Having read a review of Janet Kellogg Ray’s book, “Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark?” on Spectrum (a mistake, I know), I wanted to know how Ray preserves her conservative Christian views, such as having a high view of the inspiration of Scripture, while embracing the mainstream origins narrative. And I have to admit that the book’s title is irresistible.
Ray describes five positions on origins, (1) atheistic evolution, (2) theistic evolution, (3) intelligent design, (4) old-earth creationism, and (5) young earth creationism. One infers, based upon (a) her claim to be a believer, and (b) her harsh criticism for intelligence design and creationism, that she must be a theistic evolutionist. But she makes no attempt to reconcile a theistic evolutionary position with the Scriptures or, for that matter, with science. That is not what her book is about; rather, the book is solely an attempt to browbeat Christians who believe 3, 4, or 5 into abandoning those beliefs and accepting the mainstream origins narrative, but with God appended as an afterthought.
What Evolution Says About God and Religion
Right up front, she writes, “I passionately and unequivocally declare, ‘Evolution theory says nothing about God or religion or any other world view, for that matter.’” (p. 10) And she repeats this assertion on page 110: “The theory of evolution says nothing at all about God, or religion, or any philosophy or world view.”
But the theory of evolution has a great deal to say about God and religion. In the Scriptures, God claims to have created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11). But the theory of evolution, says, “no, that did not happen. All current plant and animal life forms, and many extinct forms, evolved from single-celled life forms over the course of over 500 million years.” God claims to have specially created Adam and Eve in God’s own image on the sixth day of creation week, but evolution claims that humans evolved from an ape-like simian ancestor over the course of the last 2 million years. So there is an enormous conflict between the theory of evolution and biblical religion.
And, despite her “passionate declaration” to the contrary, Ray understands this perfectly well. She very obviously does not believe that evolution says nothing about religion, because her entire book is devoted to defending evolution and refuting your religion, if your religion involves God creating the world in six days in the recent past (Young Earth Creationism) or a special creation at any time (Intelligent Design, Old-earth Creactionism) on the basis that those beliefs are not compatible with evolution.
What Ray really meant to “passionately declare” is that, so long as your religion does not include intelligent design or special creation as an explanation for the origins of mankind or any plant or animal, then evolution says nothing about your religion. But in that case, your religion does not have a high view of Scripture. It is not Seventh-day Adventism, evangelical Christianity, nor anything other than liberal “Christianity,” which is not even a religion, much less Christianity, but rather an ethical system with Bible stories.
Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? – Ray Does Not Understand Creationist Thinking
In an early chapter, Ray gets to the inspiration for her title: ridiculing the idea that all the types of animals could fit inside Noah’s Ark. Dinosaurs are a big problem for biblical literalists, especially the 80-meter-long varieties of dinosaurs, so creationists suggest that Noah carried them on board as juveniles or even as eggs. Ha, ha, ha, isn’t that ridiculous, chortles Ray.
As an Ellen White-believing Seventh-day Adventist, my young earth creationism does not call for any dinosaurs aboard the ark. I believe the dinosaurs were among the “confused species, which were the result of genetic engineering (“amalgamation,” as Ellen White called it) and one of the reasons for the Flood was to destroy those animals:
“Every species of animal which God had created were preserved in the ark. The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood.” Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 75. (The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. I, p. 78).
For more information on that, please see my weighty tome, “Dinosaurs, An Adventist View” available at your local Adventist Book Center or at Amazon.com.
But what all creationists believe is that God created the original “kinds” of animals with tremendous genetic potential, and that multiple species were often descended from each created kind. An Adventist scientist named Frank Lewis Marsh coined the term “baramin,” from the Hebrew word bara, meaning “to create,” to describe the created kinds, and that term has been picked up by contemporary creationists such as Todd Wood and Kurt Wise.
It is important to note that baramins do not correspond to species; rather, each baramin has given rise to a whole genus, or perhaps even a family, of closely related species. Creationists believe that baramins were created with inherent genetic variety, multiple phenotypes, such that the original canine or dog type diversified into all the different canine creatures, we see today, including wolves, coyotes, foxes, and all the many breeds of domestic dogs, while the original feline or cat type diversified into lions, tigers, pumas, cheetahs, cougars, lynx, bobcats, and all the many breeds of domestic cat. What this means for ark feasibility studies is that Noah only needed one pair for each baramin—one dog type, one cat-type, etc.
It is clear that someone did try to explain to Ray the “baramin,” or created kind, concept, because she writes: “Note: creationist literature defines ‘kind’ as a generic group of similar animals.” But the emphasis should be on the fact that a created kind could give rise to whole group of similar animals.
Creationists believe strongly in “micro-evolution,” that small genetic changes could create tremendous variety very quickly, on a much shorter time-scale than is typically contemplated by Darwinists. (As to Intelligent Design advocates, they have no problem with substantial evolution over millions of years, they merely balk at new biological mechanisms, organs, and organ systems, because the current evolutionary mechanism—natural selection acting upon random genetic copying errors—does not have the power to create those things.)
Again, all of this was explained to Ray, and she duly states on page 49,
“Young earth creationists believe organisms were created with the potential to give rise to multiple varieties within a generic ‘kind’—for example, lions, tigers, and domesticated cats are derived from a specially created ‘cat kind.’ Therefore, Noah only needed to take representative ‘kinds’ aboard the ark.”
But it is apparent throughout the book that Ray never internalized this, and her inability to grasp it crops up over and over, and blights her critique of creationist thinking. For example, by page 73, she’s already forgotten what she wrote on page 49:
“Even the most ardent young earth creationists concede that species change—just a bit—in order to meet environmental challenges. Although creationists (both young and old) accept small adaptive changes (“micro-evolution”), these small changes never result in a new species . . . Creationists (whether young earth or old earth) do not accept “macroevolution” in which a species gives rise to other new and different species.
But, of course, creationists do believe in speciation, that new species arise. And the last I checked, lions and tigers and domestic cats were three different species—in fact two different genera, because lions and tigers are from genus Panthera and house cats are genus Felis. But Ray obviously cannot hold in her head for 24 pages the idea that creationists believe in speciation.
Nor Does She Understand Flood Geology
As we get deeper into the book, Ray fails to keep what creationists think straight from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. Of the origins of Grand Canyon:
“According to the flood geologists, the Grand Canyon formed rapidly as the result of turbulent floodwaters, then was further carved out by the Colorado River over several thousand years.” (p. 80)
“All speakers agree that the canyon was formed suddenly and catastrophically by raging and then receding flood waters. (lower on page 80!).
Both these statements are incorrect. What most creationists believe is that the vast layer-cake of geological formations exposed at Grand Canyon were laid down during the Gensis Flood. The canyon itself was cut long after the Flood when accumulated water in vast inland lakes broke through the Kaibab upwarp. (That is the majority view; Michael Oard believes that the canyon was cut underwater, by retreating floodwaters near the end of the Genesis Flood.) The brutal truth is that Ray does not care, and can barely even pretend to care, what creationists believe.
Flood geologists note that the vast and near continent-wide layers of sedimentary rock tell of catastrophe, not normal sedimentary processes. These vast continental deposits, laid down across hundreds of thousands of square miles, do not have an analog in any modern depositional environment. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the layers were deposited rapidly, one after the other, with no long eras intervening between them. Most of the stratigraphical pile was clearly and obviously formed catastrophically. As Derek Ager, a Darwinist and long-ages geologist, writes, in The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record:
“. . . we must conclude that sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed, and very spasmodic. This may be called The Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of Much of the Stratigraphical Record.” (p. 46-47)
Those strata that would seem to have taken millions of years to form, e.g., the chalk cliffs of Dover, formed of the skeletons of algae, are the exception, not the rule. Creationists attribute their formation to unique conditions in the Genesis Flood creating massive algal blooms.
In her discussion of Flood geology, and the fact that different layers have different life forms, Ray mentions hydraulic sorting, and the idea that smarter, swifter creatures ran uphill, and she trashes both of those theories, but rejects the one theory that most YEC scientists embrace, which is ecological zonation. The plants and animals buried at different levels are different because the Flood was destroying and burying different biomes, or ecological zones, based upon elevation, starting on the sea floors.
But Ray simply ignores ecological zonation theory and skips on to the problem that marsupials pose for a creationist model of the post-Flood diffusion of the animals. Why did all the marsupials (but for the opossum) end up in Australia? Did Noah stop by Australia and drop them off on the way to Ararat? Ha, ha. She doesn’t stop to consider the problems marsupials pose for Darwinian theory.
There are the famous and unique marsupials—the Koala bear, Kangaroo, Wallaby and Tasmanian Devil—but several marsupials are very similar to their placental cousins—moles, shrews, squirrels, mice, dogs, hyenas, and the marsupial wolf that went extinct around 1950. We are expected to believe that these all evolved from some hypothetical basal marsupial that lived millions of years in the past, but in a miraculous case of “convergent evolution” they all ended up evolving into something almost identical to their placental counterparts to whom, we are told, they are not related at all!
Perhaps Australia is there to show us that there are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy, creationist or Darwinist.
The Fossil Record Does Not Support Evolution
Ray makes a half-hearted attempt to argue that the fossil record supports evolution, but it does not. As has been pointed out repeatedly by both creationists and Darwinists, e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, the fossil record shows stasis, not change over time. Creatures come into the fossil record, they stay the same for long periods of hypothetical “geological time,” then they disappear from the strata. But they do not change over time. There is precious little in the fossil record that can called a transitional form, and we certainly do not see any life form evolving into a different form across a sequence of 20, 30, or 50 fossils
Darwinists have the additional problem of the “Cambrian Explosion,” in which a variety of sea-floor creatures, across many different phyla, show up in the Cambrian layers with no possible evolutionary antecedents below them in the fossil record. Darwin’s response to the Cambrian Explosion was to claim that about half of the fossil record—presumably showing the development from single-celled creatures to the many phyla of the Cambrian—was simply missing! But this was not true. There are no missing strata; the rocks are all there, but the fossils do not show evolution. There are some strange forms in the Precambrian—the “Ediacaran” forms and the “small shelly fauna”—but they are not the ancestors of the many different phyla that appear in the Cambrian explosion.
But, of course, a creationist who believes that the Genesis Flood began in the oceans with the bursting forth of the “great fountains of the deep” would expect to find a large variety of sea floor creatures buried by turbidity currents during the early stages of the Flood. He would not expect to find intermediate forms leading up to those sea floor creatures; rather, they would all appear suddenly in the fossil record, an “explosion” of diversity and variety at the lowest fossiliferous level. This is exactly what we see in the Cambrian Explosion.
Abiogenesis Not Part of Evolutionary Theory?
Ray claims that abiogenesis, the theory that life evolved from non-life by undirected processes, is not part of the theory of evolution. In this, Ray follows the lead of Stephen Jay Gould, who started saying this back in the 1980s. Ray states:
“Misconception: Evolution is a theory about the origin of life. Scientists are interested in how life began, but the emergence of life is not a part of evolution theory. Once life arose, evolution explains how it spread and diversified.” P. 110.
This is an attempt to define away the atheistic origins narrative’s biggest problem. Why is Ray so anxious to dissociate abiogenesis from evolution? Because there has been no progress on abiogenesis theory since the Miller-Urey experiments of the early 1950s. To the contrary, the hurdles confronting any theory of abiogenesis are severe, to say the least. The more we understand about the astonishing complexity of life at the subcellular level, the clearer it becomes that there will never be a plausible theory of abiogenesis.
This creates a crippling philosophical problem for the atheists, which goes like this: if there must have been a miracle, and a miracle-working God, to produce the first living single-celled organism, then a Creator God exists, and if there is a Creator God, He could have created the world in six literal days, and rested on the seventh day, just as the Bible says. You do not need evolution to explain the creation.
Clearly, one “cannot let a divine foot in the door” or else the whole atheistic origins narrative collapses. The point of Darwin’s theory was to obviate the need for a Creator God, and if you separate abiogenesis from evolution, Darwinism cannot do that. You still need a Creator God. Hence, abiogenesis is a necessary and indispensable part of the atheistic origins narrative—it cannot be defined away as not being “part of the theory of evolution.”