Eyelashes on an Ichthyosaur

Mark Honeychurch - 24 June 2024

On Saturday afternoon I joined an old friend and fellow nonsense junkie, Tim Atkin, as we attended a creationist talk in Wellington, organised by Creation Ministries International (CMI - the group that run the creation.com website). Now, Tim has been spending a lot of time over the last few years learning mandarin, and this was to come in handy as the meeting was at the Wellington Chinese Methodist Church on Boulcott Street. We arrived just before the 4pm starting time, and were greeted by a large creation.com banner featuring one of CMI’s favourite topics, dinosaurs (presumably this is seen as a way to capture the imagination of kids).

The speaker, Mark James, is a kiwi who works as an events coordinator for CMI, and also gives a lot of talks to local churches. He’s been doing a mini-tour of the bottom of the North Island this month, visiting not only Wellington but the Hutt, Foxton, Levin, Whanganui and Palmerston North as well, as I was told in an email I received at the beginning of this month:

The email also included a handy Bio of Mark:

Mark received his B.Sc. (Hons) in Organic Chemistry from Victoria University of Wellington. Raised in a Christian home but with a science teacher mother who believed in evolution and long ages, Mark abandoned his faith as the ‘easy’ option when the conflict between these beliefs was made abundantly clear at university.

After 20 years as an atheist Mark returned to faith in the late 1990’s when confronted by the fact that he couldn’t believe the children he was raising could possibly be the result of random chance.

Having experienced the faith destroying effects of the secular education system first hand, Mark has a heart for reaching youth, in particular, with the Gospel and teaching that real science doesn’t contradict but actually confirms the truth of the Bible.

The event started with a couple of hymns, first one in Mandarin and the second in English. For me this event was a two-for-one. Not only was I getting to see a creationist speaker I’d not seen before, but I was also experiencing my first ever Chinese church meeting. Then Mark James was briefly introduced, and he was joined on stage with a young man who was introduced as the translator for the evening. Now, I had no idea if this translation was going well, especially as Mark, like most of the CMI speakers, kept to his well-honed script, which was not amenable to easy translation.

Not only did he use words that I imagine would have been hard to translate on the fly, as well as phrases that were not commonplace, but he also had convoluted sentence structures that made sense in English, but would have been hard to translate into any other language. Mark kept stopping to wait for translation part way through his sentences, and often that would be after a group of words that, in isolation, didn’t make much sense without the context of the rest of the sentence. This meant that the translator kept having to ask for Mark to continue with his sentence to aid with translation, which at first Mark didn’t understand and he just kept repeating the sentence fragment he’d already spoken.

It’s weird, but I felt kind of embarrassed watching this white man fail to listen properly to the feedback he was getting from the Chinese translator he’d been given. The awkwardness of it was reminiscent of episodes of The Office at times. I was told after the meeting by Tim that, as far as he could tell from his understanding of Mandarin, the translator had done a very good job of managing to convey the message Mark was there to spread. Damn, I responded, I’d hoped that the text was so confusing that maybe the message had been lost in translation.

创造论 (Chuangzaolun)

• Creationism

As for the message itself, it was a lot of hackneyed old Creationist arguments that Mark James could have easily debunked himself with a computer and an afternoon with Google and Wikipedia. The talk started with an extended advertisement for Creation Ministries International, along with a sign-up sheet for their email newsletter that was passed around the congregation (I didn’t give them my details, as I’m already a subscriber!).

Then we heard that neither side, Creationism nor Evolution, has more facts than the other, as both sides have the same facts and we’re just arguing over our interpretations of them. This led into a very popular creationist argument, one used by Kent Hovind, Ken Ham and many other Christian creationists speakers - that of the difference between what they call observational science (observing things as they happen) and historical science (figuring out what happened based on evidence left behind from events). The argument goes that creationists are all on board with how secular scientists deal with observational science, so aeroplanes and mobile phones are all good, but their godless worldview somehow selectively poisons their work when they are trying to interpret historical evidence, and their conclusions about what happened in the past are often erroneous, because they omit God from the equation.

Mark then talked about how rock layers could only have been laid down rapidly, because there was no erosion at the tops of distinct layers, and because there is no soil between layers - only at the top. And, of course, a global flood is the best explanation for this rapid depositing of so many layers of rock. Rapid burial of fossils, and the existence of fossilised hats, teddy bears and other modern objects, also point to a global flood. He then skipped over the section on radiometric dating, as he said it might be too complicated for the audience to understand (I think this was more a commentary on the complexities of having the message translated to Mandarin and the varying English skills of the congregation than an accusation that the audience were stupid).

Next up was evolution. Long and short haired dog genes were used to explain how creatures after Noah’s Ark could have new characteristics, but that evolution was not adding novel features, just deleting potential and moving everything further away from their original form as perfectly designed by God. We then heard about how collagen had been found between dinosaur bones - something that I had until yesterday thought had been debunked, but some googling tells me that this seems to be a find that’s becoming more and more common.

We heard that the claim that evolution requires millions of years of suffering and death before the time of the Garden of Eden, and that a Just God would not have allowed all of this suffering to happen.

Finally, there was another long advert for CMI, this time with a mention of all the books that were available to buy, and a sign-up sheet that was passed around for people who wanted to pay to subscribe to CMI’s quarterly Creation magazine, which they produce in Mandarin as well as English:

Overall, there wasn’t much in this talk that was new, and there was certainly nothing that seemed to be a serious challenge to the current scientific understanding of the age of the earth, or how evolution works. The most interesting thing, that really made this talk stand out to me, was the fact that it was being given to a Chinese Christian audience. It was fascinating to be a part of a Chinese church service, and to see an entire talk being translated into Mandarin for a congregation that seemed, for the most part, disinterested. During the talk I sent a small section of video to a Chinese friend, and she simply replied with “It hurts my brain”. After the talk there was one question from the audience, and it sounded like it was coming from someone who wasn’t swallowing what had just been served up. Then, just before we left, Tim overheard a couple of the younger people talking about how one of them had fallen asleep during the talk - twice. It was heartening to see that, at this church at least, the seeds of Mark James’ creationist misinformation may not have been falling on fertile soil.