Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us LITERARY FREEWARE -- NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August 1993. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other F&SF Science Column #8: "Creation Science" In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists. This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source of historical and scientific knowledge. The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness. Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge. Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland, John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin himself was a one-time divinity student. Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the 1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the day in the scientific community. But convincing the scientific community was far from the end of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning. Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in 1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present human form, less than ten thousand years ago. So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity. Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists. It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth -- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened in the first place. One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The commonest view of the origin of the cosmos is "theistic creationism," the belief that the Cosmos is the product of a divine supernatural action at the beginning of time. The creationist debate, therefore, has not generally been between strictly natural processes and strictly supernatural ones, but over *how much* supernaturalism or naturalism one is willing to admit into one's worldview. How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and the age of rocks? Let us assume, as a given, that the Bible as we know it today is divinely inspired and that there are no mistranslations, errors, ellipses, or deceptions within the text. Let us further assume that the account in Genesis is entirely factual and not metaphorical, poetic or mythical. Genesis says that the universe was created in six days. This divine process followed a well-defined schedule. Day 1. God created a dark, formless void of deep waters, then created light and separated light from darkness. Day 2. God established the vault of Heaven over the formless watery void. Day 3. God created dry land amidst the waters and established vegetation on the land. Day 4. God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and set them into the vault of heaven. Day 5. God created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. Day 6. God created the beasts of the earth and created one male and one female human being. On Day 7, God rested. Humanity thus began on the sixth day of creation. Mankind is one day younger than birds, two days younger than plants, and slightly younger than mammals. How are we to reconcile this with scientific evidence suggesting that the earth is over 4 billion years old and that life started as a single-celled ooze some three billion years ago? The first method of reconciliation is known as "gap theory." The very first verse of Genesis declares that God created the heaven and the earth, but God did not establish "Day" and "Night" until the fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life, and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a standard six-day Edenic "restoration" around 4,000 BC. "Gap theory" was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield, prominent '30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well- known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others. The second method of reconciliation is "day-age theory." In this interpretation, the individual "days" of the Bible are considered not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time. Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4, more than halfway through the process. It's difficult to understand how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour "day" without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago, with matter created on the first "day," life emerging on the third "day," the fossil record forming during the eons of "days" four five and six. Humanity, however, was created directly by divine fiat and did not "evolve" from lesser animals. Perhaps the best-known "day-age" theorist was William Jennings Bryan, three-times US presidential candidate and a prominent figure in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925. In modern creation-science, however, both gap theory and day-age theory are in eclipse, supplanted and dominated by "flood geology." The most vigorous and influential creation-scientists today are flood geologists, and their views (though not the only views in creationist doctrine), have become synonymous with the terms "creation science" and "scientific creationism." "Flood geology" suggests that this planet is somewhere between 6,000 and 15,000 years old. The Earth was entirely lifeless until the six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils, including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC during Noah's Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs, which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists, are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth. The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology. Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (1961). Much of this book's argumentative energy is devoted to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and therefore more pernicious day-age theory. Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to survive for "eons" without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies -- winged creatures that were products of Day Five. Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah's Flood. Jesus Christ Himself refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19. Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to lack faith in the historical exi...
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