A claim one occasionally hears from creationist camps is that they and scientists have the same evidence, it’s just being interpreted differently. This is meant to establish that one should be open-minded and consider various viewpoints. But just because multiple interpretations exist doesn’t make them all reasonable, nor does it follow that each has strong support.

Further, if creationist leaders really believed we should consider competing ideas about the origin of Earth and mankind, they would hold that the Zoroastrian and Lakota creation tales should also be espoused and given equal time in debates and public school science classrooms.

As to reasonable dialogue and analysis, some creationists are up for it, but the most well-known one, Ken Ham, is not. He tries to dismiss evidence by saying that scientists and Young Earth creationists have different worldviews. While this might be a rare Ham accuracy, it is a genetic fallacy and irrelevant to the legitimacy of the conclusions that each camp draws.

Consider how those conclusions are reached. Scientists go where the evidence leads. Creationists start with the conclusion that Genesis is a literal account, then try and finagle around discomfiting evidence, either shoehorning it in or rejecting it. Ham has said that evidence doesn’t count if it contradicts his interpretation of the Bible. Similarly, the Institute for Creation Research website lists these among its principles:

“Space, time, matter, and energy were supernaturally created by a transcendent personal creator.”

“Each of the major kinds of plants and animals was created functionally complete from the beginning and did not evolve from some other kind of organism.”

“The record of Earth’s history as preserved in the crust, especially in the rocks and fossil deposits, is primarily a record of catastrophic intensities of natural processes.”

Only after signing a statement agreeing to these planks and promising to promote them is one allowed to work for this institute, which makes the “research” in its title fraudulent.

Contrast this with how a geologist, biologist, or astronomer operates. A blogger at Logic of Science wrote about how research on lake bed layers helped prove Earth’s age. Called varves, these layers alternate between patterns of light and dark, and between fine and course, and are the result of seasonal change.

The blogger further explained, “We can verify that these correlate with seasons because we see varves form today, and at some lakes, we find algae in the dark layers, but not the light layers since algae only blooms in summer. Varves in the center of the lakes only accumulate one layer each year. In the center of some lakes, we have millions of sets of alternating layers.”

Therefore, geologists deduce that the lakes are millions of years old. This logical deduction flows from observed and verified results. No interpretation is needed, nor is it necessary for the scientist to have had a “naturalist” or “humanist” worldview at the outset to reach this deduction.

Now let’s see examine a creationist’s take. John Morris of ICR writes that while there is no explanation for these millions of layers, “Research is continuing and we can be certain it won’t be solved by the sterile uniformitarian thinking of the past. However, reasoning from the standpoint of the great Flood of Noah’s day and its aftermath holds promise.”

So, through some undiscovered mechanism, the flood managed to create and sort these deposits at a rate of 20 per minute instead of the one per annum that has repeatedly been observed.

The Logic of Science blogger writes that such conclusions “are in no way an interpretation of data. It is a complete and total rejection of the data. The creationists’ ‘interpretation’ completely ignores the facts and proposes an unknown and completely absurd mechanism.”

He added that if we issue creationists a license to explain away proof with evidence-free ad hoc reasoning, then almost unlimited interpretations are possible. Zoroastrians could point out that their creation story holds that Ahura Mazda created light and darkness, and that this is consistent with the light and dark nature of varves. Or the Lakota could relate how the only survivor in the tribe’s flood tale, Kangi the Crow, asked the Great Spirit to give him a new world. Granting this request, the spirit sent animals to retrieve a lump of mud from beneath the flood waters. This could be considered the origin of varves, and since each animal got a turn, that would explain why there are millions of layers.

But it would only be possible to arrive at these positions if one went in determined to get there. If the varve evidence was shown to someone with no knowledge or preconceived ideas about Earth’s age and origin, the examiner would never conclude varves to be the result of an invisible creature in the sky sending forth torrents of rain that set in place a magic mechanism that caused the layers to form at a rate 10 million times faster than what scientists have ever observed.

To see how science really works, let’s consider evolution. In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin predicted the existence of intermediate fossils before they were known to exist. Since then, scientists have unearthed many transitional fossils, which show evolution from fish to amphibians, from amphibians to reptiles, from reptiles to birds, from reptiles to mammals, and from early apelike creatures to hominids.

Creationists look at those fossils and consider them part of a divine creation plan. This intelligent design, by the way, has seen 99.9 percent of its creatures go extinct. Ham and the rest craft an ad hoc rationale that the intermediate fossils are of separately created animals that no longer exist. The seemingly gradual transition of the fossils, located in the precise place in the geologic column one would expect to find them if evolution were true, is coincidental.

Again, no neutral party would come to such a conclusion. It is only possible if one goes in with an unbending mindset, such as this one displayed by the Discovery Institute: “The universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

If geologic digs repeatedly revealed the sudden appearance of, say, ostriches, zebras, and rhinos, with no intermediary fossils before or after; if there was no similarity in DNA between different creatures; if there were no vestigial traits; if there were no strikingly similar anatomies between some species; if no creatures unique to isolated locales like Tasmania, Iceland, and Mauritius were ever found, then Darwin would be the scientific equivalent of Freud – a giant in his time, still recalled somewhat fondly, but one whose major ideas have been rejected. The lack of evidence would ensure that.

Now let’s look at how Ham’s Answers in Genesis deals with the complete lack of evidence for its position that man and dinosaurs lived together. In an essay, AIG’s Bodie Hodge proffered two reasons. One, everybody went as high as possible to escape the flood, leaving the terrible lizards way down below. Second, humans would have been avoiding dinosaurs anyway because they are scary.

You interpret that however you want, but I would have considered The Flintstones to be better evidence.