An industry group for religious fundamentalist organizations is seeking to reduce confusion by changing the terms used to describe their work.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines Science as:
(knowledge from) the careful study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by watching, measuring, and doing experiments, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities (1)
But an industry group of conservative Evangelical Christian content creators is pushing back on the use of the word “science” to describe the work they do. The group, Creation Science Isn’t Science, or CSIS, represents organizations such as Answers in Our Favorite Book, the Institute for Making Magical Creation Seem Scientific, Preachers Pretending to Do Research, and Revealed Truth Our-Particular-Flavor-of-Christianity-Which-We-Think-Is-The-Only-Valid-One Home School Pseudoscience Propaganda Text Book Publishing, Inc.
Janet Bartholomew, a spokesperson for the group says: “Our members believe the entire universe was created out of nothing by a middle-eastern deity called Yahweh speaking them into existence about 6000 years ago. Human beings are His specially-beloved masterpiece. He formed the first man out of clay and the first woman out of one of the man's ribs. To spread belief in this story, we carefully select from a tiny number of facts about biology, geology and other sciences that we think are consistent with our narrative, and ignore mountains of other contradictory facts. Then we confidently claim that this means our creation narrative, and only ours, out of at least 30 stories about deities creating humans out of clay or mud (and hundreds of creation stories in general), is a fact and not a myth. A lot of people call what we do ‘Creation Science’, but we feel that unfairly misrepresents us. We think ‘Creation Picking The Answers That Make Us Feel Special’ is more accurate.
"the whole point of science is to increase knowledge"
Bartholomew explained that the whole point of science is to increase knowledge, or understanding, of the world. So if you come to an incorrect conclusion about some aspect of the world, you’ve wasted your time. You never, ever, assume your preferred answers must be right, because then any work you do would just be pointless pretending. You proceed very carefully. You analyze and re-analyze. You use sound logic and critical thinking. You look for errors in your work and have others look for errors in your work, and you correct them. You publish your work in science journals, where other tough-to-convince experts are likely to see it and can write to the editors if they want to dispute it. You describe in detail what hypothesis you had, how you tested it, and whether your hypothesis was confirmed, falsified, or your results were inconclusive. You acknowledge when you find out your hypothesis was incorrect, because you're still glad you learned something, and you want to help others learn something. Your confidence in any conclusion develops slowly over time if, and only if, you are able to develop a coherent explanation of the topic you are researching, and you’ve found that several independent ways of investigating the topic lead to the same conclusion. And even then, you’re always open to adjusting or even abandoning the conclusion if new conflicting evidence comes to light.
"we occasionally do a little tiny bit of analysis, and we pay lip service to critical thinking, but just enough to be impressive to our core audience"
“But what our member organizations do is very different from that". With a chuckle, Bartholomew added "I mean, if you take just a few minutes to listen to us, you'll quickly see that we pretty much do the exact opposite of all of those things. So that’s where I take issue with the use of the word ‘science’. Sure, we occasionally do a little tiny bit of analysis, and we pay lip service to critical thinking, but just enough to be impressive to our core audience of people who already hold the same faith. We know they want to hear that science supports their beliefs. So we never go far enough into trying to understand a scientific question that we pose a risk of us or anyone in our audience coming to anything other than our pre-determined faith-based conclusions. So don't lump us in with the science crowd. There was even a US federal court trial about this in 2005 where a Bush-appointed federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach creationism in public school classes because it's religion, and not science".
Bartholomew explained the way she thinks people should learn about the world: “You see, we have this book that contains some stories that someone (we don’t know who) told a long time ago about where everything came from. And these stories floated around in oral tradition for a few hundred years at least, and eventually someone wrote them down. Mind you, these types of stories are found in every culture around the world and most developed many centuries before the idea of trying to write down historically accurate accounts was even a thing. But we still take ours as absolute, literal fact. Our book also tells us that skeptical investigation of these stories is to be frowned upon and that we will be rewarded for our persistence in believing our tribe’s preferred answers. We think resisting and denying all evidence that shows a different answer is a virtue. It’s the same exact type of dogmatism we falsely accuse those evil, liberal, deceived mainstream scientists of practicing, but when we do it, we call it ‘faith’ and regard it as a good thing.”
CSIS’s member groups want to reach "the lost", who Bartholomew says ”need to hear and believe The Truth of the specific supernatural assertions that we know for a fact are definitely more true than any of the gazillions of other supernatural assertions that people have made throughout history. Because if they don’t believe what we do, they'll suffer a totally justified infinite time of punishment in our particular version of hell for the not-infinite things they did wrong during life”. But their core audience is those Sunday school attendees and religious home school parents who are afraid of what science might say that would challenge the beliefs they have held deeply since childhood. “So, our main work takes more of a confirmatory approach rather than an investigatory approach. It’s belief reinforcement, not learning. That’s what we’re mostly about.”
"It’s belief reinforcement, not learning. That’s what we’re mostly about.”
Eons News asked Bartholomew why some of these Creationist groups actually hire some qualified scientists if doing science research is not their aim. Seeming to feel slightly accused, she commented “Look, the vast majority of writers and presenters in our industry who talk about biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, and astronomy have practically zero formal science education, ok? These are people who couldn't read and accurately summarize a research journal article if their life depended on it. But they meet the main qualification, which is a willingness to pick the answers they like and promote them with a confidence grossly in excess of their understanding of the topic. Now I’ll admit, a few of our member organizations do employ a few actual PhD scientists, but that doesn't mean they're actually doing any science research in their jobs, alright? We just have them author articles and put them on camera to increase the believability of our religious and political messaging. It’s amazing how many people will believe you about literally any subject you spew nonsense about if you say you have a PhD in some field and tell them they’re special and loved”.
"we promote a 'guilty-and-you-must-never-believe-they're-innocent-or-else-you're-guilty-too' " perspective.
Bartholomew added that, beyond just not doing science themselves, her group’s member organizations also spend a lot of their efforts actively demonizing actual science researchers whose conclusions they don’t like. “We like to think of ourselves as possessing a special understanding of morality. We think the morally right thing to do to the hundreds of thousands of scientists who don’t subscribe to our narrow and dogmatic interpretation of our particular holy scriptures and let that corrupt the integrity of their work, is to convince people that those scientists are wicked liars doing the work of an invisible evil being we call The Enemy; we promote a 'guilty-and-you-must-never-believe-they're-innocent-or-else-you're-guilty-too' perspective, if you will.”
A group of volunteers from Bartholomew’s Creation Science Isn’t Science team hopes to gather enough signatures by next summer to move forward with the official name change. The group had also considered “Creation I’m Tired Of Being Asked For Evidence Of My Claims Because All I Have Is Recycled, Tired Old Repeatedly-Debunked Talking Points, But If You Don’t Take My Word For It, You’re Going To Suffer Unending Agony After Death But That Doesn't Mean My Religion Uses Fear As A Tool To Convince People; It's Really All Love and Justice” as a replacement for the term “Creation Science”. Although this was representative of the group’s beliefs, it was deemed too long and too likely to be a turn-off to potential converts.
Seriously Though
Would you go to a doctor who has a declaration posted on their door reading "I unwaveringly believe that every patient whom I examine has asthma and if they look like they have a broken leg, that can't be true? Would you go to a mechanic with a sign reading "Whatever issues I find with your car, if they're not with the starter motor, they're wrong"? Anybody who says they are investigating a question but holds a personal commitment to any one answer to that question is deceiving themselves and maybe you.
There are few more obvious practitioners of this behavior than the many Christian young-earth creationist websites, authors, and publishers who hold, and even put in writing, an unquestioning commitment to the literal truth of the Biblical creation narrative in the Book of Genesis. Some of these sources call their work creation science, some call it apologetics or something else, but all attempt to support their beliefs with science-based arguments. But the statements of faith posted on the websites of major creationist groups like Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research amount to a vow to be unscientific. A vow to not objectively evaluate the question at hand. A vow to avoid the uncomfortable. A vow to never honestly consider and investigate whether their current beliefs are based in reality or whether they may be the result of indoctrination.
If you're a young-earth creationist, I applaud your courage for reading this far.
The “RATE Project” conducted by staff at the Institute for Creation Research stands out as a stark and egregious example of the Christian creationism variety of “picking the answers that make us feel special”. An acronym for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth, the apparently well-funded project was aimed at finding and documenting some fatal flaws in radiometric dating, a process whereby the decay over time of naturally-occurring radioactive elements in trees, rocks and other materials are used to determine the age of those materials. Many amateur and professional creationists had made quite kindergartenish attempts to cast doubt on the reliability of these methods, which consistently show that the oldest rocks on earth are about 4 billion years old, much older than the 6,000 - 10,000 years required for their literalist Bible interpretation to be correct. (2)(3)(4) The RATE team aimed to tackle radiometric dating in a much more rigorous way and was composed of members who were much more qualified and knowledgeable on the subject, yet still utterly and desperately cling to a fable and make a career out of trying to convince people it's factual. The RATE team wrote a very long report (5) about their work, which found absolutely nothing supporting their young-earth dogma. Page after page, analysis of the data is mixed about 50/50 with wild speculation treated as fact, of the form "we don't know how, but God must have done this and that" and "we trust that God definitely did such and such" and "we must find a way to show that God did this thing over here". The later pages drip with contrived optimism, basically pleading for more funding to continue this important work under the manufactured certainty that the project's utter failure to produce results will magically be reversed. Here is my brief summary of the summary report published in Rate II, Chapter 10. If you think any of this is incorrect on doesn't fairly represent ICR, please let me know and I will review the objection and consider editing my summary.
Summary of the ICR's 'RATE Project'
We looked at a ton of conventional radiometric dating results, which show the Earth is about 4 billion years old.
We can't find any problems with these results that we can explain.
But we have decided up-front based on nothing but our religious faith that these results cannot ever be correct because they contradict our understanding of the Bible's creation narrative, which we think says the Earth is only 6 - 10,000 years old.
We recognize that the only way the 4 billion year age could be reduced to our preferred 6 - 10,000 years would be for radioactive decay rates, which have never been shown to change even a small amount, to have been faster by a ludicrous amount at certain points in history, and that our God must have done this but we don't know how or when.
We acknowledge that these drastic increases in decay rates, even if they happened, which we can't show that they did, cause fatal problems for our argument, namely:
The Heat Problem: the required increase in radioactive decay rates such that 4 billion years worth of radiation energy was released in only a few hundred years, and especially in only one year (our main line of thinking is that all the decay happened during the flood of Noah, which we think is an actual historical event), would have resulted in a catastrophic level of heat buildup on Earth. (See Reference (6) below).
The Radiation Problem: If the radioactive elements in the Earth's rocks were decaying at the extremely high rates we need during Noah's flood the way we assert they must have, the radiation would have killed Noah and his family and every animal on his floating zoo.
The Theological Problem: We speculate that, aside from the year of Noah's flood, the Creation week could have been a time when our astronomical rates of decay were occurring, but that contradicts our theology because it means something on Earth was decaying while everything that God had created was still considered "good", as it hadn't yet been subject to the fall of man and the entry of evil.
Even though we just showed that our literal interpretation of the Bible is wrong, it can't be wrong, so we still believe the Bible is literally true.
Or, in super-brief:
The Institute for Creation Research found out their preferred conclusion was wrong, but declared it to be right anyway.
And over the many months that the project was going on and failing spectacularly to produce anything remotely meaningful as far convincing any non-creationist scientists that the conventional radiometric rock ages are wrong, the ICR team churned out a bunch of updates to their supporters, and announcements and training materials for use by churches, proclaiming the raving success of their quest to prove their Biblical timeline correct. The degree to which some groups loudly claiming to have the infallible Truth resort to naked lying and the systematic distribution of propaganda is mind-bending. If you are getting your 'science' information from young-earth creationist sources, please, please stop giving them your attention and money. Be curious. Learn how real science works. Understand why creation 'scientists' publish their work on websites, in apologetics books and Sunday school materials, and not in the science journals that have been the places where real scientists publish real science research for over a hundred years.
Questions for the Curious
What are the names of some real science journals where scientists publish their work?
The Journal of Geology (University of Chicago Press)
What are some of the ways that mainstream scientists reduce the potential for bias and errors in their work? Do creation proponents do these same things?
What are the names of some scientific journals where researchers submit their work for peer review and potential publishing?
What is the difference between a research paper published in a scientific journal, and an article posted on a website or blog?
What useful function have the origin stories found in every culture around the world served for those communities? Does serving a useful function for a community mean that an idea is true in the factual sense?
Are you getting your science information from scientists, or from your pastor and religious apologists (whether qualified in science or not)?
Reference (6) is a video about the fatality of the heat problem for the young Earth hypothesis, by a woman working towards her PhD in Biological Anthropology. The very first line in the notes of the video says: "This video covers subjects outside of my realm of formal education. Alert me if things need correction!". How often do creationist speakers/writers call attention to the fact that they're speaking outside their area of formal education? How often do they welcome correction?
Where can you go online to read the work of scientists who don't hold a personal commitment to uphold specific results in their work and deny other results?
Are many of the science-related arguments for the Christian creationist view also used by Muslim and Jewish creationists? If so, why?
If the same or very similar arguments are used by different people to support conflicting conclusions, what does that mean about the strength of these arguments?
How does radiometric dating work?
What different types of radiometric dating are used on different materials and why?
What is an isochron graph and how does it eliminate errors in radiometric dating?
Have you been told that all "secular" scientists are atheists? Is that accurate?
Who are some prominent scientists who are evangelical Christians but accept the evidence that exists from many independent fields of science that the Earth is very old?
If you are a Christian who attends a church that teaches young earth creationism, have you ever looked into other denominations that love Jesus but don't think it's necessary or wise to force a literal interpretation onto the Book of Genesis?
What risks does it pose to a society if many members of the society train their children from a young age to deny the truth of ideas they don't like?
References and Stuff to Look At If You Are Interested
Note: I treat no source as infallible. These are provided for people to look at and consider critically. I find the Wikipedia pages on a topic to be a good place to start, to get a basic framework of the topic, the terminology, the issues, and a list of links and references where I can dig deeper if I want to.
SCIENCE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/science
(An Actual Scientific Reseach Paper): 4.2 Ga (Billion years old) zircon xenocryst in an Acasta gneiss from northwestern Canada: Evidence for early continental crust https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/34/4/245/129501/4-2-Ga-zircon-xenocryst-in-an-Acasta-gneiss-from
(An Actual Scientific Reseach Paper): Evidence for early asteroidal collisions prior to 4.15 Ga (Billion years old) from basaltic eucrite phosphate U–Pb chronology https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X20304416
Oldest dated rocks - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks
Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II | The Institute for Creation Research https://www.icr.org/rate2
The HEAT Problem: The One-Hit-KnockOut to Creationism https://youtu.be/ezH3c7J4-WM.
How Creationism Taught Me Real Science 17: Radiometric Dating
(A great book): The Age of the Earth: G. Brent Dalrymple (amazon.com)
Comments