Boxer, Sarah. "Will Creationism Rise Again?" Discover 8 (10): 80-85, October l987. [Subtitle: The foes of evolution arm themselvs for another fight, convinced that God and what they call science are on their side.] [Boxer is a staff writer for Discover.] This summer the United States Supreme Court squelched the latest attck on biological evolution by creationists, who believe that God created Earth and life a few thousand years ago. In a 7-2 decision the justices resoundingly rejected a Louisiana act requiring public schools that teach "evolution science" to also teach "creation science." Justice William Brennan wrote in the majority opinion that the state improperly sought to "employ the symbolic and financial support of government to achieve a religious purpose." Scientists, educators, and civil libertarians cheered, proclaiming an end to a war that had begun in 1925, when the Scopes "Monkey Trial" led to laws that forbade the teaching of evolution. But are the celebrations premature? Does the court ruling really mean that creationists have been defeated? "What else can they do?" says Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a longtime champion of evolution and dogged foe of creation science. For all intents and purposes, he says, "it's all over." But creationists, skilled at inventive interpretation, read victory in the defeat. "The decision itself was a decision against forcing teachers to teach creationism in public schools," says Kenneth Cumming, a prominent voice for creation science. "The opportunity to teach creation is still there, it's still alive." Wendell Bird, lead attorney for the creationists in the recent court case, says that the decision leaves open the right of teachers to teach "a variety of scientific theories." There is also no proscription against pressing textbook publishers to include creationist accounts of the origins of the Earth and biosphere. In the end, Cummings says, there will always be another way to bring the question back before the court--an increasingly conservative court at that. The next development, he predicts, will be a legal challenge "just like the Scopes trial," but in reverse. A pro- creationist teacher will teach creationism in a public school--this in itself is perfectly legal-- and someone, a fervent atheist perhaps, will try to stop him. In anticipation of such a fight, a Creation Science Legal Defense Fund has even been established. Ultimately the case would wind its way through the courts and, if Cummings and his colleagues have their way, give the creationists the last hurrah. Such optimism is based on a long-standing history of survival and adaptability. All along, creationists have been unusually adept at altering their course to suit the winds of political change. The Scopes trial took place in a time of strong antiscientific sentiment. In 1935 the Religion and Science Association, the first organized creation science group, was formed. Three years later there was a second group, the Creation-Deluge Society (also known as the Society for the Study of Natural Science). Despite the word science in their names, these organizations were avowedly antiscientific. They portrayed Scripture, sprituality, and conservative values as the forces of good; science, materialism, and modernism as the forces of evil. Then, in 1968, when the Supreme Court rejected the precedent that had been set by the Scopes trial and ruled that laws banishing evolution from public schools were unconstitutional, the creationists changed their tune. They began to use not only the word science but also its grammar and vocabulary. Rather than argue that the biblical story of creation should be taught as the word of God, they said it should be taught as a science, as evolution was. Using a tried-and-true debater's ploy to justify this "balanced treatment," they didn't try to prove that creationism was scientific but instead crafted arguments to show that evolution was equally unscientific. The creationists became polished and slippery debunkers, picking apart the evolutionary literature, pointing out gaps and missteps. They were, and still are, a tough lot. Now, once again, "creation scientists"--there are said to be between 700 and 6,000 people who fit the bill--are adapting their tactics to suit changing times. The fundamental precepts remain the same. Strict creationists have never strayed from the belief that a few thousand years ago a Creator set aside six days and in that time made the world and every kind of animal and plant in it, just as is written in Genesis. They still contend that man was always man, dog dog, and cat cat. As for the Earth's mountains, great stratified canyons, petrified forests, beds of fossils, and deposits of coal and oil, these cannot be the work of billions of years because Genesis says the Earth is just a few days older than life itself. All the Earth's features were actually wrought by God's worldwide flood and other, more recent catastrophes. The new creationists are affirming their roots, proclaiming that the Bible is "the true truth." Rather than lashing out at the opposition, they are building what they call a new kind of science to buttress the Bible. In reality, however, what they do is not science at all. The biblical truth comes first; the science, come hell or high water, is tortured to fit. Nestled in a small mall on a dusty frontage road that parallels U.S. Highway 67 in Santee, California, is the unofficial nerve center of the creation science movement, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), an affiliate of Christian Heritage College. ICR has a library, a few classrooms, and a small museum, but not much else in the way of scientific accoutrements. It is home to creationists old and new. The older generation spend most of their time reading, writing, debating, teaching, and making missionary voyages to such places as Mexico, Barbados, and South Korea. This group includes ICR's founder, Henry Morris, who has a doctorate in hydraulics from the University of Minnesota, and Duane Gish, its sharpest debater, who holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. They insist that science itself is responsible for their creationist beliefs and that if the scientific evidence pointed toward evolution, they would follow. "If," says Gish, "there were intermediate forms in the fossil record [fossils that are bridges between existing types, such as a creature that was half lizard, half bird, or the long-sought missing link between man and ape], then I'd have to be an evolutionist." They are skilled polemicists. Ask them about creationism and they'll tell you about evolution. "We interpret what others are doing. We use the facts they produce to show that evolution is not a reasonable scientific conclusion," says Gish, whose book is tellingly titled not Creation? The Fossils Say Yes! but Evolution? The Fossils Say No! Gish, Morris, and their colleagues think they can legitimize their beliefs by showing that evolutionary science is fallible. And so they wait for the inevitable faltering step or admission of weakness and then pounce. It is an easy pastime, because science is a history of missteps and revisions. The new creationists, on the other hand, ignore the evolutionists and strike out on their own, offering convoluted observations of the natural world to bolster biblical accounts. Gerald Aardsma, who earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Toronto and just joined ICR in January, sees evidence everywhere for Adam and Eve's fall from grace. "Why else," he asks, "would the world contain repugnant things--a queen bee that murders her sisters, baby fish born that won't survive?" And what, asks Aardsma, is the second law of thermodynamics, which says closed systems tend to become more disordered, if not evidence that the world we live in is winding down, as God said it would? "If we found that everyone was perfect and we could build a perpetual motion machine, then we could say there was no Fall." But, he adds, that's just not so. Of all biblical concepts, none is more central to the new creationists than the age of the Earth, which the Bible puts at about 6,000 years. So a key task of the new creation scientists is to explain away the best evidence for the earth's old age--its canyons, mountains, and so on--without contradicting the Bible's contention that the Earth is young. The job isn't easy. The creationists have to conjure up incredible catastrophes that can do millennnia of work in a day. The biblical flood, of course, is the catastrophe of choice. In one stroke this event accounts for mountains, stratifed canyons, and fossils of creatures that modern man has never seen. John Morris, son of the ICR founder and a biologist trained at the University of Oklahoma, is searching for evidence that the Flood occurred. He regularly leads field trips to Mount Ararat to search for Noah's Ark and to the Paluxy River in Texas to study fossilized footprints that he believes prove that man and dinosaur once coexisted. At Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin, who has a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, is searching for evidence of the Earth's youth in a flood that occurred there. When the volcano erupted in 1980, part of the mountain slipped into a lake, and water sloshed up the other side, washing hundreds of trees into the lake. Soon the bark slipped off the logs and they sank, forming an organic mat on the lake bottom. Austin believes that this mat will turn into coal in just a few years, not the 65 million years posited by even the most conservative geologic scenarios. So far, though, there's no coal to be found in the lake bed. Austin is also trying to show that a flood can make petrified forests. Such forests are often observed to be stacked vertically, one on top of the other. The best explanation, paleontologists believe, is that as one forest was fossilized, another forest grew over it and later turned it to stone. But his interpretation poses an obvious problem for creationists, because such a succession would have taken more millenia than the Bible says the Earth has seen. So when Austin saw the logs sinking near Mount St. Helens, he got an idea: while most logs sink horizontally, others, ones with very heavy roots, say, might sink vertically and become petrified in that position. If this could happen, Austin suggests, the layers of petrified forests could be interpreted as evidence not of an old Earth but of a worldwide flood. Like Austin, Aardsma is trying to prove the youth of the Earth. He says he can demonstrate that radiocarbon dating, which shows life to be at least tens of thousands of years old, is not reliable. His argument is as dazzlingly coherent and inventive as the plot of a spy novel--and far more improbable. First, he points out that even though radiocarbon dating is supposed to go back 35,000 years, its accuracy has been checked only as far back as 3,000 B.C., through the independent dating of mummy wrappings. And this, says Aardsma, is the first clue that radiocarbon dating is not as neat as it seems. All living organisms contain carbon, and a known proportion of it is rendered radioactive by the bombardment of cosmic rays. In radiocarbon dating, the age of fossils is estimated by determining how much radiocarbon is left in them. The fossils with the least are the oldest. This dating method works because the radioactive carbon continues to decay at a predictable rate long after the organisms die. So why does Aardsma say it can't be trusted for dates before 3000 B.C.? Before the Flood, he explains, which occurred between 3500 and 2500 B.C., all the water that would innundate the Earth to a depth of 30 feet was held in a vapor canopy above the atmosphere--this being the waters of the heavens, which God separated from the waters of the Earth. This vapor canopy, he says, "would have shielded the lower atmosphere from the cosmic radiation [that produces radioactive carbon] by a factor of three and thus reduced the amount of radioactive carbon found in creatures that lived before the Flood." Given this argument, fossils with very little radioactive carbon left may not be old at all. They may simply come from a time when the Earth was shielded from cosmic radiation. So radioacarbon dating is completely unreliable. This neat little story not only sabotages radiocarbon dating, it also ties together three biblical events: the recent creation of the Earth, the separation of the waters of the Earth from the waters above, and the Flood. Aardsma concedes that it will be hard to prove the presence of an antediluvian vapor canopy. "It's possible that the idea of a vapor canopy will be falsified," he says. If it is, though, he's not going to toss out the Flood story. In a fashion characteristic of the new creationists, Aardsma says his conclusion would not be that the Bible was wrong, but that his interpretation of it was flawed. "I must be misunderstanding what's written in Genesis. I've not made the plain sense interpretation of Scripture. So I'll forsake that path." In other words, any particular model of a universal flood--a vapor canopy falling from the sky, say--may be falsified, but the idea of the Flood cannot be. Kenneth Cumming, who has a doctorate in biology from Harvard, is every bit as daring as Aardsma, but like debunkers Gish and Morris, he delights in pulling out the well-worn arguments against evolution when guests come. Picking up a gigantic replica of a quarter that serves as a paperweight on his desk as ICR, he Socratically offers his own version of the classic argument from design. "Who made this?" Cumming asks. Man did. "How do you know?" Because it looks like other man-made quarters. "Are you more complex than this quarter?" Yes, of course. "Then you must have been made by something even more intelligent than man himself--God." Q.E.D. Maybe a heap of garbage can be created by random processes, he says. Not people, though, not even doubters. Cumming admits he lost his scientific respectability when he cast his lot with the creationists. And Aardsma, the epitome of the new breed at ICR, says, "I don't care whether the whole scientific community thinks I'm a fool." As he sees it, establishment scientists in the United States "will look just as silly" years from now as the scientists who once said there were no such things as meteorites. He believes that when he interprets Scripture correctly, science will bear him out. "What I'm asserting is that you will never find science proving Scripture wrong," he says. Scripture, says Aardsma, is like having the answers to a set of math problems before you start to solve them. "You can work on a problem, but it's a great consolation having the answers in the back of the book." Consider the Bible's claim that man is responsible for his sins even though God is infinitely sovereign. This statement seems to contain a logical contradiction. But Aardsma thinks the paradox disappers if you assume it's true and use the mathematical concept of infinity to help you understand it. In mathematics, he explains, if you substract any finite number from infinity, you are still left with infinity. So, "you can give man a finite amount of oontrol of his life and that doesn't diminish the infinite sovereignty of God." The new creationists, in attempting to make scientific hypotheses based on Scripture, seem to take some awesome leaps, not of faith but of interpretation. Events that are described concisely in the Bible--the six-day Creation, the Fall, and the Flood--beget strained and twisted scientific scenarios. The Fall becomes the second law of thermodynamics; the water above the firmament becomes a vapor canopy; the Flood becomes the vapor canopy falling to Earth. Aardsma's own words, however, show best that there really is no science in creation science: "I don't build my world model on current scientific consensus. I am better off saying 'God has spoken' and resting my faith there." *************************************** This file originates from: Origins Talk RBBS * (314) 821-1078 Missouri Association for Creation, Inc. 405 North Sappington Road Glendale, MO 63122-4729 (314) 821-1234 Also call: Students for Origins Research CREVO BBS (719) 528-1363