Weird Earth by Donald R. Prothero

Author:Donald R. Prothero
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Red Lightning Books
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 10.5. The famous entrenched meanders of the Colorado River at Horseshoe Bend, just south of Page, Arizona. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Sure enough, the producer was right: this demonstration was very effective and caught the smug Phil and others completely flat-footed, since it was simple laws of physics and geomorphology in action. As often happens, creationists were unable to answer this puzzle, since they have no real understanding or firsthand experience in geology; they simply have memorized ad hoc explanations for specific areas like the Grand Canyon. Rather than admitting they didn’t have the answer, Phil argued that he was sure there must be a creationist answer to this puzzle. Nevertheless, Andrew Maxwell kept at them and made them confess that they couldn’t deny basic physics.

I flew home from Page the next morning. For the rest of the trip, the creationists were confronted by a number of other scientists who effectively argued why the flood geology model and the Noah’s ark story were scientifically impossible. The most effective person of all, however, was anthropologist Tim White at University of California, Berkeley (famous as the codescriber of the famous hominin fossil Lucy, properly known as Australopithecus afarensis, from Ethiopia). For his demonstration, he laid out replicas of a number of hominin skulls and had the creationists sort them by their anatomy. Once they had done so, he pointed out that this was the exact sequence that these skulls were found in a single place in Ethiopia and that primitive ones were never found on the level with the advanced ones, and vice versa. It was a remarkable bit of scientific theater, and they were unable to respond coherently to it since there is no creationist response. The most primitive skulls looked like “apes” to them, the most advanced ones were clearly “human,” and there in front of them were all the intermediates in between.

But our scientific lessons ended up being a tiny part of the hour-long episode, which is largely filled with footage that one finds in many reality shows, from Survivor to MTV’s The Real World: people are cooped up together on camera and begin to squabble among themselves. Most of the episode focused on the antics of the five creationists as they rode their bus through two thousand tedious miles of American interstates over an entire week, got into fights, split into factions, argued with each other, and generally acted immaturely and thoughtlessly. Occasionally, Andrew would get one to interview with him directly. Although the blonde girl, JoJo, seemed to be changing her mind, the rest were still dogmatic and inflexible. (Amusingly, Abdul was completely unaware of how much he had alienated everyone, failed to make good arguments, and believed that Islam had triumphed over Christianity and science in this exercise.) None of them could give coherent answers to the scientific evidence; nonetheless, they were determined to stick with their beliefs.

This was no surprise to any of us, since evidence doesn’t matter to creationists. They have an entire worldview that

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