Put on your wetsuits and grab your scuba gear, my darlings, cuz the creationists are about to shower us with ocean babble that just doesn’t hold water. Yep. We’ve reached ACE’s idea of oceanography. It’s sooo bad.
It starts with Ace not knowing why Earth is called The Blue Planet. The former bookseller in me can’t help but heave an exasperated sigh and say, “Cuz it’s this big and it’s blue.” (Industry in-joke, my darlings.)
You’ll be astonished to hear that the ACE writers are not, in fact, moon landing denialists, as Mr. Virtueson is happy to tell us that astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, looked at Earth, and saw lotsa blue. Because water. And that brings to mind some Bible verses, which he renders thusly:
“Psalm 104:1-6 states, ‘…O LORD my God, thou art very great… who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters…. Who laid the foundations of the earth…. Thou coveredest it with the deep as with a garment…”
When creationists use lots of ellipses, I tend to wonder what they’re hiding. In this case, it’s quite a bit of redundant crap that shows these verses should be taken metaphorically. It’s poetry, not a science lesson. But of course these dogma-dazzled drips can’t understand that.
Ace’s profound insight is that the Bible calls oceans the “deep” a lot, and wow, how deep are they? His dad tells us the Mariana Trench is super-dooper deep. Which, y’know, is great trivia and stuff, but does nothing to tell us about ocean depth in general. It’s helpfully illustrated with a drawing that is not at all to scale: Continue reading “Adventures in ACE XVIII: Creationist Nonsense of the Deep”→
Earth Science 4th Edition butchers geology in agonizing detail rather than bludgeoning it quickly and leaving it for the vultures. So, while we plod through that interminable mess until it’s caught up to Science of the Physical Creation’s next geology unit, we’ll go ahead and do up one of the things SPC has got that ES4 does not: a section on chemistry.
Very nearly every argument for Young Earth Creationism, from the (pseudo)scientific to the theologic, is incredibly embarrassing. Some might be semi-plausible until a smidge more education shoots them down. Some were all right for their time (pre-Enlightenment), but are woefully outdated now. And some are so bloody ridiculous and easily debunked that even creationists should be deeply ashamed of them.
Earth Science 4th Edition’s Chapter 5, “The Changing Earth,” begins with such an argument. In a supposed science textbook, one meant to rival a good secular education, and one that a person would expect to find only the best creation “science” ideas in, we get… frozen mammoths.
And the writers are completely ignorant about how these mammoths were buried. They wish to inform us that “secular scientists” believe these mammoths were buried slowly. FFS. We know the well-preserved ones ended up becoming so by a variety of sudden mishaps: falling through ice, getting struck and buried by landslides, falling into crevasses in glaciers, and similar. All we have to do is what crime scene investigators do: investigate the death scene, carefully note the condition of the body and its surroundings, and piece together what happened from all the clues.
Creationists are apparently incapable of doing this.
And their explanation – “that the mammoths were trapped near the Arctic Ocean by rapidly changing climate conditions” – is bloody ridiculous on several levels.
Listen: even on their terms, this whole “mammoths suddenly got caught in the cold” notion is bloody insensible. Their own climate models (which we will get to in a future installment) claim the pre-Flood world was “mild to tropical.” The place was mild all over, right? So why was God such an asshole, giving mammoths all this cold-weather gear on a toasty planet?
The woolly mammoth like all mammoths is closely related to elephants, but features a number of special adaptations that helped it survive in the much colder latitudes of the northern hemisphere. First and most obvious is the growth of the long shaggy coat of hair over its body, the longest strands of which being up to meter long. These long hairs covered a denser growth of under hair that provided the main insulation which in turn covered the skin which had a thick layer of fat underneath it to provide even further insulations from the cold. Still the adaptations went even further as the skin itself had sebaceous glands that would have secreted sebum, an oily substance primarily composed of dead fat cells into the hair. Sebum has a number of functions that help maintain skin and hair integrity, but most important to mammoths is that the secretion of sebum would have helped to waterproof the long hair and further increase its insulatory properties.
In addition to all that, they had big fat humps of fat, small ears to minimize heat loss, and to top it all off, their blood had antifreeze properties. Why, pray tell, would all these extreme cold adaptations be necessary in such lovely and temperate climes as the earth enjoyed before the Flood? Why did God want the mammoths to swelter?
And if creationists wish to claim they weren’t all that cold-adapted before the Flood, and actually evolved from elephant “kind,” they’ve got an enormous problem: you’d never get enough mammoths in time. Seriously: two breeding proto-elephants pump out a bunch of mutant offspring which give rise to each of the various species of existing and extinct elephants, mammoths, and mastodons in less than a thousand years? And there’s suddenly millions of each of them, perfectly adapted to special niches in a “rapidly changing climate”? Even though they’re slow breeders? Really. Sit down and try to do that math. It’ll never work
So the same folks who claim macroevolution isn’t happening now want us to believe that these supremely cold-adapted animals arose from evolution far more rapid than is possible for a K-strategy species. And then, and then, they want to tell us those same animals lived in “broad coastal lands around the Arctic Ocean,” which, per their very own creation science, had to still be warm as all shit. Even they are forced to acknowledge that all that supposed volcanic hurly-burly during the Flood would’ve made the floodwaters hella hot, so those coastal areas would have “had a mild climate, with grasslands and forests.” This mild climate is where mammoths evolved antifreeze blood and all the other extreme anti-cold measures? Seriously?
And then, they say, these superbly cold-adapted animals suddenly “died from exposure to the arctic cold.”
Do they even listen to their own bullshit?
We will be generous and ignore the fact they apparently don’t know that mammoths were also all over America. They weren’t just in the Arctic and hanging out in Siberia. Which kinda destroys their whole here’s how the mammoths died! scenario, but hey – just pretend nobody ever found mammoth remains in, oh, y’know, southern Iowa. There! One less insurmountable problem. Now they can go back to figuring out how adaptations to extreme cold happen on a comfy warm coast, in slow-breeding species, and why God allowed this turbo-evolution rather than just conjuring up a bunch of new animals after the Flood.
Good luck with that.
Dear students subjected to BJU Press materials who may be reading this: study the scenario contained within this textbook carefully. Compare its claims not only with independent, established facts, but with conflicting and nonsensical claims within this very textbook. After an honest evaluation, do you still feel confident you’re not being sold a bill of goods?
You know, I laugh, I do, when I’m reading these creationist textbooks, and I see the ridiculous religious bullshit being passed off as important facts about earth science. And then I recall the important fact that children are actually being taught that this shit is Genuine Science™, and my laughter dies.
So, I was going to write you a post about, I dunno, something. It would have been awesome, possibly even stunning or life-changing. But I stopped by Libby Anne’s whilst I was taking a break, and any ideas I had for a post went right out of my head, because you really need to read her post right now.
In it, she describes her evangelical creationist mother sending her granddaughter some books. And one of them was a “science” book for kids. You want to know how creationists manage to come across as credible to folks? You’re about to get an inside look: Continue reading “Creationists and Their Tricksy Ways”→
Can you believe it’s been six months since we last deconstructed the dreck that is Accelerated Christian Education? I’ve been preoccupied with A Beka and BJU, because they’re more challenging. But ACE brings a unique je ne sais WTF that no other Christian textbook company can even approach, so let us return to ACE PACE 1087, and stare agape at the ways they mangle science for the Lord.
They’re on about Areas of the Hydrosphere now. The ACE writers think it’s more interesting if they have absurd characters babbling to each other, so they’re feeding us what one might loosely refer to as facts via a father-son babblefest. Little Ace is eager to show off his knowledge to dear old Dad, but he leaves out the fact that all water, including the frozen and subsurface stuff, is part of Earth’s hydrosphere. So while he gets points for mentioning oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers as major components thereof, I’m docking him for neglecting groundwater and glaciers, which account for enormous amounts of the planet’s water. In fact, if you only want to cover “major” water bodies, you’d best be leaving lakes and rivers out, as they account for only about 3% of the earth’s fresh water. Groundwater is 30.8%, while glaciers are a whopping 68.9%. And yeah, groundwater pumping and anthropogenic climate change are shrinking both sources fast, but a) not that fast and b) the Real True Christians™ behind ACE probably don’t believe humans have any impact on God’s Perfect Creation anyway. So we’ll chalk that failure to mention important bits up to incompetence. Continue reading “Adventures in ACE XVI: Holy Hydrosphere, Bibleman!”→
It’s also not pleasant when we discover they think seismic waves slow down at the Moho. They, in actual fact, speed up, from about 6 kilometers per second to about 8 kilometers per second. These aren’t negative numbers, BJU people. Larger is faster, just like on your speedometer. Sheesh. I’m beginning to think you know nothing of seismic waves. (Also, you’ve made the average crustal thickness too thick by about 20 kilometers, FYI.)
They do a ho-hum job explaining matters from the asthenosphere to the core, skimming details or omitting them altogether in a way that makes me suspect they have little idea what they’re talking about. Then, when we reach the core, it just gets weird. Despite the fairly firm grasp we’ve got on the properties of it, they act as if geologists just throw up their hands and exclaim, “Can’t nobody know what that’s like!” Sure, it’s hard to imagine the immense temperatures and pressures down there, but that’s what science is for. Do a search on Google Scholar, and you’ll find plenty of papers talking about it. There are lots of lines of evidence that have led to our current knowledge of what the core is like, and although there are many blanks to fill in, the outline is pretty solid. So all this “Many geologists don’t even try to guess what the core material is like” and “We cannot imagine” and “geologists believe” the outer core is liquid and the inner is solid – all that’s just the creationist way of throwing out massive chaff in hopes of confusing their students. What the students will find, if they look beyond their appalling education, is that we do try and can imagine and are, actually, pretty damned sure we know a thing or two about the earth’s core.
Oh, joy! After a fallacy-filled introduction featuring a two-faced jackass, Earth Science 4th Edition is gonna teach us all “geology.” After they’re done with us, we’ll be able to “explain the dangers of viewing the history of the earth as very old and as the product of natural processes.” We’ll also be equipped to “exercise dominion on God’s specially created earth.” And wow, look at this… interesting… history of geology right here:
People have been studying the earth for a long time, probably since right after the Creation and Fall (see Gen. 4:22).
O-kaaaay… so do tell us how a verse about a woman having a son who was good at making metal stuff proves people studied the earth in a systematic fashion.
After the Genesis Flood, people needed geology to identify new sources of metals and building materials.
Oh, yes. Creation myths are great science texts. Such proof. Much evidence.
They also seem to think there was no geology in Medieval Europe, as Renaissance folks had to discover that science from other people’s writings. So I guess that means they didn’t need any building materials, then?
St. Giles’ Cathedral, built in the late 14th century – positively medieval! Image courtesy Carlos Delgado (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Our preliminary foray into the world of creationist earth science education encouraged many of you to share your own stories. I want to make sure they don’t languish unread in the comments section. Real people are affected by these awful textbooks. We should never, ever lose sight of that fact. Continue reading “Readers’ Experiences with Creationist Education”→
