Answers in Genesis' David Menton writes: "It’s no wonder that for centuries
artists have been at a loss to portray just what the first couple’s abdominal
region looked like—did they or did they not have a belly button? You will note
that artists generally avoided the whole issue by conveniently covering their
midsections with nearby foliage". And as the picture above shows the tradition continues at AiG!
Recently an article appeared on the Christian fundamentalist web site Answers in Genesis entitled Creation and the Appearance of Age by
David Menton. According to an editor’s note this article was first published in
the St.
Louis MetroVoice 5, no. 8 in August 1995. The article is therefore 22 years
old and evidence that the same tropes go round and round in fundamentalist
circles without needing a great deal of modification. The reason why the same well worn arguments and articles are sufficient for a fundamentalist ministry is
because they are not trying to convince the academic elite – which they’ve written off as a satanically
inspired conspiracy – but rather they
are selling their ideas to an uncritical technically challenged audience who
can’t, won’t or don’t have time to think things through for themselves. As long
as this audience can see some semblance of plausibility, technicality and
academic authority in the articles coming out of a fundamentalist ministry
those articles have done their job and sold themselves.
I’ve seen it many times: The paranoid assumption of hard-line
fundamentalism is that Christians are in an unrelentingly evil, totally depraved
world where every activity that doesn’t fall within the scope of some favoured fundamentalist
faction is suspect and cannot be trusted – even other
Christians who are outside that faction; in fact especially other Christians
outside that faction. A fine example of this institutionalized paranoia is AiG’s boss Ken Ham: Christian opponents
of Ham’s word are condemned by him as heretics following man’s word rather than
God’s word (because
effectively Ham equates his word with God’s Word). In this context of irrational
suspicion it is no surprise that fundamentalism is fertile ground for conspiracy theorism and some
fundamentalists are actually moving into flat earth theory with its need to adopt a
very strong form of conspiracy theorism to make such a theory work – this is an extremum outcome of the social paranoia that drives fundamentalism. In flat earth fundamentalism
we have a subculture who are rejecting some very basic established science, science worked out at least 2500 years ago.
As far as I can tell this is actually part of a social malaise which extends
beyond Christian fundamentalists to
New Agers. I fear for civilisation. But I digress.
I’ve looked at the question of fundamentalism's “appearance of age” before. See these
posts:
I’ve also done a series on a related question; namely, the bogus dichotomy
mindlessly and endlessly repeated by Ken Ham that observational science is
fundamentally distinct from historical science. In support he often quotes
technology as an application of “observational science”. He clearly has never
had to do any substantial trouble shooting of problems of complex technological
artifacts where the observable records and traces left by the fleeting passage
of an artifact through history are important in the diagnosis of those problems. A
similar point applies to medical science as it attempts to diagnose organic
pathology. For my series on this false dichotomy, which is a core doctrine of Ken Ham's anti-science stance, see here:
The 22 year old AiG article I’m looking at can be found here:
Below I interleave quotes from Menton's article with my own comments. We read the following at the start of Menton’s article:
Why, I wonder, would God spend an
entire six days doing a miracle that would require of Him literally no time at
all? Think about it: How much time does a miracle take? How much time, for
example, did Jesus take for His first miracle when He changed water into the
finest quality wine (as judged by a professional steward) for the wedding at
Cana? The answer, of course, is no time at all—He told the servants to fill the
pots with water and serve it! Still, the Bible clearly reveals God took six
whole days to initially create everything to perfection; so, we must either
take God at His Word, or presume to stand in judgment of all Scripture.
MY COMMENT: No! We cannot conclude that miracles take no
time at all: It may seem from a human perspective that a miracle is absolutely
instantaneous but we really don’t know just how divisible time is; who knows
how many events are spread out over a period too small to register on human
time scales during, say, a water-into-wine
miracle? If we could zoom in on the time coordinate and see how God sees it,
a second could be an aeon in terms of the number events it contains as water
converts to wine.
But even if the miracle took no time at all there still remains the
question of divine time as measured
in terms of the complexity involved in the assembling of the event in God’s mind.
My guess is, however, that fundamentalists tend to subliminally view God as a
super magician who need only say “abracadabra” and stuff jumps into sight thus
consuming neither divine time nor divine thought. As one evangelical song has
it“[God] Spoke the stars into existence”.
The belief in a deity who just has to
speak high-level commands that don’t break down into a myriad lower level
activities is a fundamentalist trope. This is magic. That Menton probably has
this magical paradigm in mind, at least subliminally, is evident when he
writes:
Think of any one thing that our
omnipotent God might instantly create out of nothing by the power of His Word.
That is, sheer word power rather than thinking power creates things.
This is magic. Perhaps the theological lesson of Genesis' mythological six-day creation is that it tells us that God is not a lazy pagan magician who can just sit back and speak stuff into existence but a workman who assembles his creations.
Notice also the fundamentalist inquisitional tactic in the last sentence
of the quoted paragraph. Here Menton stuffs a straw-man confession into the
mouths of those who wouldn’t agree with him; namely, if you don’t agree with
Menton about those six literal days then you are presuming to stand in judgement
on the Almighty Himself. Fundamentalist paranoia means that they are unwilling
to accept that those who disagree with them do so with a clear conscience and don't see themselves as contradicting the Almighty. (This inquisitional tactic of using straw-man confessions has also been used by fundamentalist Jason Lisle)
The appearance of age in the
things that God created is a much-debated issue in contemporary Christian
scientific circles. Can God—or more accurately—would God create something that
at the very moment of its creation has the appearance of age? The short answer
to this question may be: How else? How, indeed, could God create anything that
did not appear to us to be aged (like a fine wine) at the moment of its
creation.
MY COMMENT: Written in 1994 this article is showing its
age, or should I say “maturity”? I think the AiG editorial staff who decided
to publish this article will find that there are young earthists nowadays who don’t
like the phrase “an appearance of age”
and prefer the vaguer “mature creation” as it has less connotation of God
building in misleading signs about age into His creation (But see
fundamentalist John Byl below).
Menton is wrong: It is possible
to conceive objects which have no "appearance of age" and/or are a-historical. Take for example a parameter
P which measures some aspect of an object where:
P = A T -1
…and where A is a constant and T measures time. Obviously, here P is the
reciprocal of time. If we use this equation then measuring P will immediately
give us calculable age. Of course using Menton’s philosophy this age could be
misleading because God could have created the object of this equation with a
particular value of P, just as he could, according to some fundamentalists, have
created star-light-in-transit. Thus the value of T calculated using the above
equation is then only an “apparent age” according to Menton. However, assuming that the values of T are not
just apparent, then we find that the object at T=0, on the basis of the above
equation, returns an infinity. That is, the object at T=0 is beyond human understanding and humanly speaking to assign an “apparent age” beyond the statement T=0 is
meaningless in this context. Ergo, Menton is wrong about not being able to
create an object without the “appearance of age”. Presumably God can create
such an object.
Another case in point is a Newtonian gravitational system of perfect
billiard ball spheres orbiting one another. This system returns no age at all;
it could have been there forever or it could have been created out of nothing
by God, yesterday; the object is timeless and it betrays no clues as to its
history – it is a-historical, it is ageless.
So in summary we find that some objects show signs of having a history and some
are a-historical. And of course it is likely that some objects are ambiguous and
difficult to fit in either category.
Think of any one thing that our
omnipotent God might instantly create out of nothing by the power of His Word.
……Maybe you thought of a visible
star—depending on its distance from the earth, its light might appear to have
been traveling for over a billion years to reach your eyes. All of these things
would have the appearance of age and an ongoing process at the very moment of
their creation.
MY COMMENT: This
example betrays the dilemma that fundamentalists are in: Do they go the whole
hog with “mature creation” and postulate that star light was created in-transit? Or do they get out their pencils and paper and work out theories consistent
with a 6000 year time scale and yet which give a history to the star light
without having to posit a dubious in-transit creation?
As we have seen in posts on this blog AiG
fundamentalists have recently had a tendency to do their best to drop in-transit
star light creation and give starlight a genuine history of propagation of one
kind or another. However, these efforts have had limited success (See here,
here
and here).
A similar situation exists in regard to continental drift; a fanatical mature creationist
might claim that God created what geologists see as evidences of a history of
drift (such as sea floor magnetic patterns) “as we see them, just like that!”. But recently
there has been a theory submitted by a young earthist of “runaway” continental drift which attempts to fit all
the necessary intervening drifting events into a suitably short time scale. In
order to preserve the rational integrity of God’s creation some young earthists
are at least trying to do some science rather than short cut science with “mature
creation”.
So why do we have these strenuous efforts by fundamentalists who ignore Menton's assertion about the inevitability of the "appearance of age" and attempt to provide histories for objects that are clearly not a-historical? I think it's because they can sense the violation of rational integrity that bland acceptance of an "appearance of age" is liable to lead to.
The Genesis fundamentalist thus faces a difficult question: Which
observed evidences require an historical theory in order to maintain the
rational integrity of God’s work and which can be written off as simply “mature
creation”? Adam’s navel is a case in point. Of this matter Menton comments:
Also let’s not forget the
critically important placenta—its development in the womb necessarily precedes
that of the baby so that it can serve the function of a temporary lung, kidney,
liver, gut, and endocrine system until the baby develops its own. It’s no
wonder that for centuries artists have been at a loss to portray just what the
first couple’s abdominal region looked like—did they or did they not have a
belly button? (You will note that artists generally avoided the whole issue by
conveniently covering their midsections with nearby foliage.)
MY COMMENT: Ken Ham who, as I noted in my Beyond
Our Ken series, confidently claims
that Adam had no navel and yet accepts that the trees of Eden would have been
created with a bogus history of yearly growth rings. Menton, however, being a less bullish authority than
Ham, like the artists he speaks of, doesn’t know where to go on the navel question! (See also the picture at the head of this post which has been taken from one of Ken Ham's children's books)
This whole line of thinking gets
us into what is called a “first cause” problem. We live in a “cause and effect”
world, where every action causes a reaction and is itself the result of a
previous action. Everything appears to be an ongoing process for which we are
incapable of really grasping a beginning. This is all popularly expressed in
the age-old question: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” If we say the
chicken, we will be asked from whence the chicken came; yet if we say the egg,
we will be asked from whence the egg—and so round and round we go. Somewhere,
there had to be a beginning to this cyclical process we call the chicken and
the egg
MY COMMENT: “First causism” has some issues which are
really off-topic in this context so I won’t talk about them here. (But see here). Menton tells us: Everything appears to be an
ongoing process for which we are incapable of really grasping a beginning. But
as my toy town models show there can exist systems/objects for which an antecedent
history is meaningless or is a-historical.
However, in the case of the chickens and egg, as in the question of
Adam’s navel, we find a set of observations where to deny a history violates
the creation’s rational integrity; to postulate a chicken or an egg first is
the biological equivalent of postulating in-transit start-light creation.
Menton concludes with:
We may conclude that the Lord is
captive to neither time nor process.
But God is captive to the Truth and Integrity. Therefore He creates a world with
rational integrity, not a world of belly buttons without placenta or tree rings
without a history of growth or star light without a history of travel. A truthful
God makes a creation of intellectual integrity. But if you are prepared to pass
up this integrity anything goes. For example, Whitcombe and Morris
in The Genesis Flood were quite happy with in-transit photon creation.
As I have said some objects are a-historical (such as two perfect
spheres in Newtonian orbits) and some have clear histories like star light,
sedimentary rocks, tree rings and Adam’s navel. Some objects are in between and
have an ambiguous history, such as an alcohol molecule which can be constructed
in the lab or by fermenting grapes. As
we saw in my “Beyond Our Ken” series fundamentalists
are having problems drawing the line. Some fundamentalists like John
Byl will claim that it is perfectly legitimate for God to create objects with an
appearance of having a bogus history and in any case Byl suggests that God may do
just that to deceive those evil scientists! But as a concession to rational integrity
fundamentalist Jason Lisle will claim that star light has traveled the whole distance
from its source along the radials leading to Earth, although Lisle has to concede that
in-transit photon and graviton creation is needed across non-radial paths. Ken
Ham thinks that Adam had no navel but believes the trees in the Garden of Eden were
created with rings thus having built into them a bogus history of growth and Sun spot minima.
We get poor quality articles
from Ken Ham’s organisation such as we see from David Menton and Danny
Faulkner and yet if one doesn't accept their dubious logic Ken Ham will spiritually
abuse detractors and spit
hell and hamnation in order to spiritually pressure acquiescence. This is the epistemic arrogance
of a brutal primitive spiritual logic that at one time sent people to the stake.
Postscript:
ZakDTV tells us about the lunatic fringe. I fear for civilisation!
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