BLOG

In the February issue of Discover magazine (soon to be online here), "Blinded by Science" writer Bruno Maddox shares his secular perspective of Answers in Genesis' nearly completed Creation Museum.  More to the point, he gives his personal impression of Ken Ham (AIG founder, president and CEO) and Jason Lisle (astrophysicist and AIG speaker), both of whom he spoke with during his tour of the museum.  Maddox describes himself as "so hard-core an atheist as to make Richard Dawkins look like the Virgin Mary;" Ham and Lisle he describes as "boats against the current of truth, borne ceaselessly into being just completely, utterly wrong."

What's paradoxical about Maddox's article is that he admits he couldn't refute anything he saw in the museum. That, in fact, he lost several attempted arguments with both Ham and Lisle.

Every time I feel my scientific hackles start to rise, I turn a corner and there's a reminder, either written or manifest in diorama form, that everything I've seen is merely a theory, a possible scenario, a best guess.

What's odd is, if it were a museum of natural history that Maddox was visiting, such disclaimers would be met with praise. As long as the primary principle of atheistic evolution was followed, every variation on a theme concerning planetary, stellar, and biological evolution would be welcomed with open arms. The "Disclaimers" would simply be evidence of the museum's open-minded approach--accolades of good science.

Not so for creationists. Any troublesome interference by God, any textually-based presuppositions, any views that fall outside the consensual, are forbidden on a philosophical basis. No wonder Maddox was offended by artistic license.

I'm going to quote extensively from the article to sustain my claim that Ham and Lisle were mocked. This is Maddox:

 After losing several arguments to Ham, I head to the next-door office and start losing them to one Dr. Jason Lisle, a fresh-faced 32-year-old astrophysicist. Presently I bring up space aliens, wondering whether their discovery would pose a problem to the creationist creed. Lisle grows visibly uneasy. "Well, it would depend," he tells me, and off he goes, talking very fast indeed. He doesn't want to be dogmatic, because the Bible doesn't explicitly say there aren't extraterrestrials . . . but it does say we supposedly have dominion over all the plants and animals . . . Genesis 1:26 would have to be dealt with, of course, if there were aliens . . . though perhaps not if the life-form were merely a form of moss or lichen . . . and there's no scriptural barrier to God's having designed a planet populated entirely by spatulas. . .

As he continues, I find myself reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's proposition in The Crack-Up, that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Fitzgerald's first-rate mind, of course, eventually stopped retaining the ability to function, and watching Lisle try to reconcile the cutting edge of modern planetary physics with the offhand assertions of a religious tract written thousands of years ago by an unknown assortment of bearded semi-cave dwellers, I found myself wondering how long the poor chap has.

Lisle himself may wonder the same thing, for all I know, during long, dark nights of the soul. In fact, I bet he does, and I feel for him. I arrived in Kentucky hoping to find a sympathetic slant on the creationist agenda. What I came away with, to my surprise, was less of a sympathetic slant than something akin to actual human sympathy.

For the record, I have even less patience now for the creationist agenda than I did going in, because I now suspect that they don't really believe the falsehoods with which they are trying to flood the world. But at the same time I got the clear impression that they don't have any choice. I thought I was going to meet people who love God and therefore hate science. What I found instead were people who love God but who have at least a pretty serious crush on science as well, and thus find themselves in the Fitzgeraldian nightmare of waking up every day and trying to believe in both. They will--they must--spend their lives, and brains, trying to think of ways that patently false ideas can be made to seem, if not actually true, at least not quite so patently false. It is, I fear, a doomed exercise, but it's a heroic one as well, it pains me to admit.

I for one, have less patience with Discover than I did going in. To allow one of their writers to paint Ph.D. holding scientists like Lisle as mentally disturbed, without giving any consideration to the ideas being proposed, is dishonorable and sloppy. They owe AIG an apology.

Personally, I think Lisle answered Maddox's question well. He was taking Maddox seriously, a kindness that wasn't returned to him. What was weird was that Maddox, purporting to be the nemesis of unfounded hypotheses, would even entertain the prospect of alien life. On what evidence?

If anti-god crowd wants to attack baseless beliefs, why don't they make war on UFO's?  There's a world of a lot more evidence for the biblical stories than for little green men.

(See Discover's "20 Things You Didn't Know About . . . Aliens.")

The "Hofmeyr skull", pictured above, was found in a dry riverbed in Hofmeyr, South Africa, in 1952. Although it represented a curious mixture of modern and "archaic" features, anthropologists were unable to procure an agreeable date for the specimen, and it went largely ignored over the years. But recently, anthropologist Frederick Grine has taken a new interest in the skull, applying modern dating techniques and leading a team to study the skull's morphological significance more closely. In the January 12 edition of Science, Grine's team asserted that the skull--dated to 36,000 years--was direct evidence for the theory that modern humans originated in sub-Sahara Africa and populated the Old World less than 70,000 years ago.

The problem: The "Out of Africa" hypothesis still requires a grand leap of faith. At least if it is to be taken dogmatically.

 Consider the words of Ted Goebel, anthropologist from Texas A&M University, who also published an article about the origins of modern humans in the January 12 Science magazine.

Current interpretations of the human fossil record indicate that fully modern humans emerged in sub-Saharan Africa by 195,000 years ago.  By 35,000 years ago, modern humans thrived at opposite ends of Eurasia, from France to island southeast Asia and even Australia.  How they colonized these and other drastically different environments during the intervening 160,000 years is one of the greatest untold stories in the history of humankind.   -HT: Creation-Evolution Headlines

According to a Max Planck news release, the skull "fills a significant void in the human fossil record of sub-Saharan Africa from the period between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago."

It appears, according to the proponents of the Hofmeyr skull themselves, that the skull is the only significant  paleontological support for the entire Out of Africa hypothesis. Don't they have a longer string of support to offer beside that?

Some DNA studies seem to trace human lineage to sub-Sahara Africa but, problematically, other genetic studies have pointed to non-African populations as contributing progenitors. The Max Planck release claims that "Until now, the lack of human fossils of appropriate antiquity from sub-Saharan Africa has meant that these competing genetic models of human evolution could not be tested by paleontological evidence."

Here's the evidence: Grine's team used optically stimulated luminescence dating and uranium-series dating to attain an age of 36,000 years for the fossil, which was apparently too decalcified to attempt carbon-dating. The dating tests were conducted on sand grains scraped from the inside of the skull vault (braincase), which had collected a hard carbonate layer.

As far as morphological features were concerned, the Hofmeyr skull resembled European fossil skulls presumed to be the same age or younger, but did not resemble the skulls of modern Khoe-San peoples, or "Bushmen," who are taken to represent the recent South African fossil record.

The question of the origin of modern man is a hotly contested debate in anthropological circles, and the Out of Africa hypothesis has come under criticism, some even suggesting that modern humans arose in Asia. It's unlikely that the Hofmeyr skull will be a lid on the case.

Creationists like myself reject many of the assumptions built into this debate, most importantly the belief that humans evolved from apes, a hypothesis that is itself represented by few definitive fossils. The historical descriptions contained in the Bible suggest modern man originated in the Near East, not the sub-Sahara. In addition, creationists interpret variations in skull and skeletal morphology to be the result of variations and degradations in the genetic code, not an upward path to "modern man" as evolutionists interpret.

Balancing a significant hypothesis on the dating outcome of a few grains of sand seems, to me, to indicate how fare-fetched the idea was in the first place.

Photo credit Frederick E. Grine

Scientists believe they have conclusive evidence that Titan is spotted with liquid lakes of methane (CH₄). In a brief report from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers give their reasons for interpreting "dark patch" radar data and certain geographic features to indicate the presence of liquid.

The image below is in false color (a human eye would not see it as it appears), and is the result of radar imaging from the Cassini Spacecraft's flyby in July of 2006. Areas that are presumed to be lakes in the imaging have been colored blue.

Methane is the principle component of natural gas. By itself in its gaseous state it is colorless, odorless, and non-toxic.  Like gasoline, it does not burn in its liquid form.

Astronomers have believed that Titan contains liquid methane for several years. In 2005 GlobeLens explained some of their reasons for thinking so in the article "Titan Unveiled."

Image courtesy NASA/JPL/USGS