Preservings $20 Issue No. 26, 2006 - Home at Plett Foundation

Another Look at the Creation-Evolution Debate
Glen R. Klassen, Adjunct Professor of Biology, Canadian Mennonite University
Several years ago Preservings took note of
a new book by Dr. Archie Penner, a Mennonite
scholar (Scientific Creationism in Perspective:
Biblical Creation Defended Servant Publishers,
2001). I reviewed the book at the time although
my name was omitted through an oversight. I
commended Dr. Penner for his honesty in facing
a problem that can get a scholar into hot
water very easily. Perhaps it is time to reflect
on that problem again, especially with so much
new publicity coming out around creation and
evolution.
At one time it seemed quite clear that the
Bible was telling us that the universe had been
created only a few thousand years ago in a sixday
course of creative miracles. Now it is not
so clear. Some of the necessary rethinking of
Genesis is due to biblical scholarship and some
of it is due to science. Most biblical scholars
no longer expect to learn any geology or anthropology
from the Bible because they don’t
think that was the purpose of these writings.
The Bible does not satisfy our curiosity about
such things; that’s what science is for.
What has science found? In asking this
question we must be very careful to stick with
science as just a way of tying together what
we observe about the world and not let science
become a religion that displaces our faith. Many
scientists and others have been misled into atheism
by expecting far more from science than
it can deliver. Science can’t answer the questions
that really interest us, such as: how can
we live so that we and our communities can be
everything that God wants us to be, creatively
and morally?
However, science does come out with honest
discoveries about the world that may disturb
our faith. One of the things that science has
found is that the universe is billions of years
old and that the earth itself is about 4.5 billion
years old. This figure is based on the study of
rocks, mostly studies using radioactivity measurements.
I think that the results are reliable,
but in the creationist community there is a lot
of criticism of the use of radioactivity for dating
rocks. So instead of getting into the isotope dating
debate, I will develop a different argument.
It has to do with the thickness of the ice caps
on Greenland and Antarctica.
In the middle of Greenland and in the
middle of Antarctica the ice is about 3 km
deep. Various teams have drilled down to the
bottom of the ice with a hollow drill bit and
have brought up long pencils of ice (ice cores)
so that the layers of ice can be counted. If there
is one layer per year, similar to the rings in a
tree trunk, then we can find the age of the ice
cap by counting the rings.
The results are in. Scientists think they
can count about 110,000 layers in Greenland
before they hit bedrock, and at least 420,000 in
Antarctica before they hit a huge lake under the
ice cap. One recent ice core from Dome C in
Antarctica seems to have 720,000 annual layers.
So if each layer is one year, the earth must be
very much older than 6000 years.
If we accept this argument, then we will
have a slightly different view of the stories
in Genesis, especially the genealogies, which
seem to give an unbroken line of historical
ancestors all the way back to Adam, who was
present on Day 6. No matter how the list of
ancestors is reinterpreted, there is no way that
it can reasonably be stretched back 400,000
years. We then ask: what was the purpose
for including the ancestor lists in the Bible?
Maybe the whole point was that the God of
the Hebrews was the same God that created the
world and the first people. The writer wanted
to make a connection between the history of
God’s interaction with Israel and the creation
of the universe. Yaweh is truly the creator of
the world. Who are we to criticize the method
used to convey this message?
Creationists, of course, don’t accept the
great age of the polar ice sheets. They have not
produced much of a response to the ice core
argument, but one of their number, Michael
Ooard, has tried valiantly to give a creationist
version of the ice core discoveries. His main
argument against the standard interpretation
is that at the deeper levels of the ice there are
many layers per year (thousands) and that the
methods used to count the layers are biased in
favour of the old earth hypothesis. Ooard thinks
that there was only one very short ice age immediately
after the flood, which occurred in
about 2300 BC.
The trouble is that Ooard presents no evidence
for his model. He starts with the absolute
belief that the earth is only about 6000 years old
and then tries to think (guess, actually) how he
can still have an ice age. As science, his efforts
are worthless. This is a very strong criticism, but
for those who want some honest science here,
I think the criticism is deserved.
As for the creationist’s criticism of how the
ice bands were counted, all of their arguments
have been carefully evaluated and refuted by the
Christian geologist Paul H. Seely, with the help
of glaciologists Todd Hinkley and Richard Alley
(www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-
03Seely.pdf). The creationist’s idea that extra
ice bands were inserted by individual storms
or ice melts is not believable and cannot possibly
account for the number of bands actually
seen. Scientists can easily tell the difference
between an annual band and one produced by
a melting episode.
The main strength of the ice core studies is
that there is great agreement between ice cores
from Greenland and from Antarctica and these
agree with sediment cores from the ocean bottom.
The events that created the annual band
patterns are truly global events, and not just
seasonal storms or ice melts.
There is an almost humorous footnote to
this story. Carl Wieland from Answers in Genesis
has drawn attention to the so-called Lost
Squadron – a fleet of World War II P-38 fighter
planes abandoned on Greenland in 1942. They
have been found under about 250 feet of ice
and several kilometers from where they were
last seen. This depth was surprising at first and
it was used by creationists to cast doubt on the
validity of the ice core work. If the Greenland
ice builds up that fast, then surely the whole
glacier is only a few thousand years old! Unfortunately
for Wieland and Answers in Genesis,
we now know that the planes are buried near
the coast of Greenland where about seven feet
of snow falls each year and where there is a lot
of shifting of the ice. The planes are exactly
where they would be expected to be.
It would be nice if Answers in Genesis
would now move Wieland’s Lost Squadron
article to the file on their own web site reserved
for “Arguments we think Creationists should
NOT use”, right beside the “Footprints in
Stone” story and the “Dust on the Moon” story.
Archie Penner got it right.
So the earth is undoubtedly much older
than what a literal reading of Genesis can accommodate.
I guess we will have to conclude
that the Genesis genealogies are expressing the
Hebrew faith that the same God who rescued
them from Egypt also created the universe. It
is not a statement of science; it is a statement
of faith expressed in a way appropriate for
their time.
Once we no longer need to insist that the
Bible tells us that the earth is only a few thousand
years old, we are free to think of the past
as a long story of change and development.
This is what the fossil record suggests. The
geological map of Manitoba is very interesting
in this respect. As you enter Manitoba from the
east you notice the edge of the Canadian Shield
made up of precambrian rock with no fossils
in it, except for a few rare microbes. After
Beausejour the rock is limestone, full of fossilized
sea creatures that you can easily see in
your Tyndall stone fireplace. You pass through
three more different fossil communities until
you come to Morden with its huge dinosaurs.
All of Manitoba is tilted to the west so that
when the glaciers scoured off the top, the layers,
which were laid down horizontally, now come
up for air one after the other according to age.
From east to west it’s oldest to youngest. Each
layer has a distinctive and strange population
of fossilized creatures.
There is no chance that all of this can be
blamed on a world-wide flood that happened
about 4000 years ago. Chaotic floods don’t
organize geological layers in this way, placing
the strangest creatures deeper and the most
familiar ones higher in the earth. Why are
none of the familiar forms mixed into the deep
layers by accident? Creationists have indeed
tried to produce such out-of-place fossils but
such “data” never survives scrutiny for long.
The data only survives on the web pages of the
creationists themselves. And sometimes one
Preservings No. 26, 2006 - 85