No, you don't just 'read' the creation narratives. (Or why ignorance of hermeneutics has cursed us with YEC)

It's axiomatic that if there is a contradiction between interpretations of the Bible and science, then we have a problem with Biblical understanding that needs to be corrected. Unfortunately, our community has more than a few people who confuse a natural reading of the Bible with its original meaning. A knowledge of basic hermeneutics, which was once part of our community, is sadly lacking.

Reformed pastor Scott Hoezee's words may be aimed at the evangelical world, but they apply just as well to us:

After I preached a sermon in Iowa some years ago—a sermon that had nothing to do with cosmic origins or Genesis—a man came up to me to inquire what we at Calvin Seminary were thinking about Genesis 1-2. About four or five words into my reply I mentioned the word “interpretation” and this prompted the man to cut me off cold. “That is just your problem,” he snapped. “Stop interpreting it and just read it!” 

Again and again we hear about the importance of a “natural reading” of the early chapters of Genesis. It’s clearly a literal narrative, we are assured—it was written as such and so requires no interpretation whatsoever to uncover its meaning. Just read it! But on this point some are self-deceived: the “natural” readers of the text are employing a hermeneutical tool—fueled by an upfront hermeneutical decision—no less than those who take the text in other ways. Even as you cannot properly understand any three-chapter chunk of Matthew’s Gospel without thoughtfully and carefully employing several different hermeneutical tools, so you cannot read Genesis or any part of the Bible without doing the same thing.

It is important to recognise that Genesis, while written for all people, was not originally written to us. Those who fail to enter the ancient Near Eastern world of Genesis and read the text, not as a literal how-to manual of creation, but as a polemic against paganism which accommodated ancient Near Eastern cosmogeography to make a theological point will never fully understand the message of Genesis. Worse still, those who ignore genre and context lock themselves in a hermeneutical bubble. As Hoezee says:

But when some fellow believers cut themselves off from the entire interpretive tradition of both Jews and Christians alike by claiming that their view is so obviously true no interpretation is even involved, there is little hope for a common starting point. Worse, it is likely that those who wield a different hermeneutical tool than young earth creationists will, in increasingly shrill tones, be dismissed as enemies of God’s Word.

Unfortunately, that is what we are increasingly seeing. If those who have the intellectual honesty to accept the universe as it is, rather than how others demand it should be, we should not be surprised to see our community dwindle into fundamentalist irrelevance.

No, there never was a Cambrian 'explosion.' Here's why.

If you hear a special creationist talk about how the 'Cambrian explosion' poses an insuperable problem for evolution, you can safely ignore everything that person has to say about palaeontology. Special creationists still perpetuate the myth that no complex multicellular life existed prior to the start of the Cambrian 542 million years ago, with all major phyla springing into existence without any trace of ancestry. This is false. The reality is somewhat different:

Souce: BioLogos

As one can see, not all major phyla appeared at the start of the Cambrian. Poriferans, cnidarians, and molluscs appearing prior to the Cambrian, while bryozoans appeared near the end of the Cambrian. The period commonly referred to as the Cambrian explosion took place over a twenty million year period, hardly an explosion. As palaeontologist Keith Miller notes, "[t]he Cambrian “explosion” appears to have had a 'long fuse.'"

Dispelling creationist misconceptions about ENCODE

In 2012, some scientists made hyperbolic claims that the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project (ENCODE) had shown that 80% of our genome was functional. Unsurprisingly, special creationists latched onto this now-refuted claim as if it somehow invalidated common descent. It did not. Apart from the fact that those with the ENCODE project did not declare that their research rebutted evolution, special creationists ignored two points:

1. Functional does not mean essential. Actively transposing retrotransposons writing over essential DNA are functional, but are definitely harmful

2. Once again, the evidence from consonant phylogenetic trees and shared genomic 'errors' is independent of any claim about 'functionality'

Unfortunately, almost all special creationists peddling the ENCODE claim have not caught up with the refutation of the hyperbolic '80% is functional' claim so a detailed rebuttal is needed.

The Genomic Evidence for Common Descent: 6. Scars of DNA repair and out of place DNA elements

The consonance of molecular and morphological phylogenetic trees, coupled with the pattern of distribution of pseudogenes, retrotransposons, and endogenous retroviral elements makes the case for common descent just from comparative genomics alone unassailable. Yet, there is even more genomic evidence from scars of DNA repair, elements of mitochondrial DNA in nuclear DNA, and ectopic telomeric DNA. Arguing that God has created humans and apes with:

• identical scars of DNA repair
• identical mitochondrial DNA elements in nuclear DNA
• identical telomeric DNA elements

all at the same places in their genomes simply to deceive human beings poses insuperable theological problems. Common descent however readily and easily explains these patterns.

The Genomic Evidence for Common Descent: 5. Endogenous Retroviral Elements

One could easily argue that further posts demonstrating the evidence for common descent from genomics are superfluous given that the case has already been made beyond reasonable doubt. However, the point of these posts is to show that given multiple independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion, the special creationist argument is clearly shown to be iterated special pleading.

The power of the evidence from endogenous retroviral elements is that they are clearly alien to the human genome as they are undeniably evidence of ancient retroviral infection that became integrated into the germ line, and subsequently inherited by descendant species. The odds of exactly the same retrovirus integrating into the germ line at exactly the same place in the genomes of related species is billions to one against just for a single retroviral element. Given that there are multiple such examples in human and ape DNA, the chance becomes so remote as to be negligible.

The Genomic Evidence for Common Descent: 4. Retrotransposons

The evidence from nuclear gene phylogenies and shared identical pseudogenes alone is enough to confirm human-ape common ancestry beyond reasonable doubt, but the evidence from comparative genomics does not end there. Retrotransposons, mobile genetic elements that copy and paste themselves randomly throughout the genome provide another line of evidence for common descent. Unlike pseudogenes, retrotransposons are essentially selfish genetic material, existing solely to propagate itself throughout its genomic host. The presence of identical retrotransposon material at the same place in the genomes of related species is prima facie evidence that those species shared a common ancestor in which the retrotransposition event first took place. Once again, there is simply no credible special creationist explanation for their existence.

The Genomic Evidence for Common Descent: 3. Shared identical pseudogenes

If a university lecturer receives six term papers that not only share the same four paragraphs in the conclusion which are word-for word from Wikipedia, except for identical spelling errors at the same place in the paragraphs that closely resemble Wikipedia, she is unlikely to conclude that purely by chance, all six students independently wrote four concluding paragraphs that happened to resemble Wikipedia word for word, and independently made the same spelling mistakes. Rather, she is entitled to conclude that one student plagiarised Wikipedia, making a few spelling errors in the process, and that the remaining five students copied that original paper.

A similar phenomenon exists in comparative genomics, where identical genetic 'errors' are found in exactly the same place in the genome when we compare genomes from a number of related species. These 'errors' include broken genes, remnants of ancient retroviral infection, mobile genetic parasites, and markers of DNA repair. These are not design features, but evidence of an ancient accident which occurred in an ancestral species, and was subsequently inherited by descendant species. This post will review the evidence from pseudogenes.