate has a real chance in your constituency, vote for them.

Otherwise, since we know which party is going to be in power, I think the most important thing is to do what you can to get decent thoughtful individual MPs into Westminster, so take your pick on that basis among the leading individual candidates. In 2019, when I was living in Glasgow NE, I voted across party lines for the admirable Paul Sweeney, who narrowly lost, is now a Scottish Parliament list MSP for the Glasgow region, and is not standing in the General Election.

In the constituency where I now live, Stirling and Strathallan, the two leading candidates seem to me, because of the general collapse of the Conservative vote, to be be Alyn Smith (SNP) and Chris Kane (Labour Party); however, a statistician friend thinks that in this particular constituency, after boundary changes, the leading contenders are Alyn Smith and Neil Benny (Conservative). Alyn Smith was MP for Stirling in the 2019 – 2024 Parliament, and in correspondence I have found him attentive, and concerned with human rights. I have had no personal interaction with Chris Kane, but note that he is the leader of Stirling Council, having chosen to go into coalition with the Conservatives, rather than SNP, and in that capacity has overseen a reduction in the number of nursery school places, and a sell-off of public fishing rights. Neil Benny is the Conservative leader on the Council. Both Chris Kane and Neil Benny, in their election literature, claim to be the only candidate who could defeat Alyn Smith.

Update June 26: Mirror predcts Stirling and Strathallan will be won by Labour.

Book Review: Who Am I? By Martyn Iles, Executive CEO of Answers in Genesis

Martyn Iles, as many readers will know, was managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby until sacked by the Board in February 2023, was appointed Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis in May of that year, and in November was promoted to Executive CEO, working alongside Ken Ham, who remains as Founding CEO.

While still in Australia, Iles promoted right-wing causes in the name of individual religious freedom, expressed support on his YouTube channel for the claim that the 2020 US presidential election had been stolen, and in a Facebook post on January 21 2020, just two weeks after the January 6 insurrection, reaffirmed his admiration for Donald Trump. However, since joining Answers in Genesis he has, to the best of my knowledge, refrained from overtly political comment. In a Facebook post on March 17 this year he explicitly rejected the idea of a “Christian nation,” since being a Christian or not is a characteristic of individuals. Thus he has placed a welcome distance between himself and the extremes of US Christian Nationalism.

There is one important difference in style between Iles and Ham. Ham, in the tradition of Henry Morris and, before him, George McCready Price, argues that science supports his version of Bible-based Young Earth Creationism. Iles, however, does not even condescend to discuss such mere details. As he posted on Facebook in October 2022, “Truth is in the [biblical] word itself. Other things are true insofar as they conform to it.” Moreover, Iles is clear in his own mind that his understanding of the Bible, however far-fetched, is the correct one. So when he tells us what it means, he is speaking for God.