Dendrochronology Demolishes YEC

Trees produce rings every year due to seasonal changes in growth speed. Using these rings, scientists in the field of dendrochronology can calculate the age of trees independently of other methods.

Two bristlecone pine trees, Prometheus and Methuselah, are known based on their ring counts to have lived for over 4,800 years – significantly older than the worldwide flood that YECs claim occurred roughly 4,350 years ago. But by cross-matching patterns based on multiple bristlecone pine trees in the same area, the timeline can be extended back even further. For example, a ring pattern of "thick, thin, thin, thin, thick, thin, thick, thick, thin, thin" found in the inner portion of one bristlecone pine might be found in the outer portion of another such tree nearby. Using this method, scientists can date trees back over 11,000 years ago – far longer than the 6,000 years allotted by YEC. The supposed date of Noah’s flood around 2350 BC makes this even more problematic, since no trees would have survived.

YECs generally try to cast doubt on this data by pointing to some species of trees that occasionally make more than one ring per year. However, fellow YEC John Woodmorappe has acknowledged that there is no evidence for this in bristlecone pines:

"Could the weather patterns right after the Flood, probably quite different from those of recent decades, have triggered flushes of multiple ring growth in the BCPs of the White Mountains, California—the ones that form the inferred 8,000 year chronology? This seems unlikely, as BCPs already grow in a variety of montane environments in the western U.S., yet none of them is known to have ever produced more than one ring per year."

In fact, missing bristlecone pine tree rings occur with relative frequency, so if anything, the trees’ estimated ages are slightly underestimated. Woodmorappe also reviewed the cross-matching process and found no errors in the methodology. The only explanation he was able to make up to explain the cross-matching data is some sort of phantom "migrating ring-disturbing event" – a far-fetched idea that he has absolutely no evidence for, and which still wouldn't explain why individual bristlecone pines contradict the flood date by hundreds of years.

WEIT: The Big Picture

I'm spending a bit longer on Chapter 2 of Why Evolution Is True than I was planning to, but I want to quickly go back to something I skipped over: the overall fossil pattern found within the geologic column.

In the very lowest reaches of the fossil record we have very simple photosynthetic bacteria from roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Further up we find the more complex eukaryotes (~2 bya), then basic multicellular organisms like worms and sponges (~600 mya). Around 400 mya we find tetrapods, then amphibians (~350 mya) and reptiles (~300 mya). Closer to the surface we find mammals (~250 mya) and birds (~200 mya). Humans can be found only at the very top, only about 7 mya. Plants follow a similar pattern: "The oldest are mosses and algae, followed by the appearance of ferns, then conifers, then deciduous trees, and, finally, flowering plants." Below is a depiction of the latter (upper) part of the fossil record:

Coyne also provides some detailed small-scale examples from deep within the fossil record, showing that ancient plankton and trilobites changed slowly over periods of a few million years. He summarizes the "big picture evidence" as follows:

"Simple organisms evolved before complex ones, predicted ancestors before descendants. The most recent fossils are those most similar to living species, and we have transitional fossils connecting many major groups. No theory of special creation, or any theory other than evolution, can explain these patterns."

And he's right. He doesn't mention the creationists' attempts to explain them, but as with their massively flawed explanation of continental drift, I don't blame him. How do creationists explain the exquisite ordering of fossils throughout the geologic column? Their answer once again is essentially "the Flood did it." Basically, they think that denser creatures that lived at lower altitudes would be fossilized at the bottom, and less dense creatures living at higher altitudes would be at the top. They also think dumber, slower animals would be buried more quickly and deeply than smarter, faster animals. It makes just enough sense to convince the creationist crowd, but it's laughable to anyone who thinks about it critically for a few seconds.

I wonder if the creationists can tell us why fossils of helpless infant specimens are buried at the same level as their intelligent, mobile adult counterparts. If their ideas are correct, I wonder why birds, which have hollow bones and could fly to escape the flood waters, aren't virtually all found at the very top of the geologic column alongside humans. I wonder why the land mammal and early whale transitional Indohyus, which has unusually dense bones, didn't sink significantly deeper than other similar creatures. I wonder why we observe the delicate small-scale plankton and trilobite patterns that Coyne mentions in spite of the upheaval and chaos that would accompany a global flood. I wonder why we don't find a single fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.

The principles that the creationists propose are so weak that even if they were true, we would still expect there to be a huge standard deviation in burial point. There should be outliers: a few humans and penguins and flowering plants that for one reason or another were buried much deeper than the rest. Yet the fossil record is far too consistent for their ridiculous sorting mechanisms to account for. So I guess I'll continue to wonder how creationists can ever hope to explain away all the problems with their claims—I don't expect decent answers from them anytime soon.

WEIT: Continental Drift

On page 16 of WEIT, Coyne mentions continental drift and the problems it poses for young earth creationism. We know from evidence such as geographical fossil distribution (see image below) that the continents were once together. We know from GPS satellites that the continents are moving at 2–4 inches per year. And plate tectonics, which posits many millions of years of drift, already explains the observed evidence. It can even make accurate predictions. For example, oil companies use plate tectonics to figure out where to drill.

Coyne doesn't mention the proposed YEC explanation for continental drift, runaway subduction, but I don't really blame him; the whole concept is a mess. Basically, the YECs think that around the time of the flood, entire continents moved thousands of miles across the earth at about 4 miles per hour – roughly the average person's walking speed. They provide no mechanism for this phenomenon, and the heat released by billions of tons of land moving that fast would be enough to boil away the world's oceans. If YECs want to use the catch-all, unfalsifiable "God did it" as the explanation for these problems, that still leaves the problem of why God would want to move the continents around in the first place.

The real problem with runaway subduction is that it takes the Bible as a given and then tries to reconcile it with our observations, no matter how absurd the result. Objectively speaking, it makes far more sense to start with the observable evidence and then find the simplest and best explanation for that evidence – precisely as traditional plate tectonics already does.

Why Not Theistic Evolution?

I'll be spending a lot of time focusing on the evidence for evolution and against creationism, so it's worth explaining why I don't just accept theistic evolution (TE) as many Christians do. I'll leave aside my other objections to Christianity while answering this question.

TE takes some or all of the Genesis creation account to be allegorical. The problem is that there's simply no reason for an allegory here. The creation account itself doesn't teach us anything morally – certainly nothing that an omniscient God couldn't teach us using a more accurate account. (And while the Adam/Eve part of the story does offer a moral lesson, we'll see later that this portion is definitely meant to be historical.) Objections that the Bible isn't a science textbook are pointless; one expects accuracy from any text unless there is a legitimate reason to stray from the truth.

Some might say that the real science would only confuse people of that time and distract from the message. But first of all, I would expect an omniscient God to be able to express himself accurately without confusing people. And second, the creation account differs unnecessarily from reality on too many points. For example, in the creation story plants come before stars and birds before other land animals, when in fact the orders are reversed. There's simply no reason for them to be out of order; the accurate version would be neither distracting nor confusing. There's also no reason to make bizarre mentions of nonexistent phenomena such as "waters above the firmament." Clearly, the creation account is the way it is because the authors believed it to be literally true.

Another problem with TE is that biblical support for the creation story isn't limited to Genesis 1–3. For starters, it's quite obvious that the Bible intends Adam and his descendants to be real people. The Genesis 5 genealogy stretches from Adam to Noah, and Luke 3:23-38 traces Jesus' ancestry all the way back to Adam. Here are more verses that seem to take creation literally:

• Exodus 20:9-11 and Exodus 31:15-17 make no distinction between the "days" of the week and the "days" of creation.
• In Mark 10:6 Jesus says that "from the beginning of creation" God made humans male and female.
• Romans 5:12 and 2 Corinthians 11:3 clearly show that Paul believes the snake/forbidden fruit part of the story to be real.
• 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 says that "man is not from woman, but woman from man."
• 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 says Adam was "the first man" and "made from dust."
• 1 Timothy 2:13-14 says "Adam was formed first, then Eve" and that Eve was deceived.
• Hebrews 4:4 says God rested on the seventh day – again no indication of the day being non-literal.

Incidentally, Noah's flood is also seen by later authors as historical:

• In Matthew 24:37-39/Luke 17:26-27, Jesus treats Noah's flood as a real event.
• 1 Peter 3:20 says that only 8 people were saved in the flood.
• 2 Peter 3:5-6 says the world "perished, being flooded with water."

Romans 5:12 above also states that death entered the world through Adam's sin. This is totally incompatible with evolution, which states that billions of creatures died before the first humans evolved. TE advocates' attempts to resolve this by suggesting that sin also caused death "retroactively" stretch credulity well past the breaking point.

As I've shown, the entire Bible treats the events of Genesis as if they actually happened. In my opinion, it does not leave TE open as a legitimate option, so my choice is between creationism and unguided evolution. Based a thorough examination of the evidence, I must choose the latter.