Believe it or not, as an atheist I don't see this as an irrefutable text.
As far as atheists are concerned, I think I come off being rather tame. I have never suggested that religion is some horrible institution that should be burned to the ground and I have been quite outspoken with my fellow skeptics about my belief that there are forms of belief which cannot ever be debunked through skepticism. That said, creationism bothers me on multiple levels. Last week, I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time arguing with a creationist on this very blog and I came to the conclusion that reactive defense of evolution was not going to win an argument with someone who refuses to look at evidence. So I’ve decided to go on the attack on this one. My reason is simple: whether there is a god or not, the specific God of Christian Creationism is logically impossible.
Because I’m talking deities here, I need to make sure my term is actually defined. There are several different Creationist deities. There is an Islamic creationism, the beliefs of the Raelians, and of course, the logically consistent Pastafarianism. What I mostly encounter, however, are the beliefs of Christian creationists, so that’s what I’d like to deal with here. Even talking Christian creationism, we need to specify our terms a bit, there are after all both Young and Old Earth creationists. Old earth creationists form a strange group to me. They have decided to embrace the scientific evidence that tells us the universe is over 13 billion years old and that earth is over 4.5 billion, and yet they don’t seem to get that fossils being in different geological strata means that without multiple creation events, folks must have had really big shovels to bury all their dinosaur friends so deeply. Mostly, I’d like to deal today with young earth creationism.
Let’s make one thing clear before I really start getting to the meat of this argument. I fully acknowledge that not all Christians are creationists. The Catholic Church, just to point out one sect of Christianity, has acknowledged that the account of Genesis is at least mostly metaphorical and state that evolution is the tool God used to create man and populate the planet. Also, I’d like to point out that I’m not here to disprove the existence and/or divinity of Jesus. Not because I don’t think I can, but I’m just not interested in the discussion. Whether there was a Jesus or not and whether he was divine or not has nothing to do with this particular argument. Here’s what’s important when we’re looking into young earth creationism.
1 – The Genesis account of the bible is literal truth with an earth around 6000 years old.
2 – Rejecting the above claim is possible grounds for eternal damnation.
3 – The God of this Genesis account is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent.
To begin with, there’s sort of a problem no matter what if you have a deity who possesses the above traits. If that deity is all-knowing, than that deity knew everything that was ever going to happen before the universe came into existence, including everything bad that would ever happen. What’s more, that deity chose to not take any action that would prevent any of those ills from occurring. This includes creating a world where in order to survive, we all have to kill and eat each other. Certain apologists try and say that before man’s fall, everything just ate vegetables. You do wonder why he made his vegetarian lion with those huge teeth and claws, but maybe he’s just got a kinky design sense. Of course, the biggest flaw in the whole “everything used to be vegetarian” argument is the shark. Most fish have gills that allow them to suck in water and remove the dissolved oxygen, but sharks get oxygen quite differently. The only way that sharks can get water moving through them is by moving through the water. This is why you may have heard sharks never stop moving. If a shark stops moving, it stops getting oxygen and dies of hypoxia. The problem with a vegetarian shark is that vegetables don’t move. Herbivores generally have to stop in front of vegetation to consume it, if a shark were to stop in front of some reeds to eat them, the shark would die. Sharks need to eat living animals to breathe. But you know what, I’ll give you the sharks. Let’s say that sharks used to be able to get oxygen without moving and that after the fall of man, God just took that ability away. The problem of a meat eating shark is nothing compared to the idea that evolution never happened.
No matter what creationists claim, there is an awful lot of evidence in support of evolution. Understanding how the mechanisms of evolution work goes back at least as far as Gregor Mendel who codified the methods by which traits were passed on from parents to children. It can be clearly seen how we’ve used hereditary traits in our domestication of animals and plants. We’ve taken Queen Anne’s lace and turned it into carrots and huge wolves we’ve made into toy poodles (check out NOVA: Dogs Decoded that aired last week). Though this is a guided process, it is the basis for understanding the science behind evolution, where one group in a species is forced to differentiate itself from its fellows thanks to some natural force, and these differentiations compound on themselves until the group becomes separate genetically from its ancestral species.
We’ve seen clearly how groups of animals adjust to their surroundings. Darwin’s insights into evolution came in many ways from his study of the Galapagos finches and how the finches of the separate Galapagos islands were each uniquely able to consume the indigenous flora of their home island. We understand how if a group of animals settles on an island with limited resources, that species tends to evolve smaller bodies so that they don’t outstrip their habitat’s ability to feed them (the process, by the way, is called “Insular Dwarfism“). We see how different environments force animals to assume different coloring and how birds can shed the ability to fly when it is no longer necessary for its survival. We have seen how humans can affect changes in animals like peppered moths in Britain changing from white to black or the arise of Nylon-eating bacteria, a species who evolved the capacity to consume an entirely man-made substance within 35 years of the creation of that substance.
Through our study of fossils, we see growing complexity in life as we move up through geologic ages, and as of yet we have not found any modern animal fossilized in a strata that geology tells us is more than a couple million years old. We have found evolutionary dead ends that show us how species will diverge in many different avenues before natural selection decides what will survive and won’t, even in our own genus with our extinct cousins Homo Neanderthal and Homo Floresienses.
We see evidence in genetics. We see that at our core, we share common traits with every life-form on the planet and that we are closer genetically to those creatures with whom we share more traits. It’s commonly known that our DNA is 98% identical to that of a chimpanzee, what fewer people know is that we share 40% of our genetics with lettuce. And in our DNA we find more tantalizing clues to evolution, endogenous retro-viruses and fused chromosomes. Atavisms that show chickens once had teeth and that we once had tails.
But what makes all this evidence truly extraordinary is that every single line of evidence we follow suggests the exact same tree of life and the exact same time scales for speciation. Every piece of evidence that we look at tells us that we share common ancestry with every living organism on this planet, that there is an enormous web of life on this planet and that we are not separate from it, but that we exist within it.
We know from measuring background radiation and our examination of universal expansion that our universe is 13.7 billion years old. We know from radiometric dating of meteorites – I know, creationists, carbon dating doesn’t go back that far; don’t worry, we used uranium – that the earth is 4.75 billion years old, and every piece of evidence we have tells us that life arose in the form of single celled organisms about 3 billion years ago, and that gradually those organisms evolved and differentiated themselves becoming us and the myriad of living creatures we share this planet with.
So for a second, let’s forget all that and say that the earth is under 6000 years old and that every species on it arose independently. What would that mean? It would first mean that all that evidence we have for an old universe, and old earth, and evolution was fabricated. This is what we of a scientific bent would call Last Thursdayism. It’s an unprovable idea which states that the universe could have been created last Thursday and simply made to appear as though it were billions of years old. And frankly, if you have an omnipotent being, you cannot say that your omnipotent being didn’t do that. But that would mean that being had deliberately misled us. That deity decided to place fossils in separate geologic ages, that deity decided to use the same genetic information to assemble all the beings on this planet and that deity decided to put in clues that they shared a common ancestry. What’s more, that deity gave us the ability to consider the evidence and follow where that evidence went. Trying to get us to accept creationism after showing us all the evidence for evolution would be like holding up a red piece of paper and hitting us whenever we wouldn’t say it was blue.
Of course, some apologists will tell me that their Devil was the architect of evolutionary evidence. My response to that is simple: since when does their Devil have more power than their God? If the devil they believe in made the evidence for evolution, than the God they believed in allowed the devil to do it. Let us not forget the definition for this deity. He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. If he is omnipotent than there is nothing he cannot accomplish if he so desires. This deity could create a world without all the evidence for evolution. If he is omniscient than there is nothing he would not know and would not have known since the beginning of the universe. That deity would have known the evidence for evolution would be discovered and that it would cast doubt on the Book of Genesis. He would have known everything that would ever happen before anything had happened. And if, as the person I was arguing with last week implied, rejecting Genesis would lead to being damned for eternity, then that deity condemned everyone who followed the intellect and evidence that the deity had put before then. And this brings us to omni-benevolent. This deity intentionally decided to try and fool man and has made the decision to reward gullibility over reason. He has created a system that is inherently rigged. How this can be considered moral is beyond me.
I cannot disprove that god(s) exist, but an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent deity who created this world in 6 days 6000 years ago and damns people to hell if they refuse to believe simply cannot exist. Either he’s not omnipotent and had no ability to stop false evidence from being planted. This would mean, however, that there was someone out there with more power than that deity and why would you worship the #2 guy in the universe instead of the #1? It could be that he’s not omniscient. He has either been blinded or intentionally blinded himself to the evidence man would find and couldn’t figure out that man would actually follow that evidence to its logical conclusion. If he’s that thick, he’s not going to notice what you happen to believe or not so why does your belief even wind up mattering? And the final possibility is that, far from being omni-benevolent, he is a being who deceives or allows others to be deceived when he has the ability to halt the deception. Far from being omni-benevolent, this being is morally repellent and has proven himself why he is not worth being worshiped.
I don’t think that the inherent belief in a deity is bad. It’s not something I believe, it’s not something I have any interest in believing in, but there’s nothing really I see that’s really wrong with that idea. But a deity that created the universe as stated in Genesis does not fit the definition of the Christian deity. There is no way that deity could be all good, all powerful, and all knowing.
If anyone wants to hop up and tell me why I’m wrong, I welcome the discussion. However, if you want to argue with me on this, I ask that you bring arguments to the table. I’ve spent nearly three and a half hours today putting together my argument and though I don’t expect you to do the same, I would ask that you put in some effort. If you’d like to argue back I ask you to respect the idea of discussion enough to present your own argument, and not just some link to some page where I might find an answer to a question I might or might not have posed. I would also advise that before you hop on to argue with me, you remember that an argument against evolution is not an argument for your deity.
