The creationists’ jumbled line

Press, 30 August 1989, Page 20

The creationists’ jumbled line

CREATION scientists subscribe to a jumble of half-truths that they say prove Darwin wrong and Genesis right. Their “science” is not endorsed by any established Church. The Pope has condemnea it. A Lutheran priest testified against it in California last month, claiming that he represented most of mainline Christendom. But enough evangelical preachers (Pat Robertson, for instance, and Jimmy Swaggart) endorse it for most of Bible-belt America to confuse it with a belief in God — and therefore to like the idea.

Creation scientists say they can prove, scientifically, five things. All methods used to date the age of the Earth are inaccurate (true). Life’s complexity implies the existence of a creator (to many an attractive belief, but neither verifiable nor falsifiable). There are no transitional

forms in the fossil record (nonsense). All fossils were created and deposited in one year following the Biblical flood (funny they ended up in such neat order all over the world). Finally, man and dinosaurs coexisted.

This last is the only proposition for which they offer conventional “proof.” Their evidence for the other propositions consists mostly of obfuscation of the “there’s life on Mars — they did an experiment on rats that proves it” variety. But in the Paluxy River in Texas, they claim to find fossil dinosaur tracks and fossil man tracks criss-crossing each other. This sounds convincing until you see the man tracks, which are blurred depressions that could have been made by anything from an ostrich to a hippo and were probably made by relatively small, three-toed dinosaurs of a type common in the area at the time.

These arguments emanate mostly from the Institute for Creation Science in California, where a few miscellaneous exscientists (none of them biologists) who believe in creationism present themselves as freethinking researchers. The knots into which they tie themselves are Illustrated by the case of Archaeopteryx, a fossil animal that was half-way between bird and small dinosaur, and thus a step in an evolution.

Nonsense, said the creationists, it’s just a bird with tail, teeth and claws: nothing reptilian about it. Then along came Sir Fred Hoyle with his (refuted) charge that the feathers were faked. Told you so, said the creationists, it’s just a reptile: nothing bird-like about it. California has recently revoked the institute’s licence to grant science degrees, saying it teaches religion. Copyright — The Economist