Is Genesis History? is a 2017 feature film which interviews various believing, literalist, Christian PhDs about how they reconcile their belief in a young earth with their scientific training.
And by “young earth” they mean literally 6000 or so years old. Given the fact (in my worldview anyhow) that the planet is vastly older than this, it necessitates some intellectual moves which are genuinely interesting, even if I regard them as quite probably wrong.
Since a Christian friend recently recommended the film (perhaps attempting to bring me into the fold of young-earth-creationist Christianity? Or considering the merits of it herself?) I watched the movie and took notes; thus this post.
But first, some Kuhn
Early in the movie Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is introduced. This is one of my favorite books and completely apt to any conversation between creationists and evolutionists.
One of the main ideas in Kuhn is that a scientific paradigm is generally maintained even when “anomalous” observations conflict. Kuhn calls this normal science. Normal science is all about filling in the details, executing the research program implied by the prevailing paradigm. It enables the systematic collection and initial interpretation of observations, the point of which is to verify whether the existing paradigm is correct, but which also to an extent presupposes that paradigm.
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The tendency when something doesn’t fit is to make it fit. This can be quite sensible, as often an anomalous observation can be explained with only minor refinements to the model, or by an increase of rigor in measurement.
But eventually, the observations that the current model can’t explain become too numerous and too glaring; a state of crisis is recognized. This brings on Kuhn’s other mode of revolutionary science; in other phrasing, of scientific revolutions.
Whereas normal science modifies the model incrementally within the parameters set by the paradigm, revolutionary science proposes a new model that is in some regard fundamentally incompatible with the current approach. Kuhn’s term is incommensurability, meaning that there is no reconciliation of the two worldviews possible based only on the assumptions of either, as the arguments for a new worldview are expressed in terminology which the status quo paradigm does not recognize as valid:
Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing science and its problems, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.
The ultimate resolution of a scientific crisis is itself an extended process. Old and new paradigms can coexist:
[T]he proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction…. [I]n some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other.
Regarding evolution, featured prominently in Is Genesis History?, this process has already played itself out for the most part among scientists. Those featured in the movie are some of the remaining dissenters from the idea of Darwinian evolution. They do see the world differently from the mainstream, and that is both fascinating and useful. The critiques they offer could, in theory, be anomalies relative to the current paradigm, evidence of incorrect assumptions. They are challenges that should be met and responded to.
Priors
At this point in my life, I regard evolution as one of the most profound truths about the world; to my understanding, it is a property of reality itself, the force or tendency that brought about everything that is. What’s difficult to imagine is a world where what persists somehow doesn’t supplant what no longer exists. It’s true more or less by definition.
But the ground covered in Is Genesis History? is very familiar to me, as I contemplated very much the same set of issues for a little over a decade after first learning about the evidence for biological evolution.
The difficulty for me largely stemmed from the insistence of Mormon revelation that Adam and Eve were human beings who actually lived at the same time in the distant past, and from whom all human beings descend. Another difficulty was the apparent complex history of the Genesis creation account which occurs in two contradictory forms, the non-individual meaning of “Adam” in Hebrew, and the sheer metaphorical and literary utility of the creation story, which in my view far exceeds its scientific or historical power. If an account works better as myth, literature, poetry, and metaphor, then maybe that’s the correct way to view the it?
It turns out, Is Genesis History? very much disagrees!
The plan of attack
Is Genesis History? is determined to convince us of a few things:
- That the biblical Book of Genesis is a literal historical account, including even the earliest, most-mythological-seeming material: the creation of everything in six days of 24 hours in length; the fall of Adam and Eve bringing death and a curse upon all of existence; a global flood that completely covered all landmasses around the planet and destroyed all animal life not contained in the Ark; and the destruction of a Tower of Babel resulting in the instantaneous confounding of languages.
- That scientific investigation has somehow systematically vastly overestimated the passage of time. This includes time reflected by radiometric dating, times inferred from the observed speed of light and the distribution of stars throughout the universe, times implied by fossilization processes, etc.
- That evolution is either completely non-real, or possible only while maintaining the integrity of a set of originally created species, i.e. not generating new species. Some of the interviewees contemplated that animals might change over time, but none accepted that species could evolve enough to become their own sort of animal. At one point, a biologist pulled a neanderthal skull and an australopithecus skull out of his backpack and declared that the neanderthal is of the same “created kind” as humans, while the australopithecus is not. (How he determined that, I’m not sure.)
Well, is it?
History that is. Is Genesis ‘history’?
The movie uses the word history repeatedly. Conspicuously. At times that to me seemed inappropriate.
To my view, the title, Is Genesis History?, is anachronistic. When the text of Genesis was first set down, was history, as we now conceive of it, even a thing?
I’m fresh off a Wikipedia deep dive about Thucydides, the Athenian historian. (Yes, I read a lot of Wikipedia, which has pros but also cons; it’s better than the news, or social media, anyway.) The Wikipedia view at least is that Thucydides innovated a lot of what we now regard as history.
Whether something is seen as proper history or not I think is largely a measure of whether one sees a recognizable epistemology at work. Are the sort of things the historian regarded as real and reliable the sort of things I regard as real and reliable? Then history it is! (In this one gazes across a paradigm boundary, and is not persuaded; an instance of Kuhn’s incommensurability.)
Is a contemporary notion of literal truth even something ancient people would recognize? Pre-modern worldviews could be quite different from ours, even from that of bible-literalist Christians, who (whether they like it or not) are downstream from the Enlightenment and scientific revolution just like the rest of us. The film never defines literal truth, but definition it implies is relative to science, to objective ways of knowing. When someone says the bible’s creation account is literally true they mean that someone with an iPhone who somehow time-traveled back to 4000 BC would be able to record a video of God’s hand forming the humans from the dust of the earth, come back to the present, and post it to Tik-Tok. And when Is Genesis History? asks about history, I think they mean it in a similar, iPhone-Tok-Tokian sense. But that division of the world into objective, literal reality and everything else, I don’t think existed at the time the Genesis text came together. The scientific and the metaphorical modes hadn’t been distinguished, I don’t think. Everything was a sort of mixture of both.
Are we wrong about time?
The movie Is Genesis History? really hates radiometric dating. I also remember, well, not hating, but seriously questioning the reliability of radiometric dating as I first took in the idea of evolution. Radiometric dating is what makes the idea of a young earth and a six-day creation so implausible; or, conversely, a young earth and a six-day creation make radiometric dating implausible.
So, it makes sense that a creationist film would focus so much attention on the topic, and the skepticism is refreshing. Is it possible that the calibration of all those dating methods is somehow profoundly flawed? It sure is possible. Isotopic ratios are finicky things—there’s plenty of room for conceptual errors as well as user error. The methods operate on the basis of certain assumptions. Reasonable assumptions, assumptions that have been empirically evaluated to the extent possible, but assumptions nonetheless, such as that the rate of decay we measure is the same, more or less, as that which prevailed over the lifetime of the objects in question.
One interviewee describes getting certain samples dated using multiple methods, and how they disagreed. For him this was all the evidence he needed to conclude that the dating methods themselves are deeply unreliable. He transitioned quickly from normal science to a revolutionary mode of science. Damn these anomalies, let’s overthrow the whole of science! Or a huge portion of it anyway.
The challenge is multiplied by the existence of various other methods of estimating dates, such as astronomy’s modeling of the age of stars and geological stratigraphic analysis.
Another window on the passage of time is the process of fossilization. The film discusses the numerous dinosaur fossils which preserve soft tissue. Again, the interviewee is quick to move to a revolutionary mode of thinking: if there are soft tissues preserved, it could only be due to a young earth, therefore the dating methods must all be wrong, therefore God. Whereas those in a “normal science” sort of mindset say, We must have missed something about tissue preservation—let’s tweak our model.
Almost there
This is simply to observe that some of those interviewed in the film go a long ways toward accepting something like Darwinian evolution; they can accept that species change over time in response to their environment; they can accept that there is wide variation and yet clear relatedness between all species; but because a theological commitment to God himself being the one who creates new species, / the earth being young / the days of creation being short / all animals surviving a population bottleneck in the Ark of Noah, they don’t follow the acceptance of small degrees of variation explained by evolution to the natural conclusion that all variation is explained by evolution. Their worldview suffers in Occam’s razor terms, in that they have to say (arbitrarily) which aspects of biological variation are and which aren’t explained by evolution. There has to be a part of their model of reality that says “if [condition], then evolution; else creation by the hand of God”.
I don’t know if anyone completely rejects evolution. The existence of different dog species seem like pretty good evidence that change is possible (through artificial selection); and species in the wild have been observed to change in ways predicted by evolutionary theory within human lifetimes. The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a striking recent example. The evidence is simply too clear for short-term modifications through natural selection. The issue is less about whether, more about how far.
The Bayes’ rule of it
For those with a pre-existing belief in a very literal sort of creator God, it makes sense to defend the rest of their worldview by taking a skeptical view of evidence that seems to push against or even contradict that belief. Bayes’ theorem clarifies this:
In the first arrangement of Bayes’ theorem above, it can be seen that the higher
And in the second arrangement of Bayes’ theorem above, it’s clear that those with a very low prior belief in evolution
I find the evidence for evolution very convincing, and the evidence for an interventionist, creator God to be unreliable. I used to have a high prior belief in God
Selective Transcript and Notes on Is Genesis History?
What follows are my notes and comments on the film, Is Genesis History?, edited only very slightly to clarify and for reader convenience.
Narrator: “Del Tackett, DM”
“He currently teaches as an adjunct professor for the Alliance Defending Freedom, Summit Ministries and Impact 360. Del has his doctorate in Management and Computer Science.”
Does the erosion since Mt. St Helens indicate something…. like… erosion can happen fast?
Global flood?
4:08 If flood waters covered the mountains, there should be evidence.
4:23 Steve Austin, PhD, geologist
Basics of sedimentary strata; fossils; water as driver of canyon process.
6:07 what is evidence that hundreds-of-millions-of-years model is wrong?
Flat-lying strata; he considers them too flat, that there should be more evidence of erosion.
(Aren’t they flattened by the pressure of the layers above??)
Evidence of very rapid sedimentation, in just hours or minutes. (What is that evidence?)
6:42 Quotes Genesis 7:11
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
7:00 Imagines the oceans were propelled over the continent, leading to the marine fossils.
Would have happened in 6 month he thinks.
Sees the strata as coming from different parts of the global flood.
Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah?
7:58 is Genesis about a local flood?
8:01 No; mountains have risen since the flood, thus the water could have covered them.
8:40 Grand Canyon – “most geologists have jettisoned that idea” that the Colorado carved the Grand Canyon over tens of millions of years.
“It’s hard to sustain a canyon like this for tens of millions of years”
He thinks the canyon walls would have eroded over that time, destroying the canyon.
9:05 His explanation: “catastrophic erosion by drainage of lakes”
Large bodies of water trapped after global flood. Cites Hopi Buttes and says there was a massive lake the suddenly rushed out. I think it’s about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidahochi_Formation
Which apparently others have contemplated, though not invoking a Genesis flood as the source of the lake.
10:00 “the incredible power of moving water”
10:27 side canyon; “granite basement rock” and strata above
“An erosional boundary of colossal scale”
Talking about various sequences representing seawater coming into the continental interior, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratonic_sequence
11:47 False dichotomy that it was either a small local flood or a global flood.
12:10 Says the layer under the Great Unconformity is too uniform to be the result of half a billion years; must have been planed off by water.
13:08 “It’s not a little water and a lot of time; it’s a lot of water and a little time.”
13:48 Paul Nelson, PhD, philosopher; Computer History Museum
14:15 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, good cite
Paradigm shifts.
Two major views:
- conventional paradigm; deep time; 13 billion years; gradual process; simple to complex; strictly physical processes, no mind, no creator, no design
- “historical Genesis paradigm”; “everything starts with a divine mind, a creator, an intelligence”; more recent; universe, solar system, comes into being fully formed as a functioning system
Considers bible a witness to the events of creation, and that it therefore is evidence that must be considered.
17:15 what is the difference between the two paradigms?
“Both of them are scientific in the sense of looking at a common body of data”
17:32 “Really, at the deepest level, is two competing views of history”
They keep using the word ‘history’; I guess when you believe the world is 6000 years old, and literally documented in the Bible from the very beginning, it makes sense.
18:00 Steven Boyd, PhD, Hebraist; Hebrew Union College
Bible expert talking about Genesis 1
18:26 “Steve, it seems there is a lot of history in the bible. Is that how you see it?”
8:32 “Oh, absolutely. In fact, the first thing is that it’s an accurate historical account. The presentation is such, and the perspective of the writers, that they believed they were talking about real events.”
19:00 goes through initial creation account. Genesis 1:2 “water ball that is in space”.
Literal days?
19:30 “Well first of all, it’s not poetry. The world’s greatest Hebraists all affirm that this is a narrative.” Says because it’s not epic poetry, therefore it’s a narrative.
“And here we have narrative, to indicate that this is historical. What that means is that you should understand the words, the normal way in which those Hebrew words are understood.”
He rejects metaphorical interpretations, but seems overconfident in doing so based merely on the text not being epic poetry.
20:52 “The biblical text is not compatible with the standard, conventional paradigm”
Recounting creation of Adam and Eve, Noah, global flood, “if this is a judgment on mankind then it has to be global”
Table of nations, sons of Noah; how language developed (Babel)”
21:57 Asserting that this is “one long historical narrative”
Narrator: “It is”
Genealogies important in OT and NT; sees them as important and literal. Doesn’t mention the conflict between gospels.
22:56 “It shows that Christianity has a historical basis; it’s what the scriptures say, and the scriptures represent actual, historical data.”
23:20 The narrator agrees the genealogies are really important because they indicate that the earth was created very recently. “So where do the millions of years come from?”
22:25 Andrew Snelling, PhD, geologist; Flagstaff, AZ
Volcano, lava flows, more evidence of sudden dramatic events
Mt. St. Helens
Yellowstone caldera
Lava flows in India
25:03 “We can’t use present-day rates of these processes to understand how quickly and how majestically in terms of scale the geological record accumulated”
(This implies that there is no effort to determine rates over time, which is obviously false.)
How do we determine age of rocks?
25:38 Dating by radioisotopes
What if radioactive decay occurs at a different rate now than in the past?
(This is why multiple dating methods are used when possible.)
He says he dated samples using multiple methods and found large discrepancies. K-AR, RB-SR, SM-ND.
Because of these discrepancies, “If we have an open system, that means we can’t trust it to give us dependable dates for those rocks.”
(The most likely explanation in my view is user error; there has been great effort put into calibrating these dating systems, but they’re not without their complexities, and it’s not inconceivable that individual samples were handled incorrectly, or analyzed using methods irrelevant to their actual age, and so on. If discrepancies are being found systematically, he should have published papers on it, it would have been a great scientific contribution. It’s certainly not impossible that there’s something wrong with the prevailing paradigm, but he should do the work to demonstrate it.)
Lyell, Principles of Geology; Darwin, Origin of Species
They’re attacking the measurement of age of rocks largely to undermine biological evolution. If the earth is young, then it’s harder to imagine enough changes to accumulate to evolve various species.
However, the evolution of species also serves as great evidence of a billions-of-years-old earth.
29:48 “Today everything’s much much quieter; today’s processes are extremely slow, but they can’t explain how we got this erosion, how we got these layers, how we got these cliffs”
(They can explain that if there’s more time to pass. Radiometric dating is only one reason to believe in an old earth; stratigraphic analysis as well; not to mention again the existence of complex life.)
31:06 “That’s not the scale that we see today, with localized sedimentation, and to get it flat lying like this over such a large area, its like you have to make your pancake all at once very rapidly”
(Wikipedia informs us that “Several structural features such as ripple marks, sand dune deposits, rain patches, slump marks, and fossil tracks are not only well preserved within the formation, but also contribute evidence of its eolian origin.” Eolian meaning wind-deposited.)
(He’s doing what the other guy did; saying there’s no erosion, therefore it happened suddenly. Couldn’t the erosion have been removed by some later process? Also, just eyeballing it, it’s sandstone, it always looks hugely eroded, so what’s he talking about?)
32:21 “So this means that the Schnebly Hills formation in this area had to form in a matter of hours”
(Sometimes things do happen rapidly, like lava flows, but sandstone?)
(Silt deposits at the bottom of a streambed occur within human lifetimes and can be quite uniform.)
(The belief that there is a drastic difference between rates of extreme events today versus the past strikes me as a fallacy based on over-interpreting the narrow window of time we experience in our individual human lives. Extreme events are, by definition, rare. A pareto-type distribution describes them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle. So, small erosion happens all the time; you can see flecks of sand being blown away by wind in a given moment. Large erosion happens more rarely; such as the recent effects of the Missoula floods as recently as 15k years ago, as at Wallula Gap and the Palouse. The same for volcanic eruptions: venting of gas happens every day; Mt St Helens eruptions happen every century; the sort of things that formed some of the layers discussed in the video would occur on extremely long time scales, millions to hundreds of millions of years; but that doesn’t mean they never happen.)
32:50 sloping bands in Coconino sandstone. Indicates underwater deposition. He thinks it happened within hours, weeks, months.
(What makes him think that other than his pre-existing belief in a young earth?)
(They keep calling it “history”.)
34:17 Kurt Wise, PhD, paleontologist; Dayton, TN
“complex design of biological systems”
Abandoned coal mine.
35:20 He’s completely mischaracterizing “the conventional paradigm”. No scientist assumes constant uniformity of processes; see above discussion of power-law distributions. They’re attacking a straw-man.
36:10 Rockslide as evidence of lack of uniformity. Nobody would disagree; geology is not what it was 100 years ago. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz#The_Spokane_floods:an_outrageous_hypothesis They seem to be responding to what some people used to think about geology.
See power-law distribution. Wikipedia: “The distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and human-made phenomena approximately follow a power law over a wide range of magnitudes: these include the sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares, cloud sizes, the foraging pattern of various species, the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations, the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the species richness in clades of organisms, the sizes of power outages, volcanic eruptions, human judgments of stimulus intensity and many other quantities. … Acoustic attenuation follows frequency power-laws within wide frequency bands for many complex media. Allometric scaling laws for relationships between biological variables are among the best known power-law functions in nature.”
36:46 “you can’t use the present to judge the past, to understand the past”
He divides “history” into epochs which are really different from each other. Sounds unnecessarily complicated.
- “Creation epoch”
- “Edenian epoch” – “very different from the present”; humans living forever
- “Antedeluvian period” – dinosaurs? Continents in different positions; different climate; mountains being created; continents moving; water washing across continents; ripping sediment off; “earthquakes of astonishing power”
- “Post-Flood” – “slow decrease in intensity and in frequency of those things”; ice ages. Global warming: “the earth is still recovering from the flood”
- “Modern epoch” – consistent back to within a few centuries of the flood
He believes there are fundamentally different epochs, but what’s the evidence?
42:32 Marcus Ross, PhD, paleontologist; Discovery Park of America
Dinosaurs; “all the animals that used to live before the flood”
naturalistic vs. biblical
Alternate paradigm for dinosaur.
Thinks rock layer feet thick could take “minutes to make”, “sometimes even seconds”; what’s the evidence? Outlandish claim.
The different waves of “the flood” producing different layers of sediment with different layers of dead animals / fossils. But why wouldn’t all the animals die at once when the flood waters drowned them?
Mesosaurus fossils on land as evidence for global flood.
It seems like good evidence that water once covered those locations. This is different from a single global flood 6000 years ago.
They focus on the Great Unconformity again, suggesting it is uniform because of a global, worldwide flood.
45:38 Cambrian explosion. “Makes perfect sense from a creation and flood perspective”
He sees Cambrian explosion as really sudden, but it’s only so in relative terms. Also, would “creation” be happening after the “flood”??? That’s not how it’s presented in the Bible. He keeps describing waves of destruction from the flood, and phases of creation, as happening interleaved with each other. This clearly makes no sense.
45:40 He suggests that animals originated in the Cambrian explosion, but this is incorrect; many sorts of animals appear at that time, but there is evidence of animals long before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal#Evolutionary_origin
His view appears to be the view at the time of “Origin of Species”, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#History_and_significance
47:26 trackways of animals, footprints first, body parts later
47:50 – “from an old earth perspective that’s really weird and hard to grapple with” — why? Easily explained by different rates of fossilization and survival for the different materials.
Lack of appreciation of survivorship bias.
49:07 world post-flood is “radically different” from prior
49:23 nasty features of animals (claws, etc.) he sees as a result of the Fall
50:20 Arthur Chadwick, PhD, Taphonomist; Hanson Ranch, WY
bone bed; dinosaurs
He says the bones at the site have not been eroded; fossilization “requires special circumstances, not the least of which is rapid burial”
“that condition requires a sorting process that can only take place during a catastrophic emplacement”
(“requires”; “only”; strong words)
53:47 asserts that “dinosaurs are already dinosaurs when they first appear”; “an enigma for those who believe in evolution of the dinosaurs”
He rejects “transitional forms”; some are “challenging” but he rejects them. “The rule is there are no transitional fossils”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil#Prominent_examples ?
The belief that there are no valid transitional fossils again mirrors Darwin himself. Wikipedia: “In 1859, when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published, the fossil record was poorly known. Darwin described the perceived lack of transitional fossils as ‘the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory,’ but he explained it by relating it to the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
He says his views are based on evidence, but he’s selective about the evidence he admits. They earlier cited “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, and he seems like a good example of someone who ignores anomalous observations because they don’t fit his preconceptions.
55:55 Kevin Anderson, PhD – Microbiologist; Van Andel Creation Research Center
fragment of triceratops horn
He says they have found tissue with cells in the horn. Apparently this happens pretty often:
He says it’s because the earth is only 6000 years old. So, he’ll throw away the explanatory power of evolution, geology, etc. for this seeming anomaly. Which is his right, but what’s his better explanation? Saying “God did it” is a non-explanation, unless you can show evidence that such a being/force exists.
They’re again attacking radiometric dating. They really hate radiometric dating.
1:02:10 focus on long period of time being required for evolution.
1:03:04 Robert Carter, PhD – Marine Biologist; Coral World, St. Thomas
sharks
evolution
“of course species change” – this contradicts Arthur Chadwick, PhD’s view at 53:47
Sounds like he believes in Lamarckian evolution but also the immutability of species.
1:04:51 “So we don’t get one kind becoming another kind?”
“No. Evolutionary theory requires that small, random changes can explain everything we see, but it can’t.”
“And why can’t it?”
“Because life is so complex that small changes can’t explain it.”
That’s an article of faith.
“Just like you can’t take a computer operating system and look at it and say this was built up one digit at a time over any length of time, no it took an intelligent person to sit down and put it together.”
“Well I can guarantee you as one who was in that world, that if anyone in the area of computer science were to say if we just randomly change some things in this operating system it’ll get better, I mean no one would agree with that.”
Randomness plays a huge role in contemporary computer science:
If you produced sufficient numbers of randomly mutated copies of an operating system, and subjected them to selection pressures such as users being able to replace malfunctioning operating systems; with survivor operating systems being replicated and rejected ones not; then over time the operating systems would get better.
1:05:34 “We’re not gonna get the shark to evolve into a bird. The number of changes, and the types of changes, are not something that you can do one change at a time.”
He believes that, but what’s the proof? They’re talking about computer science, well, give me a proof of that statement. I actually think you could prove the opposite, that there is no large-scale change that could not be reduced to smaller steps.
How you could be an effective marine biologist while rejecting evolution I cannot fathom.
1:05:50 sea urchins and starfish. He seems to be showing how sea urchins are related to starfish; what’s the point of such relationships if God just created each immutable species instantaneously?
Sea cucumber. He shows how it’s also an echinoderm. Calls them “related in their creation, not in an evolutionary sense; but our creator took this phylum of life, the echinoderms, and created this and this and this on a similar pattern, and that’s what we see across the entire realm of life, similarities and differences.”
“So, what makes them different?”
“Well, genetically they share most of their genes in common. They’re called Hox genes.” Getting into embryology. The different developmental paths of different types of animals.
Differential activation of parts of the genome.
“Rob, that’s so far beyond anything that we know, even in our most complex software systems, that it’s almost beyond imagination to think that someone would look at that and say it all happened by chance.”
“Yes, and it only brings glory to God. You can’t build something like that one thing at a time. You need it functional, in all its interlocking 4-dimensional complexity, it’s not something you can do one letter at a time with natural selection.”
“It all has to be there.”
“Yeah, and the same way when we talk about the environment out here on the coral reef, if you don’t have all these interlocking pieces of that puzzle, you don’t have that ecology, the system will come crashing down if you just remove a couple of very important factors that are there, they have to be there together or it doesn’t happen.”
“So not only do we have this interdependency, this mutualism so to speak, down at the genetic level, now we even make it more complex by saying there’s that same mutualism at the higher level.”
“Yes, in fact the entire world has a mutualism.”
“It’s impossible to think that all of this could have happened just by a series of slow processes over billions of years.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
It’s not impossible to think that. I think that. It’s not “just” by a that series of slow processes.
1:12:40 Todd Wood, PhD – Biologist; Memphis Zoo, TN
Obvious relatedness of different animals. (The problem of taxonomy.)
He sees them as descended from a “single pair of critters” on the Ark.
Cat/lion more like a template; he calls it a “multitool”.
How do the animals on the ark relate to the original created species before the flood? They feel similar.
This is a way of resolving the huge variety of life with the small size of the Ark.
“All of that diversity that we have today is built into those two of every kind.”
He sees evolution by natural selection as doing “fine tuning”. Darwin’s finches’ beaks becoming longer.
“A really exquisite design in the beginning has provided these creatures with the ability to survive and to change for their benefit.”
(So, you’re saying that God created animals that were capable of evolution by natural selection?)
“Now don’t get me wrong, I mean natural selection and random variation can do amazing things, I mean, it’s pretty astonishing the kinds of changes that we can see, but we don’t see one kind turning into another, all we see are variations that happen within a created kind, so there’s a felid tree that has all the cats on it, there’s the canid tree that has the dogs on it, there’s the ursid tree which has all the bears on it, there’s the equid with all the horses on it. Each individual created kind then, has its own individual tree, so that you end up with something like an orchard, or a forest.”
“As a scientist, it seems what you’re saying is that the Genesis paradigm answers all of this data better.”
“Ultimately I think it does because it embraces both similarity and difference.”
1:18:32 human evolution
neanderthal skull
Australopithecus africanus skull
He says the neanderthal is of the same “created kind” as humans, but the austrolopothicus is not.
The need to draw distinct lines between “created kinds” burdens this worldview with needless complexity.
It’s very much an update of the pre-darwinian view of there being fundamentally distinct species.
1:21:32 Danny Faulkner, PhD – Astronomer; Chino Valley, AZ
regularity of solar system
“the design of the sun and the moon”
The possibility of eclipses. “This is the only planet on which it happens.”
That’s not correct.
Wikipedia: “The gas giant planets have many moons and thus frequently display eclipses.”
Who is this guy?
How to reconcile the speed of light and apparent distance of stars/galaxies with a young earth?
“We call this the light travel-time problem.”
He seems to be suggesting that within one day of creation, time might flow extremely quickly.
In which case, is it really a “day” anymore, if more time passed?
Development of rings of gas giant planets. Says ring systems are fairly young.
1:26:25 Big Bang
He thinks it’s a mistake to interpret Genesis according to current scientific paradigm; seems sensible.
But…
1:27:39 narrator “We need to interpret the universe in terms of Genesis, not the other way around.”
I’d say both views are relevant.
1:28:12 Douglas Petrovich, PhD – Archaeologist; Oriental Institute Museum
They’re visiting the museum, I don’t think it’s his institution.
Near east archaeology vs. biblical text
Urbanization. Babel.
He says Eridu is Babel.
His model is of a “post-Babel dispersion”
Sees sudden diversity of languages.
Same problem as biological evolution. He sees the diversity as appearing suddenly based on action by God; while I imagine he doesn’t think God per se made Italian, Spanish, and Romanian diverge from Latin. Similar to seeing God create specific species (“created kinds”) but more recently seeing evolution by natural selection.
Ur, Abraham, reason to think Abraham was real.
I have no objection, Abraham may well have existed.
1:33:29 George Grant, PhD – Pastor; Bountiful Blessings Farm
Adam and Eve placed in a garden; “more than just a story”
24 hour day as really important.
(Agreed—the day/night cycle matters.)
“When we get to Genesis chapter 2 we start to see the meaning and purpose of man, of course in Genesis chapter 3 we see the disruption of everything by the Fall. And the implications of an [sic] historical fall, an actual man and an actual woman, who actually yielded to actual sin, have implications all through the rest of the bible. If you remove a literal Adam and Eve, that changes the whole shape of what history is and how history is remembered.”
“Is that because when we pull an Adam and Eve out of a historical record, we can then pretty much make up whatever we think about man and marriage and even sexuality?”
“Absolutely.”
This is peak literalism.
Paul and Peter relying on Genesis for various teachings.
“Even judgment is part of understanding that historical record.”
“You cut things off from history and you lose sight of the meaning of all of it.”
Again, they are saying ‘history’.
“I think most Christians when we talk about for example the life of Christ, those are understood to be historical accounts. Why is it when we look at the account in Genesis, that we have a tendency not to want to do that?”
“We have a tendency not to do it because we’re constantly exhorted to not see it that way.”
“From the culture around us?”
“The culture around us, from theologians, modern theologians who are trying to, somehow, in their minds, fit the truths of scripture with the so-called discoveries of science, which if you know anything about the history of science you know is an incredibly unreliable path, so we’re constantly bombarded with this message that we have to adjust our view.”
“But I think that there are a lot of Christians who have a sense that the historicity of Genesis is just not that important to their Christianity.”
“I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods on that. When you, somehow, make those chapters a different category altogether and non-historical, what are you doing to all of the rest of the bible, the bible that assumes that it’s true, the bible that treats it as historically true, the bible that refers back to all of the characters that are there, does that then negate the whole of the bible? Well, yes. And that’s exactly what the strategy was of the higher critics in the 18th and 19th centuries. They knew if you could somehow attack the first three or the first eleven chapters of Genesis, you’ve done away with the whole thing.”
They again speak of Genesis as “history”.
“And moral relativism is the necessary outcome.”
(Is that necessarily true?)
The narrator bears testimony of Genesis, the creation, Adam and Eve, the flood, etc.
“Genesis is history. True history.”
Dramatic orchestral music.
Image Credits
- William Blake, The Ancient of Days in Europe a Prophecy, copy D, from the British Museum, 1794.
- Adalbert Seitz, Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde (The Large Butterflies of the Earth) , p. 18, 1912.
- William de Brailes, The Flood of Noah, ca. 1250.
- Rob Farrow, Hampton Court – Astronomical Clock, 2022; CC-BY-SA 2.0 Generic.
- Pingelig, Stained glass window depicting Creation according to Genesis. Church of Raperswilen, Switzerland, 2014; CC-BY-SA 4.0 International.
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