Flawed Scientific "Evidence" of God
There are plenty of theists in the world who have no problem whatsoever with the fact that modern science contradicts a literal interpretation of their particular religion’s holy book (especially any creation stories contained therein). They are perfectly willing to accept that some parts of their religion’s holy book are meant to be taken metaphorically and acknowledge that those holy books were never intended to be any sort of science textbook in the first place. Now, I do have to wonder just how much of your religion’s foundational document(s) you can dismiss as not literally true before you end up needing to admit that none of it is likely literally true, but that’s a post for another day. My point is simply that most theists tend to accept that the creation stories contained in their religion’s holy book are not literally true, and that this post is not about those theists. So if you are one of those theists and are reading this, please realize I’m not talking about you.
No, the theists this post is about are those who are convinced that their religion’s holy book contains a historically and scientifically accurate description of actual events regarding the creation of the universe and the Earth and all life thereon. And when science directly contradicts those accounts written thousands of years ago by people so ignorant about the universe and our place in it that they didn’t even realize our day/night cycle was caused by the Earth’s rotation on its axis, well, it can only be science that is wrong, not their literal interpretation of the creation story in their holy book.
Now, usually this basic denial of any science that contradicts their holy book’s creation story takes the form of a blanket assertion that anything that contradicts the scriptures simply can’t, by definition, be true, as in the following example:
By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.
This is the equivalent of sticking ones fingers in ones ears and shouting “LA LA LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING I CANNOT HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA LA!” Most of the time they don’t even bother trying to explain what the correct “interpretation” of the evidence is since, by definition, any interpretation that contradicts the scriptures must be invalid. And this is, quite frankly, just plain sad.
However, occasionally these theists will get tired of having people look down on them as irrational and uneducated and will attempt to use their poor (if not wholly absent) understanding of basic science to discredit other basic science with the use of science-y language. They will, for example, claim that “The Second Law of Thermodynamics” somehow proves that evolution is impossible because they erroneously think (or, more likely, read on a creationist website somewhere) that Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it’s impossible for order to ever come from disorder. And, aside from the fact that that is not actually what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says,⁽¹⁾ it’s rather hilarious that they will put absolute faith in one principle of modern science while wholly rejecting another, just as well-established, principle.
Or they will try and use evidence of the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”⁽²⁾ as proof that God created all life on Earth at once, just like it says in the Bible, which therefore once again proves that evolution must be false.
Or they will claim that the scientific concepts (not “discoveries”) of a Mitochondrial Eve and a Y-chromosomal Adam somehow prove that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden some 6000 years ago is literally true.⁽³⁾
Or they will claim that the discovery of “horizontal gene transfer”⁽⁴⁾ somehow proves evolution is false because it somehow refutes the idea of a universal common ancestor for all species (ignoring, of course, that everything else about genetics proves that evolution is real).
Or they will claim the the so-called “big bang”⁽⁵⁾ theory somehow proves that the entire universe was created some 6000 years ago out of nothingness, just like it says in the Bible with the whole “Let there be light” bit.
Or they will claim that something called the “law of biogenesis”⁽⁶⁾ somehow proves that life could not have arisen naturally on Earth from inorganic materials and must therefore have been created by God.
And the list goes on and on and on…
Now, you may find this all to be just as sad as those theists described above who metaphorically stick their fingers in their ears, but I actually find it rather amusing. Cute, even! Seriously, it’s as cute as a little boy walking around the house wearing one of his father’s suits in an effort to make himself appear all grown up:
[So cute!]
They don’t actually understand basic science, but they are so desperate to be taken seriously by those who do understand basic science that they walk around the house wearing their big “basic science” pants and hope nobody notices they don’t actually fit.
On a related note, I often encounter theists who, in order to prove that God must exist (and, of course, it’s always the particular God that they were indoctrinated from a young age to believe in and not somebody else’s God, but I digress…) claim that the universe must have been “created” because “nothing can come from nothing” or “it’s impossible for something to come from nothing” or even (my favorite) “Science says that something can’t come from nothing.” To which I respond:
And you know this to be the case in all circumstances and at all times and places how, exactly? Are you some sort of omniscient God who understands everything about the universe and can state with absolute certainty how it must behave? If so, I am truly honored to be in the presence of such a being. If not, I find it awfully ironic that theists like to call atheists “arrogant” for supposedly claiming to “know” that no gods exist.
Footnotes:
¹ The Second Law of Thermodynamics actually states that in an isolated system (i.e., one that that does not receive energy from an outside source) things tend to move from an ordered state to a disordered one (a.k.a. “entropy”). The Earth, however, is not an isolated system, since it constantly receives energy from the sun, and even if it were an isolated system, overall entropy of a closed system may tend to increase while still decreasing in localized areas. If the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually meant that entropy could never be reversed, then there would be no life on Earth at all since even something as basic as photosynthesis involves decreasing entropy and increasing order. Oh — and more complex life forms are not necessarily “more ordered” than less complex life forms, which once again means that even if the Earth were a closed system (which it most assuredly isn’t), evolution would still be possible.
² The so-called “Cambrian Explosion” describes a time approximately 541 million years ago when the first animals that had bodies hard enough to regularly become fossilized appeared on the earth over a period of 13–27 million years. Although these early hard-bodied animals were the 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” lasted tens of millions of years and was a period when most major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record, not any of the actual species alive today (and in case you don’t know, it goes phylum, then class, then order, then family, then genus and only then species). So if you want to use the Cambrian explosion to argue that God just created everything as-is overnight instead of life evolving, you then have to explain why none of that “overnight” life actually resembles anything alive today.
³ Both “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-Chromosomal Adam” are terms that refer to the assumed female and male most recent common ancestor to all humans alive today. If you were to trace the lineage of every single person alive today, you would eventually come to a woman and a man who were a common ancestor to everybody. But not only would this man and woman most likely not have lived at the same time (and were therefore obviously not a couple), current scientific thinking is that Mitochondrial Eve probably lived anywhere from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago, whereas Y-Chromosomal Adam probably lived around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. So, no, it doesn’t even remotely support the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the recent past.
⁴ Horizontal gene transfer (a.k.a. lateral gene transfer) is when genetic material is transferred between simple unicellular or multicellular organisms other than directly from parent to offspring via DNA. It is the primary mechanisms for how bacteria become antibiotic resistant and, rather than disprove evolution in any way, is simply known as an important factor in the the evolution of many organisms. It really has nothing to do with whether there was a single “universal common ancestor” for all species alive today (as is generally assumed to be the case) or multiple versions, but even if it did somehow prove that different species alive today could trace their evolutionary heritage back to different early life forms, that still wouldn’t mean that evolution itself is not real.
[Sorry, no “Maude & Eugene” cartoon for this particular bit of inanity. Yet.]
⁵ The so-called “big bang” theory (not its actual name) describes a time some 13.8 billion years ago (not 6000) when the universe as we know it began a rapid transition from a very hot and dense state to a cooler and less dense state. It doesn’t say the universe just appeared out of nothingness and, in fact, says precisely nothing about where that initial very hot and dense state came from or how long it existed before beginning to transition. Also, according to the theory, the first visible light would not have appeared for hundreds of thousands of years after the initial expansion, which means that “Let there be light” couldn’t possibly be an accurate description of the same event.
⁶ OK, so first of all there is no actual “law of biogenesis.” What creationists who use this term are referring to is the fact that the idea of “spontaneous generation” was shown to be false hundreds of years ago by Luis Pasteur, but spontaneous generation was not merely a claim that life could arise from non-living material. Instead, it was a claim that complex life such as fleas, maggots, mice, etc. spontaneously arose from [currently] non-living matter such as decaying corpses. And Pasteur correctly demonstrated that such complex life forms only come only from other living things, by means of reproduction (as in, when a mommy fly and a daddy fly love each other very much…). Abiogenesis, on the other hand, is not the same as “spontaneous generation.” It is the idea that the first simplest forms of life here on Earth arose from inorganic materials and this has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that complex life only arises via reproduction. Scientists are working very hard to figure out whether abiogenesis occurred and, if so, how it was possible, but the evidence so far indicates that the first life may have arisen over a very long period of time and involved numerous precursor steps to finally produce something that would barely be recognized as life today but was able to start replicating on its own and that eventually evolved into something that we would consider fully alive.
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