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by Steve Risner

[This blog post is part of a series. The previous post is here, and the next post is here.]

Are you ready for this? This blog post is going to be part one of a mini-series within the larger series I’ve been working on regarding theistic evolution. We’ve been tackling a blog post by a theistic evolutionist Tyler Francke that he calls “10 theological questions no young-earth creationist can answer.” Within that blog post is a series of links to other posts he’s written. I’ve been dismantling them over the last several weeks. Today we start a very lengthy response to “Why Ken Ham’s scientific defense of young-earth creationism just doesn’t make any sense.” As one can tell from the title, it is yet another attack on Ken Ham, which seems to be the sole intent of Tyler’s writings. We will also find that this entire blog post by Tyler is filled with strawman arguments, which I feel is unfortunate. His entire case against Biblical creation is built on something other than Biblical creation—in other words, he’s made up a number of issues or exaggerated the Biblical stance to make it easy to refute. Over and over he has failed to accurately describe the Biblical position. This is strange as well since he claims to be a follower of Christ and a lover of the Word of God. So let’s take a look at Tyler’s blog post and see what we find. Be advised that there are actually two links in this post we will be addressing. The other post is “Ken Ham has a problem with the Bible.” Because some of the points are the same or similar, I will treat them as one larger post (they are, in fact, a series by Tyler).

Tyler starts out by saying, “One of my favorite verses in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 14:20: ‘Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.’ In a time when it seems all too fashionable for Christians to be stereotyped as mindless sheep, this verse helps me remember the rich intellectual tradition our faith has. But sometimes, I can see all too clearly where those ‘stereotypes’ come from, and — in those instances — I can’t say I blame any atheist who walks away thinking that Christians are dunces who have no idea how to think.”

There are a few things to note in this single paragraph. 1) He uses the Bible to mount a personal insult on the intelligence of Christians. 2) Evolution from a single common ancestor is impressively naïve in its beliefs but is dressed up in a way to make it seem intelligent. This has been brilliantly developed over the last 150 years since Darwin. Darwin’s ideas were based on an enormous ignorance on genetics and the complexity of living things in general. He also failed to ever come up with a mechanism by which the indescribable advancements in living things occurred. Pond scum to people is a large leap and we’re no closer to figuring out how that could possibly happen than when he suggested it in the “Origin of Species.” Combine this with the fact that the theory relies on abiogenesis to even get started (I know, these two things—Darwinian evolution and abiogenesis are not linked according to them but we all know that’s just wishful thinking on their part), which was shown by Redi and Pasteur to be an old wives’ tale long ago. Dunces indeed. 3) He references the “rich intellectual tradition” of Christianity in this writing while insinuating that Christianity was responsible for the Dark Ages in another. I responded to that here if you’re interested. 4) He once again agrees with atheists in trashing Christianity. Does anyone find this troubling?

Tyler moves on to say he’s going to address two problems Ken Ham has, then he lists a third. The third issue Ham has is a reliance on Scripture. Again, this is a strange thing to cite as a problem for a Bible believer and Bible lover as Tyler claims to be. He then gets to one of the problems Ham has—Ken Ham believes that science is limited (gasp!). The way Tyler describes it is a little harsh and actually exaggerated, but what else can we expect? Tyler accuses Ham of believing that science is “completely useless in examining the past.” This is obviously not true. Word usage is very important. He further states, “We can use geological and biological evidence to reconstruct the past as surely as a CSI team can use forensic evidence to investigate a crime. But it ‘sounds’ good.” Is it difficult to determine one time past events with any degree of accuracy? Sure. Is it even harder if the alleged event took place before anyone was around to observe it? Of course. Is it even more difficult if the conditions of such an event are unknown? Clearly. This is what Ken Ham believes. I have written quite a bit about the issues with what some call “historical science.” Take a few moments, if you like, to read here, here, here, and here. Drop me a comment to let me know you were there. To say we can “surely” reconstruct that past in terms of Darwinian evolution is simply a terribly inaccurate statement, in my opinion. These reconstructions exist only in the minds of those who want it to be true. Lucy is an excellent example of the desire to find something leading to a monumental discovery that’s really nothing of the sort.

Tyler moves on to defend things like the speed of light and radiometric decay in determining the age of the earth and/or universe. Tyler is certainly not up on things in this debate at all. The starlight “problem” has a few solutions proposed. I tend to like Dr. Humphreys’ work on the topic, but Dr. Lisle and others have proposed solutions as well. The fact is, the “deep time” believers have their own issues with distant starlight, and, to my knowledge, no one is trying to deal with it (see the end of this article). Maybe they’re just waiting on the creationists to solve the problem for them. Since creationists have invented this thing we call science, it wouldn’t be a bad move. Then there’s the decay rates. Oh, boy. If he truly believes the rate of decay is the only thing in question, he’s misinformed. Decay rates do vary and this is common knowledge, or so I thought. The RATE project has done some great stuff on this as well as a number of other things. But there are no less than 5 assumptions that radiometric dating uses. The fact that rates of decay do change is only one of them. The other assumptions are not hard to grasp: you must assume how much of the parent isotope was there to start with, you must assume how much daughter isotope was there to start with, you must assume the parent isotope did not leak in or out during its decay process, and you must assume the daughter isotope did not leak in or out during the decay process. So if Tyler is okay with giving a solid age for anything based on these 5 very unlikely assumptions rather than the clear communication in God’s Word, that’s his problem. We also have a number of problems that arise when we use radiometric dating. Here’s just a little on that.

The truth here is that neither the speed of light (and, therefore, distant starlight) nor radiometric dating are issues for the Bible or a Biblical worldview. I’m not sure why he acts like they are issues for Biblical creation. He makes a strange comment here, though. He says we “trust these findings are reliable because of Occam’s Razor.” This really isn’t the case. He trusts them because he’s relied heavily on uniformitarian philosophy. In reality, in employing Occam’s Razor here, we find the extremely large assumptions (in number and magnitude) of the theistic evolutionist means his theory is doomed. He also says, “We’ve never found anything that would indicate otherwise.” As I’ve mentioned above, he must be way behind here because, at the very least, radiometric dating is questionable for a variety of reasons.

Next week, we’ll continue exposing this awful belief system for what it is—secular humanism that wants to masquerade as a Christian belief system. Please stay with us and please leave a comment or two if you feel led to do so.

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