Sundays With The Christianists: A Biology Textbook That Explains Science Is Mostly Atheists Making Things Up

 
 You know what's compelling about creationists? They are awfully good at making incredulity seem like science: "Evolution is like believing that a tornado in a junkyard could build a 747" and so on. Which means that we're in for one last look at our tenth-grade science textbook,  Biology for Christian Schools,  by William S. "Stop Calling Me Pinkie Pie" Pinkston. Last time, we looked at the totally convincing scientific evidence for Noah's Flood (review: God said it did), so now, let's take a brief look at why most biologists are lying (it is because they hate God).

To start with, let's just reject the notion of common origins, because all life was created by God, after all:

there is no history of evolution recorded either by man or by fossils. This lack of evolutionary records does not disturb most evolutionists because they believe they have a model of how evolution took place. This model is often illustrated by aphylogenetic tree-- a line-up of organisms based on how they are supposedly related in an attempt to show the path that evolution has taken.

It is quite natural to notice similar facial features in different members of one family. But people who look very much alike may be entirely unrelated. One organism may have characteristics similar to another organism’s but not be related to it at all.

Haha, why would anyone think that people from different families are all related, unless they read the part of Biology For Christian Schools that says "The eight people on the ark are the ancestors of all people alive today"?

The sheer absurdity of evolutionists' dumb guesswork is illustrated by this hilarious cartoon:

Silly evolutionists, whales cannot sit in trees! Pinkston then explains that all of evolutionary theory is based on wild speculation:

Evolutionists claim that organisms which are alike in some ways must have had a common ancestor. When a limb of a phylogenetic tree branches, a common ancestor is implied. A phylogenetic tree that contains many organisms and is relatively detailed usually has the known organisms (those alive today and those extinct organisms that left fossils) on the ends of the branches. The common ancestors at the forks of the branches are usually guesses. Many phylogenetic trees, for example, assume/that the birds and the mammals both came from a common reptilelike ancestor. In one line of development, the scales became feathers and the animals became birds. The mammal-bird ancestor may be imaginatively drawn and described, but examples of this common ancestor do not exist among animals alive today or in the fossil record.

 
 Those wacky evolutionists! They use illustrations to lie! And even with their crazy speculation, Pinkston says, "there is little agreement among evolutionists about which organisms are the ancestors." The thing is just a silly matching game, because for some strange reason, there are a lot of similar features among species, but they are also very different from each other, because God made them that way:

Although putting pictures in sequence is easy, when considering the thousands of characteristics of different organisms, it is not always easy to create a logical sequence for them. What characteristic should be used to arrange the organisms? The use of eye development will give one phylogenetic tree, and the use of leg form or another characteristic will give a different phylogenetic tree.

The really excellent news, however, is that good Christian boys and girls do not have to worry about such folderol:

Creationists have no difficulty with similarities and differences between organisms. God designed each organism for a particular purpose. If four long legs are the right design for movement in one animal, it is likely that four long legs will be the best design for a similar movement in a similar animal. Similarities and differences come from God’s design, not from a common ancestor.

On the other hand, instead of using real science, which starts with the plain truth of the Bible and then finds evidence in nature to support it (and ignores anything inconvenient), evolutionists have been forced to make up all sorts of outlandish just-so stories, without even accounting for miraculous intervention by God:

Using the fossil record and phylogenetic trees has not given adequate support to evolutionary beliefs. Evolutionists have thus resorted to trying to figure out how it could have happened, rather than showing how it did happen. This tactic takes evolution out of the realm of science and puts it into the realm of guesswork.

One of our favorite parts of this section is a text box on the evolution of horses. (It doesn't use the illustration at the top of today's blog, but it might as well). Pinkston states that the supposed evolutionary history of the horse is just evolutionists making unsupportable guesses, and that the fossil record reallyillustrates "some of the problems involved in lining up animals for a phylogenetic tree" (click illustration to embiggen) :

The Eohippus was an organism about the size of a terrier dog, with four toes on each front foot and

three toes on each hind foot. Other extinct animals have been lined up with progressively larger bodies and with foot structures more like that of the horse to form an evolutionary "path."

The evolution seems plausible until one realizes that much of the progression is art work, and much information has been omitted. The fossils of these organisms are not found in sequence in the fossil record. In fact, the fossil record gives evidence that these organisms were alive at the same time. Having the horse and the Eohippus alive together at an early date defeats the evolutionary purpose of the Eohippus, though, so that evidence has been ignored.

Wow, pretty compelling! Except for the teensy detail that, sorry, Eohippus and Equus  didn't  live at the same time, although that discredited assertion has been around since the 1930s. And then, with a collection of evolutionary steps between Eohippus and Equus sitting right at the top of the page, the text pretty much holds out for Zeno's paradox:  

The supposed evolution of the horse is like a series of piers with the connecting bridges missing. In other words, this line—up of organisms, as with all such line-ups, is without in-between organisms, themissing links(common ancestors). According to evolutionary theory, these missing organisms must have existed. Research in the fossil record has not revealed any of the missing links in horse evolution. Nor does the fossil record show a clear progression between any two different kinds of organisms.

Of course, any time a new transitional fossil is found, our creationist says that there is no evidence of a transitional form between that fossil and the species it bridged. Fortunately, Christians are not burdened by any curiosity about the similarities between various fossil horses, because evolution is a fairy tale:

A creationist looking at the fossils of the Eohippus or the Mesohippus or any others in an evolutionary line-up simply observes that they are interesting animals that must have become extinct during the Flood or shortly thereafter.

Meh, bunch of dead animals. They mean nothing other than that God was finished with them, and with that, we are finished with this textbook. There's a lot of other idiocy in Biology For Christian Schools -- for instance, the mathematical improbability of getting a dictionary by just throwing millions of letters into a pile, or why scientists are increasingly rejecting the fuzzy idea of classifying life into "species" and adopting the much more useful Biblical term "kinds" (because that way, Noah's ark is less obviously absurd) -- but frankly, we've had about enough of this book, and since it merely repeats creationist nonsense you can find all over the intertubeses, we are going to move on to something different.

What do you think, should we look next at an American History book? We have Bob Jones University Press's high school text, or an 8th-grade text from the always-nutty A Beka house...or for that matter, we could tackle both at the same time, for hot compare-and-contrast action. Or would you prefer that we delve into BJU Press's 12th-grade American Government text, which promises some novel thoughts about the Constitution? Discuss amongst yourselves, and don't worry, regardless of what we hit first, we'll eventually cover the whole awful mess.

[Illustration:  "Natural History Tour" by "Moderately Deviant"]

 Remember, Pacific Northwest Wonkers, Yr Doktor Zoom will be attending the reader-organized Seattle Drinky Thing on June 1; details at this here linky. Door prizes will include copies of at least one or two of these god-awful awful-God textbooks!