What makes a theory about the past scientific, as opposed to a form of myth?

The opening chapters of Genesis account for the origin of the world through historical narrative. They are not a scientific theory, and whether they should be classed as myth or not depends on whether they are – or could be – true. That question has become increasingly complicated over the last two hundred years. The dominant world-view today is Darwinian evolutionism, a science-based account which seeks to supplant the Genesis narrative, and it has all the authority of an explanation that man has worked out for himself, on the basis of what he can deduce from the world around him. Historical tradition plays no role. In reaction against this revolution, creationism has attempted to give a scientific account which supports the Genesis narrative.

To avoid misunderstanding it is worth unpacking these labels a little. ‘Evolutionism’ here is the teaching that, from the Big Bang onwards, the history of the universe was determined solely by natural causes (hence the term ‘naturalism’); that these causes eventually gave rise to the earliest form of life; and that from this earliest and simplest form all subsequent forms descended, as shown by the Earth’s fossil record. In this view the beginning of all things can be dated to about 13 billion years ago. From their different perspectives modern cosmology, biology and geology have all contributed to this story. The term ‘Darwinian’ refers to the fact that some of the biological foundations for modern evolutionism were laid down by Charles Darwin.

‘Creationism’ is the teaching that the universe came into being through the will of a supreme being who was, and is, outside time and space; that he made land and sea and everything in them in six days; and that he subsequently destroyed them in a global flood, the evidence for which may be seen in the fossil record. In this view the beginning of all things may be dated to less than 10,000 years ago. The term ‘biblical’ refers to the fact that believers take the book of Genesis as their starting point rather than Darwin’s Origin of Species (or the assumptions underlying Darwin’s book), and they read it primarily as a work of direct revelation whose meaning is self-evident, almost as if it were written yesterday. As an apologetic movement creationism goes back to the ‘Scriptural geologists’ of the 19th century, but it was not until the publication of The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in 1961 that it began to make an appreciable impact.

The inquirer who begins to take an independent look soon finds himself caught in a propaganda war. Champions of Darwinism claim that ‘evolution is a fact’, and creationism just religion masquerading as science. Champions of creationism claim that the evidence supports their contention that Noah’s Flood destroyed the earth as recently as 4,500 years ago, whereas Darwinism is a ‘uniformitarian’ pseudo-religion. Convinced of the rightness of their cause but unable to produce evidence that would clinch it, both parties argue along the lines that their own theory must be true because their opponents’ clearly is not.

Not everyone is so partisan. Many of those involved concede that science does not ‘prove’ the account of origins they draw from the data and simply argue that the data are consistent with their account. The acknowledged difficulties can be shelved, on the basis that they will be solved by further research. But although their commentary is more measured, they too are loath to experiment with the possibility that the difficulties might be weaknesses, that there might be another way of looking at things.

What, then, makes the theories ‘scientific’? Is it their appeal to data which are gathered by scientific methods? Or the fact that they involve the investigation of physical processes which, as a result of investigation, are explained in terms of cause and effect? We don’t have to come up with a definitive answer, but one thing a scientific theory must be is capable of being falsified. The crux of the matter is not whether there is evidence which the theory satisfies – other theories may be able to do the same – but whether there is evidence that contradicts the theory.

In this sense, because they are falsifiable, Darwinian evolutionism and biblical creationism do both have the characteristics of a scientific theory. But while it is the case that they cannot both be true, does the failure of the one to account for the data mean that the other must be true?

They have, in fact, both been falsified, notwithstanding that they continue to be advocated as vigorously as ever. This is disturbing, for the will to believe in them and promote them for all they are worth despite their having failed as scientific theories shows that, ultimately, they are both – as indeed they say of each other – beliefs that function as myth, modes of interpretation that determine our perception of reality.

If the offered alternatives are wrong, it follows that there must be a third possibility. That is the possibility presented on this website. However, we first need to be clear about just how comprehensively the two main contenders have been falsified.

Evolutionism

There is as yet no satisfactory explanation for the origin of the Earth or the origin of the organisms that populate its fossil record. These organisms fail to show a smooth progression from simple forms of life to gradually more complex forms, connected through a single genealogical tree.

• Astronomers hold that the Sun formed from a cloud of gas which originated from the explosions of earlier generations of stars. While some of the gas condensed at the centre to form the Sun, other material aggregated into planets – solid planets close to the Sun and gaseous planets further out, along with icy chunks of rock and dust which we know as comets. Problems with this ‘nebular hypothesis’ include (a) the cores of the giant gas planets are not as rocky as predicted (b) there is no theoretical explanation for why bodies greater than a metre in size should clump together; and (c) simulations indicate the proto-planets would have spiralled inwards and been gobbled up by the Sun within 100,000 years. For these and other reasons ‘the origin of the Solar System represents one of the oldest unsolved problems in science’. Further details may be found at The origin of the solar system.
• There is no satisfactory explanation for the existence of large amounts of water on the primeval Earth. During the formation of the Solar System the Earth is believed to have been red-hot and therefore not to have hosted liquid water, yet the oldest evidence for terrestrial conditions shows that water was abundant. There were already entire oceans at this time, and apparently they predated the first continents. These matters are further discussed in Water, water everywhere.
• Astronomical theory dictates that the early Sun must have been 30–25% cooler than its present temperature. However, geological evidence shows that during the Archaean, when the Earth should have lost most of its original heat, the oceans were not, as expected, frozen solid but hotter than they are today. This is known as ‘the early faint Sun paradox’.
• Fossils are the remains of dead organisms, and in studying them we can easily forget that there is more to life than just what we see. The most distinctive property of animal life is consciousness, a state which we know first-hand because we ourselves have consciousness. We are, indeed, self-conscious beings. If this property could be adequately accounted for in terms of physical laws, human thought would have no rational quality, and Darwinism, being determined by those laws rather than resulting from processes which require assessment of evidence and logical decisions, would also have no rationality. Unlike computers or any other machine, we are informed by a spirit, as are all animals. Death occurs when the body ceases to have any sense of subjectivity and the spirit leaves the body. With its most fundamental premise that life consists only of atoms, evolutionism fails at the first hurdle. The attempt to explain life in terms of non-life and reduce reality to atoms is self-negating.
• As measured by radioisotope dating, three quarters of the fossil record consists only of microscopic organisms, after which both diversity and complexity increase abruptly, not little by little. The sudden appearance of mutually unrelated, complex organisms is known as ‘The Cambrian Explosion’ and was well known to Darwin. See The limits of relatedness.
• The Cambrian Explosion is not a unique phenomenon. Although the Cambrian is the time when nearly all major body animal plans (‘phyla’) appear, the first appearance of animal ‘orders’ – a less inclusive level of classification than phylum – is similarly explosive. Examples include the sudden appearance of insect orders in the Carboniferous and of mammal orders around the beginning of the Cenozoic.
• All the major plant groups (‘divisions’) also appear out of nowhere – mosses, ferns, horsetails, cycads, ginkgos, conifers, gnetophytes, monocots and so on.
• Major evolutionary transitions, such as the transition from fish to amphibians, or from amphibians to terrestrial reptiles, or from dinosaurs to birds, are likewise undocumented. There is not merely a lack of evidence, but the evidence which we have contradicts the evolutionist presumption.
• Evolutionary trees are frequently contradicted by the phenomenon known as ‘convergence’, i.e. the appearance of the same feature in independent lineages. It is called convergence because, although blind and undirected, Evolution appears to ‘converge’ from different directions upon the same or a very similar idea, e.g. the independent evolution of gliding among eight different groups of mammals (From reptile to mammal), the independent evolution of the spider form in trigonotarbids and harvestmen, or the independent evolution of the scorpion form in eurypterids and pseudoscorpions (The first land animals).
• The all-determining timescale depends on the assumption that the speed of light has always been the same as the present speed (the prime assumption, whether we are considering stellar distances, redshift or radioisotope decay). In geology this can be tested against the direct evidence of what is being dated. It fails such tests. The processes recorded in geological strata indicate rates of activity more than 20,000 times faster than those extraneously imputed by radioisotope dating (see How old is the Earth?).

There are also fundamental problems of a biological nature, not dealt with here. Evolution in the genome discusses, in a simple way, some of the genetic mechanisms underlying evolutionary change.

Creationism

Creationist organisations in the United States and Australia divide the geological record into pre-Flood rocks (the Archaean and most of the Proterozoic), Flood rocks (the rest of the Proterozoic to the end of the Cretaceous or later) and post-Flood rocks (the small fraction remaining). The fossils in the Flood rocks are understood to be the remains of pre-Flood animals that perished in the inundation. This view has problems at least as severe as those which undermine the evolutionist view:

• Archaean rocks – necessarily interpreted as Creation rocks – have every appearance of having originated directly from the mantle (granites, gneisses, basalts etc) and having solidified predominantly under water. Their nature is impossible to reconcile with an instantaneous origin, or with the emergence of dry land from the waters gathered together on Day 3 of the Creation (Gen 1:9).
• Proterozoic rocks are interpreted as formed either in Creation Week or in the interval between the Creation and the Flood, but they contain multilayered, microbially formed mounds known as stromatolites which can neither be reconciled with a single creation event nor with a normal marine ecosystem. There are, conversely, no fossils of shellfish, fish, sponges, worms etc, corresponding with the supposed pre-Flood seafloors. Proterozoic rocks also fail to disclose any evidence of normal terrestrial ecosystems.
• There is no geological interval after the Archaean when the whole Earth could have been under water. While there were time when sea-levels were high, the evidence is overwhelming that at least parts of the continents were above water.
• Terrestrial crust formed by a process of accretion, sometimes gradually, sometimes episodically, over the entire span of time from the Archaean up to the Cenozoic. It was not the result of a single creation event at the beginning of time.
• No part of the present oceanic crust is older than Jurassic. The ocean floors formed progressively as a result of spreading from mid-ocean ridges (discussed in Plate tectonics (’continental drift’)).
• The purpose of the Ark was to preserve the terrestrial animal kinds, so that the Earth after the Flood could be recolonised. But the vast majority of organisms fossilised are extinct: they have no recent counterparts. For example, not one pelycosaur, pterosaur or dinosaur is known to have survived into the Eocene, let alone up to the present day. The supposed pre-Flood world and the world which succeeded it are discontinuous.
• There is no gap near the top of the fossil record representing the world immediately after the Flood, barren of terrestrial animals and vegetation, before the descendants of animals saved on the Ark recolonised the earth.
• Burrowing (‘bioturbation’) is a common feature of marine sediments of all ages, indicating that seafloors were being inhabited under fairly normal conditions and that the sediments themselves did not form catastrophically. Sometimes beds have been so bioturbated that the original layering is no longer visible. Fossilised roots of plants in growth position are less common (because terrestrial sediments generally are less common) but where they do occur they also show that the enclosing sediments were not formed catastrophically. The photograph right shows roots from a marl bed that formed in an estuarine environment during mid Jurassic times.
• Dinosaur and mammal bones do not appear until relatively late in the fossil record. They are accompanied by abundant signs (tracks, burrows, coprolites) that the animals themselves were living at the same level. As the sediments beneath them cannot be interpreted as ‘pre-Flood’ sediments, their presence at these levels, alive and going about their normal business, is contradictory.
• The same point may be made in relation to complete reef systems (evidently not transported from some pre-Flood seafloor), hardgrounds encrusted with sealilies and oysters, termite nests, millipede tracks, etc.
• The fossil record is capable of being divided into very fine subdivisions. Species typically have a vertical range of 2 million years or less, including species that are geographically widespread and very common. Part of the explanation must be that organisms were changing over time. It is not possible to explain the phenomenon in terms of a global flood.
• It is equally not possible to explain the order of first appearance of fossils generally (in the case of animals: marine invertebrates and vertebrates, amphibians, land-dwelling reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and birds, and finally humans).
• Although most higher taxonomic groups are already well diversified when they first appear, the fossil record also shows abundant evidence of continuing diversification (new species arising from existing species) within the groups after their first appearance.
• The creationist argument turns the Flood into the opposite of what Genesis describes it as. Instead of being a cataclysmic judgement on all humanity, the Flood allows animals to carry on going about their normal lives throughout, and human fossils do not occur in any of the rocks assigned to the Flood period.
• Similarly, one would expect to find at least some traces of pre-Flood civilisation (such as buildings, tools, graves) in strata assigned to the pre-Flood period. In fact there are none.

For a detailed discussion of how the creationist theory fails to satisfy its own predictions, see A critique of The Genesis Flood.

For a detailed discussion of how creationism fails to take proper cognisance even of the biblical record, see The Cataclysm – more than a flood.

For a discussion of how a Creation date of around 4000 BC cannot be inferred from the Bible, see Ussher and the genealogy problem.