Answering Genesis: Interpreting the Evidence

One of the main position's held by Answers in Genesis is that they don't have different evidence, they just view the evidence through their own world view, while "evolutionists" view evidence through a different world view. As I've said before, this is really just so that, when evidence contradicting their position is given to them, especially transitional forms, they can claim to just be interpreting it differently.

That guy on the right looks like a porn star. Just sayin'.

And so, I wanna take a look at this view. See if it stands up to scrutiny. Because, of course, it doesn't.

I won't lie. Scientists do indeed interpret evidence according to views, but this isn't some naturalistic, atheist philosophy. There are two base assumptions science makes, and neither of them are that God doesn't exist. But to understand those, you need to understand a little bit about something called epistemology.

Epistemology - Do we exist?

Epistemology is the field of philosophy based on what we can know. And, well, the short answer is... not a lot. It's a pretty deep area of philosophy and is good for some mind-screws but I'm gonna focus on the basics.

Consider the Matrix, and the argument Morpheus makes in it. Imagine you're having a dream, and it's one of those incredibly realistic dreams. How can you tell that you're dreaming? What if you're unable to wake from that dream? How do you tell the difference between the dream world and the real world?

This is one of the core parts of epistemology. We honestly, really can't know that the world around us actually exists. For all we know, it could be part of an elaborate hallucination or dream, or some kind of virtual reality where we're used as an energy source for some reason that actually makes no sense when you think about it.

The common answer to this is "well obviously it exists, if I run into that wall over there, I'll hit something and it'll hurt", but again, consider the Matrix. Those ordinary people inside the Matrix have no idea that the world they see around them is a lie created by robots. They get shot and killed all the time and it appears completely real to them because that's all part of the illusion.

This is part of where Descartes' famous saying, "cogito ergo sum", or "I think therefore I am" comes from. Descartes reasoned that, if we can doubt our existence, something must be there to do that doubting, therefore, we can reason that we can know that we ourselves exist. And that's really about it.

And so, this is the first of the two assumptions that science makes. It's an assumption because we honestly cannot actually prove it. It's reasonable to assume it, and it's required by science to assume it because if we can't assume it, science itself is useless: The universe exists.

Seems fairly obvious really, but again, we can't prove that we aren't part of the Matrix, or that solipsism is true and I'm actually the only person who exists and all of you who are reading my blog and that I interact with daily aren't actually just hallucinations produced by my own mind.

The Problem of Induction

The problem of induction is another one that's a bit tricky to understand if you don't have any basis in philosophy (And the one paper I took at university clearly makes me an expert) but the basics are this: You can't prove the future by using the past. How can you? For all we know, things could suddenly change for no particular reason.

A good example of this, is the swan. Before the 18th century of so, Europeans had only seen white swans. Therefore, they concluded, all swans were white.

Then, they discovered Australia. And found swans that were black. Their conclusion, based on induction, was invalid.

This is a key problem for science. We must be careful that, the conclusions we make are not based on faulty premises like this. This is also why science always has a degree of error; to account for this possibly happening.

However, there is still one unprovable assumption that the problem of induction leads science to make: We can learn something about the universe.

Uniformitarianism

I like big words. They make me smart. But uniformitarianism, a word that I'm never going to spell right the first time, is a follow-on assumption from the previous one and one that it's based on. Basically, it's the idea that the laws of science and nature are the same throughout all of space and time. In other words, the force of gravity or electromagnetism aren't going to suddenly become different.

There's two parts to this. First, the idea that they'll be the same in the future. This is the most unprovable bit, because the only way to test this would be through induction and, as the last section showed, we can't prove anything with induction. It's rational to believe that the laws of nature will always stay the same, and it's essential to science too. If the laws of nature were likely to suddenly, unpredictable change, how can we perform science? How can we deduce things about the world, and make testable predictions if the conditions those predictions are based on might suddenly change?

Image credit: ESO / L. Calçada.

The second part, the one that creationists object to, is the idea that the laws of nature were the same in the past. Now this, we can test. Consider, the supernova I like going back to because it throws such a huge spanner in the machine of creationism, SN1987a. It occurred 100,000 light years away, and thus, 100,000 years in the past. We can examine things like decay rates, not to mention the force of gravity in the past, based on astronomy. So far, uniformitarianism holds up.

It's a pretty reasonable assumption too. We know of no way by which the laws of nature might suddenly change. While we can't prove that it's true, it's more reasonable to assume that it is true than that it isn't.

Ken Ham commented on uniformitarianism a few times during his recent debate with Bill Nye. Firstly, he claimed that we can't prove it's true and thus, geologic processes and radiometric decay could've happened differently in the past. The second was that uniformitarianism only makes sense within a Christian world-view. Let's ignore for the moment that these two claims are entirely contradictory, and just examine each one, one by one.

Graded bedding, as predicted by a flood.

Firstly, he's correct in stating that uniformitarianism can't really be proven, but he's completely wrong to say that geologic processes and radiometric decay could have been different in the past. Firstly, geologic processes. He seems to be somehow implying that all the geologic layers that we see were somehow all laid down in one flood and that we can't prove that isn't true because uniformitarianism. This claim is pretty absurd really. Geologists don't just kinda guess what deposits might maybe look like and maybe they're formed like this or that. They look at deposits being laid down today and then it's reasonable to assume that they were always laid down like that. Why wouldn't they be? Why would a flood deposit, that normally leaves a graded bedding, where the grains found are effectively sorted from largest on bottom to smallest on top, suddenly leave a deposit where the rocks are sorted in no particular order, in distinct layers made up of separate minerals with each layer containing distinct fossils that are rarely found in other layers, including some layers that today can't be formed in less than thousands of years? It's, quite simply, insane to actually believe that but that's exactly what Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis propose. We can't prove uniformitarianism, no, but it's far, far more likely than AiG's proposal.

Chalk is laid down at 1.6cm every millenium

Secondly, the idea that uniformitarianism only makes sense with a Christian world-view. Why only a Christian world-view, Ken? Why not a Hindu world view? Or a Buddhist or Shinto world view? Or an ancient Greek world view? Why only your specific religion, Ken?

An atheistic world-view can't exactly claim why the laws of logic and uniformitarianism are how they are. They just, well... are. Again, they can't be proven, they're assumptions. But to say that your particular world-view is correct because we have laws of logic and uniformitarianism is as invalid as saying that Ra is the true God of the sun because we have sunrises every day. After all, AiG, your world-view with its sunrises really is just borrowing from the Egyptian world-view.

Besides, your position seems flawed to me anyway. As I stated in an earlier blog, if we have deities who can willy-nilly change the laws of nature around as they see fit, uniformitarianism is no longer a valid assumption. This is why your view is contradictory, Answers in Genesis.

These are the only assumptions that science makes and will not back down on. Everything else is open to question. Creationism adds one more assumption that they won't back down on: the bible is literally correct (Except the bits that aren't, of course). But in science, that sort of assumption must be question. Answers in Genesis claim that scientists assume that only naturalistic explanations are valid, but that simply isn't true either. Science can test the supernatural, provided it gives something to test. Everything that happens, must leave some evidence behind. Maybe that evidence is gone now, but let's say ghosts are maybe real and we want to test them. Surely, ghosts, despite being a supernatural phenomenon, can be tested. And yet, every tests for ghosts has failed so far.

But when creationists claim that evolutionary scientists interpret evidence with evolutionary world-views, they aren't referring to either of these base assumptions. And so, we need to look at the other way scientists make interpretations: Based on models.

Models and Theories

The way science basically works is a little like this:

1: Notice something in nature.

2: Make a guess as to why it's like that. Or, as they're commonly known, a hypothesis.

3: Make a prediction based on your hypothesis.

4: If your prediction worked out true, your hypothesis might be onto something.

5: Make more and more predictions, including predictions about what you should find if your hypothesis is wrong.

6: Test all these predictions. If your predictions consistently come up correct, and the ones that would disprove your hypothesis don't come up, your model is probably pretty robust.

7: Repeat step 6, well, forever really. If your model works considerably well, encompasses a large field of knowledge and makes a lot of excellent predictions that consistently wind up true, your model may be considered a scientific theory, one of the most robust forms on knowledge in science.

This is an overly simplified version, there are other fairly standard tests too, such as the peer review process, where others examine your work and make sure you haven't made any mistakes. But let's look at this way of building models works with something even creationists don't deny: the model of the atom. So let's look at how we discovered basically what atoms look like.

I want to note first, that nobody's ever actually observed an atom. Nor could we. The radius of a gold atom is ~100pm, whereas visible light is a few hundred nanometres, a thousand times longer. There's no way that we could possibly observe something a thousand times smaller than the light we're using to view it. So how can we possibly know?

The basic observation that was made was that atoms were not indivisible. How did we find this? Well, basically through electricity. We knew that rubbing two things together could cause something to rub off on the other, giving a static charge (For example, when you rub your hair with a balloon, though obviously, this discovery was pre-balloon), so something was moving from the balloon to the hair, or vice versa. Something in the atom was being taken away. What was it?

An experiment was performed, pretty much by setting up a cathode in a vacuum and putting a charge through it that caused it to launch particles at a screen. By then applying a magnetic field, we found that the particles, whatever was being taken out of atoms, had a negative charge. Thus, the electron, the carrier of electricity, was found to be negative. (Fun side note: Ever heard the term CRT screen, or cathode ray tube screen? Electrons were originally called cathode rays, because of this whole launching-from-a-cathode thing, the whole CRT thing is a very archaic term from before we understood what exactly an electron is)

Thomson's plum pudding model

The model of the atom that was based on this came from a man named J. J. Thomson. His model was known as the "plum pudding" model, which was a vague sort of cloud of positiveness with electrons dotted through it, like plums in a plum pudding. And so, the time came to test this model, and the man to do that was Ernest Rutherford, a man I'm rather fond of because he's one of only three New Zealanders to win the Nobel prize. While he's most famous for splitting the atom, to me, his biggest contribution to science is what he did to Thomson's model of the atom.

Rutherford's idea to test the model was basically to get a leaf of gold foil, extremely thin, and fire alpha particles (An alpha particle is basically a helium nucleus, two protons and two neutrons) at it. If Thomson's model is correct, they should all pass through the gold foil pretty much unimpeded. And most of them did. Hooray, Thomson was correct!
Right? Right?

Rutherford's model

Weeeellll no. Rutherford, being a great experimentalist, didn't stop at a few examples of it working. That isn't how science is done. He kept going. And kept going. And noticed something extremely strange. Every so often, an alpha particle would bounce backwards. Some where being deflected slightly, that was fine, but others would do a near complete 180 and come back towards the launcher. It was as if you fired a gun at some tissue paper and every so often, a bullet flew back in your face. It was a completely absurd thing to happen and there was no way Thomson's model could account for it. The only solution was that there was a very dense, very small clump of postiveness in the middle of the atom, now known as the nucleus. Rutherford's model of the atom was superior to Thomson's, it made predictions and explained things that Thomson's could not, and so, Thomson's was abandoned in favour of Rutherford's. This isn't the end of the story here either, Rutherford's model couldn't explain a few things either, such as how the nucleus stuck together, or why the electron didn't spiral into the nucleus and matter as we know it could even exist; this is why his model was later replaced with Bohr's model but I could talk endlessly about atomic models but I won't.

Bohr's model

This process of building models, refining them, discarding parts that don't work is how science works. Thomson's model made predictions about how electrons flew out of atoms but couldn't explain the nucleus. Rutherford's model made predictions about how electrons orbited the nucleus and even the size of the nucleus but couldn't explain other things. Science isn't perfect and due to induction, we can't ever prove these models to be completely correct. We find the ones that work best and abandon those that don't. This is why science is trustworthy: it corrects itself. Saying that we can't trust science because it doesn't give complete, 100% accurate answers is like saying clocks aren't trustworthy because they're never completely 100% on time. Science is a clock that isn't always exactly on time but we're doing a good job of adjusting it and getting it closer. Creationism is a stopped clock. It might be exactly right twice a day, but it's completely useless all the time.

Evolutionary vs Creationist Models

So let's finish up this rather length article by talking about geology, and using proper, scientific models. There are two basic models for geology according to creationists: the evolutionary model and the creationist model. Let's look at their predictions and see what we can discover.

The evolutionary model basically says that the Earth is pretty old and is made up of various rock layers laid down over time. Some are laid down slowly, some are laid down quickly, but they're laid down in a chronological order: older ones at the bottom, younger ones at the top. Sometimes, we find the remains of dead animals in these rock layers and again, animals from earlier in the Earth's history at the bottom, animals from later in the Earth's history above them. 

But the earth isn't static. It's made up of tectonic plates and these move around. Sometimes, they warp and deform rock layers and for that reason, we expect to sometimes find rock layers in weird positions, maybe at an angle, maybe even folded in on top of each other.

The creationist model says that God created the world 6000 years ago, there was a flood about 2000 years after that and that flood laid down most of the rock layers on the earth and there are lots of dead animals buried in this rock layer.

So, what predictions can we make based on these models? This is, after all, how scientific models are tested: with observable science.

Firstly, let's look at what the rock layers should look like as we dig down.

If the evolutionary model is correct, we expect to find different layers of rocks, some of them folded in ways that can only happen under extreme pressure with long time scales, but not in any particular order and each layer made up of different materials.

What we actually find (source here)

If the creationist model is correct, we expect to find a base layer that was there when God first made the earth, then a massive layer of flood deposit, then maybe something above that that's formed in the last 4000 years or so. We'd expect this flood deposit to be graded: smaller rocks on top, larger rocks at the bottom.

Well, the evolutionary model's prediction is correct. We do indeed find distinct layers of rock, each made of separate, distinct materials in no particular order. Certainly no one single flood layer, and instead, separate layers.

What about fossils?
If the evolutionary model is correct, the older the rock, the more primitive the life form. We shouldn't expect to find anything that pre-dates its ancestry; no pre-Jurassic birds, no pre-Cambrian mammals, everything in a clear evolutionary order. We don't expect to find animals swimming between different layers.

If the creationist model is correct, as Ken Ham puts it, we expect to find "billions of dead things, buried in rock layers above the earth." And yay! That's what we do find! But wait, that's a very basic prediction there. If they were all buried in one global flood, we'd expect to find them in a very random order, birds buried with trilobites, humans buried with dinosaurs and so on. 

Well, guess what? The evolutionary model is correct again. Nobody has ever found a pre-Cambrian bunny. The creationist model of geology fails on every prediction its made. 

We can do similar with astronomy. The big bang theory predicted the cosmic background radiation: we found it. It predicted evidence of inflation: we found it. The only defence to these claims that creationists can come up with, is either blatantly denying that they exist, or claiming that we only see them like that because we're viewing them with an evolutionary interpretation. Well... yeah, that's kinda how models work. But you don't have a valid model to explain these yet. Come up with one. Make some predictions based on your model. If you want to be taken seriously as scientists, you need to make models that predict future data and so far, no creationist claim has ever met this challenge.

This is why creationism is not taken seriously by scientists. This is why creationism is not taught in the public schools, and why "teaching the controversy" about evolution is nonsense. There is no controversy because there is no other model that explains the evidence explained by an evolutionary viewpoint on geology, biology, astronomy or any other field of science. Come up with some to interpret the evidence with. Until then, stop trying to act like you have equal footing with science.

The AiG articles I based this blog post on are here:

• http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2008/05/16/feedback-museum-evidence
• http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v22/n1/creation-proof 
• http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/03/10/just-one-piece-of-evidence/