Creationism: Words fail me

I visited the Darwin ‘Big Idea’ exhibition at the Natural History Museum at the weekend. The tagline – ‘If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself?’ – refers to the fact that Darwin held off publishing On the Origin of Species for twenty years for fear that Christians (his wife/cousin included) would not be best pleased.

Fortunately, sane people don’t worry about such things in this day and age. But ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ how on earth Creationist types – Sarah Palin and the like – actually explain the evolutionary stuff around us in a way that is so compelling as to discount Darwin entirely. Here is what I discovered.

So there’s something called ‘flood geology’, which tries to prove that the Genesis flood, of Noah and the Ark fame, occurred approximately 4500 years ago and was the cause of all the geological features and fossils we see around us today. Some Creationists argue that ancient dead things are buried at different levels in the earth’s rock because they sank more quickly during said flood. On account of being heavier, you see. So a dinosaur is heavier, and therefore lower – but not necessarily older – than Noah’s third-favourite cat.

Young Earth Creationists believe that the earth is about 6000 years old. Indeed, a seventeenth-century archbishop called James Ussher did some sums based on a literal reading of the Bible and deduced that the world was created ‘upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty-third day of October’ in 4004 BC.

Old Earth Creationists, on the other hand, can explain how our world came into existence one autumnal Saturday evening in 4004 BC, and yet clearly hosted dinosaurs and whatnot long before that date. The Bible doesn’t specifically state that ‘the first day’ (God switches the lights on) was the same day as ‘in the beginning’ (lights on the blink). So he could well have created the earth, spent veritable eras creating and destroying dinosaurs in the darkness, and then settled on a new plan – the one with which the Good Book is actually concerned.

There is so much more of this stuff that will have to be left for another time. ‘Irreducible complexity’, for example – the theory that things are just so damn clever and fiddly that it’s simply not possible they weren’t created by a big invisible beardy man in the sky. There was a great quote from David Attenborough in today’s Guardian:

‘They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.’

I love David.