The Walls Again Collapse, With A Deafening Roar.

The Bible talks about a worldwide flood;
Could the fossils be the proof we see?
If there really was a worldwide flood,
What would the evidence be?

Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth….
Well there really was a worldwide flood;
Just look at the stony curse,
With billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth!

— Buddy Davis

Note:  This blog post has been a month in the making, mainly because every time I browse websites to glean addresses I intend to include in my links, I become distracted by an overwhelming deluge of information.  I feel like a kid in a candy store.  So I’ve been taking my time, savoring the information, enjoying the learning experience as I’ve slowly formed this post.

Under each of the bullet points below is a Creationist claim with links to multiple Creationist sources promoting that claim.  Each point is followed by a brief handful of links to sources that clearly, rationally, and in detail, expose the (often ludicrous) invalidity of the claim.

One of the greatest inhibitors to my moving away from Christianity has been a deeply grounded belief in creationism. Thanks to ICR, AIG, Apologia, Morris, Behe, and many other sources, I was convinced that the earth was likely only a few thousand years old, that Noah’s flood created most or all of the fossils and geological strata we see today, and that evolution was absurd, impossible, or at the very least impractical and highly unlikely.

Thanks to a blog post made by a friend of mine, I discovered a site that addresses many Creationist claims from a scientific (not atheistic) perspective. I’ve been sitting here in horror, with four words echoing in my mind as my universe crumbles around me:

I’ve been lied to.

• Carbon-14 dating is extremely unreliable, since ¹⁴C dating depends on the assumption that ¹⁴C has always been present in the atmosphere in the same amount; in reality, fluctuations in the amount of ¹⁴C present in the atmosphere can vary over time — it’s so unreliable that living or recently-dead animals have been misdated to being thousands or millions of years old!
  Lies, lies, more lies, and damn lies.
• Life cannot arise from non-life — that’s the age-old false idea of spontaneous generation, a.k.a. abiogenesis, which has been disproven multiple times. Scientists have created proteins in laboratory conditions that are supposed to replicate a possible primeval-earth scenario, but we really don’t have any way of knowing what the earth was like back then, and it could have been far different from these test conditions … not only that, but even proteins are not life — they’re the building blocks of life, and can’t give rise in turn to life.
  Lies, lies, more lies, and damn lies!
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an established scientific principle that insists that the state of the universe tends from order to disorder. Life rising from some sort of primordial soup is just the opposite — disorder giving way to order. The “big bang” theory, as well as any theory that claims stars and planets “grow” from floating space dust, also violates this law.
  Lies, lies, more lies, and damn lies!
• Paleontologists found a T-Rex bone that was not completely petrified, indicating that it was probably younger than the previously-assumed 65 million years. Furthermore, unfossilized tissues were discovered inside the bone, tissues that were still soft and stretchy — they would have rotted away long before 65 million years had passed. Oh, yeah, and there’s that infamous vertical whale….
  Lies, lies, and damn lies!
• Virtually no “missing links” have ever been found to demonstrate the process of evolution — only different, distinct types of animals. If evolution were true, the fossil record should be overwhelmed with missing links.
  Lies, lies, lies, more lies, and damn lies!
• Mutations never add information, since they’re merely corruptions of pre-existing data. Therefore mutations cannot give rise to higher order and complexity. Furthermore, mutations are almost always harmful and result in a less “fit” individual, one which “natural selection” should select against. The few mutations that appear to be beneficial in actuality lessen the overall “fitness” of the mutated organism in favor of boosting a specific statistic that give it a greater advantage in specific circumstances.
  Lies, lies, and damn lies!
• Irreducibly complex systems (such as the human eye, the bacterial flagellum, the immune system, and countless others) depend on a number of interdependent functions, without even one of which the entire system would fail. (Comparable to a standard mousetrap.) Irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve because the system would provide no advantage to natural selection while some evolved functions were waiting for their counterparts to evolve.
  Lies, lies, more lies, and damn lies!
• The entire paleontological and geographical record overwhelmingly evidences a catastrophic global flood. Most (if not all) fossil-containing rock is sedimentary — dirt and sand deposited by water that has turned into stone. Since fossilization is unlikely when an animal simply dies (the remains must be buried quickly or preserved in an oxygen-free environment), a catastrophic flood that moves vast amounts of sediment, quickly burying countless animals in its path, is highly likely to create millions of fossils worldwide, probably segregated in layers by the animals’ ability to evade the flood and their buoyancy in the water. Since volcanic activity is insinuated in the Genesis flood account, the presence of volcanic rock is not only explainable but predicted. Furthermore, abnormal stratification and angled or folded rock formations no longer present a puzzle to geologists, but are quite easy to explain — the rocks were still soft and not finished solidifying during the part of the Flood that they represent!
  Of course, the catchy song quoted at the beginning of this post helps keep these concepts close at hand….
  Lies, lies, damn lies, lethal lies, hellacious lies, and how the hell could anyone have ever bought into these lies!

I sit here, shaking my head in disbelief.

Disbelief at how quickly my entire perception on the world can change.

Disbelief that I could have possibly believed those outrageous claims (though creationists do their darnedest to package it all up in Bible-based, scientific-sounding lingo that can easily fool laymen).

And disbelief that anyone could so callously tell bald-faced lies — which they know are lies — and be lauded for it, rather than derided.

On the positive side of things, I finally, for the first time in my life, get to marvel at the vastness of history. A planet nearly five billion years old (can one even conceive of the magnitude defined by a billion?!) … yet our earth is young in the timeframe of the universe! Dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago — try to wrap my mind around that figure — and those millions of years are just a brief moment in the span of earth’s history.

Ah, moments of childlike wonderment I thought had died forever….

It’s as if I just discovered color.
And I love it.
And I’m still furious at those who insist that the world is 8-bit grayscale.