Why Don't More Scientists Accept Young Earth Creationism?

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

Previously I wrote a post highlighting Michael Behe’s video aiming to answer why don’t more scientists accept ID:

Behe on why do some scientists still not accept intelligent design?

I came across a video put out by the Discovery Institute 6 days ago titled Michael Behe Answers Hard Questions: Why do some scientists still not accept intelligent design? The question came out of a follower (or several) of his that are amazed that more scientists don’t accept ID when the evidence for it is overwhelming. Behe’s response: Scientists, just like everybody else are not logic machines. They’re smart but just don’t use logic without caring about other things too. Professionals in th…

His response was rather shocking to me and in some places, demonstrably false. It was a question inspired by a follower of ID who was surprised that while it was very obvious to them, it was not obvious to the scientists who actually do the studies ID writers talk about. The same question was proposed to Answers in Genesis and here is Ken Ham’s response:

Why Don’t More Scientists Believe in Creation?

The reasons:

• “Probably at least 70% of professional scientists are non-Christians. We know from Romans 1 that non-Christians have a spiritual bias and deliberately suppress the truth.”
• The public school system ensures they never hear any other hypotheses.
• They don’t read YEC literature. “They’re ignorant.” They argue that if you haven’t read the top twenty AiG YEC hits, you are ignorant. And you don’t want to consider it.

So stop suppressing it dear sinners! If you get mad at YEC, Ken Ham notes that there were those “who wanted to kill Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead, so they could get rid of the evidence.”

My Comments

I first heard about this from Joel Edmund Anderson’s blog here:

Ken Ham Answers the Question: “Why don’t scientists accept young earth...

I made some slides summarizing Young Earth Creationist Cosmology the other day. One thing that struck me about YEC’s aiming to explain cosmology is that there were no experiments being done, no papers being published (in real science journals) and a heavy dose of “well God just made it that way.” I proposed that the YEC Cosmology includes things like:

God created globular clusters 6 thousand years ago with most of the main sequence stars gone such that the main sequence turnoff points are consistent with the age of the universe from the expansion of space. He put in a few neutron stars that typically could only exist after a star ten times the mass of the sun lived for 10 million years and also a few blue stragglers as well for good measure. God also saw fit to give cool stars proper rotation rates consistent with the main-sequence turnoff point and put the proper distribution of radionuclides in galaxies and stars such that when we radiometrically date them, we get the same results at billions of years.

And despite Ken Ham’s accusation that I haven’t read enough YEC writing, I am basing this on YEC writing that I’ve spent more hours than anyone probably ever should and I scour the internet to see what’s the best YEC Cosmology that exists only to find that the emperor has no clothes.

Comments, criticisms, questions welcome!

[Randy]

Very well put.

It reminds me of Gandalf’s quote, “The treacherous are ever distrustful.” With Ken Ham admitting that intellectually, nothing that anyone proves to him will ever change his mind about his faith-held belief that the earth is young, he casts the same accusation at others. Perhaps that’s the way he blocks having to take things seriously.

Growing up, the response many of my elders gave to evolution was, “they want to rebel against God and leave Him out of the equation,” just never made sense to me. These evolutionist folks were universally kind and listened to my questions from a YEC perspective. They demonstrated a better regard for their neighbor than the YEC I had met. They demonstrated genuine enthusiasm for learning. As a result, they grabbed my attention, and convinced me after I read their arguments honestly.
I think that one of the best armaments that EC and science types have is to be consistently kind and mature, even when insulted (unintentionally) by their skeptics. Realizing that YEC are often simply afraid of losing out on salvation, their world view and the Great Commission helps us with empathy for them.

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

I take medicine to keep down my blood pressure. So forgive me, but my health dictates that I do not engage with this topic.

[Randy]

Biblicism Run Amok - Randal Rauser

In Randal Rauser’s post above, he critiques Al Mohler’s quote in “Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy,”

“I do not allow any line of evidence from outside the Bible to nullify to the slightest degree the truthfulness of any text in all that the text asserts and claims.”

If we a priori decline to investigate the evidence in a truthful manner, we condemn ourselves.

Rauser further points out that strict Biblicism is logically internally inconsistent in many ways in this post.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

It must be very frustrating that so many in the greater Christian tribe take such obtuse positions and foist them on their kids to boot. Yet you’d like to have community with them all.

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

Certainly, we cannot read and comprehend anything in the Bible without bringing the knowledge learned outside the Bible into the mix. I am impressed how as life goes on the new knowledge we learn both through life experience and study affects our comprehension of what the Bible says. To deny that is nonsense.

One on the comments in Rauser’s blog brings up John 5:39-47 where Jesus tells of the scriptures, the writings of Moses, telling about him. This was done to support the thought that some falsely read science into the text leading to bad interpretations, and I agree with that assessment.

[Randy]

@MarkD

Yet you’d like to have community with them all.

Well, yes; but coming from that standpoint initially, I understand and sympathize also the pull of commitment to an ideal (not something that belongs only to religions–it seems that group identity and social evolution seem to favor that idea for safety. One example would be the odd political fights between Stalin and agriculture scientists on the way to best plant seed).
One could easily argue that a mental commitment to an ideal is all social evolution, so that religion is an adaptation only–but that doesn’t explain it all by any means (I am a Christian, after all ) However, recognizing that it can come from our insecurities rather than some divine mandate induces humility and understanding, not only with religious fundamentalists, but also with all who struggle with such group identity, I think.

[T_aquaticus]

The reason that most scientists don’t accept Young Earth Creationism is because they have open minds. Answers in Genesis has explicitly stated that the conclusion of YEC is unassailable, and any evidence that appears to contradict YEC has to be disregarded:

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.
Statement of Faith | Answers in Genesis

In his debate with Bill Nye, Ken Ham stated that no evidence would ever change his mind. Here is a transcript:

5. What if anything would ever change your mind?

Ham: Well the answer to that question is, I’m a Christian. And as a Christian, I can’t prove it to you, but God has definitely shown me very clearly through his Word and shown himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The Bible is the Word of God. I admit that that’s where I start from. I can challenge people that you can go and test that, and you can make predictions based on that; you can check the prophecies in the Bible, you can check the statements in Genesis, you can check that and I did a little bit of that tonight, but I can’t ultimately prove that to you. All I can do is to say to someone, look if the Bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the Word of God and that’s what it claims, then check it out. The Bible says if you come to God believing that He is, He will reveal himself to you and you will know; as Christian’s we can say we know. And so, as far as the word of God is concerned, no one’s ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true.

But I do want to make a distinction here, and for Bill’s sake: we build models based upon the Bible. And those models are always subject to change. The fact of Noah’s flood is not subject to change, but the model of how the flood occurred is subject to change. Because we observe in the current world, and we are able to come up with many different ways that this could have happened, or that could have happened, and that is scientific discovery. That’s part of what it’s all about.

So, The bottom line is that as a Christian I have a foundation, but as a Christian I would ask Bill a question, "What would change your mind? I mean, you said , even if you came to faith, you’d never give up on believing in billions of years, if I heard you correctly, you said something like that recently, so that would be my question for Bill.

Nye: We would need just one piece of evidence, we would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another; we would need evidence that the universe is not expanding, we need evidence that the stars appear to be far away, but they’re not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in just four thousand years instead of the extraordinary number. We need evidence that somehow that you can reset the atomic clock and keep the neutrons from becoming protons. Bring out any of those things, and you would change me immediately.

The question I have for you though, fundamentally, in front of the washing??, Mr. Ham, it’s What can you prove? What you have done tonight has spent all of the time coming up with explanations about the past. What can you really predict? What can you really prove in a conventional scientific-- or in a conventional, I have an idea that makes a prediction, and it comes out the way I see it. This is this very troubling to me.
Transcript of Ken Ham vs Bill Nye Debate

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

I also came across this article by Nathaniel Jeanson:

Why Don’t More People Accept the Young-Earth View of Speciation?

It really should just be plainly obvious to everyone as he argues all the data from genetics, Darwin, the Bible all put the evolutionary models to shame but still 97% or more of scientists reject creation and accept evolution. So what are his reasons? Really just one, ignorance.

Jeanson argues, since scientists are trained in the public school system they have no idea of Jeanson’s conclusions. Anyone who writes against him, like @DavidMacMillan, @Joel_Duff, @evograd just write blog posts while he writes 29,000 word technical science articles. If you ever meet such an evolutionist, Jeanson tells you to ask them to name the major young-earth creation technical journals and describe all the details of all the papers they read. Since they won’t be able to, link them to Jeanson’s stuff and follow up to make sure they’ve read them all.

@pevaquark side note. In the fields I know a lot more about, it’s been embarrassing to read the various articles on Physics contained in the various YEC “journals.” The articles would be torn to shreds in a real science journal, not because of the non-falsifiable miraculous parts, but the parts that contain scientific claims tend to contain gross misunderstandings or misapplications of scientific ideas and ironically they tend to fail to engage real scientific studies. I’ll have to do a review of one of them sometime for reference.

[T_aquaticus]

@pevaquark

I also came across this article by Nathaniel Jeanson:

Wow . . . still picking my jaw up off the floor:

These skeptics forget the evidence right under their nose. While the origin of over 30 living cat species might appear to require significant morphological changes, visible variety of a much greater magnitude can arise in an even shorter frame of time. For example, a frog begins its life as a fertilized egg—as single cell. No limbs, head, eyes, tongue, long toes, and so on are visible at the single-cell stage. Yet, in the process of development and maturity that spans less than 3 years, these anatomical features are formed. This progression from a single cell to an adult frog represents far more visible change than the process of forming new species from the kinds on board the Ark. Thus, when the skeptic claims that we’ve never witnessed the amount of morphological change required by the young-earth speciation model, the skeptic does so by ignoring the familiar process of development.

Just . . . wow.

They even have the following figure, and still don’t understand the implications:

For the inheritance of mitochondrial DNA, did they happen to notice all of the other women in that same generation? Do people at AiG think they only had one great-grandmother?