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.
Years ago I read that 'post 1500' is an unnecessarily wide time window. That biblical literalism and young earth creationism can be quite definitively traced to an early 20th century anti-secularism movement, specifically in the U.S..
That this intentional misunderstanding of reality is barely 100 years old, today.
Not even the writers of the Bible believed in Biblical literalism.
In 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, Paul thought that he would still be alive at Christ's second coming.
"WE WHO ARE STILL LIVING when the Lord returns will not meet him ahead of those who have died. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the believers who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, WE WHO ARE STILL ALIVE and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever."
But when Paul wrote 2 Timothy as an old man, he had realized that the second coming would not happen during his lifetime.
"For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing."
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.
Yes, I'm here! I'm a young earther and I completely disagree with the scientific arguments presented in this article. The evidence against evolution is very strong, but unfortunately, most people are not willing to think critically about the issue. I appreciate Matthew writing the article, but I do wish he'd look a little harder at the evidence. Thanks!
Hi Soren! Thanks for responding. Well, it isn't the kind of thing one can do justice to in a comment thread. If you are interested, I have a YouTube channel called Examining Origins with relevant content, and I just started a weekly debate on that channel with my brother who believes in evolution/old earth.
Great Piece! I’m not a young creationist since the most pious person I knew growing up was my Grandmother who was also a biology professor so I was not cognizent of the controversy until Middle School Bio.
My sense though is that “evolution is false because the Bible says the Earth was created in a week” is a bit of a low brow argument. The more high brow case is that Darwinism is incompatible with Christian ideas of Creation due to it placing death as a central mechanism for creation, highlighting “survival of the fittest” over the meek inheriting the Earth, ect.
So I think the part of your argument that is least compelling is the argument that there must have been other people because otherwise who would Cain and Abel had married. Or that argument is incomplete. Some church fathers made the same point that other humans seemed to exist outside the Garden, and Cain marrying his relative would violate the Biblical prohibition on incest.
But YEC seem to be willing to allow for that at the early stages of history. (I’ve heard it said that “it took a while for Adam and Eve’s genes to be corrupted by the Fall which seems like cope but whatever.) The reason for that consensus seems to be that removing Adam has the ancestor of all men would remove the hereditary nature of concupiscence. In other words, you would need to come up with a different mechanism in which the effects of original sin affected the aboriginal people of Australia. Perhaps even more importantly, if Adam was created as the first ensouled being among humans with no souls, that would mean that humans with no descent from Adam are less then human. This idea was the source of a lot of “Christian” and “scientific” justifications of racism. Also, if the literal interpretation seems to force early humans to violate the command against incest, this interpretation would force early humans to commit a form of bestiality with their not-quite human relatives
William Lane Craig’s perferred solution is to place Adam and Eve at the time of Homo heidelbergensis when no other human species existed (or at least none that exhibited obvious signs of human culture). He also claims that at this point in the past, there is no scientific evidence that there could not be a single couple but I have not fact-checked that claim.
My perferred version (which I have not systemized yet but I may in the future) is that there may have been two Adams. The first would be a Genesis 1 “Primordial Adam” who may have been a pre-Homo Sapian hominid who was the first in his tribe to be elevated to God’s image and was thus made to hold a king/priest role. Then there would be a Genesis 2 “Representative Adam” who lived during the first Agricultural Revolution and was meant to fill a similar priestly role to the first Adam and lead humanity towards knowing God but whose fall meant the consequences spread to the Human diaspora.
Re. "The more high brow case is that Darwinism is incompatible with Christian ideas of Creation due to it placing death as a central mechanism for creation ...".
I think that is incorrect. "Variation" is arguably the central mechanism of evolution. Everything dies anyway, but without variation, no species would evolve. Survival of the fittest would become survival of the lucky.
You could argue that it's a matter of opinion; but that just reveals that creationists frame evolution in a convenient way; a form of a straw man argument.
I'm one of those people who grew up YEC. I'm still a member of a Christian denomination that holds very strongly to a young earth position. But after learning basic science, and understanding more about evolution and origins, I had to abandon that view.
The 'heat problem' is another major thorn on the side of the YEC view. They have no viable solution for it that doesn't include "God must've intervened..."
Happy 102nd birthday of young-Earth creationism! Also, I think one item in your post holds the potential to END it.
I first got interested in both science and theology through, of all things, becoming a creationist. Decades later, I'm an agnostic and evolution-promoter (it's been a heckuva ride). Lately I've lately been looking into the history of YEC, and was surprised to find how young it is. While opposition to evolution predates Darwin, modern YEC (creation in six literal days, the world is less than 10,000 years old, and fossils can be explained by Noah's flood) was born in the work of a now-forgotten man named George McCready Price, whose insistence on six LITERAL days came from being a Seventh-Day Adventist. (That denomination takes the question of "which day should we celebrate the Sabbath?" super-seriously, so they opposed the idea the idea that was popular among fundamentalists of the time — that Genesis's story of creation contains long gaps.)
The arguments you list here are all correct, and some of the strongest ones, rhetorically. I think, though, that one of the arguments in particular — "4.4, the fossil record" — actually can be utilized to help young Earth creationists see that their model doesn't actually make sense, and give it up. Yes, I understand that this sounds crazy! But I've used it to help YECs become old-Earth creationists who are open to evolution. Over the last couple years, I've sketched out a plan for how this could be operationalized. At present, I'm calling it "Fossil in the Wrong Place", and it leverages the fact that a single fossil in a (very) wrong place would totally upend our understanding of the history of Earth.
This is already way too long for a comment, but some pieces of the plan involve (1) helping people clearly understand their local geological strata (this is something professional geologists are usually TERRIBLE at, because they know way too much to speak simply), (2) helping them look for and identify fossils, (3) showing them what animals & plants they should expect to see, & (4) funding a contest that would award at nice cash prize to anyone who can find a fossil in a VERY wrong place (judges would need to include evangelical paleontologists) (yes, there are lots of them).
Obviously, there are lots of other pieces! But in short, it's clear explanations + citizen science + a cash prize + de-emphasizing the culture war.
I was hoping to lead this project, but then life picked up (aka I won the ACX book review contest), and I don't have time to. But I'd love to help anyone with the passion and right background start it up — if anyone's interested, just reach out to me.
Great piece! Particularly appreciate you addressing the 'genetic entropy' and the 'irreducible complexity' arguments, as they *sound* smart even if they're mistaken. Especially error catastrophe (ie average rate of reproduction falls below one) hasn't been observed across natural populations, and attempts to induce lethal mutagenesis in viruses—which have high mutation rates, and so would be our best bet at studying error catastrophes—haven’t been empirically conclusive, either.
I know you've expressed disdain towards the "God of the Gaps" label, but I think irreducible complexity fits it to a tee. It's an argument from personal incredulity rather than anything else, and an “irreducibly complex” structure is always proposed once we figure out how something, well, isn’t. In my experience, one of the main things that creationists try to argue is that evolution is faith-based, rather than a result of inductive thinking––in doing so, they'll appeal to questions we haven't answered yet ("oh yeah?! well how did the first life-form arrive?!!?"), or shift goalposts. :P
Great post! And given the beliefs of a growing segment of your audience, your influence on this could be significant. I’m in full agreement with nearly every sentence you’ve written here (except for maybe the second to last one).
I was raised in a Christian homeschooled family, and like many in that demographic my middle school science textbooks were written by Jay Wile, a chemistry professor who converted to Christianity as a result of being convinced of YEC (yeah). I just checked his blog and it looks like he's still writing posts arguing for YEC as recently as a couple months ago: https://blog.drwile.com/senter-continues-to-use-false-information-to-assure-the-faithful/
His textbooks provided evidence for both sides, and encouraged students to go research more themselves. As a result I spent a fair amount of time in high school researching the subject.
But there are a fair number of articulate academics who are committed to YEC for theological reasons writing at places like creation.com, and that combined with Brandolini's law ("bullshit asymmetry principle") makes it an overwhelming subject to research if you're not pre-committed to a metaphysical worldview that requires one or the other. The fields covered (cosmology, genetics, geology, radiation chemistry etc.) are complicated enough that it's very difficult to discern the quality of argument between two people who are well trained in the background and vocabulary in that field, unless you're well-read in it yourself. So I got nowhere in high school and honestly even after a biology undergrad and plenty of spare time reading scientific papers and discussions since I don't feel much further along (although I haven't dedicated as much time to the old age/YEC debate in particular for a while).
I really wish I could be more confident about what happened, and it feels like it should be really obvious. Like it does seem like more evidence favours old earth, but it still feels like soft tissue couldn't possibly survive millions of years, even if there are speculative explanations (by the way, your source for the absence of DNA in fossils is from 2001, and your first link on mechanisms of soft tissue preservation mentions DNA fragments in fossils, with more recent citations).
I wanted to leave this comment for other readers questioning how anyone could still believe in YEC or how they could not be convinced by this post. I'm undecided (leaning old earth recently although I still have some metaphysical questios about it), but I know that there are YEC who have responded to most or all of the arguments here with academic answers. That doesn't mean they're *good* arguments! But it's enough to cause hesitation, doubt in both directions, and it means that basic overview lists like this aren't going to do it on their own.
This article also includes some misunderstandings of creationism that makes me skeptical the author has really engaged with creationist arguments deeply. Either that or he's oversimplified them a lot, which won't help with convincing any well-read YEC. For example section 5.1 assumes that creationists believe in the immutability of species. But actually creationists require speciation to happen *faster* than old earth theory does, in order to allow the amount of "created kinds" to fit in Noah's Ark and then diversify into the amount of species that exists today. The argument is instead that speciation inevitably causes deterioration of the genome with no potential of increasing complexity, preventing large-scale evolution. It's a much more subjective and difficult argument to say that "macroevolution" has been observed, and it's too easy for YEC to argue that any particular example doesn't count.
I think the young earth creationists should give the atheists and scientists some slack if God is literally conspiring to make them falsely believe the Earth is old!
1--The evidence for evolution is strong but not exclusive. There are other ways to explain this evidence; particularly, intelligent design. You may not -like- that theory, but it does explain things like morphology: Just like my car did not "evolve" two headlights, four wheels, etc from previous car, but rather designers re-used successful concepts and materials. It is imperfect; a better explanation IMO would be relatedness without evolution (de novo creation married to guided "evolution").
Speciation in particular. I skimmed both papers. Sounds like the virus one was microevolution oversold (and do viruses count?). The plant one was pure hybridization--was the author intending to mislead here, counting on people not clicking? The fact is, the complete LACK of speciation after decades of diligent research; with organisms that can produce more generations in a short period of time than most mammals have had in all history, is completely fatal to descent with modification.
2--the evidence against evolution is actually super limited and cherry-picked of the weakest arguments. I suggest learning about the math behind protein folds in sequence space now that we know the odds of generating a novel and working protein fold. And the speciation case touched on above.
But I'll go with the most obvious: the Cambrian explosion.
Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
That simply has not happened. Descent with modification driven ONLY by random mutation and natural selection (what most people mean in this argument by "evolution") stood refuted by Cambrian, and still stands.
Falsification is science is simple and lovely. I don't need to tell you what happened instead, or give you my own novel theory.
Based solely on the Cambrian, Darwin is falsified.
> >Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
It did. We do in fact have a great amount of pre-Cambrian fossils [1], including several plausible precursors of later animals proper [2], with traces of guts [3], mineral skeletons [4], and animal-like developmental patterns [5]. (They're not *certain* precursors, of course, but that's as good as it gets with soft-body fossils of simple bodyplans.) Since one of the main features of the Cambrian Explosion was an arms race between preys and predators leading to a proliferation of armors, shells, mouthparts, and teeth, not to mention larger size and better mobility, it's not surprising that fossils become much more abundant, and more recognizably animal, afterward. (Similar arms races also occurred afterward on a smaller scale, e.g. [6].)
The so-called “Cambrian Explosion” describes a period approximately 541 million years ago during which the first animals that had bodies hard enough to regularly become fossilized appeared on the earth over a period of 13–27 million years.
An "event" taking MILLIONS of years to play out does not seem like an "explosion"!
And bear in mind that, although these early hard-bodied animals were the very distant ancestors of all animal life we see on earth today, there were none of the various “kinds” of animals described in the Bible. No cats, no dogs, no horses, no camels, no sheep, no pigs, etc. In fact, there were no birds, no fish, no reptiles and no mammals. Just a bunch of very early forms of animal life that were just starting to develop hard shells.
Seriously, the so-called “explosion” was a period when most major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record, not any of the actual species alive today. So if someone wants to use the Cambrian explosion to argue that God just created everything “as-is overnight” instead of life evolving, then they would have to explain why none of that “overnight” life actually resembles anything alive today.
>Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
Darwin's original theory very much doesn't stand up to the scrutiny of modern evolutionary theories - he didn't even know about genetics for example. Without any involved party committing themselves to a more well operationalized theory than just "evolution" in the abstract, the discourse probably won't be fruitful.
>The fact is, the complete LACK of speciation after decades of diligent research; with organisms that can produce more generations in a short period of time than most mammals have had in all history, is completely fatal to descent with modification.
"Species" - like all our concepts - is neither univariate nor univocal. A trivial example of interbreeding-failure-speciation occurs in ring species like salamanders that are e.g. ecologically segregated due to geographical features like mountains, resulting in nearby segregated groups suceeding in interbreeding attempts whereas the groups that are farthest separated fail to interbreed; i.e. establishing a continuum of interbreeding where groups at the farthest ends cannot interbreed with each other. There is no bright line to draw as to where speciation occurs here, so many people instead rely on other species concepts to deliver clearer answers when other species concepts fail. The lack or presence of an "Ah ha, that's where speciation occurs" moment doesn't mean much, because many people's pretheoretical notions of how biologists classify things into species and thus what significance said classification carries is uninformed.
Even if this is true that doesn’t prove young earth creationism. And just because was that we don’t have fossil evidence leading up to the Cambrian explosion doesn’t change the fossils we do have
Right--YEC is wildly false. I agree, and thus didn’t comment on that. It is embarrassing to see other Christians fall for this nonsense. Just unthinking.
As to the fossils...not sure what difference it makes. Falsification is fun that way. My official response is "don't care--see Cambrian explosion, Darwin still falsified".
It's good to have the arguments put together like this. But I wonder: do things like this actually persuade anyone who is an adult? I was thinking that if you're an adult, and you buy YEC, then you've already pretty much had to accept the following idea:
"God arranged the physical world so as to mislead us when we try to think for ourselves. He arranged things so that there is tremendous evidence for an old Earth and cosmos, but he must have had his reasons for putting such a colossal amount of misleading evidence around us."
Isn't that what adult YECs believe? (I don't know; I don't hang out with those people.) If so, why would they be moved by the arguments in this post?
Okay, but there's a lot more going on here than some alleged evidence against evolution. The idea that the Earth is just a few thousand years old, or the universe itself is only that old, goes against a lot more than a slice of biology. In order to believe that based on scientific evidence, you need a lot more than biology considerations, as was pointed out in the original post.
In any case, if someone has reached adulthood, endorses YEC, and *reads Substack essays*, I doubt that they will be moved by anything in the original post. Those people are too far gone.
There are so many arguments against young earth creationism: the starlight paradox, the CMB, carbon dating, fossils, erosion, continental drift, stalactites, corals, impact craters, permafrost, lunar recession, ice layering, and the list goes on and on...
However, the problem with all these arguments is that it takes a lot of scientific literacy to understand, so they're not going to be convincing to most people who believe in YEC. So my favorite argument is actually *tree rings*. Counting tree rings is something even very scientifically illiterate people understand, and with those tree rings we can create a record that stretches back thousands of years before the YEC says the earth began. This argument is both scientifically strong, and easy to understand for a layman, which is why it's my favorite.
One small correction, when you say:
> 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
this is technically incorrect. We have found *singular* trees (or more accurately clonal root colonies) that are older than YEC says the earth is, but they weren't dated with rings. And we have dated the earth to be older than YEC says the earth is using tree rings, but not by using only *one* tree, but rather records of multiple stacked together. If you only use one tree and only use ring counting, we don't stretch back before the age of the earth according to YEC (although depending on your math, we have found ones that are before the Noah's flood, so that's still a mystery for some of them to solve).
I appreciate you taking the time to write this. I don't think you've made a good case against young earth creationism here. I know you are a very good thinker, so I hope you will take a little more time to investigate the evidence against evolution before coming to a conclusion. Your discussion of irreducible complexity does not take into account the numerous chicken-and-egg problems in every living organism. The mechanisms supplied by evolutionists cannot account for the diversity and complexity of life. Even the simplest living cell cannot be produced by natural processes.
I have been discussing this topic with creationists since the 1970s; to date none have been able to show actual "evidence against evolution". If you think I am wrong (always possible) I'd love to see some. You make several claims in your comment, can you provide any evidence for them?
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.
Years ago I read that 'post 1500' is an unnecessarily wide time window. That biblical literalism and young earth creationism can be quite definitively traced to an early 20th century anti-secularism movement, specifically in the U.S..
That this intentional misunderstanding of reality is barely 100 years old, today.
Not even the writers of the Bible believed in Biblical literalism.
In 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, Paul thought that he would still be alive at Christ's second coming.
"WE WHO ARE STILL LIVING when the Lord returns will not meet him ahead of those who have died. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the believers who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, WE WHO ARE STILL ALIVE and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever."
But when Paul wrote 2 Timothy as an old man, he had realized that the second coming would not happen during his lifetime.
"For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing."
2 Timothy 4:6-8
Second Timothy was probably not written by Paul himself, but a later author who would obviously be aware of his death.
Are you saying that the true author wrote down things that Paul said? Or that the true author falsely attributed the epistle to Paul?
The latter
Most historians would disagree with that, but I guess it can't really be proved one way or the other.
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.
I think the most interesting part to the skeptic/Christian who is agnostic on this issue is the Biblical evidence. That could inform anyone.
I believe he wrote this for a posh Bri’ish YEC friend of his
Yes, I'm here! I'm a young earther and I completely disagree with the scientific arguments presented in this article. The evidence against evolution is very strong, but unfortunately, most people are not willing to think critically about the issue. I appreciate Matthew writing the article, but I do wish he'd look a little harder at the evidence. Thanks!
Lay out your case, then. I would like to see it.
Hi Soren! Thanks for responding. Well, it isn't the kind of thing one can do justice to in a comment thread. If you are interested, I have a YouTube channel called Examining Origins with relevant content, and I just started a weekly debate on that channel with my brother who believes in evolution/old earth.
I'm about to debate one soon
"God put all of the evidence..."
Is it too much to hope you have some evidence for this? Or are we to take it on faith?
It was a joke
Great Piece! I’m not a young creationist since the most pious person I knew growing up was my Grandmother who was also a biology professor so I was not cognizent of the controversy until Middle School Bio.
My sense though is that “evolution is false because the Bible says the Earth was created in a week” is a bit of a low brow argument. The more high brow case is that Darwinism is incompatible with Christian ideas of Creation due to it placing death as a central mechanism for creation, highlighting “survival of the fittest” over the meek inheriting the Earth, ect.
So I think the part of your argument that is least compelling is the argument that there must have been other people because otherwise who would Cain and Abel had married. Or that argument is incomplete. Some church fathers made the same point that other humans seemed to exist outside the Garden, and Cain marrying his relative would violate the Biblical prohibition on incest.
But YEC seem to be willing to allow for that at the early stages of history. (I’ve heard it said that “it took a while for Adam and Eve’s genes to be corrupted by the Fall which seems like cope but whatever.) The reason for that consensus seems to be that removing Adam has the ancestor of all men would remove the hereditary nature of concupiscence. In other words, you would need to come up with a different mechanism in which the effects of original sin affected the aboriginal people of Australia. Perhaps even more importantly, if Adam was created as the first ensouled being among humans with no souls, that would mean that humans with no descent from Adam are less then human. This idea was the source of a lot of “Christian” and “scientific” justifications of racism. Also, if the literal interpretation seems to force early humans to violate the command against incest, this interpretation would force early humans to commit a form of bestiality with their not-quite human relatives
William Lane Craig’s perferred solution is to place Adam and Eve at the time of Homo heidelbergensis when no other human species existed (or at least none that exhibited obvious signs of human culture). He also claims that at this point in the past, there is no scientific evidence that there could not be a single couple but I have not fact-checked that claim.
My perferred version (which I have not systemized yet but I may in the future) is that there may have been two Adams. The first would be a Genesis 1 “Primordial Adam” who may have been a pre-Homo Sapian hominid who was the first in his tribe to be elevated to God’s image and was thus made to hold a king/priest role. Then there would be a Genesis 2 “Representative Adam” who lived during the first Agricultural Revolution and was meant to fill a similar priestly role to the first Adam and lead humanity towards knowing God but whose fall meant the consequences spread to the Human diaspora.
Re. "The more high brow case is that Darwinism is incompatible with Christian ideas of Creation due to it placing death as a central mechanism for creation ...".
I think that is incorrect. "Variation" is arguably the central mechanism of evolution. Everything dies anyway, but without variation, no species would evolve. Survival of the fittest would become survival of the lucky.
You could argue that it's a matter of opinion; but that just reveals that creationists frame evolution in a convenient way; a form of a straw man argument.
I'm one of those people who grew up YEC. I'm still a member of a Christian denomination that holds very strongly to a young earth position. But after learning basic science, and understanding more about evolution and origins, I had to abandon that view.
The 'heat problem' is another major thorn on the side of the YEC view. They have no viable solution for it that doesn't include "God must've intervened..."
Hi! I don't think the heat problem is really a problem if the radioactive isotopes were from the period of creation. Thanks!
As you noted, the Bible is making theological points. It isn’t a scientific text. In the case of Genesis 1, it is teaching monotheism.
Happy 102nd birthday of young-Earth creationism! Also, I think one item in your post holds the potential to END it.
I first got interested in both science and theology through, of all things, becoming a creationist. Decades later, I'm an agnostic and evolution-promoter (it's been a heckuva ride). Lately I've lately been looking into the history of YEC, and was surprised to find how young it is. While opposition to evolution predates Darwin, modern YEC (creation in six literal days, the world is less than 10,000 years old, and fossils can be explained by Noah's flood) was born in the work of a now-forgotten man named George McCready Price, whose insistence on six LITERAL days came from being a Seventh-Day Adventist. (That denomination takes the question of "which day should we celebrate the Sabbath?" super-seriously, so they opposed the idea the idea that was popular among fundamentalists of the time — that Genesis's story of creation contains long gaps.)
The arguments you list here are all correct, and some of the strongest ones, rhetorically. I think, though, that one of the arguments in particular — "4.4, the fossil record" — actually can be utilized to help young Earth creationists see that their model doesn't actually make sense, and give it up. Yes, I understand that this sounds crazy! But I've used it to help YECs become old-Earth creationists who are open to evolution. Over the last couple years, I've sketched out a plan for how this could be operationalized. At present, I'm calling it "Fossil in the Wrong Place", and it leverages the fact that a single fossil in a (very) wrong place would totally upend our understanding of the history of Earth.
This is already way too long for a comment, but some pieces of the plan involve (1) helping people clearly understand their local geological strata (this is something professional geologists are usually TERRIBLE at, because they know way too much to speak simply), (2) helping them look for and identify fossils, (3) showing them what animals & plants they should expect to see, & (4) funding a contest that would award at nice cash prize to anyone who can find a fossil in a VERY wrong place (judges would need to include evangelical paleontologists) (yes, there are lots of them).
Obviously, there are lots of other pieces! But in short, it's clear explanations + citizen science + a cash prize + de-emphasizing the culture war.
I was hoping to lead this project, but then life picked up (aka I won the ACX book review contest), and I don't have time to. But I'd love to help anyone with the passion and right background start it up — if anyone's interested, just reach out to me.
Great piece! Particularly appreciate you addressing the 'genetic entropy' and the 'irreducible complexity' arguments, as they *sound* smart even if they're mistaken. Especially error catastrophe (ie average rate of reproduction falls below one) hasn't been observed across natural populations, and attempts to induce lethal mutagenesis in viruses—which have high mutation rates, and so would be our best bet at studying error catastrophes—haven’t been empirically conclusive, either.
I know you've expressed disdain towards the "God of the Gaps" label, but I think irreducible complexity fits it to a tee. It's an argument from personal incredulity rather than anything else, and an “irreducibly complex” structure is always proposed once we figure out how something, well, isn’t. In my experience, one of the main things that creationists try to argue is that evolution is faith-based, rather than a result of inductive thinking––in doing so, they'll appeal to questions we haven't answered yet ("oh yeah?! well how did the first life-form arrive?!!?"), or shift goalposts. :P
Here are three more proofs. It is written to an insular Ultra Orthodox population, but if you skim the jargon it should make sense.
https://open.substack.com/pub/daastorah/p/torah-and-science-the-problems-with
Great post! And given the beliefs of a growing segment of your audience, your influence on this could be significant. I’m in full agreement with nearly every sentence you’ve written here (except for maybe the second to last one).
I was raised in a Christian homeschooled family, and like many in that demographic my middle school science textbooks were written by Jay Wile, a chemistry professor who converted to Christianity as a result of being convinced of YEC (yeah). I just checked his blog and it looks like he's still writing posts arguing for YEC as recently as a couple months ago: https://blog.drwile.com/senter-continues-to-use-false-information-to-assure-the-faithful/
His textbooks provided evidence for both sides, and encouraged students to go research more themselves. As a result I spent a fair amount of time in high school researching the subject.
But there are a fair number of articulate academics who are committed to YEC for theological reasons writing at places like creation.com, and that combined with Brandolini's law ("bullshit asymmetry principle") makes it an overwhelming subject to research if you're not pre-committed to a metaphysical worldview that requires one or the other. The fields covered (cosmology, genetics, geology, radiation chemistry etc.) are complicated enough that it's very difficult to discern the quality of argument between two people who are well trained in the background and vocabulary in that field, unless you're well-read in it yourself. So I got nowhere in high school and honestly even after a biology undergrad and plenty of spare time reading scientific papers and discussions since I don't feel much further along (although I haven't dedicated as much time to the old age/YEC debate in particular for a while).
I really wish I could be more confident about what happened, and it feels like it should be really obvious. Like it does seem like more evidence favours old earth, but it still feels like soft tissue couldn't possibly survive millions of years, even if there are speculative explanations (by the way, your source for the absence of DNA in fossils is from 2001, and your first link on mechanisms of soft tissue preservation mentions DNA fragments in fossils, with more recent citations).
I wanted to leave this comment for other readers questioning how anyone could still believe in YEC or how they could not be convinced by this post. I'm undecided (leaning old earth recently although I still have some metaphysical questios about it), but I know that there are YEC who have responded to most or all of the arguments here with academic answers. That doesn't mean they're *good* arguments! But it's enough to cause hesitation, doubt in both directions, and it means that basic overview lists like this aren't going to do it on their own.
This article also includes some misunderstandings of creationism that makes me skeptical the author has really engaged with creationist arguments deeply. Either that or he's oversimplified them a lot, which won't help with convincing any well-read YEC. For example section 5.1 assumes that creationists believe in the immutability of species. But actually creationists require speciation to happen *faster* than old earth theory does, in order to allow the amount of "created kinds" to fit in Noah's Ark and then diversify into the amount of species that exists today. The argument is instead that speciation inevitably causes deterioration of the genome with no potential of increasing complexity, preventing large-scale evolution. It's a much more subjective and difficult argument to say that "macroevolution" has been observed, and it's too easy for YEC to argue that any particular example doesn't count.
I think the young earth creationists should give the atheists and scientists some slack if God is literally conspiring to make them falsely believe the Earth is old!
Rebutting the evolution claims:
1--The evidence for evolution is strong but not exclusive. There are other ways to explain this evidence; particularly, intelligent design. You may not -like- that theory, but it does explain things like morphology: Just like my car did not "evolve" two headlights, four wheels, etc from previous car, but rather designers re-used successful concepts and materials. It is imperfect; a better explanation IMO would be relatedness without evolution (de novo creation married to guided "evolution").
Speciation in particular. I skimmed both papers. Sounds like the virus one was microevolution oversold (and do viruses count?). The plant one was pure hybridization--was the author intending to mislead here, counting on people not clicking? The fact is, the complete LACK of speciation after decades of diligent research; with organisms that can produce more generations in a short period of time than most mammals have had in all history, is completely fatal to descent with modification.
2--the evidence against evolution is actually super limited and cherry-picked of the weakest arguments. I suggest learning about the math behind protein folds in sequence space now that we know the odds of generating a novel and working protein fold. And the speciation case touched on above.
But I'll go with the most obvious: the Cambrian explosion.
Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
That simply has not happened. Descent with modification driven ONLY by random mutation and natural selection (what most people mean in this argument by "evolution") stood refuted by Cambrian, and still stands.
Falsification is science is simple and lovely. I don't need to tell you what happened instead, or give you my own novel theory.
Based solely on the Cambrian, Darwin is falsified.
> >Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
It did. We do in fact have a great amount of pre-Cambrian fossils [1], including several plausible precursors of later animals proper [2], with traces of guts [3], mineral skeletons [4], and animal-like developmental patterns [5]. (They're not *certain* precursors, of course, but that's as good as it gets with soft-body fossils of simple bodyplans.) Since one of the main features of the Cambrian Explosion was an arms race between preys and predators leading to a proliferation of armors, shells, mouthparts, and teeth, not to mention larger size and better mobility, it's not surprising that fossils become much more abundant, and more recognizably animal, afterward. (Similar arms races also occurred afterward on a smaller scale, e.g. [6].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4tte#Precambrian
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111%2Fbrv.12239 (particularly II.6 and V.3)
[3] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01699-2
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbi.12122; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1860
[5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/brv.12379
[6] https://www.iiserkol.ac.in/~devapriya/Chattopadhyay,2003.pdf
The so-called “Cambrian Explosion” describes a period approximately 541 million years ago during which the first animals that had bodies hard enough to regularly become fossilized appeared on the earth over a period of 13–27 million years.
An "event" taking MILLIONS of years to play out does not seem like an "explosion"!
And bear in mind that, although these early hard-bodied animals were the very distant ancestors of all animal life we see on earth today, there were none of the various “kinds” of animals described in the Bible. No cats, no dogs, no horses, no camels, no sheep, no pigs, etc. In fact, there were no birds, no fish, no reptiles and no mammals. Just a bunch of very early forms of animal life that were just starting to develop hard shells.
Seriously, the so-called “explosion” was a period when most major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record, not any of the actual species alive today. So if someone wants to use the Cambrian explosion to argue that God just created everything “as-is overnight” instead of life evolving, then they would have to explain why none of that “overnight” life actually resembles anything alive today.
>Darwin admitted in Origin that the Cambrian -then- refuted his theory, but outlined his theory and predicted that the gap between the Cambrian and earlier eras would close with more fossil discovery.
Darwin's original theory very much doesn't stand up to the scrutiny of modern evolutionary theories - he didn't even know about genetics for example. Without any involved party committing themselves to a more well operationalized theory than just "evolution" in the abstract, the discourse probably won't be fruitful.
>The fact is, the complete LACK of speciation after decades of diligent research; with organisms that can produce more generations in a short period of time than most mammals have had in all history, is completely fatal to descent with modification.
"Species" - like all our concepts - is neither univariate nor univocal. A trivial example of interbreeding-failure-speciation occurs in ring species like salamanders that are e.g. ecologically segregated due to geographical features like mountains, resulting in nearby segregated groups suceeding in interbreeding attempts whereas the groups that are farthest separated fail to interbreed; i.e. establishing a continuum of interbreeding where groups at the farthest ends cannot interbreed with each other. There is no bright line to draw as to where speciation occurs here, so many people instead rely on other species concepts to deliver clearer answers when other species concepts fail. The lack or presence of an "Ah ha, that's where speciation occurs" moment doesn't mean much, because many people's pretheoretical notions of how biologists classify things into species and thus what significance said classification carries is uninformed.
Even if this is true that doesn’t prove young earth creationism. And just because was that we don’t have fossil evidence leading up to the Cambrian explosion doesn’t change the fossils we do have
Right--YEC is wildly false. I agree, and thus didn’t comment on that. It is embarrassing to see other Christians fall for this nonsense. Just unthinking.
As to the fossils...not sure what difference it makes. Falsification is fun that way. My official response is "don't care--see Cambrian explosion, Darwin still falsified".
Falsification is fun, especially if you get to ignore facts. A lot of hard stuff becomes fun when you cheat!
It's good to have the arguments put together like this. But I wonder: do things like this actually persuade anyone who is an adult? I was thinking that if you're an adult, and you buy YEC, then you've already pretty much had to accept the following idea:
"God arranged the physical world so as to mislead us when we try to think for ourselves. He arranged things so that there is tremendous evidence for an old Earth and cosmos, but he must have had his reasons for putting such a colossal amount of misleading evidence around us."
Isn't that what adult YECs believe? (I don't know; I don't hang out with those people.) If so, why would they be moved by the arguments in this post?
The YECs who raised me all thought the evidence was actually against evolution and the scientists were lying/biased due to being atheists.
Okay, but there's a lot more going on here than some alleged evidence against evolution. The idea that the Earth is just a few thousand years old, or the universe itself is only that old, goes against a lot more than a slice of biology. In order to believe that based on scientific evidence, you need a lot more than biology considerations, as was pointed out in the original post.
In any case, if someone has reached adulthood, endorses YEC, and *reads Substack essays*, I doubt that they will be moved by anything in the original post. Those people are too far gone.
There are so many arguments against young earth creationism: the starlight paradox, the CMB, carbon dating, fossils, erosion, continental drift, stalactites, corals, impact craters, permafrost, lunar recession, ice layering, and the list goes on and on...
However, the problem with all these arguments is that it takes a lot of scientific literacy to understand, so they're not going to be convincing to most people who believe in YEC. So my favorite argument is actually *tree rings*. Counting tree rings is something even very scientifically illiterate people understand, and with those tree rings we can create a record that stretches back thousands of years before the YEC says the earth began. This argument is both scientifically strong, and easy to understand for a layman, which is why it's my favorite.
One small correction, when you say:
> 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
this is technically incorrect. We have found *singular* trees (or more accurately clonal root colonies) that are older than YEC says the earth is, but they weren't dated with rings. And we have dated the earth to be older than YEC says the earth is using tree rings, but not by using only *one* tree, but rather records of multiple stacked together. If you only use one tree and only use ring counting, we don't stretch back before the age of the earth according to YEC (although depending on your math, we have found ones that are before the Noah's flood, so that's still a mystery for some of them to solve).
I appreciate you taking the time to write this. I don't think you've made a good case against young earth creationism here. I know you are a very good thinker, so I hope you will take a little more time to investigate the evidence against evolution before coming to a conclusion. Your discussion of irreducible complexity does not take into account the numerous chicken-and-egg problems in every living organism. The mechanisms supplied by evolutionists cannot account for the diversity and complexity of life. Even the simplest living cell cannot be produced by natural processes.
I have been discussing this topic with creationists since the 1970s; to date none have been able to show actual "evidence against evolution". If you think I am wrong (always possible) I'd love to see some. You make several claims in your comment, can you provide any evidence for them?
Thanks so much for writing this. It's perfect timing cuz I am about to debate an intelligent YEC.
Can you recommend any audiobooks, podcasts, or videos I can use to learn more about this topic?