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, obviously, a scientific theory, and whether they should be classed as myth or not will depend on whether they are – or could be – true. That question has become increasingly complicated over the last two hundred years. Today the dominant world-view 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. Historical tradition plays no role. In reaction against this revolution, creationism has attempted to give a scientific account that supports the Genesis narrative.

‘Evolutionism’ is the teaching that, from the Big Bang onwards, the history of the universe was determined solely by natural causes; that these causes eventually gave rise to the earliest form of life; and that from this simplest form all subsequent organisms descended. In this view the beginning of all things can be dated to about 13 billion years ago, and the origin of the Earth to about 4.5 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.

The ‘ism’ at the end of the word denotes a belief system. Evolutionism is therefore not the mere acceptance of the observational fact that organisms have changed over time and in so doing have generated new species. Evolutionism interprets the fact that pre-existing forms have diversified as evidence that all forms came into existence by diversification. Darwin’s theory of evolution (i) advanced evidence in support of the observational fact, (ii) proposed a mechanism for evolutionary change (natural selection of chance variation), and (iii) proposed that all organisms were linked together by a genealogical continuum of ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications’, from the simplest to the most complex.

‘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 beginning of all things is dated to less than 10,000 years ago, maybe even 6,000 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 base their date of less than 10,000 years on the Genesis genealogies, taken to record the number of years between Adam and Abraham without abridgement. As an apologetic movement, creationism goes back to the ‘Scriptural geologists’ of the 19th century. However, 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.

Creationism is also a belief system, and therefore not to be confused with acceptance of the observational fact that organisms show design. One can draw the conclusion that organisms were created without believing that they were created in their present form or that the universe came into existence only 6-10,000 years ago, looking then much as it does now.

Evolutionism and creationism are embroiled in a propaganda war. Champions of Darwinism claim that ‘evolution is a fact’ and dismiss creationism as religion merely masquerading as science. Against this, champions of creationism claim that Darwinism is a pseudo-religion: if one only interpreted the facts in accordance with the Bible, it would be clear that God made the world and Noah’s Flood made its fossils. In respect of conviction and unwillingness to look for common ground, both sides are very similar to each other.

Many of those involved are not so partisan. They concede that science does not prove the account they draw from the data and simply argue that the data are consistent with their account. They shelve the acknowledged difficulties, 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 a theory scientific? Is it the appeal to data gathered by scientific methods? Or the fact that they involve the investigation and explanation of physical processes 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 both have the characteristics of a scientific theory.

And both have been falsified, notwithstanding that they continue to be advocated as vigorously as ever. Their adherents feel an overpowering will to believe in them and promote them for all they are worth despite their having failed as scientific theories. Thus, ultimately, they are both – as indeed they say of each other – beliefs that function as myth, modes of interpretation that determine the perception of reality.

If the offered alternatives are wrong, there must be a third possibility, as set out elsewhere on this website. The following summaries are restricted to showing 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. The fossil record fails 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 chunks of rock which we know as asteroids. Problems with this ‘nebular hypothesis’ include (a) simulations indicate that the proto-planets would have spiralled inwards and been gobbled up by the Sun within 100,000 years, (b) asteroids on investigation have turned out not to be primitive objects but to consist of fragments that came from much larger bodies, and (c) present-day rates of radioactive decay are insufficient to account for the melting that occurred in these bodies. Accordingly, ‘the origin of the Solar System represents one of the oldest unsolved problems in science’. Further details in the section entitled The old world destroyed.
• There is no satisfactory explanation for the existence of large amounts of water on the primeval Earth. During the formation of the Solar System, Earth is believed to have been red-hot and therefore could not have hosted liquid water, yet the very oldest mineral evidence shows that continents and liquid water were already present. These matters are discussed in Water, water everywhere.
• Astronomical theory dictates that the early Sun must have been 30–25% cooler than its present temperature. However, the oceans of the then Earth 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 reduced to solely physical causes, human thought would have no rational quality, and Darwinism, being determined by physical cause and effect rather than the assessment of evidence and logical decisions, would itself have no rationality. Unlike computers or any other machine, animals (including human beings) are informed by a spirit. 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 explosive appearance of nearly all the distinctive body plans of marine animals in the Cambrian period is not a unique phenomenon. The appearance of terrestrial animal kinds 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 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 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 (the rest of the Proterozoic to the end of the Cretaceous or later) and post-Flood (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 – 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). New land in the Archaean
• 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 present day. 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’)).
• Although the whole purpose of the Ark was to preserve representatives of terrestrial life, so that the earth after the Flood could be recolonised, 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 even into the Eocene, let alone 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.
• 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 (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, disproves the notion that they died in the Flood.
• The same point may be made in relation to complete reef systems (which cannot be argued to have been transported from some pre-Flood seafloor), hardgrounds encrusted with sealilies and oysters, termite nests, millipede tracks, etc. They are all remains of animals once living at those levels.
• 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, they also typically show patterns of continuing diversification (new species arising from existing species) after their first appearance.

In short, creationism has no more explanatory power than the idea that the Earth is flat. Its ruling idea is that the world is less than 10,000 years old, something the world itself contradicts. The so-called ‘Flood’ is intended to cut the Gordian knot presented by the successive geological periods, but it ends up also being contradicted – by the very thing creationism claims to be defending. Instead of being a cataclysmic judgement on humanity, as set forth in Genesis, the creationist Flood allows animals to carry on going about their normal lives, from Cambrian strata right up to the Cenozoic, while human beings are conspicuous by their absence. There are no traces of pre-Flood civilisation (ruins of buildings, artefacts, graves) in whatever rocks are assigned to the pre-Flood period and no human fossils in whatever rocks are assigned to the Flood period. Sustained though it is by an overwhelming desire that it might be true, the theory does not work at any level.