Refuting Creationism - Climate Change In the Andes From 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Llaviucu in Cajas National Park in Ecuador.

Photos by Mark Bush

Bolivian tropical Andean foothills

CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

New study unveils 16,000 years of climate history in the tropical Andes | Brown University

Ask any creationist who is up to date with the latest dogmas as handed down by creation cult leaders, and they'll assure you their magic creator created Earth just a few thousand years ago and fine-tuned it for the existence of life (especially their life, because it had them in mind all along).

The reality, however, is very different: not only is Earth very much older by several orders of magnitude, but it is a dynamic and changing world, not the fixed, unchangeable world that 'fine-tuning' implies. It resembles a system in chaos, where a small change in one part can cause profound and unpredictable changes in another part. This is especially true of the weather, but is no less true of ocean currents, tectonic activity and the composition of the atmosphere.

As though to illustrate this, although refuting creationism was probably far from the minds of the scientists - that is a mere incidental of scientific facts as usual - a team of scientists led by climatologists from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA have analyzed the record of climate change in the Andes over the past 16,000 years (i.e. from 6,000 years before Creationist dogma says the Universe was magicked into existence out of nothing) and shown that major changes were brought about ultimately by the level of atmospheric \(\small \ce{\(\small \ce{CO2}\)}\).

Creationism in Crisis - Order From Chaos in The Namibian Desert

Fairy circles from Iona National Park in Angola

Image: © Michael Fay,
National Geographic Creative.

A typical fairy circle on the Kamberg on the edge of the Namibian Desert

Photo: Stephan Getzin.

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Scientists are hotly debating how the 'fairy circles' which arise in the vegetation on the edge of the Namib desert actually form. Whatever the process, they are examples of order emerging from chaos by the operation of natural forces. The debate is over what exactly those forces are.

Typical of the mindless parroting that constitutes creationism in the social media, is the claim that 'you can't get order from chaos', which of course is nonsense, since any chaotic system will tend to order if a directional force is applied to it.

Suns and galaxies condense out of the chaos of dust and gas clouds under the directional force of gravity; raindrops form in clouds under the directional forces of gravity and electrostatic attraction; and 'fairy rings' form in grassland under the influence of fungal hyphae and nutrient depletion, and rings form in ell grass because of a build-up of toxic sulphides in the marine sediment, just to cite a few examples

Here's a little bit of fun which you can use to show any creationist acquaintance what nonsense they've been fed. Next time you're playing Scrabble, place all the tiles in the upturned box lid and make sure no tile is on top of another. Ask them to swirl it round to show you're not cheating. Observe that the tiles are in a chaotic arrangement. Now apply a directional force in the form of gravity by tipping the box lid about 15 degrees to produce a slope and tapping it or shaking the lid gently to provide a little energy to the system. Observe now that the tiles have formed themselves into neat rows and columns at one end of the lid. If not, give it a little more shaking or tapping.

Order has emerged out of chaos under nothing more magical than the directional force of gravity.

More examples of emergence of order out of chaos are:

Creationism in Crisis - Colliding Planets Falsify Creationism

Image shows a visualisation of the huge, glowing planetary body produced by a planetary collision. As the resulting debris moves between the host star and Earth it causes the star to appear to dim. The host star is seen in the background of the image.

Credit: Mark Garlick

October: Exoplanet collision | News and features | University of Bristol

The reason creationism is so easy to refute is that its claims are simplistic, designed as they are to appeal to those who think like children and who know little or no science.

This means we can construct simple hypotheses and predictions and test them against the real world. When we do that, we invariably find the hypotheses are easily falsifiable and the predictions fail to be fulfilled.

Science readily accepts, for example, that much of the observable universe emerged from chaos under the directional force of gravity, which turns a chaotic system into a progressively ordered system, so galaxies, superclusters, black holes, suns and planetary systems all emerged from the background chaos of the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations. This view of the universe predicts that there is still a degree of chaos and unpredictability about the universe.

M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble.
The chaotic remnants of an exploding supernova.

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)

Creationists however, insist that the universe, and everything in it was created in a few days by a perfect, omniscient, god, casting magic spells and commanding everything to appear from nowhere, made out of nothing, in a perfectly ordered and designed universe. It then either micromanages it or sits back and watches while it runs on a prepared a set of rules that govern it (depending on the flavour of creationism and how much the superstition has tried to accommodate science while still believing in magic and the fairy tales they were told in childhood).

So, our simple hypothesis then is that a universe created according to creationist superstitions would be perfectly ordered and free from chaos, and of course had the ultimate purpose of providing humans with somewhere nice to live, like America. Such a well-ordered universe would never have planets colliding, or comets being knocked out of stable orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system and moving into elliptical orbits around the sun, for example. Nor would it have had a minor planet colliding with a young Earth as is believed to account for the Moon and the axis tilt that causes the seasons.