POST 3.
In earlier centuries, before philosophers of science took it upon themselves to help form modern definitions of what science is, many scientists mixed their science with their religion quite freely. In fact, most scientists simply assumed that discovering the workings of nature was in fact the same as discovering the natural laws of the God of the bible, and that is just what they called those discoveries – laws. So let us take a look at the historical aspect of our subject and see how it developed and where our modern controversies came from.
Let me, however, digress briefly as I should have mentioned this point earlier. The kind of creationism that is attacking the science curriculum in the USA and may be coming to a country near you soon believes in the creation of the universe about 6,000 years ago in a period of 6 days, which we will call recent creation. Jehovah’s Witnesses differ slightly on this, and whilst I will quickly address this point I don’t want to get bogged down by being too JW specific but rather stay more generalised.
The JW’s mock the recent creation belief but their own take on this is that the planets (including Earth) and stars are billions of years old but that creation events – the Genesis "days" – are days of 7,000 years each. This would mean life on earth began between 27,000 and 34,000 years ago. This is a hopeless position from a variety of scientific perspectives, and is particularly inconsistent with their view of an Earth billions of years old because large parts of the Earth’s crust are formed from organic limestone.
On page 9 of the JW publication "Life-How did it get here? By evolution or by creation?" there is a drawing of a man holding a rock with the condescending caption, "Only 6,000 years old?" Obviously it is designed to distance the book and JW's from recent creationists.
However, a certain type of limestone is made primarily from the accumulative layering of the dead remains of sea creatures. Sea creatures were made, according to the bible, during the fifth day. Let us be generous and suppose they were created at the very beginning of the fifth day, and let us also very generously ignore the substantial amount of time it would take for these creatures to die and form sedimentary layers in the stupendously enormous numbers that we observe in organic limestone. If we are to believe The Society’s interpretation of the "days" of Genesis we could easily change the caption in the book to, "Only 20,000 years old?" which is equally ridiculous to geologists. Incidentally, large tracts of the Earth are made up of such limestone, for example, chunks of Europe, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia, as well as some sea floors. For example, the White Cliffs of Dover going along the seabed of the English Channel rising up on the coast of France are largely limestone; the Florida peninsula is largely limestone. Only 20,000 years old?
But I digress; let’s consider the history of creation and evolution.
During the Middle Ages and on the idea that fossils might once have been living thing could have landed you in deep trouble with the Church, but about 1500 AD Leonardo da Vinci argued that fossils were indeed the remains of living things and subsequently started off a debate that continues today as to their origin.
It became difficult for many believers not to accept the biological origin of fossils. Yet Bishop James Ussher’s chronology of the bible was also widely accepted, placing the Genesis creation at 4004 BC. So an effort more or less was made to reconcile fossils with the chronology of the bible as described by explaining them in terms of the flood of Noah.
Fossils and Strata
Fossils are found in strata typical of sedimentary rock, which is formed gradually as particles of mineral and/or organic matter are deposited in layers, with the younger or more recent layers near the top. Despite the fact that these layers can be turned upside down in places by geological activity it became obvious that all these layers, and any fossils in them, could be given an age relative to each other, so that fossils found in lower layers must be older than those above. It was noticed that fossils of like species were found to be present in all parts of a single group or formation that could be traced horizontally. It was further noticed that fossils in formations above or below were found to be distinctly different, but always occurred in the same order in widely separated localities. From this a number of things could be implied. For example, fossils in an upper formation descended from those below. Or, fossils were alternately wiped out by catastrophic events to make room for a new creation, called catastrophism.
Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism
Catastrophism was developed by Baron George Cuvier in the early 1800’s who noticed in a fossil sequence in the Paris Basin that the lower strata forms are very unlike modern species, but that they become increasingly similar to modern forms the further up you go into younger formations. However, the changes occur in abrupt jumps between formations, rather than in a smooth transition. Cuvier, who never doubted the bible, proposed a series of sudden floods to account for the extinctions followed by new creations. The final extinction was correlated with Noah’s Flood.
At the same time Pierre Lamarck came to a different conclusion about the Paris Basin fossils. He emphasised those similarities between life forms in different strata. He concluded that particular taxonomic groups – a particular order or family – had persisted through time, undergoing change due to environmental pressures. He explained the sudden jumps as gaps in the record. He suggested as an explanation for this that the missing fossil bearing strata must at some time have been uplifted and exposed to erosion. Then the land would sink again to be covered by ocean and new fossil bearing strata formed. And so on.
Lamark’s view of a biological evolution for fossils complemented a new view of geology by James Hutton and James Hall that introduced a concept of vast spans of time for geological activity by continuous natural causes. This proposed that new strata was being both formed and eroded in continual divers natural processes observable today, such as stream floods, moving glaciers, winds, tidal currents, volcanic eruptions etc, which came to be known as Uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism assumed that the laws of physics and chemistry apply equally to past, present and future unless compelling evidence suggested otherwise, and was intithetic to any supernatural explanation of natural-science phenomenon, and that all interpretations of the universe and its parts should be as simple as possible (Occam’s Razor). This view not only opposed catastrophism but also the prevailing geological view, called neptunism, which taught that all types of rocks were created suddenly by precipitation from a single world ocean within a biblical framework.
In the meantime advances continued in understanding fossil content of strata and their relative ages. Within each formation it was noticed there was a distinctive collection of fossils, so that the fossils themselves could be used to correlate the strata at other localities. Sometimes a single fossil proved to be uniquely limited to a single narrow zone of strata, called an index fossil, and its presence in a formation on any continent establishes the position of the formation in the standard geological timescale of relative age.
Groups of formations sharing the same fossil faunas and index fossils were assigned to a system, belonging to a time unit known as a geologic period. It became clear that a pattern was forming from generally simpler life forms to more complex ones. Following marine invertebrate dominance in the Cambrian Period, the vertebrates appeared as fishes and sharks in the Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian periods, followed in later periods by reptiles and birds and still later mammals. Naturally this gave rise to the possibility of a grand tree of life, all interconnected through geologic time. This assumes that all life evolved from previously existing life, or the principle of biogenesis, but this leads inevitably to a time when life began. Without getting into a discussion of the seemingly contradictory idea of biopoesis at this time, the naturalistic view that nonliving matter gave rise to living matter, it is enough to state that the concept of evolution depends upon there being a single originating point in time and place for life on earth. This must be the case if all life is somehow related in a grand tree of life, where we imagine a single tree growing from a single seed into a great trunk to which many divers but related branches are attached.
