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Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible.
It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead
relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that creation science fails to qualify as scientific because it lacks empirical support, supplies no testable hypotheses, and resolves to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes. Courts, most often in the United States where the question has been asked in the context of teaching the subject in public schools, have consistently ruled since the 1980s that creation science is a religious view rather than a scientific one. Historians, philosophers of science and skeptics have described creation science as a pseudoscientific attempt to map the Bible into scientific facts. Professional biologists have criticized creation science for being unscholarly, and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.
Beliefs and activities
Religious basis
Creation science is based largely upon chapters 1–11 of the Book of
Genesis. These describe how God calls the world into existence through
the power of speech ("And God said, Let there be light," etc.) in six
days, calls all the animals and plants into existence, and molds the
first man from clay and the first woman from a rib taken from the man's
side; a worldwide flood destroys all life except for Noah
and his family and representatives of the animals, and Noah becomes the
ancestor of the 70 "nations" of the world; the nations live together
until the incident of the Tower of Babel,
when God disperses them and gives them their different languages.
Creation science attempts to explain history and science within the span
of Biblical chronology, which places the initial act of creation some six thousand years ago.
Modern religious affiliations
Most creation science proponents hold fundamentalist or Evangelical
Christian beliefs in Biblical literalism or Biblical inerrancy, as
opposed to the higher criticism supported by liberal Christianity in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. However, there are also examples of Islamic and Jewish scientific creationism that conform to the accounts of creation as recorded in their religious doctrines.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a history of support for creation science. This dates back to George McCready Price, an active Seventh-day Adventist who developed views of flood geology, which formed the basis of creation science. This work was continued by the Geoscience Research Institute, an official institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, located on its Loma Linda University campus in California.
Creation science is generally rejected by the Church of England as well as the Roman Catholic Church. The Pontifical Gregorian University
has officially discussed intelligent design as a "cultural phenomenon"
without scientific elements. The Church of England's official website
cites Charles Darwin's local work assisting people in his religious
parish.
Views on science
Creation science rejects evolution and the common descent of all living things on Earth. Instead, it asserts that the field of evolutionary biology is itself pseudoscientific or even a religion.
Creationists argue instead for a system called baraminology, which
considers the living world to be descended from uniquely created kinds
or "baramins."
Creation science incorporates the concept of catastrophism
to reconcile current landforms and fossil distributions with Biblical
interpretations, proposing the remains resulted from successive
cataclysmic events, such as a worldwide flood and subsequent ice age. It rejects one of the fundamental principles of modern geology (and of modern science generally), uniformitarianism, which applies the same physical and geological laws observed on the Earth today to interpret the Earth's geological history.
Sometimes creationists attack other scientific concepts, like the Big Bang cosmological model or methods of scientific dating based upon radioactive decay. Young Earth creationists also reject current estimates of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth, arguing for creationist cosmologies with timescales much shorter than those determined by modern physical cosmology and geological science, typically less than 10,000 years.
The scientific community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideas
put forth in creation science as lying outside the boundaries of a
legitimate science.
The foundational premises underlying scientific creationism disqualify
it as a science because the answers to all inquiry therein are
preordained to conform to Bible doctrine, and because that inquiry is
constructed upon theories which are not empirically testable in nature.
Scientists also deem creation science's attacks against biological evolution to be without scientific merit.
The views of the scientific community were accepted in two significant
court decisions in the 1980s, which found the field of creation science
to be a religious mode of inquiry, not a scientific one.
History
Creation science began in the 1960s, as a fundamentalist Christian effort in the United States to prove Biblical inerrancy and nullify the scientific evidence for evolution.
It has since developed a sizable religious following in the United
States, with creation science ministries branching worldwide. The main ideas in creation science are: the belief in creation ex nihilo
(Latin: out of nothing); the conviction that the Earth was created
within the last 6,000–10,000 years; the belief that humans and other
life on Earth were created as distinct fixed "baraminological" kinds; and "flood geology" or the idea that fossils found in geological strata were deposited during a cataclysmic flood which completely covered the entire Earth. As a result, creationists also challenge the geologic and astrophysical measurements of the age of the Earth and the universe along with their origins, which creationists believe are irreconcilable with the account in the Book of Genesis. Creation science proponents often refer to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" or as "Darwinian evolution."
The creation science texts and curricula that first emerged in the 1960s focused upon concepts derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible and were overtly religious in nature, most notably proposing Noah's flood in the Biblical Genesis account as an explanation for the geological and fossil record. These works attracted little notice beyond the schools and congregations of conservative fundamental and Evangelical Christians until the 1970s, when its followers challenged the teaching of evolution in the public schools
and other venues in the United States, bringing it to the attention of
the public-at-large and the scientific community. Many school boards and
lawmakers were persuaded to include the teaching of creation science
alongside evolution in the science curriculum. Creation science texts and curricula used in churches and Christian schools were revised to eliminate their Biblical and theological references, and less explicitly sectarian versions of creation science education were introduced in public schools in Louisiana, Arkansas, and other regions in the United States.
The 1982 ruling in McLean v. Arkansas
found that creation science fails to meet the essential characteristics
of science and that its chief intent is to advance a particular
religious view. The teaching of creation science in public schools in the United States effectively ended in 1987 following the United States Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.
The court affirmed that a statute requiring the teaching of creation
science alongside evolution when evolution is taught in Louisiana public
schools was unconstitutional because its sole true purpose was to advance a particular religious belief.
In response to this ruling, drafts of the creation science school textbook Of Pandas and People were edited to change references of creation to intelligent design before its publication in 1989. The intelligent design movement
promoted this version. Requiring intelligent design to be taught in
public school science classes was found to be unconstitutional in the
2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District federal court case.
Before 1960s
The teaching of evolution was gradually introduced into more and more
public high school textbooks in the United States after 1900,
but in the aftermath of the First World War the growth of
fundamentalist Christianity gave rise to a creationist opposition to
such teaching. Legislation prohibiting the teaching of evolution was
passed in certain regions, most notably Tennessee's Butler Act of 1925.
The Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 sparked national concern that the science education in public schools was outdated. In 1958, the United States passed National Defense Education Act which introduced new education guidelines for science instruction. With federal grant funding, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study
(BSCS) drafted new standards for the public schools' science textbooks
which included the teaching of evolution. Almost half the nation's high
schools were using textbooks based on the guidelines of the BSCS soon
after they were published in 1963.
The Tennessee legislature did not repeal the Butler Act until 1967.
Creation science (dubbed "scientific creationism" at the time) emerged as an organized movement during the 1960s. It was strongly influenced by the earlier work of armchair geologist George McCready Price who wrote works such as Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory (1906) and The New Geology (1923) to advance what he termed "new catastrophism" and dispute the current geological time frames and explanations of geologic history. Price was cited at the Scopes Trial of 1925, but his writings had no credence among geologists and other scientists. Price's "new catastrophism" was also disputed by most other creationists until its revival with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, a work which quickly became an important text on the issue to fundamentalist Christians and expanded the field of creation science beyond critiques of geology into biology
and cosmology as well. Soon after its publication, a movement was
underway to have the subject taught in United States' public schools.
Court determinations
The various state laws prohibiting teaching of evolution were overturned in 1968 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas such laws violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
This ruling inspired a new creationist movement to promote laws
requiring that schools give balanced treatment to creation science when
evolution is taught. The 1981 Arkansas Act 590 was one such law that
carefully detailed the principles of creation science that were to
receive equal time in public schools alongside evolutionary principles. The act defined creation science as follows:
"'Creation-science' means the scientific evidences for creation
and inferences from those evidences. Creation-science includes the
scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:
- Sudden creation of the universe, and, in particular, life, from nothing;
- The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism;
- Changes only with fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals;
- Separate ancestry for man and apes;
- Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of worldwide flood; and
- A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds."
This legislation was examined in McLean v. Arkansas, and the ruling handed down on January 5, 1982, concluded that creation-science as defined in the act "is simply not science". The judgement defined the following as essential characteristics of science:
- It is guided by natural law;
- It has to be explanatory by reference to nature law;
- It is testable against the empirical world;
- Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and
- It is falsifiable.
The court ruled that creation science failed to meet these essential
characteristics and identified specific reasons. After examining the key
concepts from creation science, the court found:
- Sudden creation "from nothing" calls upon a supernatural intervention, not natural law, and is neither testable nor falsifiable
- Objections in creation science that mutation and natural selection
are insufficient to explain common origins was an incomplete negative
generalization
- 'Kinds' are not scientific classifications, and creation science's
claims of an outer limit to the evolutionary change possible of species
are not explained scientifically or by natural law
- The separate ancestry of man and apes is an assertion rather than a
scientific explanation, and did not derive from any scientific fact or
theory
- Catastrophism, including its identification of the worldwide flood, failed as a science
- "Relatively recent inception" was the product of religious readings
and had no scientific meaning, and was neither the product of, nor
explainable by, natural law; nor is it tentative
The court further noted that no recognized scientific journal
had published any article espousing the creation science theory as
described in the Arkansas law, and stated that the testimony presented
by defense attributing the absence to censorship was not credible.
In its ruling, the court wrote that for any theory to qualify as
scientific, the theory must be tentative, and open to revision or
abandonment as new facts come to light. It wrote that any methodology
which begins with an immutable conclusion that cannot be revised or
rejected, regardless of the evidence, is not a scientific theory. The
court found that creation science does not culminate in conclusions
formed from scientific inquiry, but instead begins with the conclusion,
one taken from a literal wording of the Book of Genesis, and seeks only
scientific evidence to support it.
The law in Arkansas adopted the same two-model approach as that put forward by the Institute for Creation Research,
one allowing only two possible explanations for the origins of life and
existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a
creator or it was not. Scientific evidence
that failed to support the theory of evolution was posed as necessarily
scientific evidence in support of creationism, but in its judgment the
court ruled this approach to be no more than a "contrived dualism which has not scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose."
The judge concluded that "Act 590 is a religious crusade, coupled
with a desire to conceal this fact," and that it violated the First
Amendment's Establishment Clause. The decision was not appealed to a higher court, but had a powerful influence on subsequent rulings. Louisiana's 1982 Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act, authored by State Senator Bill P. Keith, judged in the 1987 United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard,
and was handed a similar ruling. It found the law to require the
balanced teaching of creation science with evolution had a particular
religious purpose and was therefore unconstitutional.
Intelligent design splits off
In 1984, The Mystery of Life's Origin was first published. It was co-authored by chemist and creationist Charles B. Thaxton with Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen, the foreword written by Dean H. Kenyon, and sponsored by the Christian-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The work presented scientific arguments against current theories of abiogenesis and offered a hypothesis of special creation
instead. While the focus of creation science had until that time
centered primarily on the criticism of the fossil evidence for evolution
and validation of the creation myth
of the Bible, this new work posed the question whether science reveals
that even the simplest living systems were far too complex to have
developed by natural, unguided processes.
Kenyon later co-wrote with creationist Percival Davis a book intended as a "scientific brief for creationism"
to use as a supplement to public high school biology textbooks. Thaxton
was enlisted as the book's editor, and the book received publishing
support from the FTE. Prior to its release, the 1987 Supreme Court
ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard barred the teaching of creation science and creationism in public school classrooms. The book, originally titled Biology and Creation but renamed Of Pandas and People, was released in 1989 and became the first published work to promote the anti-evolutionist
design argument under the name intelligent design. The contents of the
book later became a focus of evidence in the federal court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, when a group of parents filed suit to halt the teaching of intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania, public schools. School board officials there had attempted to include Of Pandas and People
in their biology classrooms and testimony given during the trial
revealed the book was originally written as a creationist text but
following the adverse decision in the Supreme Court it underwent simple
cosmetic editing to remove the explicit allusions to "creation" or
"creator," and replace them instead with references to "design" or
"designer."
By the mid-1990s, intelligent design had become a separate movement. The creation science movement is distinguished from the intelligent design movement, or neo-creationism,
because most advocates of creation science accept scripture as a
literal and inerrant historical account, and their primary goal is to
corroborate the scriptural account through the use of science. In
contrast, as a matter of principle, neo-creationism eschews references
to scripture altogether in its polemics and stated goals (see Wedge strategy).
By so doing, intelligent design proponents have attempted to succeed
where creation science has failed in securing a place in public school
science curricula. Carefully avoiding any reference to the identity of
the intelligent designer
as God in their public arguments, intelligent design proponents sought
to reintroduce the creationist ideas into science classrooms while
sidestepping the First Amendment's prohibition against religious
infringement. However, the intelligent design curriculum was struck down as a violation of the Establishment Clause in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the judge in the case ruled "that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism."
Today, creation science as an organized movement is primarily centered within the United States. Creation science organizations are also known in other countries, most notably Creation Ministries International which was founded (under the name Creation Science Foundation) in Australia.
Proponents are usually aligned with a Christian denomination, primarily
with those characterized as evangelical, conservative, or
fundamentalist. While creationist movements also exist in Islam and Judaism, these movements do not use the phrase creation science to describe their beliefs.
Issues
Creation science has its roots in the work of young Earth creationist
George McCready Price disputing modern science's account of natural history,
focusing particularly on geology and its concept of uniformitarianism,
and his efforts instead to furnish an alternative empirical explanation
of observable phenomena which was compatible with strict Biblical
literalism. Price's work was later discovered by civil engineer Henry M. Morris, who is now considered to be the father of creation science.
Morris and later creationists expanded the scope with attacks against
the broad spectrum scientific findings that point to the antiquity of
the Universe and common ancestry among species, including growing body
of evidence from the fossil record, absolute dating techniques, and cosmogony.
The proponents of creation science often say that they are
concerned with religious and moral questions as well as natural
observations and predictive hypotheses. Many state that their opposition to scientific evolution is primarily based on religion.
The overwhelming majority of scientists are in agreement that the
claims of science are necessarily limited to those that develop from
natural observations and experiments which can be replicated and
substantiated by other scientists, and that claims made by creation
science do not meet those criteria. Duane Gish,
a prominent creation science proponent, has similarly claimed, "We do
not know how the creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe.
This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot
discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative
processes used by the Creator." But he also makes the same claim against
science's evolutionary theory, maintaining that on the subject of
origins, scientific evolution is a religious theory which cannot be
validated by science.
Creation science makes the a priori
metaphysical assumption that there exists a creator of the life whose
origin is being examined. Christian creation science holds that the
description of creation is given in the Bible, that the Bible is
inerrant in this description (and elsewhere), and therefore empirical
scientific evidence must correspond with that description. Creationists
also view the preclusion of all supernatural explanations within the
sciences as a doctrinaire commitment to exclude the supreme being and
miracles. They claim this to be the motivating factor in science's
acceptance of Darwinism, a term used in creation science to refer to
evolutionary biology which is also often used as a disparagement.
Critics argue that creation science is religious rather than scientific
because it stems from faith in a religious text rather than by the application of the scientific method. The United States National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) has stated unequivocally, "Evolution pervades all biological
phenomena. To ignore that it occurred or to classify it as a form of
dogma is to deprive the student of the most fundamental organizational
concept in the biological sciences. No other biological concept has been
more extensively tested and more thoroughly corroborated than the
evolutionary history of organisms." Anthropologist Eugenie Scott
has noted further, "Religious opposition to evolution propels
antievolutionism. Although antievolutionists pay lip service to supposed
scientific problems with evolution, what motivates them to battle its
teaching is apprehension over the implications of evolution for
religion."
Creation science advocates argue that scientific theories of the origins of the Universe, Earth, and life are rooted in a priori presumptions of methodological naturalism and uniformitarianism, each of which they reject. In some areas of science such as chemistry, meteorology
or medicine, creation science proponents do not necessarily challenge
the application of naturalistic or uniformitarian assumptions, but
instead single out those scientific theories they judge to be in
conflict with their religious beliefs, and it is against those theories
that they concentrate their efforts.
Religious criticism
Many mainstream Christian churches
criticize creation science on theological grounds, asserting either
that religious faith alone should be a sufficient basis for belief in
the truth of creation, or that efforts to prove the Genesis account of
creation on scientific grounds are inherently futile because reason is
subordinate to faith and cannot thus be used to prove it.
Many Christian theologies, including Liberal Christianity, consider the Genesis creation narrative to be a poetic and allegorical work rather than a literal history, and many Christian churches—including the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic, Anglican and the more liberal denominations of the Lutheran, Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian
faiths—have either rejected creation science outright or are ambivalent
to it. Belief in non-literal interpretations of Genesis is often cited
as going back to Saint Augustine.
Theistic evolution
and evolutionary creationism are theologies that reconcile belief in a
creator with biological evolution. Each holds the view that there is a
creator but that this creator has employed the natural force of
evolution to unfold a divine plan.
Religious representatives from faiths compatible with theistic
evolution and evolutionary creationism have challenged the growing
perception that belief in a creator is inconsistent with the acceptance
of evolutionary theory.
Spokespersons from the Catholic Church have specifically criticized
biblical creationism for relying upon literal interpretations of
biblical scripture as the basis for determining scientific fact.
Scientific criticism
The National Academy of Sciences states that "the claims of creation
science lack empirical support and cannot be meaningfully tested" and
that "creation science is in fact not science and should not be
presented as such in science classes." According to Joyce Arthur writing for Skeptic
magazine, the "creation 'science' movement gains much of its strength
through the use of distortion and scientifically unethical tactics" and
"seriously misrepresents the theory of evolution."
Scientists have considered the hypotheses proposed by creation
science and have rejected them because of a lack of evidence.
Furthermore, the claims of creation science do not refer to natural
causes and cannot be subject to meaningful tests, so they do not qualify
as scientific hypotheses. In 1987, the United States Supreme Court
ruled that creationism is religion, not science, and cannot be advocated
in public school classrooms.
Most mainline Christian denominations have concluded that the concept
of evolution is not at odds with their descriptions of creation and
human origins.
A summary of the objections to creation science by scientists follows:
- Creation science is not falsifiable: An idea or
hypothesis is generally not considered to be in the realm of science
unless it can be potentially disproved with certain experiments, this is
the concept of falsifiability in science.
The act of creation as defined in creation science is not falsifiable
because no testable bounds can be imposed on the creator. In creation
science, the creator is defined as limitless, with the capacity to
create (or not), through fiat alone, infinite universes, not just one,
and endow each one with its own unique, unimaginable and incomparable
character. It is impossible to disprove a claim when that claim as
defined encompasses every conceivable contingency.
- Creation science violates the principle of parsimony: Parsimony favours those explanations which rely on the fewest assumptions.
Scientists prefer explanations that are consistent with known and
supported facts and evidence and require the fewest assumptions to fill
the remaining gaps. Many of the alternative claims made in creation
science retreat from simpler scientific explanations and introduce more
complications and conjecture into the equation.
- Creation science is not, and cannot be, empirically or experimentally tested:
Creationism posits supernatural causes which lie outside the realm of
methodological naturalism and scientific experiment. Science can only
test empirical, natural claims.
- Creation science is not correctable, dynamic, tentative or progressive:
Creation science adheres to a fixed and unchanging premise or "absolute
truth," the "word of God," which is not open to change. Any evidence
that runs contrary to that truth must be disregarded.
In science, all claims are tentative, they are forever open to
challenge, and must be discarded or adjusted when the weight of evidence
demands it.
By invoking claims of "abrupt appearance" of species as a miraculous
act, creation science is unsuited for the tools and methods demanded by
science, and it cannot be considered scientific in the way that the term
"science" is currently defined. Scientists and science writers commonly characterize creation science as a pseudoscience.
Historical, philosophical, and sociological criticism
Historically, the debate of whether creationism is compatible with
science can be traced back to 1874, the year science historian John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science.
In it Draper portrayed the entire history of scientific development as a
war against religion. This presentation of history was propagated
further by followers such as Andrew Dickson White in his two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Their conclusions have been disputed.
In the United States, the principal focus of creation science
advocates is on the government-supported public school systems, which
are prohibited by the Establishment Clause from promoting specific religions. Historical communities have argued that Biblical translations contain many translation errors and errata, and therefore that the use of biblical literalism in creation science is self-contradictory.
Kinds of creation science
Biology
Creationist arguments in relation to biology center on an idea
derived from Genesis that states that life was created by God, in a
finite number of "created kinds," rather than through biological
evolution from a common ancestor. Creationists contend that any
observable speciation descends from these distinctly created kinds through inbreeding, deleterious mutations and other genetic mechanisms. Whereas evolutionary biologists and creationists share similar views of microevolution, creationists reject the fact that the process of macroevolution can explain common ancestry among organisms far beyond the level of common species.
Creationists contend that there is no empirical evidence for new plant
or animal species, and deny fossil evidence has ever been found
documenting the process.
Popular arguments against evolution have changed since the publishing of Henry M. Morris' first book on the subject, Scientific Creationism (1974), but some consistent themes remain: that missing links
or gaps in the fossil record are proof against evolution; that the
increased complexity of organisms over time through evolution is not
possible due to the law of increasing entropy;
that it is impossible that the mechanism of natural selection could
account for common ancestry; and that evolutionary theory is untestable.
The origin of the human species is particularly hotly contested; the fossil remains of hominid ancestors are not considered by advocates of creation biology to be evidence for a speciation event involving Homo sapiens. Creationists also assert that early hominids, are either apes, or humans.
Richard Dawkins
has explained evolution as "a theory of gradual, incremental change
over millions of years, which starts with something very simple and
works up along slow, gradual gradients to greater complexity," and
described the existing fossil record as entirely consistent with that
process. Biologists emphasize that transitional gaps between recovered
fossils are to be expected, that the existence of any such gaps cannot
be invoked to disprove evolution, and that instead the fossil evidence
that could be used to disprove the theory would be those fossils which
are found and which are entirely inconsistent with what can be predicted
or anticipated by the evolutionary model. One example given by Dawkins
was, "If there were a single hippo or rabbit in the Precambrian, that would completely blow evolution out of the water. None have ever been found."
Geology
Flood geology
Flood geology is a concept based on the belief that most of Earth's geological record was formed by the Great Flood described in the story of Noah's Ark. Fossils and fossil fuels are believed to have formed from animal and plant matter which was buried rapidly during this flood, while submarine canyons are explained as having formed during a rapid runoff from the continents at the end of the flood. Sedimentary strata are also claimed to have been predominantly laid down during or after Noah's flood and orogeny.
Flood geology is a variant of catastrophism and is contrasted with
geological science in that it rejects standard geological principles
such as uniformitarianism and radiometric dating. For example, the Creation Research Society argues that "uniformitarianism is wishful thinking."
Geologists conclude that no evidence for such a flood is observed in the preserved rock layers and moreover that such a flood is physically impossible, given the current layout of land masses. For instance, since Mount Everest currently is approximately 8.8 kilometres in elevation and the Earth's surface area is 510,065,600 km2, the volume of water required to cover Mount Everest to a depth of 15 cubits
(6.8 m), as indicated by Genesis 7:20, would be 4.6 billion cubic
kilometres. Measurements of the amount of precipitable water vapor in
the atmosphere have yielded results indicating that condensing all water
vapor in a column of atmosphere would produce liquid water with a depth
ranging between zero and approximately 70mm, depending on the date and
the location of the column.
Nevertheless, there continue to be adherents to the belief in flood
geology, and in recent years new creationist models have been introduced
such as catastrophic plate tectonics and catastrophic orogeny.
Radiometric dating
Creationists point to flawed experiments they have performed, which they claim demonstrate that 1.5 billion years of nuclear decay
took place over a short period of time, from which they infer that
"billion-fold speed-ups of nuclear decay" have occurred, a massive
violation of the principle that radioisotope decay rates are constant, a
core principle underlying nuclear physics generally, and radiometric dating in particular.
The scientific community points to numerous flaws in the
creationists' experiments, to the fact that their results have not been
accepted for publication by any peer-reviewed scientific journal, and to
the fact that the creationist scientists conducting them were untrained
in experimental geochronology. They have also been criticised for widely publicising the results of
their research as successful despite their own admission of
insurmountable problems with their hypothesis.
The constancy of the decay rates of isotopes
is well supported in science. Evidence for this constancy includes the
correspondences of date estimates taken from different radioactive
isotopes as well as correspondences with non-radiometric dating
techniques such as dendrochronology,
ice core dating, and historical records. Although scientists have noted
slight increases in the decay rate for isotopes subject to extreme
pressures, those differences were too small to significantly impact date
estimates. The constancy of the decay rates is also governed by first
principles in quantum mechanics,
wherein any deviation in the rate would require a change in the
fundamental constants. According to these principles, a change in the
fundamental constants could not influence different elements uniformly,
and a comparison between each of the elements' resulting unique
chronological timescales would then give inconsistent time estimates.
In refutation of young Earth claims of inconstant decay rates
affecting the reliability of radiometric dating, Roger C. Wiens, a
physicist specializing in isotope dating states:
There are only three quite technical instances where a half-life changes, and these do not affect the dating methods:
- "Only one technical exception occurs under terrestrial
conditions, and this is not for an isotope used for dating. ... The
artificially-produced isotope, beryllium-7
has been shown to change by up to 1.5%, depending on its chemical
environment. ... Heavier atoms are even less subject to these minute
changes, so the dates of rocks made by electron-capture decays would
only be off by at most a few hundredths of a percent."
- "... Another case is material inside of stars, which is in a plasma
state where electrons are not bound to atoms. In the extremely hot
stellar environment, a completely different kind of decay can occur.
'Bound-state beta decay' occurs when the nucleus emits an electron into a
bound electronic state close to the nucleus. ... All normal matter,
such as everything on Earth, the Moon, meteorites, etc. has electrons in
normal positions, so these instances never apply to rocks, or anything
colder than several hundred thousand degrees."
- "The last case also involves very fast-moving matter. It has been demonstrated by atomic clocks
in very fast spacecraft. These atomic clocks slow down very slightly
(only a second or so per year) as predicted by Einstein's theory of
relativity. No rocks in our solar system are going fast enough to make a
noticeable change in their dates."
Radiohaloes
In the 1970s, young Earth creationist Robert V. Gentry
proposed that radiohaloes in certain granites represented evidence for
the Earth being created instantaneously rather than gradually. This idea
has been criticized by physicists and geologists on many grounds
including that the rocks Gentry studied were not primordial and that the
radionuclides in question need not have been in the rocks initially.
Thomas A. Baillieul, a geologist and retired senior environmental scientist with the United States Department of Energy,
disputed Gentry's claims in an article entitled, "'Polonium Haloes'
Refuted: A Review of 'Radioactive Halos in a Radio-Chronological and
Cosmological Perspective' by Robert V. Gentry."
Baillieul noted that Gentry was a physicist with no background in
geology and given the absence of this background, Gentry had
misrepresented the geological context from which the specimens were
collected. Additionally, he noted that Gentry relied on research from
the beginning of the 20th century, long before radioisotopes were
thoroughly understood; that his assumption that a polonium
isotope caused the rings was speculative; and that Gentry falsely
argued that the half-life of radioactive elements varies with time.
Gentry claimed that Baillieul could not publish his criticisms in a
reputable scientific journal, although some of Baillieul's criticisms rested on work previously published in reputable scientific journals.
Astronomy and cosmology
Creationist cosmologies
Several attempts have been made by creationists to construct a
cosmology consistent with a young Universe rather than the standard
cosmological age of the universe,
based on the belief that Genesis describes the creation of the Universe
as well as the Earth. The primary challenge for young-universe
cosmologies is that the accepted distances in the Universe require
millions or billions of years for light to travel
to Earth (the "starlight problem"). An older creationist idea, proposed
by creationist astronomer Barry Setterfield, is that the speed of light
has decayed in the history of the Universe.
More recently, creationist physicist Russell Humphreys has proposed a
hypothesis called "white hole cosmology", asserting that the Universe
expanded out of a white hole less than 10,000 years ago; claiming that the age of the universe is illusory and results from relativistic effects. Humphreys' cosmology is advocated by creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis; however because its predictions conflict with current observations, it is not accepted by the scientific community.
Planetology
Various claims are made by creationists concerning alleged evidence that the age of the Solar System is of the order of thousands of years, in contrast to the scientifically accepted age of 4.6 billion years. It is commonly argued that the number of comets
in the Solar System is much higher than would be expected given its
supposed age. Young Earth Creationists reject the existence of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. They also argue that the recession of the Moon from the Earth is incompatible with either the Moon or the Earth being billions of years old. These claims have been refuted by planetologists.
In response to increasing evidence suggesting that Mars
once possessed a wetter climate, some creationists have proposed that
the global flood affected not only the Earth but also Mars and other
planets. People who support this claim include creationist astronomer
Wayne Spencer and Russell Humphreys.
An ongoing problem for creationists is the presence of
impact craters
on nearly all Solar System objects, which is consistent with scientific
explanations of solar system origins but creates insuperable problems
for young Earth claims. Creationists Harold Slusher and Richard Mandock, along with Glenn Morton (who later repudiated this claim) asserted that impact craters on the Moon are subject to rock flow, and so cannot be more than a few thousand years old.
While some creationist astronomers assert that different phases of
meteoritic bombardment of the Solar System occurred during "creation
week" and during the subsequent Great Flood, others regard this as
unsupported by the evidence and call for further research.
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