December 28, 2006
As a fundamentalist in my youth, I became more and more uneasy about the huge discrepancy between modern geology and the Genesis account of a global flood. I read the literal Young-Earth (YE) view by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (”The Genesis Flood”), but it raised more questions than it answered. Frankly, it made me even more suspicious that I was being sold a bill of goods. I decided it was time to compare Morris’s claims directly with evidence from the rock record and went to college as a geology major. It didn’t take long to see how I’d been duped; Morris and other YE creationists were outright lying about rocks! Why would they do this? Why would they lie to support a religion that forbids lying? Perhaps a private quote from Martin Luther can shed some light here:
“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”
I’m sure not all believers would subscribe to this version of end-justified means, but many fundamentalists do seem to believe their theological views are above any kind of empirical fact checking. I was not one of these. A deity that must be defended by a lie, whether literal or virtual, is not worth believing in. To do so is classic delusion and is all-too prevalent in today’s world. To their credit, many “Old Earth” creationists have rejected Morris’s geology for this very reason.
Russ Miller again confirmed his role as a disciple of Henry Morris by claiming in his Cline Library lecture that Earth’s crustal rocks originated literally in a global flood that wafted Noah’s ark. He left out details, but some are available in his online seminar about the Grand Canyon. Here he claims the entire Paleozoic sequence - from Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone to Permian Kaibab Limestone (consistently misspelled as “Kiabab” in his slides) - was laid down in the Genesis flood. Further, he claims that washing away of the overlying Moenkopi and Chinle formations constitutes “absolute proof” for a global flood (huh?). No notice is made of the preservation of these formations to the north, together with 1,000’s more feet of Mesozoic and Cenozoic rock in Zion, Bryce, and Grand Staircase National Parks (see below).
The Genesis-flood “theory” of Earth’s crustal rocks is refuted countless times by the rock record in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere (not to mention the problems of mythic preservation of a global biosphere on a single boat). Grand Canyon Paleozoic rocks represent a relatively small period of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, from about 525 to 260 million years ago. They bracket the appearance of trilobites, for example, but predate the arrival of dinosaurs and large mammals. By studying the size, sorting, shape, chemical composition, and arrangement of grains in sedimentary rocks, sedimentologists can get a pretty good idea of the environment of deposition at the time these rocks were formed. Fossils help confirm the nature of the paleo-environment. Were sediments deposited in deep ocean, coastal waters, streams, flood plains, or desert dunes, etc.? Sedimentary geologists can give you the answer. The overall picture for earth history comprises a complex assortment of diverse and evolving environments, but there is evidence for a great deal of dry land somewhere during all eras of the geological time column!
A cursory look at regional geology for the Grand Staircase shows that a global flood is not a viable explanation for any of the Grand Canyon formations, much less all of them. For example, the Coconino Sandstone is the remnant of a wind-blown Sahara-like desert that somehow managed to exist right in the middle of Miller’s global flood. Grand Staircase Paleozoic rocks and fossils generally match a wide range of marine, coastal, and even desert dune environments associated with the shifting coastline of a Paleo-North America that remained high and dry (largely to the current NE - see NAU/Professor Blakey’s Paleogeographic Maps for the Paleozoic). Miller’s (and Morris’s) claim that all these rocks were laid down in a global flood implies either abject ignorance of the relevant geology or downright deceit (or both?). I’m not entirely sure which is the case for Miller, but the level of scholarship exhibited in his slides suggests the former.
In AST184L (”Life in the Universe” Lab), we study the above rocks in the field. NAU students are welcome to sign up and see the evidence for themselves!
December 10, 2006
The “Law,” of course, is the second law of thermodynamics, and the faux controversy between it and evolution was cooked up half a century ago by creationists and repeated almost verbatim by Russ Miller in his NAU/Cline lecture. Never mind that, in all that time, virtually no serious physicist thought there was a genuine conflict here! The idea was championed back in the 60’s by hydrologist/creationist Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research. I first became acquainted with it in 1963 at about the age of 8 when my father handed me a copy of Morris’s “Twilight of Evolution” to counter my enthusiasm for plastic dinosaurs and children’s books about the history of life. At 8, I couldn’t understand thermodynamics or the flaws in Morris’s inferences from it, but neither can a large fraction of adults in our culture. This is probably what has led creationists to continue using this argument long after it has been soundly refuted. Thermodynamics flourished in the 19th century in support of theoretical efforts to define how to obtain maximum usable energy from heat flow. The second law has been articulated as, “The Entropy Inventory of the World Tends to a Maximum.” But what is entropy? The classic high-school chemistry answer – “disorder” – disguises a philosophically and mathematically sophisticated concept (see the entropy link for more). In a closed system (no exchange of matter or energy with anything outside), entropy either stays the same or increases. Miller repeated the creationist claim that evolution violates this principle, since it implies that entropy decreases. But every physicist knows that this is an incorrect inference. Life is not in a closed system! It is far from chemical equilibrium embedded in a system of heat flow from the Sun. Entropy reductions in evolution take place locally and do not completely compensate for large global increases. Indeed, nobelist Ilya Prigogine showed that all you need to produce spontaneous order in dissipative systems (like life) is an influx of energy. Miller did seem to try and address the fatal flaw in his own argument by claiming that the “raw energy” (as opposed to “cooked” energy?) of the Sun was of a type that could not produce local entropy decreases. In support of this creationist fiction, he gave no theoretical explanation, but provided suggestive and hand-selected examples of the destructive power of solar energy. Of course he left unmentioned any of myriad examples of local entropy decrease under solar energy, such as the spontaneous organization of cyclonic weather patterns. Alas, the Sun’s radiation is no different from any other type of energy flow with regard to its ability to drive local entropy changes. As the zoologist Dawkins wrote in the 70’s, “Morris’s point about the second law of thermodynamics is pathetic. Surely any chemist would accept that there can be local increases in order fed by energy from outside the local system. This is what happens when you synthesize something over a Bunsen burner.” 
Miller’s faulty reasoning prohibits not only evolution but life itself! Living systems routinely make use of the fact that, in an open system, local decreases of entropy take place in energy flow as long as they do not exceed total increases. Complexity increases dramatically in development from embryo to adult mammal. How does life do this without violating the second law? “Living organisms are open systems since they both take in and expel matter; further, they exchange heat with their surroundings…The organism discards matter with a greater entropy content than the matter it takes in, thereby losing entropy to the environment to compensate for the entropy produced in internal irreversible processes.” (Levine, Ira N. 1978; Physical Chemistry, New York: McGraw-Hill). The entropy deficit life gains for itself is clearly available to fuel one of its fundamental properties: evolution!
December 3, 2006
First things first. Whether the first cell arose from a natural or supernatural cause matters not one whit to Darwin’s theory of the subsequent evolution of life. And yet, creationists routinely criticize theories of the origin of life as if these constituted some flaw in Darwin’s theory. Miller was no exception in his NAU/Cline Library talk. As one of his “Fifty Facts against Evolution,” he trotted out a “Law of Biogenesis ” to assert that life from non-life is naturally impossible. But this law refers only to Louis Pasteur’s refutation of spontaneous generation, an ancient belief that such things as micro-organisms in broth, maggots in meat, and mice in haystacks arise continually from inorganic substances. We now know that all these proceed from biological processes that are difficult to observe. Such events have nothing to do with the origin of the very first cell! It used to be thought that even simple organic compounds could be made only by living things. A few had been synthesized in the lab inorganically by the 1950’s when Harold Urey directed his grad student, Stanley Miller, to carry out laboratory simulations of the early earth environment. But it was a great surprise when the Miller-Urey experiment yielded a host of organic compounds, including some of the amino acids that make up proteins. Russ Miller spent time informing us that the products in this half-century old experiment were not “life.” True enough! Although a great deal of progress has been made that went unmentioned by Russ Miller (including the synthesis of viruses), the polymerization of organic compounds to form the biomolecules of life acting within a cell represents an outstanding problem in a scientific theory of life’s origins. Of course, the creationist God of the gaps lives wherever we are ignorant. Miracles are invoked wherever gaps appear in human knowledge. Unfortunately, these gaps have a way of closing with time, so this particular god lives a life of repeated evictions. Bottom line - we don’t yet know precisely how to make life or how it first arose. But there is no reason to believe the process required a miracle, and Russ Miller’s depiction of current theory was a gross misrepresentation. To learn more about recent research in the origin of life, see the early chapters of my book (with Simon LeVay), “Here Be Dragons.”
Powered by WordPress
Bad Behavior has blocked 233 access attempts in the last 7 days.