Fred Clark on the Cruelty of Young Earth Creationism

Ken Ham is fond of saying that the reason that many young people are falling away from the faith is because they have been indoctrinated into "billions of years" thinking.  They are quite clear about how important this line of thought is:

What is at stake here is the authority of Scripture, the character of God, the doctrine of death, and the very foundation of the gospel. If the early chapters of Genesis are not true literal history, then faith in the rest of the Bible is undermined, including its teaching about salvation and morality.

The problem is that when many young people are launched into the real world, they come face to face with a mountainous amount of counter-evidence that leads to a real crisis in faith. Fred Clark puts it thus:

Young-earth creationism is a cruelly efficient machine for manufacturing spiritual crisis. It has created more atheists than all of Richard Dawkins’ books put together. It exchanges the truth of God for a lie — a lie that’s spectacularly indefensible because none of the people caught up in that lie lives on a young Earth. They live, instead, on this one — this ancient Earth that confronts its inhabitants with its vast and incomprehensible oldness at every turn.

The “evangelical worldview” Nelle Smith describes binds that unsustainable lie to everything else that evangelical Christians believe: the existence of a benevolent God, the belief that life has meaning, the love of Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. All of this is bound together with the lie in a constantly repeated and reinforced if/then construction. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then God does not love you. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then all meaning is illusion. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then Christ is not risen and your faith is also vain and you are of all people most to be pitied

I have seen this play out in families where children encountered the evidence for evolution and an old earth and it destroyed their faith. In one instance, a teenager who, after years of being in a YEC homeschool environment and subsequently walking away from her faith, said to their parents: “I wish you had told me more about evolution.”

If we tell our children about the love of God, the salvation through Jesus, the need to live out a Godly life, and that the central tenets of the faith can be found in the early creeds, that should be enough.  We should let them have the freedom to work out the importance of the early chapters of Genesis, to discover whether or not it is important to believe that the flood was world-wide or localized (or if it happened at all).  These questions are not an indictment of the early chapters of Genesis, simply a recognition that they were written to a different people with different customs in a time thousands of years ago.

As many people have noted: the bible was written for us but it was not written to us.  It was written to people who had no understanding of geological, cosmological or biological scientific principles because those things were unimportant to their faith and hadn't been discovered yet.  If they weren't important to the faith of those people, why should they be important to ours?

Ken Ham and other young earth creationists of his mindset are setting people up for an incredible let-down.  By linking the belief in a young earth to the rest of the faith, they are not just promoting a stark dichotomy but putting themselves into a corner by requiring that the science support their position.  This is what Joel Edmund Anderson picked up on: science then becomes the ultimate arbiter of the faith.  If Ham is going to tell people that the young earth position is integral to their faith, then the earth better dang well be 6,000 years old.

The problem is that it is not.  Hugh Ross, no evolutionist, once wrote that, after careful scrutiny, he discovered that there is not a single defensible argument for a young earth.  Worse, over 95% of practicing scientists will tell you the same thing.  Of the remaining five percent, many, like David Menton, writing for AiG, often write in fields of which they know nothing.

In the Menton post linked above, I eventually argued that people like David Menton  (and by extension, Ken Ham) were an asset to the kingdom.  Now I am not so sure.  How can those who place such a weight and potential stumbling block on Christians be an asset to anyone?   Further, how is such a position not heresy?  It links the core tenets of the faith to a position that has a time depth of a little over a hundred years.

The young earth creationism taught by most home schoool curricula is straight out of the works of Henry Morris, which was simply repackaged George McCready Price, in turn based on the “visions” and “special knowledge” of  Seventh-Day Adventist prophetess Ellen G. White. In other words, none of it is actually in the Bible.  It is often wild extrapolations on what, according to them, must be true.The rest is simply attacks on mainstream science. 

Answers in Genesis is a very popular site in Christian circles and, while it is certainly true that there are many Christians out there who are perfectly willing to accept that there are different ways to interpret the Primeval History that don't have salvation implications, Ken Ham's voice is very loud and he is doing more harm than good.  

Ted Davis on Ken Ham

Ted Davis has a post at BioLogos on Ken Ham's Alternate History of Creation.  He chastises Ham for his recent attacks on Joel Duff , saying that his treatment of   creationist history is a “...distorted historical analysis of the openly agnostic, apostate Seventh Day Adventist historian, Ronald Numbers.” Ham claims that young earth creationism was historic Christian orthodoxy until the 19th century (a claim supported by Todd Wood but challenged by Joel Anderson).  Davis writes:

This somewhat ad hominem attack on Numbers and the blanket dismissal of his extraordinarily careful work is very troubling. The strategy of “debunking” Numbers’ careful conclusions is gaining in popularity, and it bodes badly for the future of the body of Christ, since it constitutes a set of “alternative facts” rather than the truth and unfairly maligns a scholar who always seeks to be fair to people whose views he doesn’t share. (Having known Numbers for thirty-five years, I speak from extensive personal experience and knowledge of his professional activities.)

Let me remind Mr. Ham of what Whitcomb said about Numbers’ book. Whitcomb and his close friend Morris both feature prominently in that book, and Whitcomb provided Numbers with some of the correspondence that Numbers used in writing it. In a talk from 2005 published by Ham’s organization, Whitcomb says, “Dr. Morris agrees with me that this is an objective study by one who claims to be an agnostic on the subject of ultimate origins.” The tone and content of this comment—written by someone who is even closer to this subject than Ken Ham—undermine what Ham recently told his readers. Whitcomb said that it presents the historical details without bias, whereas Ham describes it as a “distorted historical analysis.” They cannot both be correct.

Davis is correct. Numbers” book is a wealth of information and an excellent read.  That the granddaddy of them all, Henry Morris, thought it was also accurate is quite remarkable.  Ham is in his own world, here.  Joel Anderson makes a good point that, in all of the early church councils, especially those that produced the creeds, the age of the earth was never debated:

...please note that there is absolutely no insistence anywhere—not in any creed or church council or pronouncement ever—that the early chapters of Genesis were to be read and understood as a point-by-point historical and scientific account of the creation of the material universe in general, and of the first human beings in particular. The historical fact is that early Church Fathers, as well as Christian leaders throughout Church history, held to a variety of interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis¹

Davis focuses on the fact that Ken Ham ignores the role that George McReady Price played in the beginnings of the young earth creation movement, relegating him to casual mentions here and there.  He further points out that this is in sharp contrast to the role that Price's works played in the writings of Henry Morris, who spoke favorably of Price, an Adventist.  Price is known to use the writings of Ellen White, also an Adventist, as the basis for much of what he concocted about modern geology.  Ham seems to be unwilling to admit this, as well.  Davis then hits the nail on the head:

Why do Ham and company go to such lengths to create an alternative history of creationism in which Price and the Adventists don’t receive proper credit? Is it because (like those Christians mentioned by Morris) they don’t want their movement associated with a Christian sect that is sometimes viewed with suspicion? Perhaps that is part of the picture, but I think there’s a much bigger reason behind it. The tangled history of modern creationism threatens the simplistic, highly inaccurate narrative AiG hammers into their followers: that Young-Earth Creationism is, and always has been, the “zero-compromise” option for all devout believers in the authority of the Bible.

This is why Ken Ham ruthlessly attacks any scriptural interpretations that do not line up with his.  As long as "millions of years" can be tied to atheistic or apostate thought, then he can be content to lob grenades at Christians who do not think like he does.  After all, he believes he has the spiritual upper hand.  That this is, at heart, dishonest, is nothing new for AiG.  Ham has been caught in several “terminological inexactitudes” before (the riding dinosaurs, the motive behind the building of the ark encounter).  This is just another one.  


¹Anderson, J. E. (2016). The Heresy of Ham: What Every Evangelical Needs to Know About the Creation-Evolution Controversy [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Andrew Snelling, Geology and Cooking

Sorry, this one rambles a little bit.

Jonathan Baker at Age of Rocks writes an interesting column that is a response to Andrew Snelling's preposterous statement that one can be a successful petroleum geologist and yet be a young earth creationist.  In his column, he likens the different layers of the rock record to the baking of a cake.  After a series of trials in which a cake is cooked for thirty minutes at 150º, then 350º, then 500º, he writes:

In the first trial, it seems, the batter never reached a high enough temperature for these reactions to complete; in the third trial, there were too many! Thus we all know from experience that the results of our cooking depend strongly on the chosen temperature and time. Consider also the various ways to make a roast: we can cook the meat for a short time at high temperature, for a long time at low temperature, or choose some option in between. Why? Because the rate of chemical reactions is temperature dependent, and for every ~10°C increase in temperature, the reaction rate doubles.

Why is this important to understanding the rock record and petroleum geology? He continues:

This flexibility in cooking reflects a basic principle in petroleum geology called the Time-Temperature Index (TTI). The deposition of organic matter in sedimentary layers is much like pouring a raw cake batter into a pan. As those sediments are buried deeper, the temperature naturally increases, due to what’s called the geothermal gradient (heat flows from the Earth’s center to its surface, so temperature increases with depth). Once the temperature becomes high enough, those same chemical reactions that turned our batter into cake can also turn raw organic matter into a suite of energy-rich hydrocarbons (oil and gas). But the actual cooking time depends on the absolute temperature to which those molecules are exposed.

In other words, the Earth’s subsurface works like a giant oven—in fact, this terminology is frequently used by petroleum geologists. As with cooking in our homes, the end result depends on three factors: the original recipe, time, and temperature. When geologists search for oil/gas, they try to constrain those variables as best they can.

The upshot is that, due to the nature of the geothermal gradient, there simply has not been enough time to produce oil if the earth is only six thousand years old. Further, because geologists use this gradient to their advantage in examining the geological column, they have become very good at finding oil.

One of the grand daddies of modern young earth creationism, George McReady Price, received a letter from Harold Clark, another Seventh Day Adventist and fellow creationist, when Clark went out to visit the oil fields in Texas, in 1938. When he got there, Clark received a bit of a shock.  The letter read in part:

"The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence than we have ever allowed. The statements made in your book, The New Geology, do not harmonize with the conditions in the field. All over the Midwest the rocks lie in great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in regular order. Thousands of well cores prove this. In East Texas alone are 25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000 wells in the Midwest give data that has been studied and correlated. The science has become a very exact one. Millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the paleontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for the work. The sequence of the microscopic fossils in the strata is remarkably uniform. The same sequence is found in America, Europe, and anywhere that detailed studies have been made. This oil geology has opened up the depths of the earth in a way that we never dreamed of twenty years ago"

Astoundingly, people like Snelling never seemed to learn from the experience that Clark had.  In the last seventy-seven years, oil and gas explorers haven't adopted any form of young earth creationism in their efforts to find oil.  Instead, they have become better at it by using standard, well-understood modern geological methods and an understanding of the geological column that was well-known even in Clark's time.  To debate this on the part of Snelling is willful blindness. 

In some ways, this is analogous to the problem of what you would find in terms of consistency if the geological column were only 4500 years old and really did reflect the remnants of the world-wide flood.  If you could, the experiment might work like this: construct a tank that was a mile high, fill it with about 1000 feet of dirt (remember, the geological column did not exist at all before the flood but they had to be walking around on something), then pour water into the tank, simulating rain for 365 days.  At the end of that period, let the tank drain away (what the flood waters are said to have done).  You know what you will find at the end of that time?  You will find very hard mud at the bottom, medium hard mud in the middle and soupy mud at the top.  What you will not find is sedimentary rock of any kind.  You won't find sandstones, you won't find shales, you won't find chert and you won't find limestone.  Why?  You won't find them because it takes lots and lots of time for these kinds of rocks to form.

Young earth creationist studies of the Grand Canyon are interesting in this regard.  They fail to account for the fact that the walls of the canyon, had they been formed in a year's time, would not have been solid enough to stand up.  Being mostly mud, they would have collapsed, which is what you typically see in large-scale floods.  In fact, you see the relative hardness of rock on display in the canyon walls: the harder rock walls are more vertical, while the softer rock walls are more eroded.  If it were mud, there would be no canyon at all.

That digressed from the original point but these are just more examples of statements that young earth creationists make that are, on the face of it, absurd.  To paraphrase Conrad Hyers: you are asked to believe several impossible things before breakfast. 

The Internet Monk is Mad

Chaplain Mike has a simply devastating post on the Bruce Waltke fiasco and what it means to modern evangelicalism. He puts forth a plea to the evangelical community to actually learn the science that seems to be so vexing:

If certain groups of Christians doubt that the evidence leads to the almost universally accepted conclusions of the scientific community, I suggest that we should be encouraging believers to pursue scientific vocations, to gain credibility by practicing honest accountable research, to do the hard work of coming up with compelling alternative models, and to make their case in the public arena.

The principle problem here is, of course, that with organizations like the ICR and AiG, they think they are learning the science. It isn't science they are learning, of course, but some bassackwards pseudoscientific deductions from a narrow interpretation of scripture. These deductions are completely at odds with accepted science in a host of different disciplines. Given the nature of scripture and the time-depth involved since the Bible was written down, they cannot help but be so. That the writers of these organizations are not even bothering to try to learn the science is obvious from Brian Thomas' horrendous post about Australopithecus sediba, on which I commented here.

Chaplain Mike then lists eight common practices of creationist groups that those of us familiar with this controversy have come to know so well. The post has the air of someone who has "had it" with creationists and isn't going to take it any more. Along the way, he has two particularly stinging criticisms:

• Creationists ignore the complex history of interpretation when it comes to critical Biblical texts like the early chapters of Genesis. To them, there has only been one accepted view of the creation narratives throughout the ages, until some geologists started suggesting that the earth might be older than previously thought, which led to “liberal theology” and all its resultant social ills.
• Creationists ignore the history of their own views. They fail to understand, for example, that the theory of a worldwide flood that changed the actual physical structures of the earth has its roots in “visions” by Adventist prophetess Ellen G. White, a teacher most Bible-believing Christians would find wanting in terms of theological acumen.

Among the early Sabbatarian Adventists, White was considered a prophetess, although the value of her visions have been debated. She appears to have supported Arianism, as opposed to trinitarianism, however, which is not an SDA position. The deluvial visions that she had in the late 1800s became the basis for the writings of George McCready Price in the 1910s and 1920s. Price's writings were full of unsupportable assertions on the geological record that were ignored by competent geologists. Sadly, these views were picked up in the 1960s and 1970s by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb for their book The Genesis Flood, which inspired a new generation of creationists. As Davis Young puts it:

All the evidence of the rocks tells us that they were not produced or arranged by a flood. The views of earth history offered by Woodward, Catcott, G.M. Price, Whitcomb and Morris, and John R. Rice are simply and obviously incorrect.

In Bruce Waltke's video, he asserts that to ignore the wealth of scientific evidence for evolution would put evangelical Christianity in the same camp as various cults that refuse to interact with the world. I wonder if that is strong enough. The complete rejection of the clear evidence of God's created planet suggests that a strange gnosticism is at work, where the record of God's creation is ignored or distorted so that a particular interpretation of His Word can go unchallenged. It is difficult to see how the modern evangelical church can be helped by such a movement.

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