By definition, “creation science” is an oxymoron. For all intents and purposes, it amounts to saying “Well, God made it that way” in scientific language. If possible, creationist arguments have gotten more ridiculous by the day. For instance, a prominent Australian creationist suggested that we should dismiss a recent find that pushes back the origins of humanity by almost half a million years because–wait for it–we weren’t on hand to see it happen.
Back in January 2013, a graduate student at Arizona State University discovered a human jawbone in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia. Last week, scientists at Arizona State announced that they had determined the jawbone was 2.8 million years old. That makes the jawbone 400,000 years older than the earliest previously known fossils of genus Homo–the same genus that includes our species, Homo sapiens.
But to Tas Walker, a senior staff geologist with Creation Ministries International, this is all much ado about nothing. Walker dropped by 3AW, a powerful talk radio station in Melbourne, to discuss the discovery. Walker told afternoon drive-time host Tom Elliott that all methods used to date fossils are based on assumptions about the past. He argued that there’s only one way you can really know how old something is–“eyewitness reports.” After all, it’s how we know how old we are. He claimed that the Bible is an eyewitness account of what happened when the human race first arrived. By his his reckoning, Earth is only 6,000 years old. Listen to the whole thing–if you can stand it–here.
Elliott wasn’t letting Walker get away with this, and asked him how he explains fossils such as dinosaurs. Walker replied that dinosaurs walked alongside humans, and were wiped out–along with everything and everyone else–in the great flood described in Genesis. He even claimed that dinosaurs were described at least once in the Bible–even though mainstream science is unanimous that dinosaurs died out millions of years before the first humans.
When pressed further by Elliott, Walker acknowledged that the jawbone had been found–but it mattered how you interpreted the find. The claim that it’s 2.8 million years old is rooted in the evolutionary interpretation, which is just “a belief system.” Elliott caught him on this, asking Walker if creation was “just a belief system” as well? Walker acknowledged this, but claimed that creation better explained reality. He then went as far as to say that dinosaurs actually proved that the flood was a real event, saying that their footprints were found in the upper areas of where the floodwaters flowed.
I listened to this, and I could have sworn that I was listening to Answers in Genesis’ initial response to Bill Nye’s scathing attack on creationism. It turns out that Creation Ministries International was actually once part of Answers in Genesis. The two groups split apart in 2006 when the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African branches of AiG objected to what they described as autocratic tendencies on the part of Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham, as well as alleged mishandling of magazine subscriptions. According to his biography at CMI, Walker joined AiG in 1999 and followed the rest of the Australian office into CMI in 2006. After almost four years of legal turmoil, the two groups reached a settlement in 2009.
The two groups, however, differ in style rather than substance. Indeed, CMI’s statement of faith is as blatantly anti-science as that of AiG. Need proof? Look at this sentence from CMI’s statement of faith:
“Facts are always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information. By definition, therefore, no interpretation of facts in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”
That statement is almost identical to AiG’s claim that “no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence” is legitimate if it doesn’t line up with the Bible. So let’s see if we’ve got this right. No matter what evidence you have, if it doesn’t jibe with the Bible, you can’t even consider it? That, folks, is not science.
Last I checked, the very foundation of science is testing and questioning how things work. Indeed, this find in Ethiopia is an example of good science–new evidence that changes our assumptions about what we already know. But in Walker’s world, it doesn’t matter since it doesn’t dovetail with the “eyewitness account” of how we got here. I give Elliott credit for calling out Walker’s idiocy. Had he read CMI’s statement of faith beforehand, however, I suspect that there wouldn’t have been much left of Walker at the end.
