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Meditation 1049
Dishonesty to promote the faith (I)

by: John Tyrrell

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Someone posted an image of a fossilized worm on Facebook with the comment that it proved Noah's flood because otherwise, an animal with only soft tissues like a worm would have quickly decayed or been eaten leaving no traces. I wondered if this thinking was the product of some ill-informed eight-year-old's mind or had some other source.

With very little difficulty I tracked the image down to the "Yec Headquarters 6 Day Creation" website which promotes "Literal Bible Creation."^[1] And the fossilized worm is on their Noah's flood page, along with a version of the argument that a worm could have only been fossilized in this manner in Noah's flood.

From that page - and it's the lead item in support of "proving" Noah's flood:

Here we have a worm that has been fossilized perfectly intact. You cannot fossilize a soft tissue organism unless there is sudden event that covered and preserved it... The only thing that can preserve soft tissue with all the fine details is a flood that covered the tissue with sediments. It would have to happen suddenly (which the flood did).

And that's their case! It stops there. As if the supposed flood described in Genesis was the only flood that had ever happened in the life of the earth. There are literally thousands of floods every year, most local, some covering wide areas. And the nature of floods is that most of them are indeed sudden. Simply arguing a flood must have caused the fossil says nothing about which of the millions of floods caused it.

Beyond the dishonest logical trick of suggesting "flood, therefore Noah's flood" there's the intellectual dishonesty which illustrates the young earth creationist tendency to cherry pick. Young earth creationists accept without question the science which identifies this as a fossil, and specifically a fossil worm,^[2] and yet, reject out of hand the science which would identify how and when this fossil was formed.^[3] Not just worms - they do this with the entire fossil record.

My view is that the original producers of this sort of nonsense know exactly what they are doing. They know their logic is unsound. They know their cherry-picking of facts is unsound. But, in light of their overall aim of supporting the bible, they are prepared to be dishonest. For them dishonesty to promote the faith is morally acceptable.

(For another example of thorough creationist dishonesty, check out Richard Dawkins Dumps the Fossil Record, a complete and utter deliberate misrepresentation of Dawkins' words.)

Notes:

1. I don't think creating a literal bible is their intention.
2. I'm assuming they got that right - I was unable to find this particular image on an actual science site.
3. And there is no science that will support that it was caused by Noah's Flood approximately 4,350 years ago.

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