Is the Genesis Account Scientific?

Introduction

The fundamental tenet of so-called "scientific creationism" is the truth of the Genesis account of the creation of the universe. But is the way creationists treat it really scientific? Recall from this essay that the way a scientific hypothesis is treated is to test it and see if it is falsified. So, leaving aside any and all contradictions in the text, let's assume the Bible is inerrant and generate the hypothesis, "The Genesis account of creation is literally true." Is this hypothesis scientific?

It sure is. While creationists often throw around the claim that "historical sciences" are unfalsifiable, we can certainly look for predictions the hypothesis that creation and the flood occurred would make that would show up in the present day, just as evolution makes predictions about the shape of the fossil record, the Big Bang inflationary theory makes predictions about cosmic background radiation, and the genesis of the solar system makes predictions about the temperature of the Earth. So, let's identify some of the predictions the Genesis Hypothesis makes and test them against observations we've made.

(Note: The verses from Genesis are copy-pasted from here. Many thanks.)

Testing the Hypothesis

Let's go ahead and test our Genesis Hypothesis.

Prediction 1: Water, Sky, Water

6 Then God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." 7 Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.

This verse simply predicts that, above the sky, we should find water. That is, instead of space, we should find the bottom of an ocean where the sky ends. Of course, we've sent astronauts into space; suffice it to say that there is no water there.

Prediction 2: One Ocean

9 Then God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Of course, this predicts that all the waters on the Earth were gathered into one place. Glancing at a map, anyone can casually see that the waters of the Earth are actually divided into the oceans (which are, indeed, contiguous) and inland seas and lakes (which are not contiguous to the seas, since there is dry land between them).

Prediction 3: Herbs, Grass, and Fruit Trees

11 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 So the evening and the morning were the third day.

Note that we are supposing the Bible is inerrant: that is, it is completely accurate and therefore omits nothing. Since this is the case, this verse predicts the existence of only grasses, seed-yielding plants, and fruit trees. Even allowing for evolution to occur, as creationists are wont to do, the existence of ferns, mushrooms, fungi, moss, to name a few, contradict this prediction.

Prediction 4: Garden of Eden

8 The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. 9 And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 10 Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
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24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

This verse gives us an approximate location of the Garden of Eden. It should be found somewhere in the Middle East. Obviously, there's no lush garden, teeming with every tree that is pleasant to sight and good for food, as well as trees of life and knowledge of good and evil, guarded by cherubim with a flaming sword, anywhere in the Middle East. Do note that this absence may be explained by the great flood, but in the absence of a flood, this prediction has been falsified.

Prediction 5: Talking Snakes

1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?"

This one is very simple. Again, since the Genesis Hypothesis does not record the serpent's voice being struck from him, snakes should be able to talk. They can't.

Prediction 6: Light Horizon

The Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar predicts that the creation event happened some six thousand years ago. Even permitting ten or fifty thousand years ago, there should be a light horizon approximately fifty thousand light years from us in every direction. Instead, we see things as far away as 11 billion lightyears away. To give an idea of just how wildly inaccurate the Genesis Hypothesis is in terms of the age of the universe, imagine one step in comparison with the distance from New York City to Houston.

Prediction 7: Earth's Temperature

The Earth has about 1e32 J of gravitational potential energy stored in it. If it's only had fifty thousand years (let alone six thousand years) to radiate that energy away, it should be exuding heat at a rate of 6e19 W. This was actually one of the objections that led geologists to discard the Genesis Hypothesis in the late 1700s and early 1800s (incidentally, the scientific community had agreed on an age in the hundreds of millions before Darwin released On the Origin of Species; they were off by an order of magnitude because they were not aware of radioactive heating).

Prediction 8: Fountains, Fountains of the Deep

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.

The predictions from the Great Flood of Noah are many and specific, so let's start with this. Apparently, we should observe windows in the sky and fountains in the sea. If one wishes to take this more loosely, instead of literally looking for fountains and windows, we should observe huge chasms and former reservoirs of water.

Prediction 9: Atmospheric Heating

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.

This verse also predicts rather esoteric atmospheric heating effects. If even a quarter of the flood's water fell from the sky a distance of perhaps ten kilometers, then, because rain releases some 90% of its potential energy into the air (upon reaching terminal velocity, air friction does work against gravity), the (1e18 m^3)(1e3 kg/m^3) = 1e21 kg falling from ten km would release about 1e26 J into the atmosphere over 40 days. That's quite a lot of power: some 3e19 W. Approximating the Earth's atmosphere by Nitrogen, we see that (0.9 * 1e26 J*mol*K / 29 J)/(4.4e20 mol) = 7000 K ! That's about 12200 degrees F. While this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, it should be accurate to within an order of magnitude or so.

What kind of prediction does this make about the modern world? Well, for starters, it would have killed off Noah and his animals after burning up the Ark, so we shouldn't see any complex life at all.

Prediction 10: Amount of Water

9 And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered. 20 The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered.

This verse predicts that there is enough water on the Earth to cover it to a depth of about nine kilometers (Mt Everest is 9.1 km above sea level). That's more than twice as much water as is in the oceans.

Prediction 11: Air Pressure

1 Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided. 2 The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were also stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained. 3 And the waters receded continually from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased.

If a hundredth of the water of the flood predicted by our Genesis Hypothesis evaporated, the water vapor would have a mass of about 1e19 kg. Since that water would be in the atmosphere, the air pressure we should see in the modern day should be ten times as much as it actually is -- that is, since the atmosphere weighs about 1e18 kg, 1e19 kg of water in it would up the pressure to some 1.1 gPa.

Prediction 12: Subterranean Water

1 Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided. 2 The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were also stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained. 3 And the waters receded continually from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased.

Since the waters were receding from the earth, they had to go somewhere. They're not in the oceans; they're not in the atmosphere. We should therefore be seeing incredible amounts of water deep in the Earth's crust. Suffice it to say, since rock doesn't float on water, this prediction is untenable at best, and we really don't see huge subterranean reserves of water beneath within the crust.

Prediction 13: Eliminated Cultures

According to various estimates, the flood took place less than 5000 years ago. Therefore, in the archaeological record, we should see no evidence of civilization before the flood: it should have been swept away. More to the point, there must not be a continuous civilization through the flood, but the ancient Egyptian civilization's archaeological record stretches continuously back past 3000 BC. Note that this is the archaeological record, which exists in the modern day, not the actual history recorded therein.

Prediction 14: The Fossil Record

A flood 9 km deep, as the Genesis Hypothesis predicts, should have killed off all life and shaken up the detritus. Therefore, bronze artifacts, manmade items, stones, and bones should have fallen to the bottom of the fossil record, and lighter material should have floated to the top. The things that were living at the time should have been distributed randomly throughout the fossil record. The fossil record, however, shows no sign of random distribution; moreover, heavy artifacts, such as bronze weapons and stone-age tools, are at the top of the fossil record.

Prediction 15: Sedimentary Rocks

If a flood had occured, we would expect the distribution of sedimentary layers worldwide to be either gradated according to weight or randomly and homogenously jumbled. Think about the finely mixed soil laid down by floods, or the jumble caused when you pour a bucket of water into a tray you've filled with dirt. This is not, in fact, what we see in the finely sedimented rocks that have been laid down over the eons.

Prediction 16: Equal Erosion

If a great flood had occurred, we should expect all the mountain ranges in the world to be equally eroded now, because water is, after all, an equal-opportunity eroder. Instead, we see various mountain rainges, some heavily eroded (Appalachians, Urals), and some barely eroded (Himalayas, Rockies).

Prediction 17: Archaeological Spread

"... 17 Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you: birds and cattle and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth." 18 So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. 19 Every animal, every creeping thing, every bird, and whatever creeps on the earth, according to their families, went out of the ark.

This verse implies that there should be a spreading pattern, both cultural, fossilized, and archaeological, radiating out of the northern Middle East. No such pattern is visible in either cultural or fossil records.

Conclusion: Scientific Methodology or Unscientific Premise?

So, we see that the Genesis Hypothesis is, in fact, testable, and has been falsified! In fact, these (and other) falsifications number among the reasons the scientific community had begun to discard the Genesis Hypothesis during the century before Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. However, the creationist impulse here is to attempt to rationalize the evidence to fit the facts. The literal truth of the account contained within Genesis is a premise, not simply a hypothesis. Just as fans of Star Wars might bend the laws of physics in order to describe the events contained within the movies (for an example, see here), so creationists who want the Genesis Hypothesis to be true are forced to bend and manipulate the evidence in order to keep it consistent with the creation story.

The difference between the Star Wars fans and creationists is that Star Wars fans do not attempt to pass off their hobby as real-world science. Creationists do. However, as we've seen, creationism's acceptance of the Genesis Hypothesis as a premise is manifestly unscientific. Remember, science has as its goal finding the best description of the natural world; it does not seek to justify any hypothesis or account which is a priori accepted as true.

This demonstration of the unscientific nature of "creation science" is also an effective counterargument to the often implicit assumption that creationism based on the Genesis Hypothesis' presumed truth and evolution are complements. They are not: even if creationists have made ground-shaking discoveries that would rock the scientific world if they ever passed peer-review and were published in real scientific journals (creationist journals don't count), that does not make the Genesis Hypothesis any more scientific. Even if creationists can wave away the contradictory evidence with the ever-popular "God made it that way", that still doesn't make it scientific: how does one test God? How does one disprove that God did something?

No, the Genesis Hypothesis has been refuted time and time again. Creationists must accept on faith that God created the world; this is tantamount to recognizing that there can be no reason to believe this. Those who reject this conclusion must face the fact that presuming the truth of a hypothesis or theory beforehand is patently unscientific, and so "scientific creationism" has no more claim to science than any other rejected hypothesis.