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The ‘Indoctrinator’

by and

A survey at a university in Sydney, Australia, showed that approximately 80% of first year students at that institution ‘believe in a God who is there’. But ‘By their second year only 15% believe in God’. It is plain to see that this university has convinced these students that there in no God nor any need of God via the teaching of Secular Humanism, which is of course based upon evolution.

Experience shows that these results are not unique to this university, nor to Australia, but are a world-wide phenomenon. Our young people (including those attending Bible-believing churches) are being subjected to an indoctrination program which leaves many of them indifferent to the things of God, closed to the Gospel, full of doubts or quietly slipping away from their faith. This indoctrination is not limited to university, being taught constantly at school, and from the media. It is a bizarre reality that some churches and ‘Christian’ schools are enthusiastic collaborators in this indoctrination.

The first author (W.A.) remembers when he first met one student, ‘Greg’, who attended this very university and whose faith was in tatters. Greg was being taught genetics from a strictly evolutionary viewpoint and he found it hard to reconcile these ‘facts’ with his Biblical ‘beliefs.’ He was an active member of a large church whose pastor rejected our offer of assistance, claiming the church was well equipped to counteract such non-Biblical teaching. Sadly, some pastors, especially in churches which practise a ‘closed pulpit’, think that a parent will come to them with any apologetics problems their kids might be facing, but in practice the first they hear is an anguished parent saying ‘My child has come home from school /university saying he’s an atheist and the Bible’s disproven by evolution, and you parents and the Church have their heads in the sand.’

Sadly we meet many ‘Gregs’ in churches, and their church is either unaware of their turmoil, or won’t or can’t deal with the problem. People (especially the young) have many questions and doubts which undermine their faith. For example: How can God be a God of love with all the death, disease and suffering in the world? How can we all be descended from Adam and Eve with all the different skin colours? What about carbon-14 dating — doesn’t it prove the world is billions of years old, when the Bible indicates thousands? They can’t both be correct. And so on. (Can you answer these questions?)

What about your church? Are your leaders aware that these very same doubts are most assuredly running through many members minds? Or does your leadership just ignore it, hoping it will go away? It won’t, the people will. Yet the answers are readily available — The Creation Answers Book (left) answers every one of the above questions. But all Christians need to ‘be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have’, as the Apostle Peter commanded in 1 Peter 3:15.

Some just say ‘Have faith’ or ‘Just stick to the Gospel’, as if this were enough. But real answers (such as the ones the Apostles provided in their day) have such exciting results. Consider the following comments:

  • ‘Very, very useful, as I’m facing many of these questions at Uni — I’m so glad the answers are available.’
  • ‘It’s great to have so much evidence against what is believed by the world.’
  • ‘As a new Christian a lot of questions were answered.’
  • ‘Excellent, picked exactly on the problems faced at school’
  • ‘It’s bringing my children back.’
  • [Update: see ‘No excuse not to believe’ by Lita Sanders]

These and many more have appeared in our comments book which accompanies some of the CMI speakers when we speak at churches. Questions answered, faith restored, lives transformed!

Recently a CMI supporter attended a home group and was confronted by an atheist who aggressively attacked the ‘foolishness’ of Christianity and particularly those who imagine God actually created, just as God tells us in Genesis. This man turned out to be the head Professor of Psychology at a Sydney university, and claimed he was a man of science (note that in most British Commonwealth countries, Professor is the highest academic rank at a university). Our supporter said that it was only his seven years of contact with CMI that gave him enough knowledge, and therefore confidence, to contradict this professional ‘Indoctrinator’ face-to-face. A debate ensued which continued via e-mail, where the professor explained the meaning of life, and how we all arrived upon this planet, all without the guiding hand of God. He says that CMI is into all forms of dishonesty, distortion and brainwashing.

Via our supporter, I (WA) challenged the good Prof. to post his (in my view convoluted) reasoning on CMI’s Web site, giving him the opportunity to expose our misdeeds. We offered him a pulpit where his views would be accurately reproduced, plus our comments. He would be then given right of reply and CMI would then be able to reply to this.

Both parties would therefore have two opportunities to put their case. Surprise, surprise, the good Prof. declined the opportunity to expose CMI’s perfidy, explaining he didn’t need a pulpit, stating, ‘I already have one’. Our supporter wrote twice more to encourage him to air his views, with negative results.

So how does this relate to you in Portland, Paris or Portsmouth? Why should you be concerned about the machinations of a God-rejecting ‘Indoctrinator’ in downtown Sydney, Australia? Simply because no matter where you live in the Western world (and places elsewhere) you, your children, and those around you, are being subjected to a sometimes subtle, and sometimes blatant indoctrination program called secular humanism — a system which will brook no opposition.

By the way, do we have anything to fear from the ‘science’ as paraded by Prof. X? Far from it, he should stick to psychology! One of us (WA) is not a scientist but had no trouble seeing through the puerile trivia the Prof. paraded as science. We have no problem with his right to his beliefs but strongly object to the indoctrination through his ‘pulpit’. The same universities would ‘scream blue murder’ if a professor used his position to promote Biblical creation, or even point out the major flaws with evolution. ‘Academic freedom’ applies only to beliefs consistent with humanism.

We also find it astounding that leading anti-creationists have chided creationists for allegedly speaking outside their fields, while doing exactly the same themselves. A prominent example is an Australian humanist and mining geologist who repeatedly prattles on about the alleged creationist threat to physics and chemistry (which happen to be the specialities of the second author (J.S.)) and even theology. Another example, this time in the USA, is an apostate who has chided creationist non-geologists for speaking on geological matters (on which they have actually read widely), but thinks it’s OK to lecture creationists on supernovae, the history and philosophy of science, classical history and even Biblical hermeneutics, although his own speciality field is mercury in water!

To demonstrate our claims regarding his non-science we will print a few of his pronouncements (dark red indented text), with comment below (black non-indented text). You decide who is making the most sense.

1) Speciation

The ‘Indoctrinator’ writes:

‘Professor Neil Moore working in Prestons NSW [i.e. New South Wales, an Australian state, of which the capital is Sydney] made a new species the Gleep [sic — geep] in 1979 using sheep and goat DNA. This is irrefutable proof of evolution at work.’

So breeding a geep, from a sheep and a goat is ‘proof’ that microbes evolved into humans? Give us a break! Those of you who read Creation magazine (Vol. 22 No. 3 June–August 2000) would have seen the article ‘Ligers and Wholphins: What next?’ on pp. 29–33, written by Dr Don Batten (see also our Website version). As Dr Batten says, “It (the geep) is not a hybrid, but a ‘chimera’, formed by mixing the (fertilized) embryo cells of two different species.” Since then, we reported on a genuine Sheep-goat hybrid from Botswana in Creation 23(2):5, March–May 2001, with hybrid physical features, an intermediate number of chromosomes, and displaying ‘hybrid vigour’, e.g. growing faster and being more resistant to disease.

Whatever else these experiments show, they do not show information-adding upwards evolution. A hybrid merely shows that the sheep and the goat are related, both descended from the original created kind. We have often shown how populations can ‘split’ into two subgroups without any gain of information, hence with no evidence that would support molecules-to-man evolution. The hybridizing of two organisms involves the mixing of two sets of genetic information, not the creation of new information, which real evolution would require to create increased complexity. See also Refuting Evolution (above) and Q&A: Speciation.

2) Geology

The ‘Indoctrinator’ pontificates about this field in which he lacks the slightest standing:

‘… sharp river valleys are NOT proof of the flood. Nice thick sedimentary deposits without sharp river valleys are proof of floods. Which of the several million flood deposits we have evidence for over the last 4 billion years is Noah’s?’

The Biblical Flood model involves nice thick sedimentary deposits laid down during the Inundatory Stage of the Flood, when water covered the whole globe, as well as broad river valleys cut through as yet unhardened sedimentary layers during the last (Dispersive) Phase of the Recessive Stage, where the water flowed off the continents as the ‘The mountains rose; the valleys sank down’ (Psalm 104:8, NASB), and split into separate water courses. This is explained further in Dr Tas Walker’s Biblical Geology Home Page (Dr Walker is a qualified geologist, unlike The ‘Indoctrinator’ ).

Some river valleys were cut by catastrophic flooding as lakes formed towards the close of the Post-Flood Ice age burst their natural ice dams. These are generally smaller, but can still be large, e.g. the Channelled Scablands of North America. Sharp valleys were probably formed from narrower water courses but large flow rates, which would have required a larger ‘head’. Such a high elevation requires much uplift of the land, which places this after the Flood

It’s interesting that even secular geologists are recognising the role of catastrophic floods. E.g. the Hawkesbury Sandstone in Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, which is a huge sorted sedimentary deposit (i.e. the grains are roughly separated according to size), indicating that the sediment has been transported a long distance from where it was eroded from the parent rock. Dr Patrick Conaghan, at one time senior lecturer in the School of Earth Science at Macquarie University, and who has published numbers of papers about the Hawkesbury Sandstone, described a succession of catastrophic, massive flood waves possibly 20 m high and up to 250 km wide sweeping down from an ancient lake that stretched from Murrurundi north of Sydney to the Carnarvon Ranges in central Queensland. Dr Conaghan recognises that the volumes and velocities necessary to explain the sediment volumes must have been huge.

In the Grand Canyon, the Coconino Sandstone covers half a million square km and has a sand volume of 40,000 cubic km, and the angle of crossbeds plus other features show that it was deposited as sand waves under water. The enormous thickness shows that the waves were about 18 m high, which indicates that they were deposited under water 54 m deep, with sustained unidirectional currents of 90–155 cm/sec. See Grand Canyon: Startling Evidence for Noah’s Flood and Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe (left).

There are no floods on earth today, or in recorded history (since the Bible of course), creating such huge deposits of sedimentary material. The present is not the ‘key to the past’, a basic principle that spurred the foundation of modern geology with its slow and gradual processes requiring millions of years to do almost anything. No, the past, as revealed in the Bible, is the key to understanding what we can see in the present — huge sedimentary formations even crossing continents (e.g. America across into Europe and Africa). Global scale catastrophe, as per the Biblical Flood, is needed to explain these features.

‘… when you take 2000 feet of mud and compress it into a few feet of rock over millions of years … .’

When we read this we realized that the ‘Indoctrinator’ doesn’t have the most basic understanding of the formation of sedimentary rock. In fact, some sediments contract by only a very small percentage when becoming sedimentary rock, and others have little or no shrinkage. As our Creation magazine article on Mt St Helens shows, it doesn’t take millions of years anyway. We also have articles showing that multiple layering can form very quickly — see How can many fine layers of rock be formed very quickly?

‘Slow bends over a long time produces geoclines [sicgeosynclines is the word] and the like. Slow bending under immense pressure does not cause breaks. We can do this to marble in the labs. So what? When the pressure is let off suddenly (say over only a few million years) or even more suddenly with earthquakes we get sharp breaks. There are billions of these examples visible everywhere.’

Many sedimentary rocks are so brittle they would break under any applied pressure, no matter how slowly applied. The fact of intense folding in some now-brittle rocks shows they were still soft when the pressure was applied. A good example is the Kaibab Upwarp in the Grand Canyon, where rock layers including the Tapeats Sandstone were uplifted by a mile, and in one place bend about 90 degrees in just over 30m. This is claimed to have been 480 million years old at the time of the warping, by which time it would have surely hardened. But if it was hard at the time of warping, we would expect to find evidence of great stress, e.g. elongated sand grains or broken crystals of cementing minerals. Yet we don’t, indicating that the material was still soft while bending, showing that it could not have been laid down over millions of years but was deformed soon after deposition, thus eliminating a half billion years from the supposed geological time scale. See The Young Earth (right).

Another important evidence that large thicknesses of layered sedimentary rock formed and hardened more-or-less simultaneously is fluidisation pipes. This is where a hot lava flow intruded horizontally and very rapidly underneath a sedimentary deposit, boiled the water touching it, which welled up to form a vertical column above the hot spot. In this column, the unconsolidated sediment transformed into a fluid suspension, destroying the layered structure, and then hardening into a noticeable ‘pipe’ structure. See Walker, T., Fluidisation pipes: evidence of large-scale watery catastrophe, Journal of Creation 14(3):8–9, 2000.

3) Mutations and natural selection

The ‘Indoctrinator’ claims:

‘We advance by a process of natural selection. The ‘selection’ bit means that what we do has consequences governed by those laws [referring to a previous statement The ‘Indoctrinator’ made regarding the lawful nature of the universe]. For example, those poisoning themselves drinking alcohol live shorter lives than those who don’t and more importantly breed less. Over millions of years this ‘evolution by consequence’ leads to what we see around us.’

Is he really asserting that natural selection, (a readily observable phenomenon which deletes genetic information), also in some mysterious and unobserved process adds the necessary new genetic information to convert a reptile into a bird, for example? I think any geneticist worth his salt would find this a hard one to swallow. If this is the kind of thing being taught to our students as science, I can understand why many of them are so confused.

We regularly receive criticisms of our beliefs from people who ‘carefully’ explain (as to a child) why creation makes no sense and why evolution is a fact. Common factors in these communications are sneering tones, mixed with libel and scientific ignorance, like that displayed above. And an almost universal unwillingness/inability to clearly point out where and why our beliefs are wrong. ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts!’ The reader can check out the Q&A pages on Mutations, Natural Selection, Speciation and Information Theory, as well as Not By Chance (right) by Israeli biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner.

The ‘Indoctrinator’ also wrote:

‘At this point I will address your assertion a few pages on [referring to e-mail correspondence he had with our supporter] that evolutionists when challenged by creationists cannot demonstrate their theory experimentally and ‘head for the hills!’ Rubbish. Richard Lewontin whom you cite has challenged creationists to come into the lab and see evolution at work in fast breeding species such as Drosophila. Evolution is scientifically testable, has been so since the mid-60s, and is done so in recombinant work every day in 100,000s labs worldwide. I’ve done this with bar-eyed flies using Richard Plomin’s model when I taught basic biology and evolution is easily demonstrated in labs. Where is Christianity as easily and scientifically testable?’

As usual, there is blatant equivocation about the meaning of ‘evolution’ — see discussion in Definitions as slippery as eels. The ‘Indoctrinator’ is effectively claiming: ‘Drosophila turn into Drosophila, therefore particles can turn into people, so creation is wrong’. Note that ‘recombinant work’ by definition is rearranging already existing genetic information, while evolution from goo to you via the zoo requires new information. Christianity has indeed passed the scientific test — if the earliest opponents could have produced the body of Christ, it would have falsified Christianity. Instead, the tomb was found empty on the third day, and Jesus appeared to many reliable eye witnesses, including 500 at once. See Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead?

Prof. X also demonstrates an inability to understand simple language. Our supporter sent him a short article ‘How Scientific and Objective is Evolution Theory’, by Molecular Biologist Dr Ian Macreadie, an award-winning microbiologist and Principal Research Scientist at Australia’s leading scientific institute CSIRO (see interview). In the article Dr Macreadie says ‘Microevolution is a readily observed phenomenon …’. Dr Macreadie was referring to such things as changes within micro-organisms and the Drosophila changes The ‘Indoctrinator’ mentioned above [CMI generally discourages the distinction between ‘micro-’ and ‘macro-evolution’, because the essential difference is not small versus large but whether the changes add new genetic information].

How does the astute Prof. X handle this? He says:

‘However the assertion that there is ‘a distinct lack of evidence’ for microevolution is asinine … .’

A casual reading of Dr Macreadie’s article will show that the Prof got it totally backwards. Did he actually read the whole article, and if so could he not understand it? Dr Macreadie was saying that microevolution is testable and observable but that ‘A big danger, however, is to extrapolate beyond the known and testable to propose that all the information encoded in a complex organism could have evolved from very simple information coupled with the above mentioned microevolution processes over a long period.’ That is another way of saying that people should be consistent with the definitions of terms.

4) The fossil record

The ‘Indoctrinator’ blusters:

‘I’m not going to send you a list of the 10,000 transitional forms of our Hominid Genus [sic — hominids are members of the family Hominidae — our genus is called Homo] because you can go to any library and get 5,000 books that have this information. I’d only be repeating myself and I’m bored with doing so. I suggest you start with Alan Walker’s and Pat Shipman’s THE WISDOM OF THE BONES: IN SEARCH OF HUMAN ORIGINS, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1996. This is a simple introduction to our evolution over the last 6,000,000 years by two of the people who have dug up 1,000s of your transitional forms. I could easily list them but what would be the point?’

Either this psychology Prof. knows he is using extreme hyperbole here; or he is deluded. Alternatively, he thinks every fossil found is a transitional form. This is the most blatant wishful thinking we have heard from any evolutionist. What a pity he couldn’t have informed the late Dr Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, who wrote:

‘… I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them … Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils … I will lay it on the line — there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.’

(Letter to Luther D. Sunderland, 10 April, 1979, as published in Darwin’s Enigma (left), Master Books, 1984, p.89.)

Many other admissions from evolutionists themselves could be adduced in support of this statement by Patterson. In fact, one of the main arguments that evolutionists Gould and Eldredge put forward for their Punctuated Equilibrium theory was the ‘extreme rarity’ of transitional fossils in support of neo-Darwinian gradualism (which The ‘Indoctrinator’ seems to believe in without question).

As far as human fossils are concerned, he could benefit from reading Marvin Lubenow’s incisive treatment of the issue from a creationist perspective, in his book Bones of Contention (right), which largely uses evolutionary sources. Lubenow demonstrates that the fossil record does not show a progression either in time or shape, but that there are discontinuities in shape and major overlaps in the time periods (even granting the evolutionists’ time scales) of the alleged ancestors and descendants. A more recent paper is The non-transitions in ‘human evolution’ on evolutionists’ terms. This concludes from the analysis of a number of characteristics that Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis were most likely racial variants of modern man, while H. rudolfensis and H. habilis were just types of australopithecines, which the evolutionary anatomist Dr Charles Oxnard showed were more different from both chimps and humans than these are from each other.

5) Probability

In an attempt to refute creationist probability arguments, The ‘Indoctrinator’ parrots a furphy by the antitheist Richard Dawkins:

‘The first sentence is ‘To be, or not to be.’ If we design a computer program along the lines that evolution works, and by trial and error we pick just one of the 26 letters of the alphabet out of a hat, and then reward correct answers and don’t reward incorrect ones, it takes an average of just 335.2 random attempts before ONE monkey types TOBEORNOTTOBE. It takes an old slow XT computer about 90 seconds to do this, and about 4.5 days to randomly retype the whole play. Richard Harrison first demonstrated this in 1988, I’ve programmed it on my Pentium 160 two years ago and it took just 391 seconds to reproduce the first two pages of the standard Hamlet text. So much for the frog in the blender (and remember your monkeys have had approximately 3,600,000 years to generate it).’

The ‘Indoctrinator’ totally misunderstands / misconstrues the nature of evolutionary change and probability to boot. For example, these computer programs presuppose perfect natural selection and foresight of the goal, in that progressive acceptable results, and an acceptable conclusion were already programmed in. Those involved already knew what result they wanted.

How does this nonsense in any way relate to the godless mindless unprogrammed process which the ‘Indoctrinator’ so passionately promotes? See A Response to Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker and references therein. See also Weasel Words (deals briefly with the lack of logic in Dawkins’ simulation of evolution using his Weasel words) and Dawkins’ weasel revisited (more detail), plus this critique of Climbing MT Improbable. The Q&A: Probability page has refutations of other evolutionary weaselling about probability.

6. Age of the Earth

In response to some young-Earth arguments, The ‘Indoctrinator’ , despite a complete lack of qualification in the areas, spruiks:

‘The more serious answer to this second point is that naïve creationists think we are dealing with a linear dating process but we are not. It’s a convergent one. Take the famous Dr Thomas Barnes from the University of Texas at El Paso who was so widely quoted in Ex Nihilo ‘proving’ the Earth was only 12,000 years old by measuring the half-life of the Earth’s magnetic field (about 1,400 years at present). But that’s at present. We have ample evidence that this measure fluctuates wildly but do you ever see Ex Nihilo printing this when scientists point out the absurdity of Barnes’ argument?’

It is clear that The ‘Indoctrinator’ has not read any creationist material for at least 10 years, if ever, or he would know that the fluctuations and reversals in the magnetic field have been given a good airing in creationist publications. This includes a [Creation] ex nihilo article by the second author (J.S.) which points out the very facts which The ‘Indoctrinator’ claims we have never mentioned!! This is on the CMI Web site — The earth’s magnetic field: Evidence that the earth is young. This alone is enough to destroy The Indoctrinator’s credibility as an informed, competent critic of creation science. In fact, these observations are part of the young-earth creationist model of the decay in the Earth’s magnetic field developed over the last 10 years by research physicist Dr Russell Humphreys (from Sandia National Laboratories). Indeed the work of Coe and Prevot showing rapid deviation in the direction of the magnetic field during the solidification of a lava flow is rather a problem for the slow and gradual reversals model that The ‘Indoctrinator’ probably thinks is unassailable. So these reversals actually help the creationist argument! See The ‘Principle of Least Astonishment’!

It’s also notable that The ‘Indoctrinator’ is crassly ignorant when he claims that creationists think we are dealing with a ‘linear dating process’. No, we point out, and so did Barnes, from well known principles of electromagnetism, that the decay of the Earth’s magnetic field is exponential (linear decays are almost unheard of in nature), and that’s the whole point of the young-Earth argument!

7. Age indicators

‘Your third argument, time is slowing etc etc, is mathematically farcical. Again two things might be said about this. First time doesn’t exist as a constant. It is relative to the vantage point of the observer. It is slowing from one point and speeding up from another.’

This is a very garbled account of Einstein’s relativity, to be expected from a psychologist with little knowledge of physics, and it’s also a garbled account of what creationists teach. The creationist cosmology of Dr Russell Humphreys invokes gravitational time dilation, which is a well attested phenomenon, and uses this to explain how we can see distant stars on a young Earth (for more detail, see his book and DVD Starlight and Time (left). Perhaps it would be good for The Indoctrinator’s education to read some creationist literature on cosmology. It would be good at least for his philosophical education to realise that the ‘big bang’ cosmology rides on unprovable atheistic philosophical axioms, such as the cosmological principle, and fudge factors such as dark matter, dark energy and the inflaton field. See some of the articles about the big bang under Q&A: Astronomy.

‘Second, even if it is slowing we can easily measure the rate at which it is slowing and this gives an approximate age of some 8,000,000,000 years for our solar system etc. … Even using the maths of such creation ‘scientists’ such as Duane Gish from the Creation Science Institute still gives an age of the Earth about 1,600,000,000 years! Wish they could count.’

Dr Gish was pointing out an upper limit not the actual age of the Earth. Too many bibliosceptics and misotheists fail to understand this elementary difference, although creationists explain it carefully. This is explained in many of the articles in Q&A: Young Earth Evidence.

8. Thermodynamics, order, complexity and information

Then The ‘Indoctrinator’ strayed right outside his own speciality of psychology into thermodynamics, which happens to be a part of the specialist field of the second author (J.S.), i.e. physical chemistry. So he had some fun showing up The Indoctrinator’s ignorance on the subject. It should be a lesson to creationists that they have nothing to fear from even the highest ranking academics, who are still laypersons outside their own fields.

‘Your fourth argument about the second law of thermodynamics, that evolutionists say order comes from chaos while the very laws they (scientists) use suggests the opposite, is a bit more sophisticated but still displays a lack of understanding of what the second law of physics actually says. What the second law actually says is everything runs down to its lowest energy state OVER TIME.’

Like other evolutionary propagandists, The ‘Indoctrinator’ equates ‘scientists’ and ‘evolutionists’, although of course there are many scientists who are not evolutionists, and are far better qualified in the areas that The ‘Indoctrinator’ pontificates on.

The lowest energy state is not the main point. What matters is the highest entropy state of the universe. Many things have a tendency to move towards a lower energy state because this releases heat to its surroundings, thus increasing their entropy by the heat transferred divided by the absolute temperature. This is well explained in The Mystery of Life’s Origin (below, left) by Thaxton et al. The relevant chapters are online.

‘The actual speed at which this happens may be a function of exactly the reverse process — from simplicity to complexity.’

Physical chemist JS wonders what on Earth this psychologist is on about. If he knew anything about the topic, he wouldn’t make the simple error that reaction kinetics are related to any hypothetical simplicity-to-complexity process.

‘If we take the Earth for example, its existence (complexity) causes the Sun to run down quicker than if the added complexity of having planets were abolished.’

Absolute nonsense. Where does this psychologist dredge up such ridiculous stuff? The Earth is so far away (150 million km) and so tiny (1/330,000th the mass) that it doesn’t affect the sun’s rate of running down, which depends largely on nuclear fusion deep in the core, so even less affected by the Earth. If the earth didn’t exist the energy which comes to it from the sun would just continue on in space without affecting the rate that the sun produces energy. He appears to be suggesting that the earth somehow sucks energy from the sun.

‘The hotter you burn a light globe, the more complex its quantum state becomes, and the faster you burn out the filament and so on.’

Total twaddle. The ‘Indoctrinator’ hasn’t a clue about quantum mechanics (take it from a spectroscopist (J.S.), a field that necessitates understanding quantum mechanics). The hotter the filament, the faster it evaporates, simple as that.

‘The second law holds, but it isn’t a fixed, invariant, and an at-all-times-in-all-places sort of thing that naïve creationists think it is. It certainly DOES NOT prove that complexity cannot come from simple things, quite the reverse in fact.’

It is correct that the second law is a probabilistic law — that is, it describes a tendency to run down; it does not say that disorder always will happen, or that localised increases in order cannot happen at the expense of increased disorder elsewhere. However, again, The ‘Indoctrinator’ is wrong. He is basically using the open/closed system ‘out’ that street-wise evolutionists have learnt to use against creationist laymen who use the Second Law argument. However, it does not help explain the origin of complexity in living things. For there to be a local increase in specified complexity (‘order’), there has to be a mechanism to harness the energy to make it create order. To be simplistic, if you beam intense energy onto your motor vehicle, it will hasten the rate in which it becomes disordered, it will not increase order unless a machine (a product of intelligence!) harnesses the energy to make the car more complex (or slow its degeneration, even).

Bradley, Thaxton and Olsen, who are experts in thermodynamics, in their monograph, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (above, left), show that the open system argument does not help with a naturalistic origin of life (for example). See also the critique by someone actually qualified in the field (JS — unlike The ‘Indoctrinator’) of evolutionist counter-arguments about the Second Law.  [Update: see responses to an evolutionary science writer, Part 1 and Part 2]

9) Noah and ‘mitochondrial Eve’

‘Your last argument about Noah and timescales and convergent genealogy and ancestral populations etc. was what really got me going. I’ve heard this argument in so many different forms that I’ll combine the several variants you used into one central premise — we can track backwards to common ancestors both in time and genetically. I’ve several things to say on this.’

‘I’ve read so much nonsense about Noah that I want to have basic genetics a mandatory skill you have to require before getting a driving licence or being allowed to drink.’

It is probably just as well that we don’t have a psychologist lacking in genetics qualifications teaching this skill.

‘It is quite clear that we have had several ancestral mothers, it’s also clear the last one lived about 80-100,000 years ago, lived in Africa and was radically different from the rest of her species because mitochondrial DNA mapping shows a clearly convergent ancestry. It was a woman, she wasn’t Semitic, didn’t live in the Middle East, didn’t know how to build a boat, and her attribute was she had something about her that let her offspring out-compete and out-breed all their contemporaries. If that’s who you think Noah was, well I agree.’

Actually, the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ idea says there was one genetic mother to us all. Of course evolutionists can hypothesize that she was one of several or many mothers at any time, but that her genes were the only ones which survived into the current world population. However, the evidence is also consistent with the Biblical account that there was one mother of all. The ‘Indoctrinator’ is also apparently unaware of the fallacious reasoning that puts ‘Eve’ at the time he claims — this is based upon the belief that we diverged from chimps x million years in the past (a classic case of circular reasoning to then use this to estimate the date of ‘Eve’ as evidence for the evolutionary story!!). However, actual observed (real science) rates of mitochondrial DNA mutation put ‘Eve’ within the Biblical time scale. See A shrinking date for ‘Eve’ (and references therein).

Also, as a matter of simple logic, how does the ‘Indoctrinator’ know that this woman did not know how to build a boat?? (is he a sexist??) Is that in her genes, or in her bones (neither of which we actually have) too?

‘If you accept creation ‘science’s’ views of Noah the numbers then make a nonsense of you. I’ve had so many people say to me that you can prove he lived 6,300 years ago simply by backwards extrapolating the population. With a six billion world population today and working backwards you arrive at an ancestral pair about the time Bishop Ussher and your friend at Oxford calculates he was around. However, by exactly the same logic, at around say 2,600 BCE (in Abraham’s time) you would have only 600 people alive in the world and we know from the Bible and archeological evidence there was at least 1,000,000!’

No one at CMI would say they could ‘prove’ that Noah lived whenever based on population growth. However, the current world’s population is consistent with the Biblical record — see Where are all the people? by Don Batten, who is a qualified Ph.D. biologist, unlike The ‘Indoctrinator’ .

If 1–10 million people had been here for even 100,000 years (standard evolutionary view Stone Age), there would have been 4–40 billion bodies buried, with their artefacts. There is of course no evidence for such numbers. Furthermore, one would expect that the current world’s population would be much greater than it is (evolutionists have to argue that mankind was on the brink of extinction for huge periods of time to avoid the implications of this argument).

‘Even if this silly nonsense about Noah was right we would have extinguished ourselves because two people, or six or ten closely related ones is an insufficient genepool for a species with such a close genetic message as ours.’

Nice bald assertion, but the human genome project (HGP) is in fact showing how little variation there is in the human genome. 0.2% of base pairs is the typical difference between any two people on earth. If there are 35,000 genes (HGP average estimate), typically only 70 genes are different between any two people, if the 0.2% were randomly distributed across the protein coding genes. It does not take much skill in genetics to work out that six people could easily have enough heterozygosity to account for the variation in genes in humankind today (and to this, of course, can be added changes due to mutations since Noah). And of course if The ‘Indoctrinator’ thinks this is silly nonsense, what about his own faith that all living organisms came from a single cell, which made itself from chemicals which came from a ‘big bang’, which arose from nothing by itself?!

10) Origin of Life

The ‘Indoctrinator’ admits:

‘I do not know how life first arose. I think the primal stew idea unlikely. I’m more inclined to panspermia but acknowledge this just pushes the problem off somewhere else.’

He’s right there! But panspermia (life seeded from outer space) is an idea of desperation, as well as failing the same criteria of testability and reproducibility that they decry Creation for failing. In reality, because of his materialistic bias, any flaky materialistic theory is favoured over the most cogent theistic theory. To find out more about the many problems of any materialistic origin-of-life scenario, see The Mystery of Life’s Origin (above left) and the articles in Q&A: Origin of Life.

‘I do know however that life on earth has become more complex since it was first observed and measurably more so in just my short lifespan.’

Surely he jests? If he can produce even a single example of a mutation resulting in an increase of information, evolutionary propagandists everywhere would be delighted to have this experimental confirmation of their theory at last. It wouldn’t be proof, because evolution requires mind-boggling numbers of such changes, not just one, but if evolution were true, such changes should be plentiful, so their observable absence counts against evolution.

The ‘Indoctrinator’ concludes

‘In short, I’m sorry, but the things you said were so far from even the basics of sensible discussion as to preclude us talking meaningfully to each other.’

Of course, it is difficult to talk meaningfully with someone like The ‘Indoctrinator’ who unquestioningly accepts the status quo, and who sneers at anyone who questions it without making the effort to properly understand their arguments. The ‘Indoctrinator’ resorts to an appeal to the received wisdom of the majority, but history has shown many times that the majority was wrong.

Many tertiary students have been through indoctrination mills, such as Prof. X’s institution, where the ‘pulpit’ is used to brainwash, rather than to train people in critical thinking. They have been told that ‘creationists’ are wrong, indoctrinating children, frightening horses and that they are environmentally unsound, and so they approach us with misguided atheistic missionary zeal, full of conviction, passion and prejudice, but without real knowledge. Attacking letters are regularly printed on the Feedback section of our Web site. The letters expose an ignorance of Scripture, ignorance of CMI ’s beliefs and often an appalling misunderstanding of science. However, many have told us that the Feedback is the favorite part of the CMI website because they can see that there are answers to the worst the bibliosceptics can throw at us. Profoundly perplexed at the Prof’s pounded pulpit, perchance?

Prof. X was extremely confident as he was deriding CMI, creation and Christians when he was speaking with and writing to a man who admits he is no scientific expert. Conversely, the Prof. ran for the hills when offered the chance to debate his views on CMI’s Web site. I would suggest that the Prof. is well aware he is on shaky ground and knew he would be made to look foolish if his ‘interesting’ views were there for all to see. He’s right — he should stick to his ‘pulpit’ where nasty creationists are not allowed to point out the error of his ways.

Helpful Resources

Christianity for Skeptics
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The Greatest Hoax on Earth?
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