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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.
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
Why creationism bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory
A friend asked me why I bother about creationism. This article spells out my reasons. It has had some 150,000 reads since first published in The Conversation in February, and has been featured in Snopes and Yahoo! News, and attacked by Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis, Jake Hebert Ph.D [sic] at the Institute for Creation Research, and others.
Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.
In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.
Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.
This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.
Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International. [Note added: Ken Ham points out in his rebuttal that Answers in Genesis arose independently of the Institute for Creation Research, and that his article concerning denial of divine authority, cited in the previous paragraph and below, does not mention Satan by name.]
Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.
Demonising and discrediting
These are common conspiracy theory tactics at play. Creationists go to great lengths to demonise the proponents of evolution, and to undermine the overwhelming evidence in its favour.
There are numerous organisations, among them Biologos, the American Scientific Affiliation, the Faraday Institute, and the Clergy Letter Project, which describes themselves as “an endeavour designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible”, that is, promoting evolution science within the context of religious belief. Even so, creationists insist on linking together the separate topics of evolution, materialist philosophy, and the promotion of atheism.
According to Answers in Genesis, evolution science is a work of Satan, while former US Congressman Paul Broun has described it as “a lie straight from the pit of hell”. When he said that, by the way, he was a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Like other conspiracy theorists, creationists immunise themselves from fact-based criticism. They label the study of the past as based on unprovable assumptions, thus disqualifying in advance the plain evidence of geology.
They then attack other evidence by focusing on specific frauds, such as Piltdown man – a hoax skeleton purportedly of a missing link between humans and other apes that was debunked more than 60 years ago – or the dinosaur-bird amalgam “Archaeoraptor”, discredited by sharp-eyed scientists before ever making it into the peer-reviewed literature (although not before making it into National Geographic).
One favourite target is Ernst Haeckel, whose pictures of embryos, published in 1874, are now considered to be seriously inaccurate. However, they do correctly draw attention to what most matters here: the features shared during development by different organisms – including humans – such as gill arches, a long tail, and eyes on the side rather than the front of the head, confirming they have a common ancestry.
Haeckel’s name appears on the Answers in Genesis website 92 times. He is also the subject of a lengthy chapter in Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution; Science or Myth?. This book, which even has its own high school study guide, was what first convinced me, back in 2013, that creationism was a conspiracy theory.
More from The Conversation’s Expert guide to conspiracy theories here.
It is a splendid example of creationist tactics, using long-rectified shortcomings (such as those in early studies on Darwinian evolution in peppered moths, in response to changing colours following reduced pollution) to imply that the entire science is fraudulent. Wells has a real PhD in biology, a PhD acquired with the specific goal of “destroying Darwinism” – meaning evolution science – from the inside.
Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative thinktank which promotes creationism under the banner of “Intelligent Design”, and is also linked to other conspiracy theories, such as claims that the consensus on climate change is bogus, and that last November’s US presidential election was stolen. An article by a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute on the subject has now being removed from its website, but can be found here.
What next?
Conspiracy theories are always driven by some underlying concern or agenda. The theory that Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery, or that the 2020 US election was stolen, are about political legitimacy and will fade as the politicians promoting them fade from memory. The idea that COVID-19 does not exist is proving a little harder to dislodge, but scientists, such as those behind Respectful Insolence, are organising to fight back on science denial and misinformation.
I fear that the creationist conspiracy theory will not be so short-lived. It is driven by a deep-seated power struggle within religious communities, between modernists and literalists; between those who regard scripture as coming to us through human authors, however inspired, and those who regard it as a perfect supernatural revelation. And that is a struggle that will be with us for a long time to come.
Is Creationism racist?
Henry Morris’s “scientific creationism” taught that red, black, and yellow races were descended from Ham, and destined to serve the Europeans and Semites descended from Japhet and Shem. Evolution science, with the help of genetics, wrote in 1977 that “race” applied to humans is a hopelessly blurred concept, that Europeans, Middle Easterners and East Asians are more closely related to each other than to Africans, that the greatest human genetic diversity is within Africa, and that human group differences are trivial compared with individual variation.
Which do you prefer?
I reblog here some comments by my friend the Rev. Michael Roberts on this subject, linking to the original discussion here by Libby Anne:
That should get tongues wagging. Most creationists will deny that and Ham of Answers in Genesis tries to blame evolutionists for racism.
I have no idea what the quote from Revelation means but then fundamentalists use the Bible is odd ways
This article deals with some of Henry Morris’s comments on race, with the sons of Ham being born to serve! (This comes from Genesis 9 where Ham found Noah drunk after the flood. and was cursed Gen 9 vs25. Bad old anthropology had the “sons of Ham” who were to serve. This was used to justify Apartheid among other things as the sons of Ham were Africans)
This attitude is typical of the whites in the Southern States and was held by some Southern Presbyterians at the time of the civil war.
However, here we see the founder father of modern creationism being overtly racist. I didn’t realise that…
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The Case Against Evolution – turning Chick on its head!!
From Old Earth Ministries by way of my friend Michael Roberts. Covers the scientific bases clearly and comprehensively, before exposing the contorted theology of Young Earth Creationism, and the arrogant presumption of its claim that evolution is incompatible with Christianity.
Disclosure: I see difficulties with religious beliefs, but these are not increased (perhaps the contrary) by our knowledge of evolution, and since they are not my difficulties it is not my place to comment on them, other than to point out that the YECist claim to “own” Christianity (or any other religion) is plainly false
Another good strip cartoon arguing for evolution in the style of Jack Chick – without the spite
Source: The Case Against Evolution
Genetics provide powerful evidence of evolution
An excellent survey from The Logic of Science, with striking examples. At every level of detail, the family trees inferred from morphology match the trees established by molecular biology.
Many people are under the false impression that evolution is just a guess or a belief, when in reality, it is one of the most well-supported concepts in all of science. The evidence for it is overwhelming and comes from many different disciplines such as paleontology, comparative anatomy, biogeography, and perhaps most significantly, genetics. Indeed, modern genetic tools have allowed us to repeatedly test evolution’s predictions, and those predictions have consistently come true. Therefore, I am going to explain in simple terms what the genetic evidence is and why it is so compelling. As I will show, the evidence perfectly matches the predictions that the theory of evolution made decades before we could test those predictions. Further, the patterns do not make sense if our modern organisms were specially created, because there is no reason why a creator would have had to make life with these patterns. In other…
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Even on his birthday, don’t say Darwin unless you mean it (updated)
How Darwin’s name is taken in vain, with mini-reviews of some of the worst offenders. And when I wrote about this last year, I did not expect to have to add a US Vice-President to their number.
Charles Darwin never thought of evolution as anything other than a theory. He hoped that someday it would be proven by the fossil record but did not live to see that, nor have we. – Representative (now Vice-President) Mike Pence, 2002, via Forbes
Trump’s Education Secretary Nominee DeVos Should Challenge Darwinism* – David Klinghoffer, CNS, 13 January 2017 [1]
From Darwin’s Notebook B, 1837
Don’t say Darwin unless you mean it. Don’t say theory when you mean historical fact. And don’t say you believe in evolution, when you mean you accept it on the basis of the evidence.
Don’t say Darwin unless you mean it. Above all, don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution”. It’s like saying “Dalton” when you mean atoms. Our understanding of atoms has moved on enormously since Dalton’s time, and our understanding of evolution has moved on similarly since Darwin’s. Neither of them knew, or could have known, anything about what caused the phenomena they were talking about, and both would be delighted at how thoroughly their own work has been superseded. Read the rest of this entry
Even on his birthday, don’t say Darwin unless you mean it
From Darwin’s Notebook B, 1837
How Darwin’s name is taken in vain, with mini-reviews of some of the worst offenders
Don’t say Darwin unless you mean it. Above all, don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution”. It’s like saying “Dalton” when you mean atoms. Our understanding of atoms has moved on enormously since Dalton’s time, and our understanding of evolution has moved on similarly since Darwin’s. Neither of them knew, or could have known, the first thing regarding what they were talking about, and both would be delighted at how thoroughly their own work has been superseded. (Dalton of course deserves further discussion in his own right, which I will be providing in a few weeks time.)
From John Dalton’s A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808)
Imagine if a lot of people decided that atomic theory was against their religion. We would see a parallel world of sacred science, in which molecules were “intelligently constructed”, and real chemistry would be referred to as Daltonism, or possibly, these days, neo-Daltonism. The scientific dissidents from Daltonism would invoke Dalton’s name on every possible occasion, and draw attention to the many inadequacies of atomic theory as he presented it in 1808. Dalton didn’t know anything about the forces that hold atoms together, which depend on electrons and quantum mechanics. In fact, he didn’t even know about electrons. He was muddled about the difference between a molecule of hydrogen and an atom of hydrogen. He thought that the simplest compound between two different elements A and B would have the formula AB, so that water must be HO, not H2O. And of course he knew nothing about the origin of atoms, a problem not solved until the 1950s, over a century after his death. Obvious nonsense, the lot of it!
Darwin was ignorant of transitional fossils, and in words still quoted by creationists deplored their absence as the greatest objection to his theory. He was equally ignorant about the origin of biological novelty, which comes from mutating genes. In fact, he didn’t even know about genes. And because he did not realise that inheritance occurred through genes, he could not explain why favourable variations were not simply diluted out. It would be decades after his death before we could even speculate coherently about the origins of life, and despite tantalising clues it remains a largely unsolved problem. But despite this, we have learnt an enormous amount since the publication of On The Origin of Species, and everything that we have learnt is consistent with, indeed requires, the key concepts of evolution and common descent.
So why is discussion of evolution still saturated with Darwin’s name? In part, I think, because that’s the way his opponents want it. By identifying evolution with Darwin, they continue to breathe life into the controversies of the mid-19th century. At the same time, it helps them pretend that modern biology is just one individual’s point of view, rather than a mature science based on the work of thousands of investigators. Very recently, creationists have taken to invoking Darwin himself for their cause, in such titles as Darwin’s Doubt and Darwin Strikes Back. This is an extremely powerful rhetorical tool; if Darwin was puzzled by [whatever], is that not a puzzle to us “Darwinists”? Closely related is the device of presenting creationism under the guise of even-handed debate, as when a creationist pseudo-textbook (which mentions Darwin on almost every page, but not in the index) calls itself Explore Evolution; the arguments for and against neo-Darwinism, or in the list below, where a creationist comic goes by the name, What’s Darwin got to do with it? A friendly discussion …
And while we’re on the subject of unhelpful language, don’t say “theory of evolution” when you mean the well-established facts of historical and continuing change over time, and of common ancestry. And if you find yourself in the position of explaining the difference between a scientific theory (coherent intellectual structure developed to explain a range of observations), and the use of the word “theory” in everyday use (provisional hypothesis), you have blundered into a morass. Back out again.
But back to Darwin. You can see what I mean if you just look at the names of the books written by the enemies of scientific biology, from Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer, 2013) back to Darwin’s Black Box (Behe, 1996) and beyond. There are other examples, such as The Darwin Conspiracy (Roy Davies, 2006), which portrays Darwin as a plagiarist, and, while checking its details, I discovered an even more lurid book of the same name by John Darnton, which portrays him as a murderer. To be fair, Darnton does not pretend that he is writing anything other than fiction, although surely he was writing with half an eye on the creationist market.
To further test my idea, I went online to Amazon.com, and typed “Darwin” and “Darwinism” in the search window (I regularly search on Amazon, but prefer to buy from The Book Depository or Wordery). Here are some of the books by creationists that I came up with; a lot of the names were all too familiar, but I never realized that Rick Santorum had actually got his name on a book. There were also references to “materialist neo-Darwinism”, but since I don’t pretend to know what a “materialist” is, and whether I or for that matter Darwin would qualify, I decided to let those ones go.
God vs. Darwin: The Logical Supremacy of Intelligent Design Creationism Over Evolution (M. S. King, 2015): “Ever since its inception, the edifice of Evolutionary Darwinism has rested upon a foundation of sand, propped up solely by media hype, public ignorance and extreme intellectual bullying.”
Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer, 2013) For the fashioning of this phrase in the creationist quote mine, see here. For Donald Prothero‘s devastating review of the book, see here.
Dehumanization: A Product of Darwinism (David Campbell, 2012)
The Dark Side of Charles Darwin (Jerry Bergman, 2011)
Evolution by Intelligent Design: Debate is Over – Darwinism is Extinct (Gabor Lingauer, 2011)
The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (David Berlinski, 2010; I have written about Berlinski here)
What Darwin Got Wrong (
The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Benjamin Wiker, 2009)
Exposing Darwinism’s Weakest Link: Why Evolution Can’t Explain Human Existence (Kenneth Poppe, 2008)
Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against NeoDarwinism, (Stephen C. Meyer, Scott Minnich, Jonathan Moneymaker and Paul A. Nelson, 2007; this fraudulently misnamed creationist pseudo-texbook is discussed further here)
Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots (Ken Ham and A. Charles Ware, 2007)
The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Michael Behe, 2007; since Behe clearly believes that biological complexity is the work of a designer who operates independently of natural laws, I include him as a creationist, although he would deny this)
Darwin Day In America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science John G. West, 2007)
Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (Thomas Woodward, 2007)
Darwin’s Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement (William A. Dembski and Rick Santorum, 2006)
Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design (Thomas Woodward and William Dembski , 2006)
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Jonathan Wells, 2006)
Reclaiming Science from Darwinism: A Clear Understanding of Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, (Kenneth Poppe, 2006)
The Naked Emperor: Darwinism Exposed (Antony Latham, 2005)
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (William A. Dembski, 2004)
What Darwin Didn’t Know: A Doctor Dissects the Theory of Evolution (
Darwinism, Design and Public Education (John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, 2003) Blurb: if science education is to be other than state-sponsored propaganda, a distinction must be drawn between empirical science and materialist philosophy.
Darwinism and the Rise of Degenerate Science (Paul Back, 2003) Blurb: many of the constructs of evolution are based on fantasies devoid of scientific credibility.
The Collapse of Darwinism: Or The Rise of a Realist Theory of Life (Graeme D. Snooks, 2003)
Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory (Michael A. Cremo, 2003)
The Case Against Darwin: Why the Evidence Should Be Examined (James Perloff, 2002)
Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Benjamin Wiker and William Dembski (Jul 12, 2002) Abortion. Euthanasia. Infanticide. Sexual promiscuity. And it’s all Darwin’s fault.
Darwinism Under The Microscope: How recent scientific evidence points to divine design (James P. Gills, 2002)
Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Cornelius G. Hunter, 2002)
Darwin’s Demise (
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Richard Milton, 2000)
What’s Darwin Got to Do with It?: A Friendly Discussion About Evolution (between a bright young creationist and a stuffy stooge; Robert C. Newman, John L. Wiester and Janet Moneymaker, 2000)
Darwinism Defeated? (J. I. Packer, Phillip E. Johnson and Denis O. Lamoureux, 1999) (Lamoureux says no, by the way)
Evolution Deceit: The Scientific Collapse of Darwinism (Harun Yahya and Mustapha Ahmad, 1999)
Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism (James Perloff, 1999)
Darwin’s Leap of Faith: Exposing the False Religion of Evolution (John Ankerberg and John Weldon, 1998)
Darwin’s Enigma (Blurb: No legitimate fossil evidence exists that shows one species changing into another
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Phillip E. Johnson, 1997)
Darwin’s Black Box (Michael Behe, 1996)
In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order (Ian T. Taylor, 1996) Blurb: Creation Moments is pleased to bring you what has been hailed as the classic work on the creation-evolution issue!
Darwinism, Science or Philosophy? (Phillip E. Johnson et al., 1994)
Darwin on Trial (Phillip E. Johnson, 1991)
Darwinism : The Refutation of a Myth (Soren Lovtrup, 1987)
And so on, all the way back to The Refutation of Darwinism: And the Converse Theory of Development; Based Exclusively Upon Darwin’s Facts (T Warren O’Neill, 1879)
The Church of England and Creationism.
Even William Jennings Bryan, at the 1925 Scopes Trial (of which more later), prosecuting under the law he had helped form that made teaching evolution illegal, admitted the probability of an ancient Earth. Now, infiltrating CofE and Church of Scotland, and overwhelming Baptist and Evangelical churches on both sides of the Atlantic, the absurdities of such Old Earth creationism have been replaced by a Young Earth “flood geology” creationism that is beyond absurd.
I have been asked about creationist infiltration into the Church of England, which has only come about in the last forty years. By Creationism I means those who reckon the earth to be only thousands of years old and that evolution has not happened. I will not discuss Creationism as such, except to say it is scientifically worthless and wrong as well as being bad theology.
Well here goes.
First consider the make-up and history of the Church of England. Right from the beginning, i.e 1540s, it was not completely Protestant, and has been called a bone half-set. Elizabeth wished to retain both ultra-protestants and semi-papists, resulting in tensions for over a century culminating with the execution of William Laud and the Civil war. After the Restoration in 1662 the Latitudinarians (fore-runners of liberals) gained the influence but from the 1730s Evangelicals began their long reign. Until about 1790 they…
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Pluto, Patterns, and Predictions; Creationism as Self-contradiction
“Unfortunately, this evidence presents yet another problem for young-earth creationism. Not only would a dwarf-planet collision completely reshape the surfaces of both Pluto and Charon, but it would have taken tens of thousands of centuries for the system to settle into the perfectly-circular, dual-tidally-locked co-orbit we observe today.”
Not surprisingly, the Young Earth Creationists are heralding the smoth-ish surface of Pluto as evidence for a young solar system. It does not seem to worry them that if the absence of craters on Pluto is evidence for its recent formation, then their presence throughout the rest of the Solar System is evidence for its antiquity. The post I am reblogging here presents yet more internal contradictions in the YEC description of Pluto, including the highlight that I quote above. And if you are willing to contradict yourself, you can, after a fashion, prove anything:
Near-true-colour image composite of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft on 14 July 2015 from a distance of 450,000 kilometers (NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Guest post by David MacMillan
One of the great things about being home schooled was the way every experience could become a learning opportunity. We were always ready to investigate new things and build on what we learned, and it’s a habit that has remained with me for the rest of my life.
As a young-earth creationist, on the other hand, I took this principle a little too far. Instead of treating new scientific discoveries as exciting and valuable on their own, I felt obligated to find a way to turn them into evidence for creationism. Any new finding, no matter how obscure, demanded that I leap in with my “biblical glasses” and show how any discovery could be shoehorned into the creationist model.
Closeup view of Pluto’s surface, taken by the New Horizon spacecraft.
It’s a familiar pattern. Creationist organizations have earned a reputation for seizing upon every…
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Primate's Progress 
