Life—How did it get here? By evolution or by creation?

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1985.

(Reviewed by P.A.B.)

If I had left school at the end of the Fifth Form and had no particular interest in science or religion I believe this book might well have persuaded me in favour of the Creationist cause.

For a start, the pictures make a big impression. The book is illustrated with plenty of attractive paintings. Many of them depict people—usually people who are smiling, good-looking and middle class or above. Adam, Eve, Mary, Joseph and Jesus resemble yuppies. (And why not?: the Church has to get its message across to yuppies too.) In some of the illustrations even the faces of the wild animals seem to express Christian joy.

More seriously, the book looks like a textbook. It has a hard cover. There are revision questions at the bottom of each page: "How many supporters of evolution have been deceived?" (p.90); "What problems arise in trying to establish Aegyptopithecus as an ancestor?" (p.91). At the back one finds an extensive list of references. A close examination of it shows the book's nameless author/s have striven to avoid being too academic: (from pages 123/124) the astronaut/now somewhat-disgraced senator John Glenn is quoted from Reader' s Digest, physicist Stephen Hawking is quoted from New York Times Magazine; rocket genius Wermer von Braun ("The natural laws of the universe...must have been set by somebody") is quoted from the National Enquirer. In one of the most surprising appearances, Malcolm Muggeridge is quoted from his review in Esquire of Bronowski's The Ascent of Man pontificating on the falsity of evolution. A good many of the popularisers of science and pseudoscience are represented. As well as Hawking, one finds David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, John Gribben, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Robert Jastrow, Car] Sagan, and Lyall Watson. Many obscurer but no less brilliant individuals are quoted. Indeed, the book reads like a series of quotations so it must be reliable, mustn't it?

The first eight chapters give the familiar Creationist arguments, but what is new is proof that the six days of creation are 'in accord with Science'. Chapters 9 to 14 give accounts of the argument from design, and what amounts to the Anthropic Principle, together with accounts of the marvels of nature such as animal instincts and the human mind, all of which are seen as evidence for a divine creator. Frankly, I find accounts of the marvels and mysteries of nature, even if superficially treated as here, irresistible.

The book's last five chapters show a change of emphasis. One particularly fascinating chapter, "Can you trust the Bible", gives as proof of the Bible's authenticity instances of the Bible anticipating scientific discoveries. Lucky guesses.

Coincidences? Divine inspiration? No, more likely tendentious interpretations and translations. (I find I am increasingly encountering this argument in fundamentalist propaganda. A whole article could be devoted to it.) And it all ends with the apocalyptic vision of the Jehovah's Witnesses (the publishers of the book), Creationism v. Evolution virtually forgotten.

If I had left school at the end of the Fifth Form, I guess it is only this J.W. aspect that might have caused me to have misgivings. Yet I could have been convinced enough to support the Creationist claim to equal time.

However, I am a skeptic and, as it happened, when I received the book I had just bought David Attenborough's Life on Earth. 1 was disturbed to find Life—How did it get here?

had quoted Attenborough's book three times. Concerned that I may have spent my money on an expensive Creationist tract, I checked the quotations. Two of them were most interesting.

On page 73, in the section "The Gulf between Fish and Amphibian", the book says:

"David Attenborough disqualifies [as a connection between fishes and amphibians] both the lungfish and the coelacanth "because the bones of their skulls are so different from those of the first fossil amphibians that the one cannot be derived from the other."

The Watch Tower book ignores Attenborough's paragraph which immediately follows the quoted sentence. It begins:

"However, there is a third fish found in the deposits of that early and critical period..." (Life on Earth, p.137).

Attenborough goes on to argue that Eusthenopteron is the link between fishes and amphibians.

On page 161, in the section "Awesome Feats of Migrators", Life—How did it get here considers the migration of the Arctic tern from the Arctic at the end of the northern summer to the Antarctic for the southern summer:

"Rich food sources are available at both polar regions, so one scientist raises the question: 'How did they ever discover that such sources existed so far apart?' Evolution has no answer."

In fact, Auenborough does have an answer and he states it immediately: "The answer seems to be that these journeys were not always so long. It was the warming of the world at the end of the Ice Age eleven thousand years ago that began to stretch them." (Life on Earth, p.184).

I sought another quotation that could be easily checked and found one used to support the book's claim that mankind has existed for only 6,000 years. (The book, peculiarly, is happy with the idea of an ancient earth. Its exegesis of the six days of creation and how it is "in accord with science" also warrants an article of its own.) Life—How did it get here? quotes W.F. Libby, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of radiocarbon-dating on page 98:

"The research in the development of the dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historical and the prehistorical epochs, respectively. Arnold [a coworker] and I had our first shock when our advisers informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years... You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 90,000 years old. We learned rather abruptly that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately."

Checking the article in the 3/3/61 issue of Science, which was the source of the quote, it is clear that Libby is not saying human society is only 5,000 years old. He is only referring to the limits of recorded history—which he, perhaps surprisingly, was unaware of. In the article he shows how he was able to use his technique to date prehistoric human remains and artefacts. He says:

"Last spring on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of California, friends of mine found a 6-foot skeleton, 10,400 years old to judge by the radiocarbon measurement of Broeker of Lamont Geological Observatory on some charcoal found next to the skeleton. This is the same 10,400 year date which now marks the early evidence of men in Santa Rosa Island; the Linden river site in Colorado: the Clovis site; the Lamus cave in eastern Nevada...; the Fort Rock Cave in Oregon...; and several other sites in the Americas."

There is nothing new about Creationists misrepresenting their sources. But to build up a case against Creationism the misquotes should be exposed'. However, when you study the book's account of the six days of creation and note its blindness to even what the Bible actually says, you begin to sense that it will be an enormous task.

Why is this deception carried out by people who see themselves as committed Christians and therefore honest and moral? Alas, none of the references in the Bible to truthfulness and lying seem to explain or, more usefully, condemn the practice. Is it too strong to call this dishonesty immoral. The fundamentalists, anyway, seem to think that so long as the faith is advanced, it's ok. (see box.)

Skeptics interested in Creationism should read Life—How did it get here? It is an excellent piece of propaganda and inevitably raises the question of whether and how such propaganda should be countered.

Notes

1. The Pseudoscience Monitor (Midwest Committee for Rational Inquiry) Vol. 2, No. 10 (October 1988), p.4, reviews Life—How did it get here? and points out several misrepresentations.

Humanist Error

"The possible justification of the Creationists' practice of misrepresenting their sources has long puzzled me. I had a real sense of "Eureka!" when reading an issue of Free Inquiry, a humanist publication edited by Paul Kurtz, Chairman of CSICOP. But after checking the Biblical text it quoted, I sent the following fetter to Free Inquiry:

In his article in your Spring 1989 issue, Harry Daum says that Paul "justifies the duplicity of his preaching by asking, 'Why not do evil that good may cone? (Romans 3:7-8)

The relevant sentence from the New English Bible actually reads, "Why not indeed ‘do evil that good may come', as some libellously report me as saying?”.

Whatever one thinks of his preaching, Paul has been seriously misquoted by Daum.

The letter wasn't published. It is sobering to know that misquotation is not a Creatiomst monopoly.