Young Earth Creationism Is Extremely False
There's a mountain of evidence favoring an old earth and evolution
1 The overwhelming consensus
Young earth creationists think that the earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution by natural selection did not occur. I think this position is very badly mistaken and contradicts about as many scientific findings as anything could. I thought it would be worth writing, at length, about why I think this. Hopefully, this article can also serve as a general source for those interested in seeing what’s wrong with creationism—especially, but not exclusively, of the young earth variety.
In section 2, I’ll discuss the many lines of evidence for an old earth. In section 3, I’ll rebut the evidence for a young earth. In section 4, I’ll discuss the abundant evidence for evolution. In section 5, I’ll explain what’s wrong with most of the supposed evidence against evolution. In section 6, I’ll explain why the Biblical case for creationism is unconvincing.
Young earth creationism runs counter to almost everything that we know from modern science. This view is not original to me; in fact, many of the smartest Christians I know have said the same thing. Aron Wall, a theologically conservative and deeply devout Christian physicist who has more Biblical knowledge than anyone else I’ve ever met by far, wrote:
I am a professional physicist, and I can say that a [6000] year old universe is almost impossible to reconcile with the known facts of astronomy and cosmology (basically almost every single thing we think we've learned would have to be wrong).
…
From the perspective of people trained in cosmology, this stuff is just crackpot nonsense. It comes into existence because of the large number of "itching ears" who want there to be a division of opinion amongst the experts, so that they can choose what to believe. It only works because the people reading it don't understand the science well enough to judge.
Similarly, Luke Barnes, a Christian physicist, described how he came to see the extreme flaws in the evidence for young earth creationism after he learned physics. While there are lots of examples of young earth creationists abandoning their view after and because of learning science, there are few examples of the opposite. In fact, a poll of scientists found about 98% of them endorsed evolution. Poll results never get to 100%, given that people sometimes are trolling or get confused by the questions: this is about as high as polls results ever get! This should tell you something. And as already mentioned, many of these people are devout Christians; it’s not just atheists who believe the earth is old and evolution happened.
They believe this because of overwhelming evidence from many convergent sources. Here, I’ll discuss some of that evidence. I won’t discuss every single line of evidence, but hopefully I’ll give you a good sense of the broad kind of evidence that exists. For helpful links that summarize the evidence that I drew from, see here and here. The cosmological evidence for an old universe is also very compelling, but it’s hard to explain and I don’t understand it as well, so I decided not to include it.
2 An old earth
The way that scientists often date life-forms is they use a method calling radiometric dating. Isotopes (states elements can be in) have half-lives—this is the time it takes for their radioactivity to be reduced by half. Thus, by looking at how much radioactivity is left over from some isotopes, scientists can determine how long it has been around.
For stuff in the not too distant past, carbon-14 is pretty good. But carbon-14 has a half-life of only 5730 years and so can’t date really ancient specimens. Fortunately, older things can be dated by looking at other that half-lives of other isotopes. Steven Ball, a Christian physicist, writes:
Fortunately, there are many such isotopes. The more common ones include Potassium-40, Uranium-238, Thorium-232, and Rubidium-87. These have half-lives of 1.3 billion, 4.6 billion, 14 billion, and 49 billion years.
Here’s an analogy: trees have rings that they get every year. We can thus date how old a tree is by looking at its number of rings (doing this, we get the result that some trees are older than young earth creationists say the earth is, taking into account other buried trees). Similarly, over time the radioactivity of elements breaks down: by measuring how radioactive they are, we can therefore measure their ages.
2.1 No short half-life isotopes
Now, one quick argument from radiometric dating against young earth creationism: on earth we don’t find any examples of naturally occurring isotopes with short half lives (except in cases where the half lives are short-lived intermediate states between longer states). If the earth were young, there’s no particular reason why there’d be only isotopes with very long half-lives. If, however, the earth is old, there’s an obvious reason: the elements with short half-lives have been burned through by now. If the earth is very old, it makes sense that there would only be the isotopes that take a super long time to disappear: if the earth is young, that’s utterly inexplicable.
2.2 Radiometric dating
A less quick but more thorough argument from radiometric dating: we’ve dated things that are very old. Using radio carbon dating, we have measured things that tens of thousands of years old, older than young earth creationists say the earth is (for responses to objections to radiocarbon dating, see here). Using other kinds of radiometric dating, measurements have been taken of the age of rocks from the moon and early meteors that connected with earth—both were dated to billions of years old, about 4.6 billion in the case of early meteors that pounded the earth.
Now, people often object to radiometric dating. These objections are generally technically wrong; while carbon dating can’t be used to date certain kinds of objects, they can be used to date other kinds. Again, the radiometric dating is done by very qualified scientists and the details are often complicated; there are sophisticated methods for teasing out if they’re getting an errant reading. But one way we know that radiometric dating gets right results is when multiple different ways of dating a rock converge, which has happened over and over again. If the methods went wrong, the odds are minuscule that they’d all go wrong in bizarrely specific ways so that they give exactly the same dates. As a Redditor said:
When the world trade center was hit by the first airplane we all wondered what had happened. I assumed it was an accident. When the second plane struck we all knew the odds of two planes hitting the buildings 15 minutes apart by accident were vanishing small. When two or more decay series yield the same date, we come up with the same conclusion.
2.3 The starlight problem
Another problem for young earth creationism is the starlight problem. We observe light from galaxies that are billions of lightyears away—certainly more than 6,000 years away! Now, there are a lot of young earth creationist replies to this; some say that God stretches out the heavens. Each one has technical problems, but even if they work, they require God doing really weird stuff that makes the universe look old! While maybe God, for instance, has time pass at different speeds on earth than in the rest of the universe, by far the more parsimonious view is simply that the universe is old.
If you see someone is moving 6 miles per hour, and you know they’ve moved 6 miles, the reasonable inference is that they’ve been walking for an hour. Sure, you can posit that their walking speed was stretched out or time moved at different speeds, but that’s obviously ad hoc.
2.4 No DNA in fossils
Another problem for the young earth view: it fails to explain why we don’t find DNA in fossils! DNA has never been found in a dinosaur fossil, nor in the fossils of other organisms evolutionary biologists believe to be old. It takes DNA about 100,000 years to decay. Therefore, if we find a large class of fossils that don’t have any DNA, we know that they must be more than 100,000 years old.
2.5 Ice cores
Another kind of evidence that the earth is old: ice cores. Ice cores—big sheets of ice that we extract—can be dated in a variety of different ways. Just like how trees get a ring every year, ice gets new layers every year. By counting up the number of new layers of ice, one can date ice; but it often dates to hundreds of thousands of years.
The common creationist response is that a flood could result in many layers being deposited at the same time. But this doesn’t make much sense—floodwater violently sloshing around won’t necessarily result in many layers of ice, and would, in fact, likely wash away the existing ice. Furthermore—and this is a common pattern—it makes poor sense of the convergence between multiple different ice-core dating methods. If several different methods turn up the same old date, that’s bad news for young earth creationists.
One way of dating ice cores (who’d want to date an ice core???) is by looking at the layering of hoar and dust. During the summer, as a result of snow melting, it becomes cooler and slushier snow called hoar. This snow is then packed during the winter under thicker, harder snow. By looking at the number of layers of oscillating hoar and thick snow, we can see how many winters and summers passed. The summer snow is visually light, while the winter snow is darker. Using this method, certain ice cores can be dated to 12,000 years.
Another way is looking at the building up of ice crystals. Ice crystals start to form under many layers of ice. By dating the development of the ice crystals, we get convergent results for the layers of 12,000 years.
For the ice sheets under the sheet dated to more than 12,000 years, we can count the build up of dust layers. Dust layers build up in ice each year, mostly in the winter and early spring, and they do it in a way completely independently of the hoar layers. To give an analogy, imagine that someone was a very messy eater and ate on a sheet of ice that was constantly rapidly growing. By measuring how many layers of dropped food there was, you could measure how many days they’d been eating for. While this can only be used for newer layers, this result gets ages for the deepest ice of about 110,000 years old.
Another way to measure the age of ice cores is by looking at the build-up of nitric acid. During spring and summer, nitric acid builds up and enters the snow, but it doesn’t during winter. By measuring the layers of snow containing nitric acid, we can see the number of passing winters and summers. This result once again converges with other methods and dates some ice to about 110,000 years.
Lastly, lighter isotopes of Oxygen tend to evaporate in the summer. Thus, by looking at the layers of heavier and then lighter Oxygen isotopes, we can get a rough estimate of the age of some ice. While this method is the least reliable of the bunch, it once again converges with the other results at about 110,000 years.
Thus, there are convergent results about the age of each thing of ice from:
Hoar and dust dating, which give convergent results when jointly available.
Ice crystal dating which can’t be used to date super old ice, but converges with the hoar dating for the first 12,000 years of ice.
Nitric acid dating.
Dating based on isotopes of Oxygen.
Young earth creationists have tried to explain away this data—their explanations don’t work.
2.6 Other
There’s really a lot more evidence and I can’t possibly hope to discuss all of it. It’s no exaggeration that pretty much everything in science points to an old earth. For the earth to be young, we’d have to be mistaken about dozens of different areas of science. The number of scientific results it conflicts with is roughly on the order of the number of historical results that the supposition that Rome never existed conflicts with. There’s a very broad cumulative case from almost every area of science against the young earthers.
A common objection to this: perhaps God makes an old earth that looks young. Just as God may have made Adam with a biological age of 20, perhaps he made the universe look old. One who claims this must, of course, give up on the claim that the scientific evidence supports young earth creationism.
But this view is very unlikely for three reasons. First, it makes God into a deceiver. If God manipulates the radiation in rocks specifically to make it look billions of years old, when it’s only a few thousand years old, he’s engaged in specific deception. Similarly, given that we observe starlight from stars billions of lightyears away, this would imply that God misleadingly sends us light from stars that never existed. But God isn’t supposed to be a trickster!
Second, this is a skeptical scenario! Why not think, by the same logic, that God makes a world that’s five minutes old but looks much older. God could always deceive us in numerous ways, but if you think he’d be willing to do this, then that results in complete skepticism.
Third, an old earth will be more probable. God could, of course, deceive us by making a young earth that looks old. But he could do a lot of things—cause cows to levitate, swallow up antarctica, and so on. The mere fact that God could do something doesn’t render it likely at all that he would do that! Thus, if the earth is young, it’s quite unlikely that of all the things he could do, he’d happen to make the earth look old. In contrast, the old earth hypothesis actively predicts this. So it’s much more likely.
Okay, so far we’ve seen there’s lots of evidence for an old earth. What do the young earthers say in response?
3 Rebutting arguments for a young earth
I cannot hope to address in detail every argument for YECism, but I’ll address some of the main ones. I’ll describe the errors in an article titled Six Biological Evidences for a Young Earth. I don’t think that any of these provide any serious kind of evidence.
3.1 Soft tissue in fossils
The first alleged bit of evidence is that we’ve found soft tissue in fossils. Soft tissues are “muscle, fat, fibrous tissue, blood vessels, or other supporting tissue of the body.” We’ve found some of these in dinosaurs. However, it’s claimed the soft tissues would break down after millions of years. Thus, soft tissue must be evidence that dinosaurs are only a few thousand years old.
First of all, even if dinosaurs are only a few thousand years old, this wouldn’t tell us the age of the earth. The argument isn’t enough to establish YECism even if it was right.
Second, scientists have discovered mechanisms by which soft tissue can be preserved for a very long period of time. Thus, a young earth isn’t needed.
Third, this is an own goal! If dinosaurs died out just a few thousand years ago, we’d expect a sizeable number of dinosaur fossils to turn up with soft tissue. We’ve only found a few out of tens of thousands of fossils. This makes sense on the old earth model where dinosaur soft tissue preservation requires an improbable series of events to happen but makes absolutely no sense if they’re just a few thousand years old.
Fourth, why don’t we find any dinosaur corpses? We find remains of dead humans from around the time the dinosaurs allegedly lived! If dinosaurs are only 6,000 years old, why don’t we find intact corpses of dinosaurs?
This is the form the YECist evidence generally takes. Anomalies that are slight mysteries but not too hard to figure out. Generally their theory doesn’t even make sense of the data.
3.2 Ancient microbes
Second, they argue that scientists have been able to resurrect microbes from rock layers that are 250 million years old. They claim that it’s obvious that they wouldn’t be around if the microbes really were 250 million years old. But there’s no reason that’s obvious; microbes can stick around for a long time. It’s obviously ridiculous to rely on untutored intuitions about how long microbes can survive for. In addition, it’s not at all clear the microbes really are 250 million years old—it might be that younger microbes from a liquid deposit became embedded in old rock.
If the earth was old, we’d expect a few anomalies like this—life forms found in rocks that make them look older than they really are. Either the bacteria is older than we think or the young bacteria got into old rocks. This is thus not at all surprising on the old earth hypothesis.
3.3 Degeneration of the genome
The third bit of evidence: degeneration of the human genome. They say that the human genome is degrading over time. Given the rate of degeneration, they say that humans can’t be that old. The claim that the genome only decays is false, however—there are various beneficial mutations. We’ve observed in COVID, for instance, lots of beneficial mutations; there’s no reason it wouldn’t work the same for humans. (Of course, because of modern medicine, humans who would have died naturally remain alive, decreasing what would naturally be our fitness, but this doesn’t establish anything about evolution in general).
3.4 Mitochondrial Eve
Fourth, the authors cite mitochondrial Eve—the last common ancestor of all humans. However, she was probably alive hundreds of thousands of years ago rather than a few thousand years ago. Thus, another own goal!
3.5 Living fossils
Fifth, the authors cite living fossils—organisms that haven’t changed much in millions of years like jellyfish. But first of all, they have changed enough so that they’re no longer the same species, and second, it’s no surprise that there’d be a few examples of resilient animals filling a niche and not changing too much.
3.6 Population growth
Sixth, they suggest that population growth doesn’t fit with the current population. But if the human population was mostly stable for most of history, weirdly fluctuating for most of it, and only going up a lot recently, it would perfectly explain the data. In fact, YECism makes poor sense of population growth because we have evidence of very old and very large civilizations. The Egyptian empire began about 3,100 BCE. Now, YECists generally think that this is before the flood, so they have to think conventional dating of civilizations is wrong. But even if it’s wrong, they have to push up when Egypt was around to near the time of the Greeks, which just conflicts with everything we know about history.
There are, of course, many more arguments—this list helpfully debunks all the common ones, and it’s generally not hard to find rebuttals to most YECist arguments published on the internet.
4 Evidence of evolution
Here’s where things get more fun. While the arguments for an old earth are sometimes dry and technical, the arguments for evolution by natural selection are cool and interesting! Most of the considerations I’ll raise came from talk origins’ excellent page “29+ evidences for evolution,” written by Douglas Theobald. Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” and he was right.
4.1 Sexual dimorphism
For example, consider the phenomenon of sexual dimorphism—differences between the sexes. Human males are bigger and more desirous of sex than human females who are more choosy. The same is true in almost every animal, including male turkeys who will even try to mate with just a female turkey head. In most species, it is primarily the males that compete for mates.
Now, evolution makes a lot of sense of this phenomenon. It’s advantageous for females to be choosy, because if they mate with some shmuck, they have to bear most of the costs. In contrast, for males, it’s a good bet to procreate as much as possible—procreating with a non-fit female is still a good bet for male turkeys. In contrast, intelligent design has no remotely plausible comparable explanation.
However, there are some species in which this is reversed. Male paper nautiluses die when they breed, as do many spiders. For this reason, the traditional evolutionary roles are reversed; it is the females who are larger and more promiscuous, and the males who are choosier. While this isn’t anywhere near the best evidence for evolution, it’s one example of the kinds of things that evolution explains. While evolution has nicely provided for thousands of different facts in biology, creationism has no comparable explanation. This is the best argument for evolution, but it’s a hard one to show comprehensively because it draws from so many strands: while there are some remaining mysteries, evolution comprehensively and uniquely predicts observed facts about nature in a way creationism doesn’t.
4.2 The fossil record
One pretty devastating argument for evolution comes from the fossil record. More primitive organisms show up in deeper fossil layers. This is exactly what we’d expect on the supposition that evolution happened—the less evolved organisms arose a long time ago. Additionally, we can track the development of traits over time by looking at the rocks they’re buried in. In contrast, if there was a global flood, for instance, the pattern of developmental features displayed in the following chart is not predicted:
Even if you’re a young earth creationist and dispute the rock dating, there’s still a simple—and inexplicable—trend: microbial life is deep layers, eukaryotic life is at shallower layers, multicellular animals are at shallower layers, and so on. Evolution deniers have no remotely plausible explanation of that!
4.3 Convergent results regarding the tree of life from transitional fossils, morphology, and genetics
Perhaps the best single argument comes from the fact that we can construct a coherent genetic tree from morphology and fossil evidence. Scientists have, by analyzing the structures of various organisms, devised a unique genetic tree that looks roughly like the following. In the kingdom Chordata, for instance, that looks like this:
Regarding the kingdom animalia more broadly, it looks more like the following:
And at the most general level, including all life, it looks like this:
Now, evolution makes a series of confirmed predictions about exactly how this should work. First of all, we should be able to identify unique features that were evolved from each creature. So, for instance, we should be able to identify universal features across mammals that trace back to the last common ancestor of mammals. While you could make such a tree for the entire tree of life, you couldn’t make one for electrons, kinds of cars, or anything else in the vicinity.
For instance, given that mammals have a unique common ancestor, you can give unique features across all mammals. Then, given that that mammals, birds, and reptiles had a common ancestor, there’d be a common set of unique traits had by all of these creatures, but not had by, say, turtles, which branched off earlier. Remarkably, that’s what we observe. Then, tracing things back, we’d expect to identify common features across organisms that branched off even further back; amphibians, then various kinds of fish, and then even more creatures.
Under evolution, we’d expect this highly specific nested hierarchy, rather than a mix and match of features. Remarkably, this is what we observe. To give one specific example, Douglas Theobald writes:
As a specific example (see Figure 1), plants can be classified as vascular and nonvascular (i.e. they have or lack xylem and phloem). Nested within the vascular group, there are two divisions, seed and non-seed plants. Further nested within the seed plants are two more groups, the angiosperms (which have enclosed, protected seeds) and the gymnosperms (having non-enclosed seeds). Within the angiosperm group are the monocotyledons and the dicotyledons.
…
It would be very problematic if many species were found that combined characteristics of different nested groupings. Proceeding with the previous example, some nonvascular plants could have seeds or flowers, like vascular plants, but they do not. Gymnosperms (e.g. conifers or pines) occasionally could be found with flowers, but they never are. Non-seed plants, like ferns, could be found with woody stems; however, only some angiosperms have woody stems. Conceivably, some birds could have mammary glands or hair; some mammals could have feathers (they are an excellent means of insulation). Certain fish or amphibians could have differentiated or cusped teeth, but these are only characteristics of mammals. A mix and match of characters like this would make it extremely difficult to objectively organize species into nested hierarchies. Unlike organisms, cars do have a mix and match of characters, and this is precisely why a nested hierarchy does not flow naturally from classification of cars.
Note that these nested hierarchies go down all the way to the deepest levels of life. All Eukaryotes—the kinds of creatures capable of being multicellular—for instance, have various commonalities. Even more broadly, all kinds of life on the planet have various specific and surprising commonalities that evolution makes sense of: common polymers, nucleic acids, using the same 22 amino acids, and more!
Second, we’d expect various transitional fossils between these creatures. If all mammals ultimately evolved from something reptile-like, we’d expect transitional fossils between that reptile-like common ancestor and mammals. We have found a vast number of transitional fossils of all kinds. Regarding mammals and reptiles, for instance, we’ve found something striking. While mammals have a particular bone that’s in our ears, for reptiles, the analogous bone is in the jaw. We’ve discovered transitional fossils with a doubly-joined jawbone that goes through part of the skull and the jaw. Similarly, we’ve found legged seacows that are an intermediate form between cows and whales—two creatures that are surprisingly genetically similar.
Note, this could be easily falsified. If one found an intermediate between any two creatures that didn’t uniquely branch off from each other (e.g. between mammals and birds or rotifera and nematoda) this would be falsified. Crucially, we haven’t observed that!
Third—and this kind of evidence is genuinely shocking—we can actually corroborate the first two kinds of evidence with molecular evidence. Organisms develop mutations over time; most of these are harmless, some are harmful, and even fewer are beneficial. Now, there are particular kinds of mutations that are always or almost always neutral; these accumulate at a roughly constant rate. Because they accumulate at a roughly constant rate, we can figure out how long in the past two organisms branched off from each other by looking at the number of divergent neutral mutations there are between the two of them. To verify these results and make them more reliable, one can look at the number of mutations made to multiple different sites in the genome: fibrinopeptides, hemoglobin, and cytochrome c.
When scientists did that, the result was absolutely remarkable. First of all, they were able to trace a unique genetic tree. Just like one can trace how related you are to someone else by looking at your genome, scientists were able to get a unique tree of life by looking at these multiple converging lines of evidence—these different kinds of accumulation of mutations. But second, this matched up perfectly with the tree of life that scientists already believed in on the basis of the morphological evidence. This is utterly shocking on the supposition that evolution didn’t happen—why the heck would God create nested hierarchies of creatures, each sharing properties with the other members in each level of the nested hierarchy, and then have the number of neutral mutations correlate with similarity according to the nested hierarchy.
Here an analogy might be helpful. Suppose that we have different copies of the same historical manuscript. Crucially, we can figure out when different manuscripts branched off by looking at how similar they are to each other, and then construct properties of the shared ancient manuscripts from which the moderns branched off. From this, we’d have reason to expect, if the manuscript was repeatedly copied over, to find transitional manuscripts over time that are a mix between our modern manuscripts—having similarities to each of our modern ones. For instance, if they each misspell some word in some way, we could know that they each had a common ancestor who misspelled that word in that way.
Lastly, imagine that these manuscripts contained one really long word with over a million letters. Assume that spelling errors to this accumulate at a roughly constant rate. Well then, we could figure out when two manuscripts branched off by looking at the similarity in the spelling errors made to that word. Now imagine that each of these methods gave exactly convergent results for which manuscripts branched off from each other. This would be extremely strong evidence for manuscript copying. This is like the evidence we have for evolution.
And we’re just getting started!
4.4 The fossil record
One additional thing we should expect on this supposition: we should expect the older transitions to show up later in the fossil record than the earlier transitions. For instance, because mammals and reptiles branched off before reptiles and birds did, we should expect to find transitional fossils between birds and reptiles in shallower rock than between mammals and reptiles. Once again, that’s exactly what we observe! To quote Theobald once again:
The reptile-bird intermediates mentioned above date from the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous (about 150 million years ago), whereas pelycosauria and therapsida (reptile-mammal intermediates) are older and date from the Carboniferous and the Permian (about 250 to 350 million years ago, see the Geological Time Scale). This is precisely what should be observed if the fossil record matches the standard phylogenetic tree.
The most scientifically rigorous method of confirming this prediction is to demonstrate a positive corellation between phylogeny and stratigraphy, i.e. a positive corellation between the order of taxa in a phylogenetic tree and the geological order in which those taxa first appear and last appear (whether for living or extinct intermediates). For instance, within the error inherent in the fossil record, prokaryotes should appear first, followed by simple multicellular animals like sponges and starfish, then lampreys, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, etc., as shown in Figure 1. Contrary to the erroneous (and unreferenced) opinions of some anti-evolutionists (e.g. Wise 1994, p. 225-226), studies from the past ten years addressing this very issue have confirmed that there is indeed a positive corellation between phylogeny and stratigraphy, with statistical significance (Benton 1998; Benton and Hitchin 1996; Benton and Hitchin 1997; Benton et al. 1999; Benton et al. 2000; Benton and Storrs 1994; Clyde and Fisher 1997; Hitchin and Benton 1997; Huelsenbeck 1994; Norell and Novacek 1992a; Norell and Novacek 1992b; Wills 1999). Using three different measures of phylogeny-stratigraphy correlation [the RCI, GER, and SCI (Ghosts 2.4 software, Wills 1999)], a high positive correlation was found between the standard phylogenetic tree portrayed in Figure 1 and the stratigraphic range of the same taxa, with very high statistical significance (P < 0.0001) (this work, Ghosts input file available upon request).
As another specific example, an early analysis published in Science by Mark Norell and Michael Novacek (Norell and Novacek 1992b) examined 24 different taxa of vertebrates (teleosts, amniotes, reptiles, synapsids, diapsids, lepidosaurs, squamates, two orders of dinosaurs, two orders of hadrosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, higher mammals, primates, rodents, ungulates, artiodactyls, ruminants, elephantiformes, brontotheres, tapiroids, chalicotheres, Chalicotheriinae, and equids). For each taxa, the phylogenetic position of known fossils was compared with the stratigraphic position of the same fossils. A positive correlation was found for all of the 24 taxa, 18 of which were statistically significant.
4.5 Vestigial structures
Evolution makes even more specific predictions that have been confirmed. Specifically, because it says that we slowly evolved other creatures, we’d maintain various remnants of the creatures that we evolved from, even when these are no longer beneficial. This is true of goosebumps, for instance—they are a remnant from our ancestors who had fur. Other examples include:
The human tailbone or coccyx. This is a vestige from our tail-having ancestors. Over time, it got smaller and smaller, until it became just a bone.
Pelvic bones in whales. These bones are remnants from when whale ancestors were land-dwelling mammals with fully developed hind limbs.
Various snake species have tiny vestigial hind-limb structures.
Some flightless birds, like ostriches or kiwis, have wings that are reduced in size and functionality. The ancestors of these birds could fly, and so they maintained wings which gradually shrunk as their use decreased.
Many cave-dwelling animals have useless, sightless vestigial eyes. Because they’re in darkness, their eyes no longer are used for seeing, but nonetheless stuck around.
Evolution makes quite specific vestigial predictions. It predicts that the vestigial features will be remnants from our common ancestors. Because mammals evolved from reptiles, it makes the specific prediction that we’ll have reptilian structures. Quoting Theobald again:
It follows, then, that we should never find vestigial nipples or a vestigial incus bone in any amphibians, birds, or reptiles. No mammals should be found with vestigial feathers. No primates should ever be found with vestigial horns or degenerate wings hidden underneath the skin of the back. We should never find any arthropods with vestigial backbones. Snakes may occasionally have vestigial legs or arms, but they should never be found with small, vestigial wings. Humans may have a vestigial caecum, since we are descendants of herbivorous mammals, but neither we nor any other primate can have a vestigial gizzard like that found in birds. Mutatis mutandis ad infinitum.
Note that vestigial structures don’t have to have no uses. They often will have some uses; after all, if you have some biological structure, evolution has every incentive to use it. But the point is that they’re by in large remnants from a previous structure—leftovers rather than things that directly evolved to be useful.
4.6 Atavisms
Closely related to vestigial structures are atavisms; these are cases where a trait of a common ancestor that’s since been lost reappears under special circumstances. For example, humans evolved from creatures with tails; as a result, in very rare cases, humans are born with tails. Similarly, whales are occasionally born with hindlimbs, having evolved from creatures with hindlimbs. Theobald writes:
According to the standard phylogenetic tree, whales are known to be the descendants of terrestrial mammals that had hindlimbs. Thus, we expect the possibility that rare mutant whales might occasionally develop atavistic hindlimbs. In fact, there are many cases where whales have been found with rudimentary atavistic hindlimbs in the wild (see Figure 2.2.1; for reviews see Berzin 1972, pp. 65-67 and Hall 1984, pp. 90-93). Hindlimbs have been found in baleen whales (Sleptsov 1939), humpback whales (Andrews 1921) and in many specimens of sperm whales (Abel 1908; Berzin 1972, p. 66; Nemoto 1963; Ogawa and Kamiya 1957; Zembskii and Berzin 1961). Most of these examples are of whales with femurs, tibia, and fibulae; however, some even include feet with complete digits.
Wikipedia has a list of more atavisms:
Reappearance of limbs in limbless vertebrates.[3][6][15]
Re-evolution of sexuality from parthenogenesis in oribatid mites.[16]
Reappearance of prothoracic wings in insects.[18][19]
Reappearance of wings on wingless stick insects and leaf insects[20] and earwigs.[3]
Atavistic muscles in several birds[21][22] and mammals such as the beagle[23] and the jerboa.[21]
Extra toes in guinea pigs.[3][24]
Reemergence of sexual reproduction in the flowering plant Hieracium pilosella and the Crotoniidae family of mites.[25]
Human tails (not pseudo-tails)[4][27] and supernumerary nipples in humans (and other primates).[3]
Color blindness in humans.[28]
Once again, this is a highly specific prediction that could be easily falsified. If humans had atavistic feathers rather than tails, this would be a decisive counterexample. If atavistic hindlegs were found in octopi or fish rather than whales, this would decisively falsify it. If teeth were found on rare occasions in octopi rather than birds, this would falsify it.
Creationists have a huge puzzle: there are easy things we could have found that would falsify evolution. Why have we found none of these?
4.7 Molecular atavisms
The same pattern of vestigial features show up at the molecular level. Humans have various dormant genes that we inherited from our ancestors. These genes are called pseudogenes—they no longer do anything, but were they to be functional, they’d have certain effects. In the case of human pseudogenes, while we can’t synthesize Vitamin C (this means we can’t naturally get it so we need to have it in our diets), we have a pseudogene for synthesis of vitamin C. In fact, we share this pseudogene with other primates!
Note: these were predictions made in advance by the evolutionary theory. They were later confirmed. This isn’t a case of cooking the data to fit our theory but of predicting in advance the data that would later be discovered.
4.8 Embryological evidence
One related line of evidence has to do with the development of organisms. Evolution predicts that in lots of cases, traits of one’s ancestors would briefly show up in development before disappearing. Just like it takes time for birds to accumulate enough mutations for their wings to fully disappear, it takes time for the old characteristics of our ancestor to fully disappear—they’re expected to make a brief cameo during embryonic development.
Remarkably, this is what we observe. Snakes evolved from creatures with legs—as a result, brief leg buds briefly show up during embryonic development, before rapidly disappearing. The same bones that make up the human ear are part of the reptilian jaw; this makes sense if these bones slowly evolved to become human jaws through our past development. Human embryos briefly have tails during development.
One remarkably simple argument for evolution: it’s the default. Organisms change over time in myriad ways. Some traits enhance survival—we’d expect those to be passed on. Over a long period of time, therefore, we’d expect very major shifts to the biology of organisms as the tiny changes accumulate. Just as taking away a grain of sand repeatedly can make a heap of sand no longer a heap, accumulating a series of small changes eventually adds up to be a very large change! These changes often lower fertility, as has been observed in the lab, until they lead to distinct species. By default, over long periods of time, you’d expect evolution to happen!
4.9 Biogeography
An additional line of evidence comes from biogeography. Under evolution, we’d expect organisms to be nearby others that they’re related to, while on creationism we’d expect no specific distribution. Because organisms generally can’t travel very far, we’d expect distinct ecological niches, wherein all the near ancestors of organisms are found in one location. This obviously won’t always hold—e.g. with birds or fish—but it will hold in some cases.
Once again, this is what we observe. Marsupials only inhabit Australia and occasionally South America, which used to be conjoined with Australia. In fact, the phenomenon of invasive species is strong evidence for evolution; under creationism, you’d expect species to simply be wherever they can flourish. Under evolution, however, species would generally only be where they evolve, so species placed from other habitats can easily outcompete native species. Evolution’s predictions are what we observe.
4.10 Endogenous retroviruses
The last line of evidence I’ll discuss comes from endogenous retroviruses. These are viruses that insert their own DNA into their host’s genome. Then, the host passes on their DNA sequence to their offspring, thus leaving a copy of the endogenous retrovirus. By seeing that two organisms have the same endogenous retrovirus show up in their genome, we can see they had a common ancestor. Once again, this is what we observe—humans and chimps have the same endogenous retroviruses.
Think back to the analogy of manuscript copying. Imagine that there are particular people who insert words into the text that weren’t in the original. If you see the same added word is in two different manuscripts, then you can infer that it had a common ancestor—they were both divergent copies of some scroll in the past. That’s what we observe with endogenous retroviruses!
Once again, I have not been able to present the entirety of the evidence for evolution—I probably haven’t presented even 1% of the arguments for it. Once you look, the evidence really is everywhere. It is quite extraordinary just how much it explains. But I’ve argued that it’s supported by:
Explaining lots of phenomena in nature like sexual dimorphism.
The presence of universal nested hierarchies.
Shared morphology that converges with the molecular evidence.
Universal features across all life forms: common polymers, nucleic acids, use of the same 22 amino acids, and so on.
Transitional fossils.
Molecular evidence.
Vestigial structures.
Atavisms.
Molecular atavisms.
Embryological development of dormant structures.
Biogeography.
It being what naturally happens over time by default.
5 Objections to evolution
5.1 We’ve never seen it!
A popular objection to evolution: we’ve never observed it happen! We’ve never observed speciation in a laboratory—never observed one species fracture into two species. The argument might be put roughly as follows:
Every organism is the same species as its parent.
If A is the same species as B and B is the same species as C then A is the same species as B.
Therefore, all of an organism’s descendants are the same species as the organism.
Evolution is inconsistent with 3).
Therefore, evolution is false.
The core problem is that “species” is not a precise term. Generally species are defined as creatures that are able to breed with each other. But as more changes accumulate, fertility decreases. Donkeys and horses can breed with each other, but they give rise to mules which are usually infertile. Lions and tigers can breed with each other, but their offspring are usually short lived.
Therefore, 2) is false. A might be able to breed with B, B might be able to breed with C, but C might be unable to breed with A. More evolutionary changes lead to lowered fertility—stretched out over a long process, a series of very small changes can lead to two species not being able to breed.
The claim that we haven’t observed speciation in a lab is false. Laboratory experiments have brought about speciation in viruses and plants. We don’t generally observe speciation, but that’s not surprising under the evolutionary theory: it takes a very long time to happen. If a wall changed color very slowly, you may never observe it go from red to orange, but that wouldn’t mean it would never do that.
5.2 Second law
Another claim: evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics which says that entropy goes up over time—therefore, structures won’t get more ordered over time. But this relies on a misunderstanding of the second law; entropy only increases in a vacuum, which the earth is not. Taking this into account, there is provably no violation of the second law.
5.3 Mutations destroy!
A third claim made by anti-evolutionists: mutations are universally harmful and universally destroy information. The problem with this claim is that it is very false—examples of mutations that add information and are beneficial which we’ve directly observed include: those that give humans the ability to digest milk, that add an extra chamber of the heart to sea squirts, that protect cells from retroviruses, and that create an extra species of abalone shellfish. The reason that microbes are becoming resistant to antibiotics, for instance, is that this benefits them; one who claims mutations are always harmful must adopt quite a revisionary interpretation of numerous observed biological facts.
5.4 Irreducible complexity
A fourth argument—and probably the most serious—is the argument from irreducible complexity. Evolution proceeds through a series of gradual, piecemeal mutations that are then selected for. Thus, if there is a system that can’t have evolved gradually, it would be a counterexample to evolution.
An irreducibly complex system is one where none of the parts work unless the others are in place. Thus, none of the individual components can be beneficial unless the others are in place—it can’t evolve piecemeal. For example, you might think wings are irreducibly complex because half a wing does you no good. Thus, wings can’t evolve piecemeal. I remember in seventh grade asking my biology teacher about how sexual reproduction evolved—one person who can reproduce sexually does you no good because there’s no one who they can reproduce with.
The problem: there’s just no such thing as irreducible complexity.
There might be systems that look irreducibly complex. But consistently, there’s a plausible story for how the system slowly evolved. This story can take various forms, but here are some examples:
There existed some much more primitive version of the system. Slowly, over time, this grew more complex until it took on the modern form it did today. For example, primitive DNA swapping present in certain bacteria may have grown more complex over time to be the modern system of sexual reproduction. The eye, for instance, evolved from organisms with very primitive eyes that just detected whether there was light. These kinds of primitive light detectors are found in bacteria!
There might have been some existing structure that was repurposed. It may be that ABCD was beneficial, then by getting rid of C, one got ABD which appears irreducibly complex but formed gradually. This is true of, for instance, the panda’s thumb, which isn’t very mobile but grew out of a spurt of bone that bears use for a different purpose. The same is true of giraffe’s necks, which have a deeply inefficient nerve that takes a many feet long detour rather than going the most efficient route. Again, evolution makes sense of this—there’s no single selection for a giraffe’s nerve’s changing, so evolution makes good sense of the giraffe’s neck nerves not being ideal designs. Emerson Green explains:
So when it comes to systems that creationists have decreed to be [irreducibly complex] (IC), we can use gradualism or exaptation as a theoretical explanation of their evolution. And of course, there’s empirical support for these processes as well; not just in nature generally, but in specific cases that ID proponents have mistakenly claimed to be IC. There’s the example of antifreeze proteins in the blood of arctic fish; or the case of the gradual evolution of the wing, where we can observe in the present many organisms that can glide or parachute using winglets like the ones Dawkins described. The eye is another clear case of gradual improvement, supported in theory and empirically.
The most famous example of alleged irreducible complexity is the bacterial flagellum. This is a propellor that allows bacteria to get around. Because all the parts are used for propulsion, it’s claimed that none of the parts could have evolved individually. But this is wrong. Emerson, once again:
The argument rests on the claim that the individual proteins or subgroups of proteins belonging to the bacterial flagellum have no useful function of any other sort, so they couldn’t have evolved stepwise by natural selection. However, this claim is undermined by the fact that exaptation — when existing structures are used for new function — provides a simple theoretical account of the flagellum. Additionally, we have empirical evidence that supports the stepwise evolution of the bacterial flagellum. Subgroups of the thirty or so proteins have been observed to perform functions other than propel the bacteria. Behe’s assertions regarding the BF have been easily refuted; simply by observing bacteria that use some of the proteins in question for a different purpose, unrelated to the propellor function. For example, Francis Collins, devout Christian and Head of the Human Genome Project, wrote in 2006, “Recent research has fundamentally undercut [Behe’s] position. Specifically, comparison of protein sequences from multiple bacteria has demonstrated that several components of the flagellum are related to an entirely different apparatus used by certain bacteria to inject toxins into other bacteria that they are attacking. This [apparatus] provides a clear ‘survival of the fittest’ advantage to organisms that possess it. Presumably, the elements of this structure were duplicated hundreds of millions of years ago, and then recruited for a new use; by combining this with other proteins that had previously been carrying out simpler functions, the entire motor was ultimately generated. . . . It now seems likely that many examples of IC are not irreducible after all, and that the primary scientific argument for ID is thus in the process of crumbling. . . . suggesting that ID proponents have made the mistake of confusing the unknown with the unknowable, or the unsolved with the unsolvable.”
Thus, I think that the creationist’s best argument—the argument from irreducible complexity—is still extremely weak. Even if there are a few examples of systems that we can’t yet see how they evolved gradually, this shouldn’t be that surprising. Evolution is often counterintuitive; if it were true, a few examples of systems with mysterious evolutionary pathways are expected. Thus, even if it could be shown that all the existing explanations of the evolution of the eye, bacterial flagellum, and so on evolved gradually, this would tell us little about whether they were actually irreducibly complex.
6 What about the Bible?
Most people are young earth creationists because of the Bible. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single atheist who thinks the earth is only a few thousand years old. This should show the extreme paucity of the scientific evidence for it—there are atheists who believe in fine-tuning, because it’s actually scientifically supported, even though they think it’s naturally explained. If the evidence for a young earth was similar, the same would be true.
The primary Biblical evidences for a young earth are three-fold. First, it’s claimed that because Genesis says that the earth was made in seven days, there must be only a seven day gap between when the beginning of creation and the creation of humans. Second, it’s claimed that Biblical chronologies date all the way back to Adam, thus establishing a small gap between the first humans and the modern day. For example the chronology in Luke goes all the way back to Adam. Similarly, the Genesis chronologies, if one traces out the dates, give about a 6,000 year gap between the start of the world and the modern day. Third, people claim that the passage in Corinthians about man bringing death into the world rules out death before the fall.
6.1 Creation in seven days
Regarding the first argument, there’s simply no reason to interpret the seven days of Genesis as literal 24-hour days. First of all, the sun and stars were created on the fourth day—there was no way to measure days before then! Second, even a Biblical literalist should be quite hesitant to assume these are literal days: 2 Peter 3:8 says “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” The word for day is Yom, which often means an unspecified period of time—as in Genesis 2:4 when it says “in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”
Applying this kind of literalistic reading gets even more ridiculous results. Joshua 10:12 describes the sun standing still; this can’t happen if we’re rotating around the sun (it is we who move, not the sun). 1 Chronicles 16:30: says “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.” Thus, by the same reasoning, one should believe in geocentrism!
Psalm 148:4 says “Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies.” Genesis 1:6-7 says “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” Thus, someone with this hyper-literal method of reading should also believe in the firmament—a dome in the sky separating water in the sky from the Earth. Notably, this was a ubiquitous belief in the ancient near east; it’s thus not surprising that a Bible author would include it if they were providing a general myth and not attempting to teach science.
6.2 Chronologies
At some point, one should simply see that the Bible is not a science textbook. It’s purpose is not to tell us directly how the world was created. An obvious allegory about a guy whose name was “man,” and a woman whose name means “life” shouldn’t be interpreted as though it was a science textbook. Wayne Grudem writes:
However, it is doubtful that God’s purpose in these genealogies was to enable us to calculate the date of creation. If that had been God’s intention, he could have done so clearly by having Moses write, “So all the years from Adam to Abraham were 2004 years” (or some similar number). But there is no such summary statement in Genesis 5 or Genesis 11.
It is certainly possible, on the other hand, that the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 contain gaps. For instance, the genealogy in Matthew 1 tells us that Joram was “the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham” (Matthew 1:8–9). But from 1 Chronicles 3:10–12 (which uses the alternate name Azariah for Uzziah), we learn that three generations have been omitted by Matthew: Joash, Amaziah, and Azariah.
So when Genesis 5 says, “When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh,” it could mean that Seth fathered someone whose descendent was Enosh. Thus Enosh in Genesis 5:6–8 could in fact be someone who came many generations after Seth. In that case, the large number of years is not meant to give us a chronology that can be added together to get the age of humanity, but rather it is given to show us the health and longevity of someone who could still beget children at more than 100 years old and could even live to 912 years.
This is buttressed by the fact that Biblical Hebrew didn’t have a word for “grandfather.” The word that’s translated as father really means begat—but one is begat by their grandfathers. One’s grandfather is why they exist. Thus, it may be that there are steps skipped in the chronologies. This is the only plausible way to make sense of the drastically differing numbers of descendants between Luke and Matthew.
One should be very skeptical about taking the Genesis ages as literal genealogies for various reasons that are purely Biblical. The Genesis ages involve people living many hundreds of years; this mirrors other ancient practices of exaggerating the ages of various ancient kings. In total, Genesis has 30 age numbers and each of them ends in 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. If the numbers were symbolic, this makes sense; if they were literal, this is very bizarre. What are the odds that 30 people would beget their offspring in ages ending with 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. (See here for more on the symbolism including the parallelism between symbolic numbers and practices of the surrounding cultures).
In addition, there are purely Biblical problems with taking the Biblical chronologies literally. In Genesis 17:17, Abraham is shocked that he is having a son at his great age, saying skeptically “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” But the traditional chronology has Abraham being born to a man who was 130, with many descendants who had children when they were far older—why, then, would he be surprised?
One should begin reading the Bible for its theological insights rather than treat it as a science textbook. That was not how it was intended, and interpreting it that way leads to adhering dogmatically to decisively disproven bronze age superstition.
6.3 Death before the fall
Romans 5:12 says “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” This passage is a favorite of YECists because it seems to show that there was no death before Adam. Thus, because evolution holds that death existed before humans and brought humans about it conflicts with this verse.
I think this explanation can’t possible be right.
First, if you read Genesis, it’s clear that humans weren’t the first to sin. The first was the snake—who Christians generally take to be Satan. This conflicts with various other verses in scripture talking about a Satanic fall like Luke 1:18’s proclamation “I saw Satan fall like lightning.” Scripture makes clear that humans weren’t the first to sin.
Second, the Romans verse may be engaged in something philosophers call “restricted quantification.” When a person says “there’s no beer,” after opening the fridge, they don’t mean that beer doesn’t exist. Rather, they mean that there’s no beer in the fridge. Similarly, the Romans passage may be talking about human death.
Third, saying A brought B into C doesn’t imply there was no B in C prior to A. For example, if someone said, Caesar brought ruin to Rome, that wouldn’t mean there was no ruin before Caesar. It would just mean that Caesar brought extra ruin. Similarly, if humans brought about a new kind of horror and death, it would be appropriate to say that man brought death into the world—even if death already existed.
Fourth, holding that there were no other humans prior to Adam and Eve makes little sense of the Cain and Abel stories. Genesis describes Cain marrying other people and fearing the reprisal of the others. This makes sense if there was an extra population of other humans but is very mysterious if Cain and Abel were two of the first people. It’s less plausible that they’d be marrying their siblings.
This is why many modern scholars hold that Adam was the first real human—the first to be given a full human soul. However, there were other creatures before Adam that were biological homo sapiens, who Cain married.
7 Conclusion
In this article, I’ve provided a pretty comprehensive overview of the evidence for evolution and an old earth. Obviously I haven’t discussed all of it—there’s just too much to be said in favor of both evolution and an old earth to fit it all into one article. But hopefully I’ve given a pretty good overview of the problems. While creationists can find elaborate ways of explaining away a few of these facts, they ultimately have to add so many epicycles to their theory that it ends up wildly implausible, just as attempts to reconcile a round earth with the discoveries of modern science do.
I would be curious to hear specific criticisms from young earthers. So if you’re a young earther, feel free to leave a comment. Similarly, I hope you’d share this with your friends who are young earth creationists.
Those of us who believe in God should stop trying to defend fringe and bunk theories. We should believe the accounts of mainstream science. In fact, when we do this, such accounts often testify to the existence of God. The route forward for theists is true in science and evidence, not dogmatically clinging to a misinterpretation of Genesis.
Interestingly, Biblical literalism is actually a relatively modern (post 1500) phenomenon.
The Catholic church has never taught biblical literalism. I don't think traditional Jewish communities taught it either.
With the rise of the printing press and Protestantism, everyone could own their own Bible, so the text itself - without a priestly tradition - became the touchstone. Biblical literalism and Young Earth creationism are Protestant phenomena.
Are there any young earth creationists on substack? I am struggling to see the target audience here. I imagine everybody who reads this piece will have already agreed with the title before reading.
Anyway, God put all of the evidence for an old earth around to test our faith.