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.
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.
Back in 2010, Answers in Genesis1 (AiG) spelt out clearly what’s at stake:
“It will be shown that the Bible provides sufficient counsel to enable Christians to evaluate the claims of global warming and arrive at a confident position that is in accord with real science. The contention that man’s activities are causing global warming, as described in the media and by its advocates, is a myth. There is no reason either biblically or scientifically to fear the exaggerated and misguided claims of catastrophe as a result of increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2).”
This August, AiG, whose Creation Museum and Ark Encounter are located in flood-ravaged Kentucky, reiterated its earlier position even more clearly:
“Really, this zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets. These activists and scientists have no idea what is really happening or what is going to happen” because “they have the wrong starting point (man’s word) and the wrong history (evolution and millions of years), so they come to wrong conclusions about the future.” Moreover, “we don’t need to wail and bemoan the future. The only true Creator has promised, ‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (Genesis 8:22).” One related article (by Beisner) on the AiG web page goes on to highlight the statement that “Fear of environmental catastrophe grows out of the lack of the fear of God”, as exemplified by what the prophet Jeremiah said regarding drought in ancient Judaea.
As I was writing this piece, Creation Ministries International (CMI) hosted its Third European Creation Conference, including a lecture offering “a Christian response to climate change”, which we know from CMI’s other statements will come to much the same conclusions. Statements by other major Young Earth creationist organisations (Institute for Creation Research , Is Genesis History?) are similar. In response to growing public concern, there has been a rhetorical shift from describing secular scientists as fraudsters, to more measured tones downplaying the significance of what is happening, and denouncing those calling for action as alarmists and catastrophists. None of this makes any difference to the final conclusion. The creationists, these days, keep telling us that they do not deny climate change itself, but only the need to do anything about it.
In the circumstances, we need to pay attention to what creationist climatology actually consists of, and the best place to start is comparison between different accounts of the Ice Ages. What we have learnt about the Ice Ages has contributed greatly to the scientific understanding of climate, while the alternative, allegedly Bible-based, analysis gives valuable insights into creationist thinking.
In the development of the science (what creationists call the “secular science”) of climate change, the Ice Ages have played a special role. From around 1840 onwards, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz developed the concept that large areas of what is now the temperate zone had been covered by an ice sheet, with glaciers reshaping the landscape, gouging out the underlying rock (glacial striations), dumping piles of ill-sorted rock and soil at their edges and ends (moraines), transplanting boulders (erratics) far from their original location, and leaving long ridges of transported material (eskers) from rivers flowing beneath the ice. By the end of the 19th century, it was realised from the location of these features that there must have been at least four separate ice ages, with more temperate periods in between.
In 1864, James Croll suggested that the ice ages were caused by irregularities in the Earth’s orbit, and although his detailed theory proved incorrect he also made the interesting observation that the initial climate forcing through changes in solar irradiation would be amplified by a positive feedback when the ice caps expanded, since that would increase the Earth’s albedo (fraction of sunlight reflected back into space). In the 1920s, Milutin Milanković developed a more complete theory of these oscillations, showing the existence of long-term cycles. There are three separate cycles, involving wobbles in the amount by which the Earth’s orbit, an ellipse, is different from a perfect circle, the direction of the Earth’s axis (cause of the seasons, currently around 23° away from vertical, relative to the plane of the orbit), and the time of year at which the Earth is closest to the Sun. These changes are small, but have their largest effect on the polar regions, and change not only the total amount of the sun’s energy that reaches the surface, but the time of year at which it does so. This in turn influences the growth and shrinkage of the polar ice caps.
In principle, we can test this theory against observation. The timing of the cycles can be worked out from the mechanics of the Earth’s motion, using methods going back to Newton. All we need now is some way of determining the growth and shrinkage of the ice caps in the past.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways we can do this by experiment. The easiest to understand is analysis of ice cores, drilled in the Antarctic ice in a research programme going back to the 1970s. Inspection of these ice cores shows annual bands, on average between 5 and 10 mm thick, so that the age of any particular band can be found simply by counting. The identification of the bands as annual has been independently confirmed for ice cores drilled in Greenland, containing volcanic ash from the numerous eruptions in nearby Iceland, which can be radiometrically dated. The annual bands contain small bubbles of entrapped gas, which can be analysed to give information about the composition of the atmosphere when each band was formed, and the Earth’s temperature at that time (more strictly, the amount of water tied up in the ice caps) can be estimated from the ratio of the isotope oxygen-18 to the much more common isotope oxygen-16 in the water molecules that make up the ice.2
We now have ice cores going back more than 400,000 years, and these clearly show the effects of the Milankovitch cycles. So these cycles are the primary drivers for the Ice Ages. However, the changes in solar irradiation are not enough in themselves to explain the size of the temperature swings. So there was some kind of positive feedback going on. Considering the Earth’s climate system, such feedbacks are unavoidable. At a time when the solar cycle is driving an increase in temperature, the ice sheets will shrink, reducing the amount of sunlight that the Earth reflects directly back into space. At the same time, because carbon dioxide is less soluble in warm water, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase, and so of course will the amount of water vapour, and both of these are greenhouse gases. Such changes in carbon dioxide concentration are directly confirmed by analysis of ice core bubbles. These and other feedbacks amplify the effects of the primary driver, as explained here and shown in the above Figure.
At present, that primary driver is the increase in our emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (for how we know that the increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere comes from this source, rather than from any natural geological process, see here). But this inevitably calls into play the positive feedbacks mentioned in the last paragraph. This is of course a greatly oversimplified picture, and there are some negative as well as positive feedbacks, creating opportunities for confusion and obfuscation by those who would prefer us not to change our behaviour, but the realities of our situation are already all too clear, and will become even more clear in the future.
In the general (not specifically religious) denialist literature, I have seen materials in which self-styled climate change “sceptics” have in turn claimed that there has been no overall increase in atmospheric CO2, that this increase is not due to human activity, that the greenhouse effect of CO2 would not be enhanced by further additions (for my own small part in refuting this particular absurdity, see here), and even that there has been no actual increase in temperature. A more sophisticated recent strategy is acceptance of the reality of human-caused change, but continued denial of the existence of positive feedback, and hence of the existence of a situation serious enough to require action.
The latest round of creationist commentaries on climate change fits in well with this strategy, with the Bible-based pseudoscience of the Ice Age playing a central role. Indeed, Is Genesis History? proclaims it “the #1 reason you shouldn’t worry about climate change” and cites in support the Cornwall Alliance, which I mentioned in the opening paragraphs. (Is Genesis History?, a relatively new arrival on the creationist scene, is described by my friend Joel Duff as part of “a growing and dynamic new wave of creationism”.)
Young Earth creationists admit the existence of an Ice Age. They could hardly do otherwise, given the gross evidence of sculpted landscapes, changed sea levels, and glacial deposits. Moreover, they are forced to place the Ice Age after Noah’s Flood, since it has refashioned sediments which they claim to be of Flood origin (for a typical Young Earth timeline, see here). In these circumstances, we can understand the creationist insistence on a single Ice Age, although the fact of multiple ice ages has been known for over a century. It immediately follows that conventional climate science, linked as it is to the study of cycles of glaciation and retreat over two million years, must be rejected, and so must the predictions of global warming that are linked to this science.
It remains for creationists to explain the causes of this Ice Age, in a manner compatible with the Bible, and they do so by regarding it as a consequence of Noah’s Flood. Indeed, with enormous (some might say blasphemous) effrontery, AiG tells us that “We know from Scripture that the worldwide Flood changed the earth’s climate dramatically.” Scripture, of course, says no such thing, but the conjuring trick is to make it appear as if the Ice Age was an inevitable consequence of the Flood. Once this is done, the Ice Age and its purported explanation can be celebrated as “biblical science”, in contrast to the secular science that lies behind demands for action.
Whitcomb and Morris’ The Genesis Flood, the foundational document of the modern Young Earth creationist movement, now available in its 50 year anniversary edition, attributed the Ice Age to the removal of a vapour canopy that surrounded the Earth before the Flood, combined with the effect of uplift of the mountains. The canopy theory is now rejected, for reasons that AiG spells out, and Creation Ministries International includes appeal to the canopy in their list of arguments that should not now be used. However, the idea of rapid mountain-building after the Flood persists in Young Earth creationist thought, since if the mountains were at their present height, there would not been enough water to cover them. Another argument common to all the creationist organisations is the invoking of volcanic dust. For instance, Creation Ministries International (CMI) cite a very interesting paper in Earth Science Reviews that reports multiple volcanic deposits in the Greenland ice cores, mainly (as shown by their composition) from Icelandic sources. These cores go back over 123,000 years, as shown by direct counting of layers, radiometric dating of the ash, and correlation with deposits elsewhere. Assuredly, the combined effect of these eruptions would have been very effective in blocking out sunlight, if we ignore the small complication that they were spread out over a period 20 times as large as what CMI regards as the age of the Earth. CMI, like other creationist sources, shows admirable zeal in scouring the regular scientific literature, combined with amazing selectivity in what they take away from it.
The creationist timeline allows only a very small time window, so there must have been a mechanism for rapid deposition of massive amounts of snow in the polar regions and on high ground. As pointed out by the meteorologist Mike Oard as far back as 1979 , this is only possible if the atmosphere was very humid, consistent with the oceans having been much warmer than today. But they would have been after the flood, because floodwaters came from release of the waters of the deep, and these would have been geothermally warmed (Oard’s own suggestion), or because the oceans were warmed as a result of accelerated plate tectonics following the flood, as postulated by present-day creationists to explain the separation of the continents and the elevation of mountains. In addition, according to a suggestion by Andrew Sibley (the speaker on climate at the CMI London conference), warming and the dissolution of nutrient minerals in the oceans, caused by the Flood itself, would have led to massive algae blooms, drawing down atmospheric CO2 and adding to the effects of the volcanic dust.
Oard’s calculations led him to conclude that the ice caps and Ice Age glaciers could have been formed in about 500 years after the Flood. This takes us into the time of the Hebrew patriarchs, but no matter, since the ancient Near East would have been protected from cold by those warm oceans (remember?) The mechanisms proposed by secular scientists cover millions of years, but millions of years were not available, therefore these mechanisms must be wrong, and it follows that secular scientists, unlike creationists, have no good explanation of the Ice Age.
The creationist position is spelt out with admirable clarity in a 14,000 word article (updated August 2022) from CMI. This is based, not on ignorance, but on carefully collated disinformation, with all the standard arguments against current climate science shamelessly repeated despite the fact that they have been repeatedly rebutted. What I find most interesting about this article is its recent date, its protestation, despite repeated CMI articles going back at least as far as 2009, that climate change is not a core issue for them, and the statement that the article was written in response to questions raised at church meetings.
The article relies on Oard’s warm waters theory about the Ice Age. It more or less correctly summarises the current scientific position, and then claims that secular scientists have imposed the Milankovitch interpretation on the data, introduced the concept of a multiplier to explain the size of the observed effects, and then by circular reasoning grafted this concept onto their predictions regarding current CO2 emissions. Such accusations of circularity abound in the creationist literature, where the outcomes of scientific studies are brushed aside as inputs.
The very opposite is the case. We have, as explained above, a coming together of arguments from planetary dynamics, the isotope chemistry used to monitor ancient temperatures, the fundamental physics behind the greenhouse effect, experimental observations on ice cores and ocean sediment borings collected over more than 50 years, and current observational climate science. This is not circular reasoning, but the very opposite; the mutual reinforcement of separate lines of argument leading to the same conclusion, as beautiful in its way as the mutual reinforcement of the arches in a Gothic cathedral.
However, the creationists’ biblical worldview is the ultimate in circular reasoning. They start from the assumption that the Bible is absolute historical truth. The Ice Age happened, therefore it must be compatible with the Bible, therefore there must be some process to make this compatibility possible, therefore this process is what must have happened, and even though there is no mention of Ice Age in the Bible itself, all of this is yet another confirmation of biblical truth. Therefore there is no need for any further discussion, the positive feedback scenario can be rejected, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 corresponds, not to somewhere between 2.5oC and 3oC, but, according to CMI, to an unamplified 1oC, and so, CMI tells its followers, there is no need to worry.
But there is. That 1oC has already been exceeded. Creationist biology is just a bad joke. Creationist climatology is toxic.
One final irony. The Genesis Flood, published in 1961, speculated on what caused the end of the Ice Age, with among the possibilities an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. It described how the then projected increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as a result of industrial activity, would provide a natural experiment to test its effect on temperature, and noted with approval the attention being brought to that issue by the 1957-8 International Geophysical Year, and plans for ongoing studies. It is precisely the results of these studies that creationists now deny.
1] Strictly speaking, not AiG itself, but an opinion piece in its journal, accompanied by disclaimer. This level of deniability is typical of AiG’s tactics.
2] Oxygen occurs mainly on Earth as oxygen-16, but includes about one part in 5000 of oxygen-18. Water containing oxygen-18 is very slightly less volatile than that containing oxygen-16, so that water vapour over the oceans is slightly depleted in this isotope, and so, as a result, is the snow formed from this vapour. As a result, when the ice sheets are more extensive, the oceans are slightly richer in oxygen-18, and so is the snow that falls that year.
I thank the Rev. Michael Roberts for helpful discussions.
This article first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.
Before he was House speaker, Mike Johnson represented a creationist museum in court. Here’s what that episode reveals about his politics
By William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. I have written about William Trollinger’s work here.while all
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.
Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.
In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism – the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”
As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”
While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.
The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”
As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.
As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. And this connection is old.
Answers in Genesis and the Christian Right
In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.
More than this, Weinberg argues that, for Young Earth creationists, evolution has been understood as the “backbone” of a communist philosophy, a “socialist, Marxist philosophy” that promotes a “spirit of rebellion” in America today.
As rhetorical scholar Susan L. Trollinger and I document in our 2016 book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” AiG continues this Christian Right tradition through its extensive online presence, its museum and now Ark Encounter.
According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption. Ham claims that a once-Christian America – with Bible-believing founders who had no intention of separating church and state – has, since the 1960s, been dragged downward. In his 2012 book, “The Lie,” Ham asserts that this will eventually “result in the outlawing of Christianity.”
In the past few years, AiG has doubled down on its culture war commitments. For example, in March 2021 the AiG Statement of Faith – signed by all employees and volunteers – was expanded from 29 provisions to 46 provisions. This includes article 29, which requires signers to affirm that “‘social justice’ … as defined in modern terminology” is “anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Then there is article 32, which says that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated.”
Rejecting the dangers of global warming and the notion that governments should intervene to reverse this trend, AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.” According to him, climate activists are misled because they begin with human reason and not the Bible, and because they hold to evolution and an ancient Earth.
In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”
Mike Johnson and AiG beliefs
Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”
He also shares with the folks at AiG the conviction that belief in evolution results in immoral behavior. For example, Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”
In this, Johnson is echoing AiG authors and speakers. For example, in response to the 2007 shooting in a high school in Jokela, Finland, which left nine dead, including the shooter, Bodie Hodge, an AiG researcher and author, asserted: “So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.”
In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically, particularly given that a significant subset of American evangelicals adheres to Young Earth Creationism.
Reading Darwin causes mass shootings. Mike Johnson says so. I have the transcript
By now you will know that the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Louisiana 4th District) was among those who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. You may also know that he is opposed to the concept of same sex marriage, which in some way he regards as undermining individual religious freedom, and wants to pass a law making abortion illegal throughout the US. You probably also know that he has denied that human activity is a cause of global warming, and has accepted more campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry than from any other source. There is a high chance that you have heard him share Marjorie Taylor Greene’s view that the problem in mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the human heart (Guns don’t kill people. Human hearts kill people.) What you may not know are his views on the causes of the moral decline that, like authoritarian pulpiteers throughout the ages, he sees happening all around him. He has, however, stated those views very plainly, at a presentation he gave in Louisiana in 2016, available [actually, no longer available] here. I have read the transcript of this, suffering so that you don’t have to, by good luck retained it, and despite many decades of following the utterances of people who share his views I was surprised by what I found.
Here he is, speaking at a less than overcrowded Shreveport Christian Center, which describes itself as mandated “to participate with the Lord in establishing His kingdom in all areas of our culture. We desire to use the authority given to us to promote and participate in seeing the Lord’s purposes rule in the church, business, media, arts, education, government and family arenas.” The authority, of course, is given by God. He is standing at the front of a platform, and behind him are musical instruments and two flags. The flag of the United States, and the flag of Israel. The Israeli Right has been wooing the American Religious Right for decades, and the unquestioning support of the American Religious Right has done much to make Israel what it is today.
Here’s part of what he said; the link the YouTube has gone dead, as with so many of his presentations, but I had collected the transcript and will make it available to anyone who asks for it privately. Like all academics, I am easy to find.
My account is rather rambling, although nowhere near as rambling as the original material, so I will place the main points here above the fold.
- He thinks that he became a lawyer in response to divine calling.
- He would rather have been born at the time of the founding fathers, but thinks that he is where he is now because that’s where God wants him to be.
- He thinks that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired.
- He thinks that the United States is a Christian nation.
- He thinks that the only real way to be a proper Christian is naïve biblical literalism, so rigorously that nowadays only 4% make the grade.
- He thinks that the US is in moral decline, and that we must identify the disease that caused that decline.
- He thinks that the disease is teaching about Darwin, imposed in the 1930s by a liberal educational elite with the collusion of progressive Supreme Court judges such as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- He thinks that darkness is encroaching, Christians are being persecuted, students who profess a belief in God are ridiculed in universities, and he himself has been shot at with flaming arrows for his religious beliefs.
- He thinks that learning about Darwin causes people to stop believing in God, whereupon they become completely amoral.
- He thinks that the results include no-fault divorce (I don’t know why he regards that as a bad thing, but I expect his audience would agree with him), feminism (the same comments apply), the legalisation of abortion which is murder (the Bible says it isn’t, but Bible believing Christians don’t seem to know that), and in due course to mass shootings.
Darwin, Marx, Satan, and a mythical dedication
In 1954, at the height of the McCarthyite Red Scare, the anti-evolution preacher John R. Rice asked his audience to whom Marx had dedicated The Communist Manifesto. The answer, he shouted out, was Charles Darwin. It is doubtful whether Marx had even heard of Darwin when he and Engels wrote the Manifesto in 1848, but that is the least of Rice’s errors.
Carl Weinberg, in his excellent Red Dynamite, an overview of the deep links between evolution denial and right-wing politics in America, points out that Rice had the wrong book; he should have been referring to Das Kapital. But as we now know, even if he had been he would still have been wrong. Wrong book, wrong date, wrong author, wrong about Darwin’s response to the request to dedicate.
The matter is well summarised by Richard Carter, reporting in The Friends of Charles Darwin on a paper by Margaret Fay in The Journal of the History of Ideas. The same conclusions had been reached, independently, by Lewis Feuer, and Fay’s paper has a long discussion regarding their relative priority, and describing differences of interpretation between them. As for the belief that Marx had wished to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, Fay traces this to Isaiah Berlin, probably misunderstanding what Darwin actually did say in a letter to Marx.
There is no doubt that Marx greatly admired Darwin, and sent him a copy of Das Kapital, which Darwin graciously acknowledged, writing, in 1873,
Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin
A polite response to Marx’s gift and implied admiration, while refraining from taking any position on the merits or otherwise of the subject matter. The volume itself still languishes, with pages uncut, in the library of Darwin’s residence, Down House.
The legend that Marx had offered to dedicate his work to Darwin may also have arisen from another of Darwin’s letters, written in 1880, most probably to Karl Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling, with reference to Aveling’s strongly anti-religious The Students’ Darwin.:
Dear Sir:
I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.— The publication in any form of your remarks on my writing really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.— Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.— I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, and looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.
I remain Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ch. Darwin
Darwin did in fact write about his changing views of religion, and at some length, in an autobiographical memoir intended only for his family, where he tells of his religious faith slipping away from him imperceptibly by degrees. He initially writes of
the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.
So to that extent he was, at that time, an advocate of what is now called Intelligent Design, although for some strange reason the modern Intelligent Design movement never lists him among their supporters.
Later, however, he wrote
This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species… But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? … The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.
The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has built an entire theory of knowledge on misunderstanding what Darwin is saying here. Darwin is pointing out that a mind arising through evolution would not be equipped to deal with problems loftier than those relating to survival. Plantinga does not seem to realise how an evolving mind would nonetheless be constrained by experience when constructing its model of the everyday world, and applies the term “Darwin’s doubt” to his own curious belief that the correspondence of that model to reality could only have arisen through supernatural intervention. For a more technical discussion of this issue, see e.g. here.
Regarding Christianity, Darwin wrote
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
Emma Darwin, Charles’s widow, wanted to suppress this passage, on the grounds that surely nobody believed so crude and cruel a version of Christianity any more. Yet that is the version of Christianity preached by John R. Rice, with whom this piece started, and central, as I wrote earlier, following William Trollinger, to the teachings of Answers in Genesis.
The 1880 letter was written seven years later than Marx’s presentation of Das Kapital to Darwin. Moreover, it clearly relates to a work dedicated to attacking religion, which in Das Kapital is a peripheral issue. As with the first letter, we have the formal salutation “Dear Sir”, which of course does not tell us who is being addressed.
Marx’s papers were curated by Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, but the letter was almost certainly not addressed to Marx (which, as we saw before, would have made no sense regarding either content or date) but to Edward Aveling, who became Eleanor’s lover. Aveling did in fact write to Darwin in 1880, offering to dedicate his Student’s Darwin to him, and enclosing excerpts for him to consider. A contemporary review of the work by the biologist George Romanes in Nature shows that Darwin’s criticisms were fully justified:
In itself science has no necessary relation to any such belief; it is neither theistic nor atheistic; it is simply extra-theistic… Therefore, although it may be of use in the interests of “Freethought” to represent science as not merely neutral but negative in its bearings upon religion, the attempt to do so is detrimental to the interests of science; so far as it may be successful it can only tend to increase the suspicious dislike of scientific knowledge which large masses of the general public are already too apt to harbour.
And as we know, that “suspicious dislike” is as powerful and as damaging as ever.
Feuer and Fay published their refutations of the myth of Marx’s request to dedicate in 1975 and 1978 respectively, but nonetheless the myth has persisted in creationist circles. Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, and founder of the Institute for Creation Research, referred to it repeatedly long after the story had been laid to rest. Weinberg shows a 2012 photo of a panel at the Institute for Creation Research’s Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California, that reads
Karl Marx is considered to be the chief founder of Communism. Although he was a professing Christian in his youth, he became an atheist and (according to some) a Satanist in college. His philosophies of history and economics were squarely based on evolutionism. In fact, he wanted to dedicate his book DAS KAPITAL to Charles Darwin, who had given him what he thought was a scientific foundation for Communism.
Satanism does seem an unlikely pursuit for the father of dialectical materialism, but according to Weinberg the suggestion that Marx had been a Satanist goes back to Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian anti-Communist dissident. Wurmbrand’s evidence included wordplay in Marx’s juvenilia, and his 1977 book Was Karl Marx a Satanist? refers in the look-inside of its Amazon page to “Karl Marx making the secret societies symbolic gesture of the ‘hidden hand.’ ”
And according to Morris, in his The Long War against God, 1989, Satan’s involvement in promoting evolution, or at any rate a materialism which is part of the same package, dates back from Darwin through the pre-Socratics to Nimrod, the mighty hunter, whom Morris, following John Milton, blames for the catastrophe of Babel. Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis, younger relative of the Institute for Creation Research, goes further, back to when the serpent (whom Ham, like so many, unbiblically identifies with Satan) first tempted Eve. As the Rev Michael Roberts has pointed out, Milton, rather than the Bible, is the source of much of this creationist theology.
There is an article in the October 2022 issue of Creation magazine, organ of Creation Ministries International, with the title “Darwin, Marx, and two letters”, by Russell Grigg, who like me is a chemist by training, and if anyone reading this has access to the article, I would greatly appreciate hearing what it says. There may yet be more to learn from this old story.
Repost from 3 Quarks Daily
Pandas, Kitzmiller, and the frozen frog fallacy
By Paul Braterman
January 4, 2023 13:00 MST
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Texas and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry at the University of Glasgow
This Kitzmas was different. For the first time, the Discovery Institute allowed the anniversary of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District to pass without complaining about the verdict. Perhaps they are hoping that we will forget about the incredible badness of the text that they were trying to foist on the District’s students. Of Pandas and People is carefully constructed to be as misleading as possible, and we shouldn’t let them forget this, as long as contributors and advisers responsible for it remain in position within the Discovery Institute1, while the Institute continues to promote works such as Denton’s Evolution – A Theory in Crisis, that perpetuate the same elementary errors of logic. But first, an apparent digression. When students first come across the use of molecular or DNA sequencing in constructing phylogenetic trees, they are sometimes puzzled. They have been told that mammals are descended from fish by way of amphibians. Therefore, as a matter of common sense, they might expect that frogs should be closer to fish in evolutionary terms than we are. This is another example of the Evolution as Progress error. While amniotes have progressed through synapsid to mammal to humans, the pinnacle of creation, the frog has remained a lowly frog and should, therefore, be closer to the common ancestor, as if the ineluctable processes of molecular mutation had somehow been suspended. We might call this the “frozen frog fallacy.”
At this point, a Table like the one shown below might help:
All the multicellular organisms shown are, apart from small random fluctuations, at the same distance from the bacterium, as expected if they share a common ancestor distinct from bacteria, which have of course, independently, been accumulating their own set of changes.
All the animals shown are, apart from small random fluctuations, at the same distance from wheat, as expected if they share a common ancestor distinct from plants. And the relative number of mutations shows that the split between plants and animals is more recent than the split between multicellular organisms and bacteria. More recent yet is the split between fish and tetrapods, leaving all tetrapods (including you and me, and of course present-day frogs) at the same distance from the fish. And so on. Most tellingly, humans share a common ancestor with monkeys, more recent than their common ancestor with non-simian mammals. There is a lot more detail in the Table, for example about how to birds relate to reptiles, and how the different orders of mammal relate to each other. And of course the construction of a phylogenetic tree is based on the specific differences found, rather than the overall number.
There are now numerous published studies of the phylogenetic relationships revealed by Cytochrome C, to say nothing of the vast recent literature using numerous molecular and morphological traits to develop detailed high-resolution phylogenies, and to explore the limitations of the concept of a unique phylogeny. What is interesting about the particular Table I have quoted is its origin, and the uses that its authors make of it.
This brings us back to our original theme. The Table actually comes from Of Pandas and People, 2nd edition, 1993, which by the time of the trial had gone through five printings. The book does not give a reference to the source of the data, but much (not all) of the information can be found in a classic 1967 paper [2], which also explains the reasoning behind the method, and critically examines the assumptions made. So there is no excuse for what the book does next, which is to repeatedly assert that the data refute claims of common ancestry:
one might expect analysis to reveal that the cytochromes in fish are most similar to the cytochromes in amphibians. But this is not the case.
And again:
To use the classic Darwinian scenario, amphibians are intermediate between fish and the other band-dwelling invertebrates. Analysis of their amino acids should place amphibians in an approximately intermediate position, but it does not.
(Note the use of Darwin’s name to denote the whole of evolution. In fact, the book is obsessed with Darwin, mentioning him on almost every page, and on some pages up to 10 times. In fact, by my count, and I may have missed a few, Darwin’s name or some variant of it occurs 262 times within the 144 pages of text. This emphasis on Darwin is of course found throughout the whole of the creationist literature, although by now evolutionary theory is almost as different from what Darwin proposed as atomic theory is from that proposed by Democritus.)
These are just two of five separate reiterations of the fallacy, leading up to the extraordinary statement that
Based upon the evolutionary series, we should expect some amphibians to be closer to fish (“primitive” species) and others to be closer to reptiles (“advanced” species).
And to make sure that the message sticks, we have this Figure, with the plain implication that the data point, not to evolution, but to separate creation:
The fallacy is not merely being stated; it is being repeated, rationalised, and reinforced. The kindest explanation is that the authors simply do not understand the science that they are presenting, seeing a hierarchical structure where none exists, and imposing on their biology a perspective in terms of “higher” and “lower” which do not belong in modern science, but have been carried over, such as the power of human vanity, from a worldview more akin to Aristotle and the mediaeval Great Chain of Being. The same fallacy also occurs in Michael Denton’s 1985 Evolution – A Theory in Crisis, and while he had by 1998 [3] quietly walked away from this, his 2016 sequel, Evolution – Still a Theory in Crisis, retains his preference for Aristotelian over phylogenetic classification.
And why should this matter? Because it reminds us, and we should not forget, that the Discovery Institute does not only deal in dis-information, but in dis-education.
I thank Maarten Boudry, Glenn Branch, Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Kim Johnson, Larry Moran, and Massimo Pigliucci for helpful comments and links to the literature.
Footnotes and citations:Permalink
(1) Dean Kenyon (co-author), Charles Thaxton (Academic Editor), and Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, and Nancy Pearcey (contributors) all hold positions at the Discovery Institute, as do Raymond Bohlin, Walter Bradley, Robert Kaita, J.P. Moreland, and Paul Nelson, who are on the list of those thanked for being “critical reviewers”, as, also, are Meyer and Behe.
(2) Walter M Fitch and Emanuel Margoliash, Science 155(3760), 279, 1967; DOI: 10.1126/science.155.3760.279
(3) For a discussion of Denton’s revised position, see this 2006 post at Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog
Repost of https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/01/Pandas-and-Frogs.html
Leading creationist organisation appoints conspiracy theorist to key position
Posted on by Paul Braterman
by Paul Braterman
One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.
Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.
Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.
AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.
There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)
Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.
It is therefore a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”
For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.
To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.
Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.
The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.
Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.
Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)
If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs. It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.
Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.
Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”
Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.
Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.
The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.
For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.
***
Image from AiG site. I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments.
1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.
Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/06/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position.html; also at https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/
Newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis is cause for concern
By Paul Braterman
June 12, 2023 14:00 MST
This is a synopsis of a fuller version that has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.
Panda’s Thumb readers will be familiar with Answers in Genesis, its position as the most vocal and best funded of Young Earth Creationist organisations (assets in excess of $82 million; owner of the Kentucky Creation Museum and Ark Encounter), its links with the Cornwall Alliance and hence with the fossil fuel industry, and its use of biblical arguments to dismiss concerns about the current environmental crisis. In my own reading of AiG materials, I have detected a progressive repetitiveness and loss of vigour. I have also noticed worrying signs of openness to the suggestion that we are living in the Last Days, with all that that implies for the abdication of long-term responsibilities.
These worries are intensified by AiG’s appointment last month of the lawyer Martyn Iles, until recently Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, to the newly created post of Chief Ministry Officer. Ministry is after all AiG’s entire reason for existence, and Iles, a skilful orator, also has a track record of effectiveness in political interventions, and in fundraising. Ken Ham is now 71, and we can expect Iles, 34, to become increasingly important in shaping AiG’s direction.
Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, argues from Genesis that God approves of population growth, preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world,” and regards the World Economic Forum as part of a grand conspiracy bent on suppressing individual liberty.
You can see Iles at his most frightening in his YouTube video, The Truth of It, Climate Totalitarianism (notice the carefully crafted title of the YouTube series, as well as of this particular item). In this, he uses quotations from Genesis to claim that this planet was created for the benefit of mankind.
It follows that environmentalist policies are misguided. And where do such policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.”
Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”
However, “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his then intended Australian primary audience.
Consider the logic of this argument. Restraint in resource use is unbiblical, and therefore uncalled for. Unbelievers have cause for anxiety, but for believers this anxiety is unnecessary, because God. I am forced to conclude that he sincerely believes that we are in the End Times, or, if not, that God will somehow intervene to save us from the foreseeable consequences of our actions.
To sum up, an eloquent preacher who is also a skilled political operative is rising to the top in the world’s most significant creationist organisation, while objecting in principle to concerns about what we are doing to the planet, because worrying about the planet is God’s job, not ours, and He will look after it all in His own good time.
Not good news.
Repost of https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/06/newly-appointed-chief-ministry.html
Heartland Institute says there isn’t any warming
The Heartland Institute tells us that there is not, and cannot be, a climate crisis, because for most of the past 12,000 years the climate was warmer than it is today. A recent (October 5) posting by James Taylor, president of the Institute, states as follows (full text; fair use claimed):
CLIMATE CHANGE: The so-called climate crisis is a sham
There cannot be a climate crisis when temperatures are unusually cool.
- Scientists have documented, and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, that temperatures were warmer than today throughout most of the time period that human civilization has existed.
- Temperatures would have to keep warming at their present pace for at least another century or two before we reach temperatures that were common during early human civilization.
- There can be no climate crisis – based on the notion of dangerously high temperatures – when humans have thrived in temperatures much warmer than today for most of the last 12,000 years.
None of this is true. Here is a graph of climate change in the past 12,000 years; note the value for 2016, on the right-hand axis of the main figure, as well as the rapid rise over the past century shown in the inset, which also shows the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I have seen Heartland’s claim before, accompanied by graphs such as the one below, but without the insert and recent date, thus effectively suppressing everything that’s happened in the last century:
Read the rest of this entryAnswers to everything, according to God, according to Answers in Genesis’Chief Ministry Officer
Abused women should submit to their husbands. Also, it is ungodly to be concerned about the climate, because rainbows. Such, at least, is the advice of the leader-in-waiting of the world’s largest and most influential Creationist organisation.
When people tell you what they are, believe them. In the 2021 Facebook posting attached below, still available [1], Martyn Iles tells us exactly what he is, and since, in May this year, he became Chief Ministry Officer at Answers in Genesis, the $28 million dollar a year concern that runs Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and has its own private jet, we ought to pay attention. All the more so since the announcement just one month ago that he is now the designated successor to founder and CEO Ken Ham [2]. So here are his answers to the burning questions of our times, given in full to avoid the risk of quote mining, with my own commentary just in case there is any ambiguity about what is being said. And he saves the worst till last, when he explains exactly how it comes about that people disagree with him, and how we should look on such disagreement.
The answer to gender identity – “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” [Gen 1:27]
I share Iles’ concerns about the use of extreme clinical procedures, but for the very opposite reason. I do not believe in rigid gender roles, and think that people should be free to live as they wish, subject to the rights of others, without the need for mastectomy or castration. Iles, on the contrary, thinks that gender roles are God-given and rigid (more on that below), and that for that very reason people should stick to the roles that they were born for.
The answer to sexual orientation – “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” [Gen 2:22, 24]
It is difficult to know what to make of this.
How is this even meant to be an answer to someone who feels romantically attracted only to members of their own sex? But I fear that Iles will be unmoved by the observation of homosexual behaviour in numerous animal species, because he does not consider that we share a common origin with them.
The answer to racism – “since [God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…” [Acts 17:26]
This on the face of it is unexceptionable. All humans share the same deep ancestry and deserve the same respect. However, as so often with Iles, there is a hidden agenda; Answers in Genesis is opposed to any kind of action to compensate groups that have been the victims of racism, on the grounds that such action is itself discriminatory and racist.
The answer to abortion – “God said to them, ‘Be Fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…’” [Gen 1:28]
Here as elsewhere (see e.g. the next item) Iles cuts through all the usual arguments by introducing a Bible verse, imposing his own interpretation on it, and using this interpretation to tell us what God wants. No need for further discussion. In this particular case, however, most of us would think that the commandment referred to has been more than fulfilled already.
The answer to climate alarmism – “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” [Gen 8:22]
Notice the question-begging language. However, he is not just attacking what he regards as excessive concern over the climate crisis, but denying on the strength of this verse that such a crisis could possibly exist in the first place. And this is the verse now quoted on every conceivable occasion by all the major creationist organisations, who are united in their opposition to fossil fuel reduction policies. None of them, however, seem to quote the parallel verse [Gen 9:11];
“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Both verses are very limited in what they promise, the second one explicitly so. Nothing here to promise stable or temperate conditions, or to absolve us of our own responsibilities. Drought and failed harvests play a prominent role in later chapters of Genesis, while in a biblical exhortation to look after what has been provided for us, Leviticus 25:4 says that every seventh year the land itself needs to rest and recover.
The answer to abuse – “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” [Eph 5:22, 25]
This is presented, not merely as the recipe for domestic harmony on Iles’ terms, but as “the answer to abuse,” i.e. guidance on how people should behave when such harmony has completely and dangerously broken down. To tell an abusive husband to love his wife may be well-intentioned, though he will probably reply that he really does so already. To tell an abused wife to submit to her husband is to ask her to behave as so many women tragically do; to accept the completely unacceptable, at risk to her happiness, her health, and, all too often, her life. And when Iles says “submit,” he really does mean submit [3].
The answer to historic wrongs that cannot be undone – “forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” [Col 3:13]
We are dealing here with a question that is the subject of much recent debate. What obligations if any do those of European descent owe to the peoples whom they have abused or enslaved, and whose land they have stolen? The answer according to Iles is very simple. The victims should simply forgive those who have wronged them, and the problem will disappear. I should mention, to put his opinion in context, that Iles is a white Australian [4].
The answer to life – “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [John 3:16]
I’m not sure how this verse would actually prove useful to anyone faced with major decisions. However, I note that this is the only verse he quotes from the Gospels. It is indeed relatively rare from creationists to quote the Gospels, apart from this one verse, and even rarer for them to quote any of the actual words attributed to Jesus [5].
But how does Martyn Iles describe those who disagree with him? The final section of his post tells us:
The contemporary answer for every one of these issues is Cultural Marxism… divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing between warring identity groups.
God’s answers bring peace and contentment, if only we’d submit to them, and stop running away from them.
So, for Iles, disagreement is Marxism, just as for Tim LaHaye it was humanism, and for the creationists of the McCarthy era it was Communism. If we only listened to God’s answers to these questions, all the conflicts between different interest groups would immediately disappear. Any assertions that things may be a little bit more complicated than that are “divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing.”
Rebellion, of course, is the gravest of all possible sins in his theology. It is the sin of Satan, from which all others follow. But Iles’ way of looking at it does raise an interesting question. If homosexuals, assertive women, proponents of reparations to historically disadvantaged groups, and those concerned about environmental degradation, are all into the business of power-grabbing, just who is it that they are grabbing power from?
***
1] The Facebook page is here, and I am commenting on the entry for 19 May 2021, screenshot below (fair use claimed), which can also be retrieved by keyword search (Iles is so prolific that I expect some culling is unavoidable. However, the Facebook page, like the Answers in Genesis website, is out of order, difficult to search, and with numerous duplications.)
2] Some of us wondered when Ken Ham took him to his bosom how soon Iles would upstage him, just as Ken Ham, decades ago, upstaged Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research, but I don’t think we expected things to start happening quite so quickly. It might also be significant that while on the Answers in Genesis website, Iles is described as Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis, on his own Facebook page Iles describes himself as “Answers in Genesis Chief Ministry Officer (USA) Managing Director (Australia).”
3] Iles, Facebook, 6th June,
A word like “independent” is a direct assault on God’s design for women… A woman who prizes strength in independence is a woman rebelling against her nature.
4] As Iles puts it on his Facebook page, entry for 4th September,
[R]econciliation is a once forever act. Warring parties are reconciled through repentance by the one and forgiveness by the other. That is when the past is treated as if it never happened, and a new day dawns. New wrongs may be addressed, but past wrongs may not.
The ‘reconciliation’ movement is far from that model. It is a grievance movement, pouring [sic] over sins of the past, resisting forgiveness. This opposes God’s very nature.
5] One exception is Matthew 25:41, “‘Depart from me, you who are cursed…”, Freely quoted in connection with the severity of God’s judgement, but never in its context about clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, that kind of thing.
This article was first published in 3 Quarks Daily
While Canada burns, Cornwall and Heartland say nothing to worry about. Meantime, in just one week…
by Paul Braterman
Within a single week, the raging Canadian wildfires have provoked opposite reactions from different wings of US evangelism, both claiming that their position is based on Genesis, with The Atlantic reporting on the churches’ deep political divisions. Statistical analysis confirms (is anyone surprised?) that July’s unusual heatwave across the northern hemisphere is almost certainly linked to human-caused climate change, which has also caused serious water shortfalls and aridification in the Colorado River basin, and is destabilising the North Atlantic system of currents on which the UK and northern Europe indirectly rely to keep Arctic weather at bay. Meanwhile, the fallout from the unexpected result of a by-election in a London suburb has exposed the dangerous vulnerability of climate policy to political disruption.
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Nature, channelling the Heartland Institute, tells us (July 19, 2023) that we are mistaken in associating Canada’s wildfires with global warming, assuring us that “[t]he truth is hard data, as opposed to climate model-generated speculation, belies [sic] the link between climate change wildfires and the recent heatwave.” If news outlets say otherwise, that is either the result of ignorance, or, worse, because they are “in the bag of climate alarmism”. Wildfires happen every year anyway, smoke darkening the skies over the US Atlantic seacoast is not unprecedented (the article quotes a total of nine precedents in the last 300 years), and New Yorkers are only seeing the smoke because of the way the wind happens to be blowing. The actual causes of the fires include inadequate management, as well as “short-term weather conditions such as a drought in some regions, less winter snowfall and warmer temperatures,” as if these had nothing to do with global warming. And ruling out “model-generated speculation,” reasonable though it may sound, would make scientific explanation impossible in any area, since explanation always involves comparison of observations with a model.
Heartland, in a July 21 video presentation hosted by Anthony Watts on its Stopping Socialism TV channel, tells us that “If you turned the news on this last week, you’d probably think parts of the Earth are literally on fire. The corporate media continues pushing the narrative that temperatures are the highest ever, but it’s simply not true.” For good measure, the presentation goes on to tell us that health concerns about particulates from the smoke are greatly exaggerated.
Anyone interested in the climate disinformation industry will be familiar with the name of Watts, whose Watts Up With That? is among the world’s most popular websites. Watts is an equal opportunity climate change denialist, having at various times rejected claims that the climate is warming, that human activity has anything to do with it, or that it is in any way harmful. I even recall seeing him giving prominence to a claim that atmospheric CO2 hasn’t really increased since the 1800s, citing obviously inaccurate Victorian data.
As my regular readers will know, the Cornwall Alliance bases its positions on the Bible, and in particular on the verses in Genesis that give Adam dominion over nature. The inference is that natural resources are there for us to use, so that leaving fossil fuels in the ground would be a refusal to take full advantage of God’s bounty. Cornwall has strong links with Answers in Genesis, as well as with the Heartland Institute, as this example shows, and through Heartland with the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential of established US conservative think tanks, with an annual revenue in 2018 of more than $86 million. So we are not looking at the lunatic fringe here, but at major players whose influence goes to the heart of American politics.
Heartland’s belittling of the health dangers of particulates may have been triggered by a strongly contrasting piece (July 17) from the Evangelical Environmental Network, with the title Why is It So Hazy Out? Climate Change, Wildfires, and How You Can Respond. This 800-word article, rich in links to the underlying health research, describes the dangers of particulate inhalation, which “contributes to shorter lifespans, dementia, autism, and ADHD. Pregnant women and their babies are also at heightened risks of low birth weight, preterm birth, and infant mortality due to this pollution.”
The connection to global warming is spelt out, with practical advice about how individuals can reduce their own carbon footprints, and a plea, also invoking Genesis, to take care of what has been entrusted to us.
We see here a deep schism within US Evangelical Christianity. The Cornwall Alliance only acquired its present name in 2006, but its roots can be traced back to 2000. It was launched in specific opposition to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Climate Initiative. The Association is deeply concerned about climate change, and especially its impact on the poor.
In recent years, this schism has widened. Within the churches, the emergence of the cult of Trump has led to a breakdown of civility. Now even theologically conservative leading figures find themselves accused of wokeness, being social justice warriors, and promoting critical race theory, to the point where some no longer feel themselves at home in their own church. Here the churches are reflecting, and contributing to, deeper conflicts within American society. It is worth remembering that Franklin Graham was among the first to endorse Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential nomination bid.
But back to the wildfires. On 18th July, the New York Times told us that Canada’s wildfires have eclipsed previous records, even though the fire season still has a month to run. Canada has warmed twice as fast as a planet as a whole, with loss of ice and snow contributing to greater absorption of solar energy, and this fire season has been quite unusual, not only in its early start, but in how widespread it is. Extreme heat on the other side of the Atlantic has also led to wildfires on the island of Rhodes, a popular holiday destination, and we have the ironic spectacle of UK holidaymakers being airlifted home, while the cheap night flights that took them to Rhodes will have contributed to global warming (night flights are cheaper for obvious reasons, and more damaging than daytime flights because while their vapour trails are keeping heat in, there is no solar input for them to keep out. Disclosure; I have often taken such flights from Scotland to the Mediterranean myself, without a second thought.)
Even the London Daily Telegraph, a right-of-centre newspaper that at one time gave a platform to the extreme denialist James Dellingpole, now tells us that the Mediterranean heatwave responsible for the fires in Greece is “the latest clear sign of an impending climate catastrophe.” As for the argument that there have been extreme fire seasons in the past, a detailed analysis published by Imperial College London (short synopsis here and analysis by New York Times here) shows that the coincidence of such record hot weather across North America, Europe, and China would have been almost impossible without global warming.
In other climate news, Nature Communications warns (July 25) of the present weakening and potential collapse within decades of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, weakening the Gulf Stream-North Atlantic current system that protects northern Europe from freezing. The Hill, an American political newspaper whose name is a reference to Capitol Hill, reported on a study showing that the loss of water from the Colorado Basin in the past two decades adds up to the capacity of Lake Mead. This despite the fact, much quoted by climate change denialists, that warmer weather and higher CO2 concentrations cause plants to shrink the openings in their leaves, thus slowing down respiration.
Meanwhile, the fallout from a freak parliamentary by-election result (July 20), in the suburban London constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, shows the vulnerability of climate policy measures to political opposition. The freak result was that the Conservative government narrowly held the seat, made vacant by Boris Johnson’s resignation, with a swing against them of “only” around 7%, while other by-elections on the same day showed swings of 20% and higher. The successful candidate ran on a policy of opposition to the pending expansion of ULEZ, London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone, from central London to the suburbs, proposed by the highly popular Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. ULEZ demands that vehicles meet standards laid down for emissions, and the policy is thought to have been responsible for saving around 4000 lives a year by reducing air-borne particulates.
No matter that the issue is one for local government, rather than for Parliament anyway. Nor that the ULEZ policy was first introduced, in central London, by no other than Boris Johnson, when he was Mayor. No matter either that the expansion was a bipartisan policy, urged on Khan in 2020 by Grant Shapps, then UK Transport Secretary and now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, no matter that exemptions are available for special cases (such as some vehicles operated by charities), and no matter that virtually all petrol vehicles registered since 2006, and diesel vehicles registered since 2015, meet the required standards. Labour appears to have been blindsided by the tactic, with canvassers reporting voters with electric vehicles in their driveways concerned about how they would be affected.
One would have hoped that the leader of the Labour Party would at this point have stepped in to point out the advantages of the extension. That is not Keir Starmer’s style; instead, he asked Khan to “reflect”, because the issue could be exploited by the Conservatives in the next general election. But Sadiq Khan has stood his ground and also overcome a legal challenge from Conservative-controlled London boroughs. So the extension will presumably be coming into force at the end of August as planned. But it may now be unwise to presume anything.
On Saturday, the headline in the left-of-centre Guardian’s print edition was “Don’t abandon clean air policies, warn scientists.” But that is only one small part of what is at stake. There is a small but vocal and well-organised group of Conservative MPs, led by former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, opposed to any serious action on the environment (Rees-Mogg, incidentally, backed Trump in the 2016 election). A senior minister, Michael Gove, had called on July 22, two days after the by-election, for a relaxation of green policies during the current economic crisis (in the UK, when is there not a current economic crisis?) As for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, he has said since the by-election that his approach to the U.K.’s 2050 zero emissions target will be a “proportionate and pragmatic” course that “doesn’t unnecessarily give people more hassle and more costs in their lives,” and the implied threat to conservation policies has already led a coalition of concerned organisations, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the World Wildlife Fund (whose environmental concerns featured in an earlier column here), the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, and the National Trust to write to the Prime Minister expressing their concerns. On Saturday evening, the Daily Telegraph reported that Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Parliamentary climate change committee, along with more than 40 Conservative MPs and peers, want to push back the 2030 date set to phase out new petrol car sales in the UK, because of costs to motorists. It was reported on Sunday that at least for now the Prime Minister is resisting this pressure, although the Telegraph‘s front page was dedicated to his declaration that he is on the motorists’ side, and ordering a review of anti-car schemes. And today, Sunak has announced hundreds of new oil and gas licenses for the North Sea, citing the need for energy security.
We know that Net Zero by 2050 will only slow down global warming, since the warming is taking place even at present CO2 levels. We know that the commitments made towards achieving Net Zero are inadequate, and unlikely to be honoured. And we know that what is happening at present is a mere foretaste of what is now in store for our children and grandchildren.
And Margaret Thatcher was already warning of “the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself”, in 1989.
This post first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily
Primate's Progress 
