Excerpts

In general, the acceptance of evolution alongside religious belief is known as theistic evolution. This term can be a little misleading, because many people assume that it is describing a fundamentally different process from how evolution would operate if God did not exist. Some Christians who accept evolution, such as the biologist Kenneth Miller, avoid calling themselves theistic evolutionists because the term is so easily misunderstood.¹ Theistic evolution does not require the process of evolution itself to operate any differently, just as religious beliefs would not require that about any other physical process such as gravity or magnetism. The reason no one refers to “theistic gravity” or “theistic magnetism” is because it generally goes without saying that those processes are compatible with Christian faith. If it were common for atheists and creationists to argue that Christianity is incompatible with the laws of physics, Christians who reject that argument might very well be known as theistic physicists.

Theistic evolution includes a wide range of viewpoints about what God’s relation to evolution is like. At one extreme, some theistic evolutionists believe that God directly guided the process of evolution in order to produce a desired result. (This is the viewpoint that “theistic evolution” is commonly assumed to mean, although among theistic evolutionists it is probably a minority view.) At the other extreme is the belief that after creating the universe, God left the process of evolution to proceed on its own, without expecting a specific outcome from it. My own viewpoint is somewhere in the middle. I believe that like most aspects of the world, evolution is controlled by the universe’s physical laws, and that therefore it is most accurate to understand the process itself as mechanical and random. But on the other hand, I also think that the universe’s physical laws were themselves created by God, so in an indirect sense God can be given credit for all of their results. Under most circumstances it is impossible for anyone to be given credit for the result of a random process, but that dichotomy breaks down if the outcomes of random events are still based on the details of how God constructed the universe. For example, decisions produced by casting lots (ancient Israel’s equivalent to flipping a coin) are physically random, but according to Proverbs 16:33 the results still represent God’s will: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

• 1.Farrell, J. (19 March 2016). It’s Time to Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’. Forbes. Retrieved 20 March 2016.

Paluxy Footprints and PRATTs

While the Glen Rose Formation presents a problem for several Flood geology models, it also contains one of the best-known sets of fossils that have been used as an argument for a young Earth. One place where this formation is exposed is the bed of Texas’s Paluxy River, and fossilized dinosaur tracks are abundant there.¹ But uniquely at this location, among the dinosaur tracks there are other tracks that appear to have been left by humans. If fossil human tracks existed alongside dinosaur tracks in Cretaceous strata, this would present a serious problem for our understanding of stratigraphy, because according to all widely-accepted accounts there are no human or human-like traces below the upper Tertiary System. In the 1970s, creationist John Morris suggested these tracks meant that the traditional understanding of the geologic column was wrong, and that the timescale it’s believed to represent must be wrong also.²

Creationists have understood from the start that not all of the alleged human tracks in the Paluxy River bed were genuine. John Morris’s article mentions that during the Great Depression, people living in the area around this river sometimes carved fake human tracks alongside the dinosaur tracks in an attempt to earn money by selling them. But forgery could not explain all of the seemingly human tracks, because in the 1970s some of these tracks had only recently been uncovered. The argument that these footprints prove dinosaurs and humans had coexisted was widely promoted in Films for Christ’s movie Footprints in Stone, which was shown in about 300 public high schools.³

These trackways were re-examined in the 1980s by the computer programmer and dinosaur track specialist Glen Kuban. Kuban documented additional signs of forgery in several of the alleged human tracks that showed distinct toe impressions, such as anatomical abnormalities that made it impossible for them to have been left by a real human foot.⁴ But Kuban’s most important discovery concerned the tracks that had not been forged, which were shaped like elongated ovals, as though a person wearing moccasins had made them. Kuban found that at the end of each of these tracks, there were faint impressions left by three dinosaurian clawed toes, which had been mostly filled in by mud on the soft ground before the tracks fossilized.⁵

Kuban invited John Morris to visit the river site with him to look at this new evidence. At Morris’s suggestion, several representatives from Films for Christ accompanied them. Films for Christ found this evidence persuasive enough that they withdrew Footprints in Stone from circulation,⁶ and Morris subsequently published a new article stating that “it would now be improper for creationists to continue to use the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution.”⁷ More recently, the young-Earth creationist organization Creation Ministries International has stated that there is no convincing evidence human tracks exist alongside dinosaur tracks in this area. One especially important fact they mention is that when one follows the alleged human footprints over a short distance, they eventually turn into normal three-toed dinosaur footprints within the same trackway.⁸

That should have been the end of the story regarding this argument for a young Earth, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. The Creation Evidence Museum, a young-Earth museum run in Texas by Carl Baugh, continues to promote these tracks as evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. (This museum is not related to the Creation Museum run by Answers in Genesis in Kentucky.) In a rare case of cooperation between creationists and supporters of evolution, Answers in Genesis has written an article for the pro-evolution website Talk.Origins repudiating the evidence at Baugh’s museum, stating that Baugh is “doing damage to the cause of Christ through ill-founded claims.”⁹ In a 2002 article titled “Maintaining creationist integrity”, Creation Ministries International provides a sharper rebuttal to an article by creationist Kent Hovind, in which Hovind argued that the Paluxy tracks and similar arguments should still be used by creationists despite their well-known flaws.¹⁰ Not even this has been enough for creationists to abandon the argument entirely: although Footprints in Stone is no longer sold by Films for Christ, a new edition of the movie is now promoted and distributed online by Restoring Genesis Ministries, presenting the same ideas that were presented in the movie’s original version.¹¹ Likewise, even though the major creationist organizations have long ago abandoned this argument, it continues to be used in recent books by less prominent creationist authors.¹², ¹³ A creationist argument that never stops being used, despite having its flaws pointed out again and again, is known as a PRATT: Point Refuted A Thousand Times.

Everyone makes mistakes, and these sorts of mistakes are not the exclusive domain of creationists. The worst example of a similar mistake by supporters of evolution is biology textbooks’ continued use of embryo diagrams based on Ernst Haeckel’s drawings. These drawings purport to show that all vertebrate embryos look identical in their earliest stages, but they have long been known to be inaccurate. In 1997, Michael Richardson and several other researchers published a paper in Anatomy and Embryology summarizing the ways that these drawings and others based on them are incorrect,¹⁴ and their conclusions were reported in New Scientist,¹⁵ The London Times,¹⁶ and the journal Science.¹⁷ Despite that, George Romanes’ copies of Haeckel’s drawings continued appearing in at least three well-known biology books from 1998 to 2007, and these books do not mention that the illustration is inaccurate and outdated.¹⁸ In 2009 this book’s editor contacted Donald Prothero, the author of the most recent book, to inform him of the error. (Of the other two authors, one was no longer living, and the other was already aware of the mistake he had made by including the image.) Prothero replied that he had been unaware of the problems with this image, and that he would do his best to correct the error in future editions of his book.¹⁹

We have no patience with these sorts of ignorant tactics from either creationists or supporters of evolution. However, there is another attitude even worse than ignorance, and that is continuing to use an argument even after finding out that it’s false. One example of this attitude concerns a well-known PRATT alleging that Earth’s rotation is slowing down at a rate of one second per year, which would be too quickly for the Earth to be billions of years old. This claim was originally made by creationist Walter T. Brown in 1981.²⁰ But the following year supporters of evolution examined the sources Brown was citing for it, and found that they actually describe a decrease of only 0.005 second per year, which is a slow enough decrease to not be a problem for an old Earth.²¹

In 2002, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance e-mailed the owners of fifteen creationist websites that were using Brown’s argument about Earth’s rotation, attempting to correct them about it and open a dialogue with them. Only five of the fifteen responded, and neither they nor the other ten were willing to remove the claim from their websites. The Ontario organization then found that instead of growing less common, creationist websites making this claim multiplied many times over between 2005 and 2011. The article about this failed attempt at dialogue quotes another author describing his frustration at the outcome: “I really don’t blame them for making this mistake initially. We are all entitled to a few mistakes. But this does not justify keeping this claim going for years and years. My question is, why is this claim still being made?”²²

In an article on creationists’ reluctance to stop using the Paluxy tracks as evidence, Robert Schadenwald offers a cynical answer: “Many prominent creationists apparently have the same view of truth as political radicals: whatever advances the cause is true, whatever damages the cause is false.”²³ Whether one agrees or disagrees with Schadewald’s interpretation, it is difficult to understand why someone who believes creationism is the truth would support it with arguments that they already know are incorrect. The truth, whatever it is, does not need lies to be told in its defense.

• 1.Farlow, J. O. et al. (2010). Dinosaur tracksites of the Paluxy River (Glen Rose Formation, Lower Cretaceous), Dinosaur Valley State Park, Somervell County, Texas, USA. 5th Jornadas Internacionales sobre Paleontology; a de Dinosaurios y su Entorno, Salas de los Infantes, Burgos, Spain.
• 2.Morris, J. D. (1976). The Paluxy River tracks. Acts & Facts, 5(5).
• 3.Morris, J. D. (1976). The Paluxy River tracks. Acts & Facts, 5(5).
• 4.Kuban, G. J. (2008). The Alvis Delk print: An alleged human footprint on a loose rock. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
• 5.Wilford, J. N. (17 June 1986). Fossils of ‘man tracks’ shown to be dinosaurian. The New York Times.
• 6.Schadewald, R. (1986a). Scientific creationism and error. Creation/Evolution, 6(1), 1–9.
• 7.Morris, J. D. (1986). The Paluxy River mystery. Acts & Facts, 15(1).
• 8.Silvestru, E. (2004). Human and dinosaur fossil footprints in the Upper Cretaceous of North America? Journal of Creation, 18(2), 114–120. Published online.
• 9.Batten, D. What about Carl Baugh? A commentary by Answers in Genesis. Answers in Genesis and Talk.Origins. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
• 10.Wieland, C., Ham, K. & Sarfati, J. (11 October 2002). Maintaining creationist integrity: A response to Kent Hovind. Creation Ministries International. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
• 11.Footprints in Stone. Restoring Genesis Ministries. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
• 12.Woetzel, D. & Dobbs, R. (2013). Chronicles of Dinosauria: An exciting history of dinosaurs & man. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.
• 13.Harris, R. (2015). Evolution unraveled: How science disproves evolution. Glenside, South Australia: Starmonics.
• 14.Richardson, M. K. et al. (1997). There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development. Anatomy and Embryology, 196(2), 91–106.
• 15.Richardson, M. K. (1997). Embryonic fraud lives on. New Scientist, 155(2098), 23.
• 16.Hawkes, N. (11 August 1997). An embryonic liar. The London Times.
• 17.Pennisi, E. (1997). Haeckel’s embryos: Fraud rediscovered. Science, 277(5331), 1435.
• 18.Kane, J. (30 October 2009). Evolutionary PRATTs. Domain of Darwin DeviantART blog. Retrieved 18 November 2014. See also discussion at Christian Forums.
• 19.Prothero, D. Personal communication with the editor, 10 September 2009.
• 20.Brown, W. T. (1981). Evidence that implies a young Earth and solar system. In: Evidence for Creation Series. Naperville, IL: Institute for Creation Research.
• 21.Thwaites, W. M. & Awbrey, F. T. (1982). As the world turns: Can creationists keep time? Creation/ Evolution, 3(3), 18–22.
• 22.An unsuccessful attempt to correct an error on young-earth creationist websites. (2002). Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (updated 2011). Retrieved 18 November 2014.
• 23.Schadewald, R. (1986a). Scientific creationism and error. Creation/Evolution, 6(1), 1–9.

Although all of the radiometric methods shown in figure 3.3 use the same basic methods, there is one important way that they differ from one another. Earth’s supply of carbon-14 is continuously replenished by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere, and the isotopes radium-232, lead-210, radium-226, uranium-234, protactinium-231 and thorium-230 all form naturally from the decay of heavier radioactive elements.¹ (See figure 3.8.) However, the other five isotopes—potassium-40, uranium-238, uranium-235, thorium-232, and rubium-87—cannot be formed by any known natural process on Earth. Earth’s supply of these isotopes is thought to be left over from the supernova that formed the solar system.² From an old-Earth perspective, the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,³ but since these isotopes have half-lives in the billions or hundreds of millions of years, they decay slowly enough to still exist on Earth in detectable amounts.

In general, radiometric dating is only useful for isotopes that have experienced fewer than ten half-lives in the time since they formed. After that, so little of the original material remains that it becomes difficult to accurately measure it.⁶ This means that if the solar system is 4.6 billion years old, isotopes that cannot form on Earth should only exist in measureable amounts if they have half-lives longer than 460 million years. On the other hand, if the solar system and the Earth were created about 6,000 years ago, any isotopes with half-lives longer than 600 years could potentially be found on Earth. This principle is similar to the analysis one might carry out when trying to determine the age of a historic burial site. If it still contains materials such as cloth that decompose quickly, it cannot be more than a few decades old. On the other hand, if the burial site now contains nothing but skeletons, it must be old enough that these other materials have already decayed—as long as their owners weren’t nudists.

In examining the amount of radioisotopes that cannot form on Earth, it becomes obvious which direction the data points. The isotope with the shortest half-life that is found on Earth in measurable amounts, uranium-235, has a half-life of 710 million years. Plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80 million years, is barely detectable in trace amounts. Samarium-146, with a half-life of 70 million years, is not found in nature all. Neither is lead-205, with a half-life of 30 million years, uranium-236, with a half-life of 24 million years, or iodine-239, with a half-life of 17 million years.⁷ This data is shown in table 3.1.

Among radioisotopes that cannot form on Earth, why does the world contain measurable amounts only of those that have half-lives in the hundreds of millions of years or longer? The simplest answer is that the Earth is very old, and those isotopes with shorter half-lives have decayed so much that there’s too little left to detect. A second possible answer, that decay rates used to be higher in the past, will be addressed later in the chapter. However, it’s also important to address a third idea: that God created the world recently, but He deliberately avoided creating any isotopes that would be absent if the world were billions of years old.

The idea that God deliberately made the world look older than it is will be discussed a few times in this and the later chapters. The problem with this view is that it raises the question of how far God would have gone in order to deceive us about the age of the Earth. When one finds animal burrows deep in the geologic column, did animals actually make these burrows, or did God fake them in order to trick us? Did dinosaurs actually exist, or did He also create fake dinosaur bones, footprints and eggs? For that matter, no one can disprove the idea that the universe was created long after the events described in the Bible, and that both the Bible and every other historical document are more fake evidence God created in order to deceive us. Scientists generally do not subscribe to this view, and neither should Christians. In order to be able to understand anything about the universe, about history, or about God, we must accept that God has not been dishonest with us.

• 1.Potts, P. J. (1992). A Handbook of Silicate Mineral Analysis. New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
• 2.Haynes, W. M. (2014). CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics(95th ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• 3.Seeds, M. A. & Backman, D. E. (2012). The solar system. Boston: Brooks/Cole.
• 4.Potts, P. J. (1992). A Handbook of Silicate Mineral Analysis. New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
• 5.Hendrix, M. & Thompson, G. (2015). Earth². Stamford, CT: Cenage Learning.
• 6.Kiver, E. P. & Harris, D. V. (1999). Geology of U.S. Parklands(5th ed.). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
• 7.Morton, G. R. (1998). Foundation, Fall and Flood: A Harmonization of Genesis and Science (3rd ed.). Spring, TX: DMD Publishing.

John Ostrom made one other important discovery about Archaeopteryx in 1970, during a trip to the Teyler Museum in the Netherlands. One fossil he examined there, discovered in 1855, had been labeled as a pterosaur called Pterodactylus. But Ostrom noticed something about the fossil that gone unnoticed for more than a century: it contained imprints of feathers. Pterosaurs are an entirely separate group from birds, and it had been widely accepted since the 1920s that birds and pterosaurs were not closely related to one another, so one would not expect to find feathers in a pterosaur fossil. Closely examining the fossil, Ostrom found that the proportions of its bones also did not match those of a pterosaur. He soon realized that the fossil’s true identity was not a pterosaur at all—it was a previously unknown specimen of Archaeopteryx.^1,2

In addition to bringing to light another fossil of this rather scarce animal, Ostrom’s discovery at the Teyler Museum is significant for another reason. While this fossil of Archaeopteryx had been unearthed in 1855, Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859, meaning that this specimen of Archaeopteryx had been found four years before Darwin’s theory of evolution was published.³ This is the clearest possible disproof of the idea that Archaeopteryx was a forgery created to provide false support for Darwin’s theory, because when this fossil of it was discovered the controversy over his theory had not yet begun.

Like all specimens of Archaeopteryx, the Teyler specimen originated in southern Germany, so a forger creating this fossil would have had to know four years ahead of time what ideas would soon be emerging on the opposite side of the English Channel. Even if that were possible, someone forging the fossil would not have identified it as a pterosaur while saying nothing about its feather impressions, since they would have no way to predict that a paleontologist would eventually notice the feathers more than a century later. Although Creation Ministries International claims that Archaeopteryx was just a normal bird, they regard the argument that it’s a forgery as so clearly wrong that they have asked creationists to stop using it.⁴ Answers in Genesis used to also have this claim on their list of pro-creationism arguments that they consider faulty, but they have since removed it.⁵

• 1.Shipman, P. (1998). Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. London: Simon & Schuster.
• 2.Wellnhofer, P. (2009). Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution (revised English ed. of the 1st German ed.). Translated by F. Haase. Munich: Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfiel.
• 3.Shipman, P. (1998). Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. London: Simon & Schuster.
• 4.Sarfati, J. (29 February 2004). Archaeopteryx (Unlike Archaeoraptor) is NOT a Hoax—it is a True Bird, Not a ‘Missing Link’. Creation Ministries International. Retrieved 15 April 2012.
• 5. Arguments Creationists Should Avoid. Answers in Genesis. Retrieved 15 April 2012 and 28 October 2014. (The Archaeopteryx forgery claim was mentioned there in 2012, but not in 2014.)

How much human variation is there? How do we vary from other animals? These questions are relevant to several lines of research, and their answers are not simple. It requires special work to determine how to compare genetic data. This work is called sequence alignment.

To understand sequence alignment, let’s return to the metaphor of DNA as text. Like a DNA segment, a piece of text exists as a linear sequence of discrete pieces of information—letters for text, and base pairs for DNA. Here is the opening of the LORD’s Prayer taken from several different translations of the Bible:

• Our Father in heaven… (Modern English: New International Version)

• Our Father which art in heaven… (Early Modern English: King James Version)

• Our Faither in heiven… (Scots: Lorimer’s New Testament)

• Oure fadir that art in heuenes… (Middle English: Wycliffe’s Bible)

• Fæder ure thu the eart on heofonum… (Old English: Wessex Gospels)^*

A naive way to measure the differences between these phrases would be to start at the beginning and go letter by letter. But note an important problem with this approach: it would show the King James and New International versions to be completely different past the first two words. In fact, the only real difference is the presence or absence of a single phrase (which art).

A more sophisticated method involves finding commonalities. All of these opening phrases have words identical to or resembling our, father, in, and heaven, usually in that order. Thus, we can align the words to each other: our to oure and ure; father to faither, fadir, and fæder, and so on.

Once we have aligned the phrases, we can model the differences between them as transformations. For example, heuenes can be changed to heaven by letter changes: inserting an a after the e, replacing the u with a v, and deleting es from the end. Changing Fæder ure to Oure fadir requires letter changes as well as an inversion of word order. Going from Early Modern English to Modern English requires deleting an entire segment (which art). These types of transformation all correspond to how mutations work on DNA. Letter changes correspond to the mutations behind SNPs, while insertions, deletions, and inversions correspond to larger-scale mutations (as well as duplications, not shown in these text examples).

By counting the number of transformations needed to go from one form to another, we can quantify the differences with greater sophistication. And we can see which sequences are truly most similar to each other. For example, the Modern English version is more similar to the Early Modern English version (≥1 transformation) than to Middle English (≥8 transformations) or Old English (≥12 transformations).

This sort of comparison can be done with DNA sequences as well, using computer algorithms. Thus, we can use sequence alignment to measure differences between DNA sequences, and even whole genomes. When we apply this method to the human genome, we find that we are all more than 99.9% similar to each other.¹ And when we apply it to the human and chimpanzee genomes, we find that we are more than 98% similar to them.² (This similarity will be discussed in greater detail further on.)

* The spelling has been changed so that it matches the alphabet of Modern English. The original has the letter “þ” instead of “th”.

• 1.Venter, C. et al. (2001). The sequence of the human genome. Science, 291(5507), 1304–1351.
• 2.Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005). Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. Nature, 437, 69–87.

While teaching the Pharisees that divorce was a bad thing, Jesus Christ is quoted in Mark 10:6 as saying that “from the beginning of the creation God ‘made them male and female.’” Answers in Genesis has argued that in this verse Jesus is stating that humans have existed since the beginning of time, and thus the Universe could not be any older than humanity is. The same exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees is described in Matthew 19, but in this passage Jesus is quoted as saying “at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’”, without specifying whether He meant the beginning of the Universe or the beginning of human history.¹ Like the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, these quotations cannot both be literally accurate: either Jesus referred to the beginning of creation in this conversation, or He did not. Which of these two verses represents what Jesus actually said?

According to a grammatical analysis by Yale language scholar Charles Torrey, the reason why Mark’s quotation differs from the one in Matthew is because the words “from the beginning of creation” are the result of a translation error that occurred when the original Aramaic text was converted into Greek. (Matthew’s quotation is translated correctly.)² One line of evidence for this is that several of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark do not contain the apparent mistranslation, and omit the words “of creation”.³ The argument that Mark 10:6 is incompatible with an old Earth is a good example of the sort of mistake that can arise from a plain interpretation of an English translation of the Bible. Without an understanding of how the original text has been recopied by well-meaning but fallible humans, it is not possible to separate God’s Word from errors that have been introduced by human scribes and translators. In this case it also is clear from the context what Jesus’ actual meaning was, which is to rebuke men who put away their wives, and to tell them that they were defying God’s original plan for humanity. Attempting to infer Jesus’ beliefs about the age of the Universe from this passage would be somewhat like attempting to find out the name of the Prodigal Son, or his dates of birth and death—it is completely missing the point that Jesus intended to make.

• 1.The Bible, Matthew 19:4.
• 2.Torrey, C. (1936). Our Translated Gospels. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
• 3.Gill, J. (1999). Exposition of the Old New Testaments: Mark. The Baptist Standard Bearer. Retrieved 27 August 2014.