UNDERCULTURE

I love getting lost into the hazy dreamlike world of the morning light. I often lay there, just waking up, watching the beautiful form of a woman cross the window. It was an intense and very subtle play of light, where form and light blended into one. I wanted to capture that feeling and enhance it. I couldn’t leave well alone, though, and distorted the figure just a little, to make it more surreal, more dreamlike but still enticing.

[Edit (16 February 2009): Added Kenny’s letter below]

Last night, I went to church (New Convenant in Lorraine). I had been invited to attend a “Creationism Seminar.” Danni decided to come with me.

We were there a little ahead of time, so we stepped out of the car, met with our cohort (Kenny) and performed the perfunctory greetings with some of the locals who, frankly, were bubbly with enthusiasm, not unlike alcoholics heading towards their first pint of the night.

The building and the interior weren’t what I expected. It was a vast, cinderblock and corrugated iron construction more reminiscent of a shopping mall than a sanctuary. This impression was reinforced by the complete absence of crucifixes or other expected symbols of God’s grace. It was hard to tell whether the barren interior was due to iconoclastic ideology or simply a lack of imagination.

The finishing touches were the many rows of cheap plastic chairs neatly arranged in a vast semi-circle around a projector and a screen. Since this was the focal point, I deduced that PowerPoint had recently achieved godhood and no-one had bothered to tell me.

I did not muse on this for long, though, because my eyes were drawn to a vast array of trestle tables at the back of the hall. They were covered in layers and piles of brightly labelled books and magazines, each one featuring the sun shining through the clouds or a picture of Darwin on its cover. Here, I got to see many of the much debunked “classics,” like Darwin’s Black Box, and Darwin on Trial. None of these tables would have been complete without the little red cashbox and the smiling suited attendant.

We soon took our seats (in the furthest and darkest corner, of course) and the bearded man whose name I didn’t bother to write down began with his talk, Genesis to the Gospel.

Beardo introduced himself and began by pointing out the points of sale, complete with their grinning and suddenly self-conscious salespeople standing awkwardly next to their bright little red cashboxes. That was it. That was the first thing that came out the guy’s mouth, and he followed it, almost breathlessly, with thorough instructions for signing up to their newsletter.

Here, I must point out that it was probably my fault for being taken aback by the brazen salesmanship of the entire endeavour. I mean, I knew that somewhere, abstractedly, in the back of all of this preaching, behind all of this posturing, there might lurk the almighty dollar. I understood that there were processes to keep this propaganda machine going, and I’m certainly not against a guy making a buck or two in the process. I get that but, never for one second, did I believe that the caricature of the money-hungry preachers was a true and real reflection.

I’m still not quite willing to buy into it. I guess I’ll have to attend another seminar or two just to correlate the results. I refuse to believe these people, who love to tell me on how heroic Jesus was for driving the merchants out of the temple, are the same people who would so blatantly and brazenly use people’s credulity for undisguised material gain.

After the initial shock, I decided that I would keep a tally of the number of times Beardo and his special PowerPoint from God mentioned a product by name, and point out where the audience could buy it. The result? 20 Sales pitches and call-to-actions which, in the space of one-and-a-half hours, equates to one sales pitch every four-and-a-half minute. I wish I was making this up! This guy and his beard should have been working for Vin Diesel in the Boiler Room.

The time that the man from God and his beard were not actively trying to actively sell something, they were dividing it evenly between presenting a twisted view of evolution, misrepresenting the creationist position and repeating old, tired canards (more on all these later). What they didn’t present, but I had fervently hoped that they would, was evidence to bolster the creationist position.

A lot of you may think, at this point, that I am exaggerating or simply lying to strengthen my position but I asure you that I’m not. I wish - I really do wish - that Beardo had offered one single, tiny iota of evidence for creationism. Such evidence would have been welcomed. It would have been something I could sink my teeth into, debate and analyze but, alas, we were given nothing.

And this has always, always been the biggest problem with the creationist hypothesis: the predictions it makes, the evidence it needs, is never presented. Even if we don’t take into account the massive amounts of evidence against their position, without evidence, their position is simply untenable. As Hitchens says, “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

Don’t get me wrong. He certainly claimed that he had evidence, he just never actually showed it. At one stage he got quite close and claimed that “fossils are evidence of a world-wide flood” but he never said how. He also didn’t go into detail as to how this supposed evidence got laid out in different strata in the geological column. I could only conclude that he was completely incompetent or that he didn’t want to shake the flock’s faith by replacing it with - you know - actual knowledge (here’s Wikipedia’s bit on fossils - a good place to start).

This is doubly strange because, as a Christian, he should know that science requires evidence, since he claimed (or maybe it was his beard) that “science could not have developed without the Bible” (Wikipedia to the rescue).

I wish I was kidding about that quote because it displayed a frightening myopic misunderstanding of not only science, but of all human history. One would have had to live in a cave to not know how patently false that is.

But here, you see, he had a problem: the very same science that drives the theory of evolution is exactly the same science that drives his car and his cell phone, and the credit card machines sitting in the back of the hall next to all the books. Clearly, this was unacceptable, so he performed some spectacular mental dodging: he divided science into “Operational Science” which is observable, and “Historical science,” which he calls guesswork.

This, of course, was done all the while ignoring all “operational” evidence for evolution, such as observed instances of speciation, and all instances where “operational” science is based on “historical science.” I suppose I should cut him some slack, though. This is, after all, what is done with the Bible all the time: one gets to take the bits one agrees with (love thy neighbour, God is love) and ignoring all the bits that one doesn’t like (don’t mix cloths, unicorns, God sends out bears to eat children), and ignoring the fact that they’re all part and parcel of the same book. The unfortunate thing is that one can get away with cherry picking what one wants to believe, but not what one observes.

And, after all that, he then contradicted himself almost a minute later by stating that “all Christians are behind true science.”

It was then more of the same when he discussed that radiometric dating isn’t accurate to measure the age of the earth. He failed, time and again, to mention that no-one claimed that radiometric dating was the only reason the age of earth is estimated to be billions of years old. He failed to mention the multiple, independent methods such as luminescence dating and the incremental dating of things like counting tree rings and varves (which is an “operational science” but - shhh - don’t tell him) which would blow his precious 6000 year-old earth claim clean out of the water.

You know, I would love to say that this guy was misguided and confused, but the sheer amount of dishonesty, of misrepresentation, and constant calls to ignore contrary evidence prevent me from doing so. I mean, it just went on and on.

He brought out Piltdown Man and Nebraska man as examples of hoaxes and errors, but then aoided all mention that it was scientists using “historical science”, and not creationists who set the record straight. He only added insult to injury when he complete failed to mention all the thousands of archaeological and ignores all the other bits and pieces for human evolution.

His next bit was equally strange: he claimed that DNA is information and that only intelligent beings can create information. This is as patently wrong as claiming that the patterns that waves make crashing onto a beach is information and that only intelligent beings can create them. The logic he proffered was clearly not sound but, as I now suspect, logic may never have been Beardo’s strong point (Again, Wikipedia is a great place to start)

Still, points must be awarded because at least he was trying. In parts of his speech, he simply lied. Here are some of the ones I wrote down: “Evolution always reduces information,” ATP synthase is “irreducible complex,” “Adam had T-Rex eggs on the ark,” “No-one challenges the Big Bang model,” and so on, and so forth.

My favourite of outright lies, though, have got to be the ones dealing with the all the consequences of believing in evolution which, he claimed are “abortions, family breakups, pornography, homosexuality, lawlessness and racism.” I don’t have a font sarcastic enough to express my shock and outrage over this, so I’ll leave it all for you to look at, read and re-read.

And that was that, apart from the the standard stuff about Jesus and faith (which is only fair, since we were in a mallchurch) which got me thinking: how small, how fragile and how weak must your faith be to have to lie and deceive yourself about what you are seeing with your own two eyes? How small, how fragile and how weak must your faith be that you have to invent vast, elaborate fantasy stories just to be able to coexist with a few dinosaur bones?

Maybe Beardo can answer that question for me.

Kenny’s Letter
Kenny was the person originally invited to the seminar, and he was the one who invited me. He’s a good guy who, like me, finds himself on the other side of the fence for asking too many questions. He took it upon himself to write a review of the seminar and send it through to the church member who invited him. This is his reply.

I must be absolutely honest and say that I was appalled. I have, up until now, only heard that there are people out there who truly believe that the earth is 6000 years old, but hearing it with my own ears was quite frankly, shocking. That this man has a Phd makes it all the more staggering. Denying MOUNTAINS of evidence to the contrary just shows how powerful his FAITH is, faith defined as “belief in the absence of evidence”.

I am not sorry that I attended, but I must open myself up here and say that I do have one regret, that I didn’t pose a question to the speaker. It was largely the fear of “speaking up in a crowd” that kept me from doing so, but also partly not wanting to dignify the content of the presentation with a response. One of the things I wanted to ask Dr. Kruger, was this…………………….

At one stage he showed a slide of **Nebraska Man (see ** footnote), and explained how, after it was ascertained that a tooth supposedly from the skeleton was actually that of a wild pig, (to titters from the audience) the “evidence” was quietly shelved in embarrassment by the evolutionists. He then made the extrapolation that similar discoveries – he mentioned Lucy and Piltdown Man – were found to be similarly devoid of evidence. Well he was right about Piltdown Man “discovered” in 1912 and found to be an elaborate hoax around 1950; however, Lucy, a skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, remains firmly accepted by the credible scientific community. He went on to subtly intimate that other evolutionary evidence would, and had in recent times, fallen away. Now, if this evidence had been negated it would surely have made headlines and been published in credible scientific journals? The fact that these revelations haven’t made significant headlines, points to the suppression of information on a massive scale, the sweeping under the carpet by evolutionary scientists of all their failed hypotheses, theories and evidence. This smacks of a grand conspiracy theory; thousands of scientists colluding to cover up their mistakes. Is this likely or unlikely?

A far simpler question I wished I had posed, was, “how the hell did all those dinosaurs, male and female of each type, get onto the ark”? Not to mention all the other animals. A pretty big boat you would agree?!!

Some more specific points.

1. Chance: Either ignorant, or as I suspect, willfully ignorant, Dr. Kruger glibly questions how life in all its complex forms can exist due to Chance. Well life does not exist due to chance alone. One of the major misconceptions about evolution is that life is all due to chance – the analogy of a tornado blowing through a scrap yard and assembling a Boeing 747 by chance, is often put forward. Yes, random, chance mutations do occur, but this completely ignores the role of natural selection, which retains those variations that lead to reproductive success, but weeds out those variations that are less successful when the organism dies before it can pass on its genes. I am not very good at explaining this but there is ample, eloquent information available on the www.

2. He made a big thing out of Presupposition – saying that evolutionists all had pre-suppositions about what they expected to find. He used the “glasses metaphor” to illustrate that the man shown on his slide, Phillip Tobias, was looking through “glasses” at the skull he held in his hands. Well, is the Bible not the biggest set of spectacles then? I can imagine Dr. Kruger saying, “right the Bible is my starting point, everything must fit back to what is written in the book, so hmmmmmmm, let me see, all the “begats” add up to 6000 years, so that’s that. Now what do I do about all the fossil records that show dinosaurs walked the earth 70 million years ago? Well, they had to have walked with man 4000 years ago”. If that isn’t pre-supposing then I don’t know what is.

3. He touched on Irreducible complexity without mentioning the term, by describing a little cell, or motor in the human body that turns ATP into energy (I think). The thinking is that something so complex cannot work without ALL of the parts being present. Well numerous examples of supposedly irreducibly complex organs have been shown to function to a satisfactory degree without all the parts being present. The eye is normally the favorite example trotted out by creationists.

4. If radio-carbon dating is not a reliable method, then why has the scientific community not rejected it en masse?

5. An interesting observation ………. 21 sales pitches in about 90 minutes.

6. Offensive and completely unfounded: A few (two or three) slides showed a tower “built on god’s word” , the Creation side, and opposite it, a tower built on “Man’s Opinion”, the Evolution side. Apparently the consequences of believing in evolution are, amongst others, homosexuality, school violence, marriage breakup and racism, as depicted in the slide above the Evolution tower. This childish notion would almost be funny if it weren’t so offensive.

7. He did not present a single credible bit of evidence to substantiate his stance.

Thanks for letting me know about the “seminar”. It was certainly an eye-opener. I’d be interested to get your opinion.

Cheers
Kenny

** There is much more to the Nebraska Man story than hinted at by Dr. Kruger, whose snide remark was designed to disparage evolutionists. See this link which shows the exact slide he used in his presentation.