Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XL: Wherein Evolution Goes Turbo

When we last visited the imaginings of Earth Science 4th Edition, they’d just finished explaining that Noah, his family, and his boatload of animals were all busy repopulating the barren earth after making a new covenant with God. The text doesn’t state things in bald terms, but God’s basically just promised never to commit total genocide again, and also, everyone’s been ordered to fuck like bunnies (incl. bunnies) so that God will have plenty of creatures to refrain from genociding.

This, folks, is creation science.

You may have wondered how the fuck kangaroos and sloths and such traveled from the Ark on Ararat all the way to different continents thousands of miles and many oceans away. You’re not going to get an answer here. But in their Life Connections sidebar, these anti-evolution folks are gonna ‘splain how two of every kind became millions of species and billions of individuals. See, before the Flood, the entire earth was one “mild-to-tropical,” uniform Paradise. We know this because there are tropical fossils in Antarctica. Wow! Look at them using all that evidence to speculate extra-Biblically!

Anyway, after the Flood, the world ended up with “freezing ice caps and broiling deserts,” which the animals right off the Ark weren’t adapted – I’m sorry, created – for. So, “In His wisdom, God created mechanisms in the original kinds of animals and plants so that they or their offspring could change in order to live in different conditions.”

The fact this shows God was planning his genocide well in advance goes unremarked.

They go on theorizing that “there could have been more than 10,000 animals on the Ark” and “nearly 5,000 more ‘kinds’ of animals, especially vertebrates.” We just don’t know exactly “because the Bible doesn’t tell us.” Now “there are lots more animal species in the world today than this.” How many? They don’t say, so let me number them for them: 1.5 million known. Up to a trillion total. Keep those numbers in mind. We’ll be coming back to them after this next bit of fail.

Image is a head-and-shoulders view of Leonard Nimoy's Spock. He's looking off-camera to the right with an impassive expression. Caption says, "Creationism? Most illogical."
They tell us there are “more than 120 species of toads and frogs seen today” – which is very broadly true. There are, in fact, currently 6,680 known species in the order Anura. That’s definitely more than 120. Now, you may want to give them a pass. You may not want to believe they’re deliberately low-balling that figure. But it’s not like we didn’t know there were thousands of species in that order all the way back in 2011. And then there’s this:

Evolutionists claim that the variety of animals alive today came about through many tens of thousands of years of slow genetic changes.

Yep. They can’t bring themselves to tell the whole truth: that even if you only go back to the Cambrian, where we see the first animals with the basic body plans we’re familiar with first evolving, we’re talking hundreds of millions of years. And life itself has been busily evolving for at least 3.7 billion years.

But the young earth creationists want us to believe that this tiny handful of animals on the Ark gave rise to the millions, possibly billions, of species we see today, in just just a few thousand years. So of course they’re going to fudge the real numbers. If they don’t, their claim looks wildly ridiculous. They’re tricksy.

The BJU writers want to have their evolution and their creationism, too. They can’t get away with claiming two of each species was on the Ark – there’s just no room for even 1.5 million pairs, much less a trillion. So they fudge it with kinds, and pretend each pair had super amazing genetic variability that allowed them to adapt to vastly different conditions the instant they were off the Ark, and super-fast evolve into at the very least two million species in just a few thousand years.

Not even the most enthusiastic secular evolution proponent would claim evolution happens at those outrageous rates. Yet these folks who barely admit to “microevolution” think God designed his “kinds” to be able to speciate at a rate of at least one new species per day (assuming rates have held steady since the Flood).

Image shows Jesus facepalming. Caption says, "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works."
That’s… not feasible. There’s no evidence anywhere that backs it up. It’s some of the worse pseudoscience I’ve ever seen, and mind you, I’ve read up on homeopathy.

Next, we’ll catch the “creationary geologists” adding more than just hyperevolution to the Bible…

{advertisement}
Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XL: Wherein Evolution Goes Turbo
{advertisement}