Creationism vs. Evolution

      Recently there was a debate on Creationism vs. Evolution between Bill Nye, the "Science Guy" on television, and Ken Ham, the head of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Many people were critical of Mr. Nye for debating something which they consider to be non-debatable. I agree with them. Creation vs. Evolution is not a proper subject of debate. It is like arguing whether the Earth is round of flat. The issue was settled a long time ago. The only people who believe in Creationism are extremely ignorant adherents of religion and superstition. It makes no sense to debate with such people because they are intellectually incapable of understanding science.

Several years ago I wrote a column for the newspapers about a visit to the Creation Museum by a group of scientists. Here it is:

NESCIENCE IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY

            In order to get from Dayton to the Creation Museum out near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, one has to drive over bedrock of Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were deposited between about 435 and 445 million years ago. World geography was quite different then. North America straddled the equator and Ohio was located south of the equator. The Ohio River did not exist. From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is quite young. It was formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago from north-flowing rivers dammed by the early ice ages.

           According to news reports, in late May, 2009, seventy paleontologists took a break from a conference at the University of Cincinnati and drove over Ordovician bedrock to visit the Creation Museum. I’m sure that they were interested in seeing not only the displays at the museum, but also the living fossils of a species that was thought to have become extinct at the time of the European Enlightenment; the irrational,  superstitious, religious believers for whom modern science means nothing. Contrary to popular belief, long after the time of Galileo and Columbus, this kind of people continued to believe that the earth was flat and was the center of the universe. Today, they insist that the earth is 6000 years old. They believe this despite the fact that everybody knows that even Dick Clark is more than 6000 years old.

One display at the museum shows two prehistoric children playing while dinosaurs, which became extinct 63 million years before the human species developed, cavort nearby. The scientists visiting the museum were astonished. "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale; "It's rather scary.” Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, said: “It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?” Lisa Park, a University of Akron professor of paleontology, who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, called it "bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me."

Leaving aside the geological evidence, it does not seem likely that the earth began 6000 years ago. There was already a flourishing civilization in Egypt 6000 years ago. British archaeologists have found 30 sites rich in art chiseled into rocks up to 6,000 years ago in the desert east of the Nile. The rock drawings show cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos and the men and women who lived in the area in 4,000 BC, long before the first pharaohs or the first pyramids.

“Lucy” was the name given to an early ancestor of the human species discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 at Hadar in Ethiopia.  Its age is about 3.2 million years. Lucy was an adult female of about 25 years and was assigned to the species “Australopithecus Afarensis.” There have been hundreds of discoveries of pre-human fossils going back millions of years.

Fossils of the now extinct species of human called Neanderthals have been found in various places in Europe and the Middle East. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago. Fossils of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, date back 40,000 years. Archeologists in Oregon have located an ancient trash dump and latrine which was found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots. The materials found were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. It is believed that the ancestors of Native Americans came over the land bridge to Alaska around 20,000 years ago.

The universe has been around for about 13.5 billion years, and the earth is over 4 billion years old. They may not believe it at the Creation Museum, but that, my friends, you can take to the bank.