Leading creationist organisation appoints conspiracy theorist to key position

Posted on Monday, Jun 12, 2023 1:10AM 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

Source: AiG.

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

Answers in Genesis appoints dangerous climate change denier as Chief Ministry Officer

Image from AiG site

 “Though some weather events result from conditions on a fallen earth, Scripture is quite clear that God is in control.” This carefully crafted tweet by Answers in Genesis a few days ago is almost certainly the work of their newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer, Martyn Iles. Since God is in control, human activity cannot be responsible for the state of the planet, and the suggestion that we should adjust our policies because of their global impact is not only misguided, but impious. 

Temperatures may be higher than at any time since the origin of humankind, ice caps may be melting in Arctic and Antarctic, and the smoke from forest fires may be making the air in New York unbreathable, but all of that is beside the point, because such things are to be expected on a fallen earth. The underlying reason for global warming is not fossil fuel burning, but Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden. Thus the entire corpus of scientific evidence and climate observation is pre-emptively dismissed as irrelevant.

Notice that Iles is, despite the headline, not actually a climate change denier. He simply bypasses the question of whether climate change is happening, in order to move directly to the conclusion that if it is, we shouldn’t be trying to do anything about it. Because God. Such sophistical subtlety is central to his impressive rhetorical technique.

It would be wrong to dismiss such thinking as lunatic fringe. Lunatic, yes, but fringe, in the context of both Australian and North American politics, anything but. Over the past 20 years, a strong alliance has emerged, with its own special pseudoscience as justification, between young earth creationism, climate change denial, and conservative politics. There are, in the US at least, direct links between the creationist ministries, the fossil fuel industry, and influential right-wing think tanks. The alliance between evangelicals and climate change deniers played a major role in the election of Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister until last year, and of Donald Trump, both of whom did everything they could to block attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions. Similar alliances are at work in Alberta, and in Texas where the legislature is placing obstacles in front of the emerging renewables energy industry, despite its massive contributions to the State’s economy.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, has been a major force in Australian religious politics. He 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.

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 thus 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.

I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this material Appeared on Panda’s Thumb and 3 Quarks Daily.

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 and https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/

Science and politics at the Creation Museum

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/08/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum.html. This piece also appeared at https://rightingamerica.net/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum/, with book authors’ comment: “Below is Dr. Paul Braterman’s review of Righting America at the Creation Museum. For us, the best part of this generous review is that Braterman covers and understands all parts of our argument. More than this, we appreciate his scientific interventions, and we absolutely agree that we should have included Henry Morris’ biblical racism in our book.”

Do we really need 230 pages of at times closely argued text, followed by 70 pages of footnotes, just to tell us about Kentucky’s intellectually bankrupt Creation Museum and the authoritarian organisation, Answers in Genesis, that brings it to us? The answer, I fear, is yes.

For instance, this book will tell you that Ebenezer the Allosaurus, prize exhibit at Answers in Genesis’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, was donated by the Peroutka Foundation. It will also tell you that Michael Peroutka, in a 2013 speech still available on youtube, states that government schools indoctrinate children away from Christian ideas (a theme that recurs throughout this book), and that this is what they were designed to do. The book also points out that he served on the Board of Directors of the League of the South, whose chairman had defined southern people as white. I recently learned that Peroutka is the official Republican Party candidate for the post of attorney general of the State of Maryland in the November 2022 elections. We had better pay attention.

Express science reporter: “proof dinosaurs lived with HUMANS?”

“Is this proof dinosaurs lived with HUMANS? Creationist claims REAL truth COVERED UP”

The Express, an ostensibly serious right wing UK newspaper, reports under “SCIENCE”.

Express caption” “Did dinosaurs co-exist with humans?”

The evidence? A display at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. Ham is quoted as saying that the standard scientific evidence is a coverup, as his own dinosaur fossils show, for some unstated but presumably non-standard reason:

“Ken Ham, founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, United States, has put the supposed evidence on display at his centre. Standard scientific evidence shows dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago … and the anatomically modern man did not emerge until around 200,000 years ago. But Mr Ham believes this is a cover-up … the dinosaur fossils were found in Colorado about a decade ago and seem to represent a tyrannosaurus rex [sic].”

Express caption: Scenes might have been similar to Jurassic Park

(Fuller quotations supplied by the Sensuous Curmudgeon, here)

Ham complains that evolutionists “use dinosaurs … to promote their worldview”. How dare they! But do not accuse the Express of bias. It does refer to what it calls “the  standard scientific evidence”, and they do quote two sentences from Bill Nye, before showing the image on the right:

And compared with the image below, the paper’s front page in the runup to the Brexit referendum, the dinosaur story is factually balanced reporting reporting; fake news is not the invention of the Trump campaign.

The Express group is wholly-owned by Richard Desmond, a UK billionaire and former publisher of such informative periodicals as Penthouse and Asian Babes. circulation is close to 400,000, in addition to online readership. In 2002, Desmond made a £100,000 donation to Blair’s Labour Party, but in 2004 switched allegiance to the Conservatives.

The lead story of this post would seem to be based on the February 4 2014 debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, which did so much to restore the former’s finances. Why it should have resurfaced now in the Express, I have no idea. But it does concern me. Desmond does not make a habit of backing longterm losers.

Clay tablet casts new light on origins of Genesis

Archaeologists are puzzled by the significance of a cuneiform tablet dating to around 1400 BCE, recently discovered during excavations in Sumeria. A tentative translation, still controversial, is as follows:

“From Moses, General Secretary of the Brickmakers Union, Land of Goshen, greetings.

Moses, contemporary scupture, holding what is thought to be this tablet

From my measurements of the sedimentology of the Nile Delta, I estimate that the river has been depositing sediment there for many tens of thousands of years. Concerning the origin of mankind, I am now convinced that we, the jabbering creatures of West Africa, and the knuckle-walking giants who live beyond Numidia are different species of the same family.

However, You-Know-Who has told me to come up with a simplified version of the story, which my members will be more capable of understanding.

Nile Delta in ancient times (Wikipedia)

I wonder if there is anything suitable among your own traditional mythologies. In particular, since the Internet has not yet been invented, can you send me by camel post a preprint of Enuma Elish. And if possible, an advance copy of your pending publication, The Flood of Gilgamesh.

Why are some Christians Young Earth Creationists?

Young Earth Creationism is not just a belief, but proof of allegiance to a very special group, the Real Christians (or, I now fear, Real Jews or Real Muslims). Once a belief assumes this function, rational criticism is counter-effective.

(Of course you and I, dear reader, are not as others are, and would never allow our allegiances to shape our beliefs.)

Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin

It baffles many people whether Christian or not why some Christians are Young Earth Creationist, with a belief in a 10,000 year old earth and rejection of evolution. It cannot be denied that Young Earth Creationism has caused bad relationships among Christians, influenced education and results in much mockery from some. A major reason for the friction is that YEC’s claim explicitly or implicitly that the majority of Christians who accept modern science with the vast age of the earth and evolution are at best naughty or heretical Christians.

With YEC making inroads into churches (including the Church of England) and trying to call the shots over education in all parts of the world, it is best to know what they believe and why they do as they go against all scientific teaching and what most churches actually believe.

WHAT YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM IS;

As YEC attracted so much more heat than…

View original post 832 more words

Will Storr’s The Heretics [US: Unpersuadables], 1: Full Frontal Creationism, and other kinds of unreason

Is this book worthy of your time and attention? Yes. But this is not a book review, so much as a conversation with myself, triggered by reading it, and what follows is as much mine as his, especially as I have focused on those chapters that overlap my own concerns. There is no shortage of writings debunking creationism, or homoeopathy, or others covered here, beliefs that fly in the face of massive evidence, and yet this evidence has no effect at all on their believers. Why is this, Storr asks. What is going on? And what makes us think that we ourselves are so different?

Storr starts by telling us of his meeting with John Mackay, a Young Earth creationist, who was talking to an appreciative audience in a small town in Queensland. This seems to have been his first encounter with the full-blooded version of modern creationism, according to which evolution science and old Earth geology are fundamentally unsound, and the Bible is the infallible word of God. At the end of Genesis 1, God speaks of His work as being “very good”. “Very good” must mean no pain, and no death. It follows that tigers and tyrannosaurs coexisted happily with Adam and Eve in Eden, all of them adhering to strictly vegetarian diets, until the Fall went and spoiled everything. And “Tonight, the choice you have to face up to is this – do you put your faith in Darwin, who wasn’t there? Or in God, who was?”

Jurassic Ark theme park activities, Gympie, Australia, where Storr met Mackay. From Creation Research website.

Mackay claims to be able to feel the presence of God. What turned him against evolution, he says, was a biology textbook he was reading as an adolescent, which followed its exposition of evolution with a chapter advocating atheism. Unfortunately, he does not tell us which textbook he was referring to, giving me no way of checking his perspective, although such a chapter would of course be completely out of place in a biology textbook.

Mackay’s audience were universally sympathetic, a fact that Storr observed with bemusement that turned to dismay when, the following Sunday, Mackay mounted the pulpit to deliver a scathing attack on the wickedness of homosexuals and the compromising Churches who countenance their activities.

Mackay speaks proudly of debating with ordinary sane scientists or, as he would call them, evolutionists: “We frequently win public debates… They presume they will be fighting against theologians with no science degrees.” He himself has a degree in geology from Queensland, where he also took a class in genetics. As a teacher in a private school, he was able to promote creationism under the guise of “critical thinking”, comparing the claims of evolution and creationism as he saw them.  He met up with Ken Ham, a kindred spirit, and together they set up the Creation Science Foundation. Mackay was forced out after some bitter infighting, and now directs a relatively small outfit known as Creation Research. The Creation Science Foundation, meantime, has turned into Answers in Genesis, a multi-million organisation based mainly in the US, famous for its Creation Museum and Ark Encounter Theme Park.

I have no doubt of Mackay’s sincerity. His arguments against creationism will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied the subject. Didn’t Darwin himself complain about the inadequacy of the fossil record? Why don’t we ever observe intermediate species? What about polystrate fossils, tree trunks that project upwards through different geological layers, supposedly separated from them by huge banks of time?

“The first dinosaurs look like dinosaurs… The last ones look like dinosaurs too. So within that timeframe – even if you did put in a millions of years – they produce their own kind, just as Genesis says.”

Let me invite the reader to respond to Mackay’s arguments, and to answer a question of my own: if your last common ancestor with a flatfish was 430 million years ago, how long ago, roughly, was the last common ancestor of a flatfish and a frog? (Answers at end)

Storr is in no doubt that Mackay is completely misguided. And yet, he says of Mackay and others pursuing the unreasonable,

“There is something noble about their bald defiance of the ordinary, something heroic about the deep outsider-territories that they wilfully inhabit… I feel a kind of kinship with them. I am drawn to the wrong.”

Storr gives us, later, more detail about his own past than I intend to divulge about mine, beyond saying that I too have explored strange places of the mind, and entertained bizarre beliefs.

Later Storr discusses Mackay with Nathan Lo, an Assistant Professor at the University of Sydney, who describes creationism as appealing because very easy to understand, unlike evolution which requires time and thought. Lo dismisses the leaders of the creationist movement as just in it for the money, prompting the kind of observation that makes this book so interesting:

“Nathan Lo and I… see ourselves as the rational ones, the clean-sighted bringers of 21^st-century reason. And yet both of us, I have come to believe, are mistaken. We are wrong about the wrong.”

He joins a group who are taking part in a 10-day programme of extremely rigorous meditation. Halfway through, a woman participant starts screaming in distress, but he does nothing to go to her aid. Why not? Excessive obedience to authority. Later, he compares himself to participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous electric shock experiment. Here, subjects were told that they were taking part in an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning, and believed that they were administering electric shocks to the learner, who was in the next room. The subjects obediently administered increasing shocks, even when the person in the next room (an actor) started screaming, and many went all the way up to levels of shock clearly labelled as lethal and not to be used. Then there was the strip-search scam, where a bogus policeman claims be investigating a reported theft, gives a vague description that the management applies to one of the waitresses, and that waitress is then told to strip naked and cavort, kiss the “policeman”, and even submit to spankings, in front of the manager, and her boyfriend acting as chaperone. And does what she is told, with neither manager nor boyfriend raising any questions. And this performance has been repeated in over 70 diners throughout the United States.

Excessive obedience, according to Storr, is but one of the many ways in which our brains differ from the standards of rational judgement that we naïvely believe ourselves to be applying. Notice that I said “differ from”, not “fall short of”. We are evolved animals, and the brain has more investment (if I may so put it) in seeing us survive and prosper in our societies, than in making us aware of objective truth. We are influenced by others, and if enough of our neighbours say so, we will actually come to see one line as being longer than another, even when our eyes plainly tell us that it is not.[1]

That’s the least of it. Storr finds himself forced to confront a much larger question, perhaps the largest question in the whole of philosophy: what really goes on inside our minds (or our brains; for me, as for Storr, these come to much the same thing) and how well does that enable us to cope with reality?

Storr deals with this question in a tightly argued (but, given the difficulty of the subject matter, surprisingly readable) chapter, of which I can do no more than convey the general favour. He quotes from Bruce Wexler’s book, Brain and Culture, which describes the brain and mind as highly plastic and shaping themselves to the environment, until early adulthood. From that stage onwards, the process is reversed, and “much of the [brain] activity is devoted to making the environment conformed to the established structures.” From which Storr draws the unpalatable conclusion:

“Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.”

This is true for the brain of the deluded creationist. And Storr’s brain. And yours. And mine. Our brains spend most of their time satisfying themselves that things are as we expect them to be, and spring into action (and denial) when this comfortable belief is disturbed.

Our entire sensory world is a construct. We see in three-colour vision, and our inner worlds are that extent richer than those of a skate, which has no colour vision at all, but poorer in ways we cannot even imagine than those of birds and insects that have up to six separate kinds of colour receptor. So colour is not something in the world, but a construct that we impose on it. Light itself has wavelength, but no colour. (Here Storr seems to me to be making a common philosophical error. When we are seeing normally, our colour vision is causally determined by the wavelengths of light impinging on our eyes, as well as by the way our brains process that information. Colour vision may encode only part of the information out there, and the particular code may be specific to humans, or even to individuals, but that does not invalidate the information obtained. But perhaps this is nitpicking.) Storr goes on to describe our inner world of perceptions as “A vision. A useful guess about what the [external] world might look like, that is built well enough that we are able to negotiate it successfully.” The point is that we do not handle reality, which is far too complex, but the model we make of it. Accuracy beyond what is needed is irrelevant for the serious business of surviving and reproducing, or even harmfully distracting.

Even our emotions are constructs, based on expectation. Depending on your culture, you will when drunk become more convivial, or more aggressive, or more sexually uninhibited, and some of these effects (I trust that no one tested for the last one I mentioned) can even be produced by alcohol-free fake drinks.

We deceive ourselves to protect our expectations without ever realising it. When told that a male applicant for the job of police chief has qualification A, while a female applicant has qualification B, most people will choose A as the more important qualification. Reverse the details, and most people will choose B. Ask them for their reasoning, and they will discuss the finely balanced choice between A and B on its merits, with no mention of gender. From the outside, it is clear that they regard police chief as a man’s kind of job, and pick the criterion that best fits this preconception, but they do not know that this is what they are doing.

We scrutinise arguments attacking our position much more closely, and reject them on much slimmer grounds, than those that support us. And if, in the end and, we cannot avoid the realisation of conflict, we experience the discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. We now have three choices; we can deny that the conflict really exists, or we can change our minds to accommodate the new evidence (the least likely outcome), or we can build a fence round our preconceptions, and hold on to our initial beliefs with more fervour than ever. This helps explain why debates about such topics as creationism, or the reality of global warming, get nowhere, and anyone who has taken part in such a debate will realise how annoyingly the arguments that we direct at the other side merely boomerang. It’s not fair. You just can’t reason with them. The most infuriating thing is that they actually seem to enjoy taking such absurd positions. And, if fMRI results are to be trusted, they don’t merely seem; when we strike a partisan posture, the pleasure centres in our brain light up. We are all, to use it Storr’s expression, “deluded egotists”, and, worst of all, we like it that way.

Storr’s next chapter is about a group of people that I belong to. He does not like them, and gives good reason for this. But that will have to wait for another post.

Appendix: And what about those objections to evolution?

Vogt, C. 1880. Archaeopteryx macrura, an Intermediate Form between Birds and Reptiles. Ibis 4:434-456, via Wikipedia

Yes, Darwin complained of the inadequacy of the fossil record and the lack of intermediate forms, but we have dug up a lot of new information since 1859, when the first edition of The Origin of Species was published. By 1863, in time for the fourth edition, we had the discovery of Archaeopteryx and its identification as intermediate between birds and their reptilian ancestors. In fact, we now know Archaeopteryx to be a great-uncle, rather than a direct ancestor, of modern birds, but that is by comparison with hundreds of other intermediate forms, enabling us to establish a bird family tree rooted among one particular group of dinosaurs, with both extinct and surviving branches. There will always, of course, be missing links in the chain, but the existence of the chain itself is now undeniable. So far from being a criticism of the evolutionary account, Darwin’s complaint should be heralded as an implicit prediction, one that has been amply fulfilled.

Polystrate fossils are the expected results of rapid sedimentation, but so what? At one time there was thought to be a conflict between catastrophism, in which geological processes occurred with terrifying rapidity, and a uniformitarian gradualism according to which they were always slow, but both of these extremes had been abandoned by 1865.

And the time elapsed between the last common ancestor of a flatfish and a frog is exactly the same as the time elapsed since the last common ancestor of a flatfish and you, some 430 million years. If you don’t believe me, go to the Timetree website and check. Your last common ancestor with a frog is somewhat more recent, at around 355 million years before present, and deserves to be called a proto-amphibian because it superficially resembles the frog much more than it resembles you, but you and the frog have both, by definition, been evolving for the same length of time since then. True, the changes in your line of descent have been more dramatic, including the ability to give birth on land, development inside the womb, warmbloodedness, and big brains, but your now extinct reptile-like and lemur-like ancestors are intermediate, not between you and the present-day frog, but between you and that remote proto-amphibian common ancestor. The distinction is important but subtle, part of why evolution is so often misundertood.

As for Mackay’s claim that a dinosaur is a dinosaur is a dinosaur, this can only be based on self-inflicted ignorance. Diplodocus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaur are at least as obviously different as a cow, a zebra, and a tiger. But for Mackay, these are all small matters, compared with his eternal salvation.

1] This is based on the behaviour of groups of students, asked to judge which of two lines was longer, and how the judgements were influenced by the opinions expressed by stooges pretending to be fellow-subjects. Storr refers to fMRI work suggesting that the students really were persuaded by their supposed colleagues, rather than deciding to go along with them, but as he says much of this kind of work is still highly controversial.

Adapted from an earlier post in 3 Quarks Daily

 

What Answers in Genesis believes

AiG spells out here the statement of faith required of all its employees and volunteers, updated August 10, 2015. I am delighted to learn that The Holy Spirit lives and works in each believer to produce the fruits of righteousness, of which the Creation Museum, the Ark Park, and Ken Ham’s personal fortune are examples.

It’s just as well that I’m a believer, because Those who do not believe in Christ are subject to everlasting conscious punishment.  This of course implies that The account of origins presented in Genesis … provides a reliable framework for scientific research, because The doctrines of Creator and Creation cannot ultimately be divorced from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Creation Museum (Kentucky) tableau of Eden, showing tigers and humans peacefully coexisting

And the fact that Death (both physical and spiritual) and bloodshed entered into this world subsequent to and as a direct consequence of man’s sin explains how we know that tigers were originally vegetarians (see illustration). I’d always wondered.

But let no one accuse AiG of narrow-mindedness! Board members believe that Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ, but other employees are free to accept different chronologies.

I give the Statement in full, to avoid the risk of quote-mining. UK readers may find it interesting to compare it with the views of the Christian Schools Trust, as described by the Trust’s founder, Doctor Sylvia Baker, in her Ph.D. Dissertation.

Statement of Faith

In order to preserve the function and integrity of the ministry in its mission to proclaim the absolute truth and authority of Scripture and to provide a biblical role model to our employees, and to the Church, the community, and society at large, it is imperative that all persons employed by the ministry in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, should abide by and agree to our Statement of Faith, to include the statement on marriage and sexuality, and conduct themselves accordingly.

Section 1: Priorities

• The scientific aspects of creation are important but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer, and Judge.
• The doctrines of Creator and Creation cannot ultimately be divorced from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Section 2: Basics

• The 66 books of the Bible are the written Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant throughout. Its assertions are factually true in all the original autographs. It is the supreme authority in everything it teaches. Its authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science.
• The final guide to the interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself.
• The account of origins presented in Genesis is a simple but factual presentation of actual events and therefore provides a reliable framework for scientific research into the question of the origin and history of life, mankind, the earth, and the universe.
• The various original life forms (kinds), including mankind, were made by direct creative acts of God. The living descendants of any of the original kinds (apart from man) may represent more than one species today, reflecting the genetic potential within the original kind. Only limited biological changes (including mutational deterioration) have occurred naturally within each kind since creation.
• The great Flood of Genesis was an actual historic event, worldwide (global) in its extent and effect.
• The special creation of Adam (the first man) and Eve (the first woman), and their subsequent fall into sin, is the basis for the necessity of salvation for mankind.
• Death (both physical and spiritual) and bloodshed entered into this world subsequent to and as a direct consequence of man’s sin.

Section 3: Theology

• The Godhead is triune: one God, three Persons—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
• All mankind are sinners, inherently from Adam and individually (by choice), and are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.
• Freedom from the penalty and power of sin is available to man only through the sacrificial death and shed blood of Jesus Christ and His complete and bodily resurrection from the dead.
• The Holy Spirit enables the sinner to repent and believe in Jesus Christ.
• The Holy Spirit lives and works in each believer to produce the fruits of righteousness.
• Salvation is a gift received by faith alone in Christ alone and expressed in the individual’s repentance, recognition of the death of Christ as full payment for sin, and acceptance of the risen Christ as Savior, Lord, and God.
• All things necessary for our salvation are expressly set down in Scripture.
• Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
• Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead, ascended to heaven, and is currently seated at the right hand of God the Father, and shall return in person to this earth as Judge of the living and the dead.
• Satan is the personal spiritual adversary of both God and mankind.
• Those who do not believe in Christ are subject to everlasting conscious punishment, but believers enjoy eternal life with God.
• The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one naturally born man and one naturally born woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.
• It is the duty of Christians to regularly attend a local Bible believing church, as portrayed in the New Testament.
• All human life is sacred and begins at conception (defined as the moment of fertilization). The unborn child is a living human being, created in the image of God, and must be respected and protected both before and after birth. The abortion of an unborn child or the active taking of human life through euthanasia constitutes a violation of the sanctity of human life, and is a crime against God and man.

Section 4: General

The following are held by members of the Board of Answers in Genesis to be either consistent with Scripture or implied by Scripture:

• Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ.
• The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of creation.
• The Noachian Flood was a significant geological event and much (but not all) fossiliferous sediment originated at that time.
• The gap theory has no basis in Scripture.
• The view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of biblical teaching, that knowledge and/or truth may be divided into secular and religious, is rejected.
• By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

Updated: August 10, 2015

h/t The Sensuous Curmudgeon, reporting on AiG’s recent defence of its statement of faith. This defence discusses, in some detail, the origin of the Grand Canyon and of the beaks of birds, and will be of particular interest to geologists and molecular biologists. For a commentary on the Statement, by my friend the Rev Michael Roberts, and why he regards it as heresy, see here. NB: comments on Michael’s position, which differs in a number of ways from mine, should be addressed to him, not me.

Ken Ham, Noah’s Ark, and authenticity

A MEME ABOUT KEN HAM IN A HAT

God of Evolution, which I regard as an ally against the forces of darkness, writes:

I don’t remember the part of the biblical flood story where Noah sues the government for not giving him millions in tax breaks. Maybe that’s because Noah actually was interested in following the God’s directives, you know, unlike some people.

This work by godofevolution.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

And if you think that Ken Ham and all he stands for is irrelevant to Scottish schools, think again.