There exists an ancient temple carving in Cambodia that is interpreted to be a stegosaur by some folks. “Some folks” in this case being a euphemism for Young Earth Creationists. So anthropology professor Scott Burnett investigated these claims by spending two weeks at the site, named Ta Prohm, and at adjacent Khmer locations in Angkor Archaeological Park. He reported his findings in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

Young Earth Creationists use the supposed stegosaur depiction as evidence that dinosaurs and humans were contemporaries. YECs maintain that all extinct and extant life arose by supernatural means less than 10,000 years ago, so dinosaurs dying out 150 million years back would throw a T- Rex-sized bone into that idea. Even by YEC standards, the Ta Prohm stegosaur hypothesis puts dinosaurs crazily close to the modern day. The Khmer Empire lasted from the 9^th to 15^th Centuries, a period that includes Joan of Arc’s brief lifetime.

The stegosaur claim made by YECs rests on these four points: 1. The carving resembles a stegosaur; 2. The image is ancient and not a modern hoax; 3. There are other known animals represented at Ta Prohm, so the carving represents a real creature; and 4. Stegosaurs had to have been known to the sculptor.

YECs are correct on point two, so we will not delve anymore into that assertion. As to the first point, while the carving somewhat resembles a stegosaur, this interpretation is primarily based on one item – apparent dorsal plates in a ridge pattern along the creature’s back. However, conspicuously missing from this supposed stegosaur are a long neck, a small plain head, and cool tail spikes, all of which are associated with this particular dinosaur.

YECs retort that the carving’s large head and horn-like appendages represent a muzzle, and that its tail spikes were removed for safety reasons by the captive stegosaur’s owner. This ad hoc reasoning is indicative of one reaching a predetermined conclusion rather than examining the evidence. There are zero anthropological or paleontological discoveries that suggest dinosaurs were alive 1,000 years ago, much less any proof that they were domesticated by Mekong Delta inhabitants.  

Further, Burnett argues that the muddled muzzle notion guess fails to account for other anatomical inconsistencies. For example, the animal’s limbs are uniform, whereas stegosaurs had long hind limbs but short, stout legs up front. As to the putative dorsal plates – the one seeming consistency with stegosaurs – there are explanations that negate the need to jump to the dinosaur conclusion. For example, Burnett pointed out the supposed plates might instead be background foliage or decorative elements. We’ll come back to that point a little later.

For now, on to the YEC’s third argument – that since there are known animals depicted at Ta Prohm, the bas relief carving is therefore a stegosaur. This is at once the affirming of the consequent fallacy and a refusal to acknowledge that mythological creatures are represented at the site.

YECs are correct that some of the carvings are of known animals. Nevertheless, Burnett cautions against exaggerating “our ability to interpret art across cultures, let alone those separated by over eight centuries, and particularly out of context.” He added that the site includes mythological animals, as well as genuine beasts who are riding atop deities. What’s more, the dividing line between natural and supernatural fauna is a blurred one in Khmer imagery.

As to the specifics of Angkor Archaeological Park carvings, they are laden with Hindu and Buddhist symbolism. The artist who created the bas relief in question may have been depicting one of those religions’ mythological animals, which has a superficial similarity with a stegosaur.

Similarly, several carvings of supposed animals at the site may not be what YECs presume them to be. Rather than being a monkey or deer, they may be a mythological beast, in the same sense that Bigfoot looks like an oversize upright gorilla and the Loch Ness Monster could be taken to be a plesiosaur’s cousin.

Burnett points out that the Indian epic Ramayana is a frequent subject matter of stone carvings in the Khmer region. The tale includes anthropomorphic primate brothers who pursue a demon that lured their sister away assuming the form of a beautiful golden deer.

“The ruins are full of Hindu and Buddhist iconography and symbolism,” Burnett wrote. “Mythological and supernatural beings abound at sites in the region. Some are chimeric in nature, including at Ta Prohm a muscular animal sitting upright, with a bird beak and long ears or horns. It also bears plates along the back reminiscent of the ‘stegosaur.” This seems a fatal blow to YEC contentions that the carving has to be of a real animal and that stegosaurs must have been known to the sculptor.

To gain a wider perspective, Burnett spent 10 days visiting the Angkor Archaeological Park, accessing and analyzing dozens images. Burnett had suspected that the supposed dorsal plates could instead be background foliage. So he searched for other animal carvings with similar features to this one, and he also looked for any images that seemed to be of the supposed stegosaur but without the plates. He explained that he looked for carving of animals with “five key characteristics — quadrupedal posture, thick limbs of roughly equal length, an arched back, ornamented head, and long tail, in the absence of a sixth characteristic—dorsal plates.” And he did uncover a depicted animal that satisfied those criteria.

As to his suspicion that the plates were actually foliage, Burnett “found clear evidence suggesting that ornamental elaboration and vegetation are much more parsimonious explanations for the appearance of the animal. Dorsal ornamentation or vegetation is clearly associated with the animal immediately above the stegosaur. Even higher in the column of images that appear to be conveying a narrative of sorts, are plate- or petal-like depictions. On other occasions, vegetation might be seen underneath or behind animals.”

Finally, the YEC assertion lacks any evidence from the time period that would be consistent with dinosaurs living amongst the Khmer people. There are no dinosaur images on ceramics, paintings, or drawings from the era. More crucially, anthropologists have yet to find dinosaur bones among cultural deposits from this period. The terrible lizards are nowhere to be found among the exhaustive species lists compiled from Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions at Angkor sites. Additionally, Zhou Daguan served as Chinese ambassador to Angkor barely a century after the supposed stegosaur image was created. He kept a journal that included descriptions of animals from that time and place, and he jotted down nothing that would be consistent with a late Triassic herbivore.

Persons sometimes hold two jobs simultaneously, but no one has a more oxymoronic dual employment than Dr. Michael Behe. He serves as a fulltime a scientist for Lehigh, where he is a biochemistry professor. Meanwhile, his moonlighting gig is as a pseudoscientist for the Discovery Institute, where he argues against a specific plank of evolution.

Behe differs from most creationists, partly because he is of the Old Earth variety, a comparatively rare subspecies. More significantly, he acknowledges that life has evolved over billions of years and that all living organisms have a common descent. He also acknowledges that mutation and natural selection drive the processes that lead to the diversity of life. All this, in fact, capsulizes the theory of evolution. But Behe veers sharply from the scientific landscape when he proposes that there is an intelligent design mechanism which is causing the genetic changes that enables evolution. He stresses that point repeatedly in his latest book, Darwin Devolves.

In this work, Behe insists that mutations can only make things worse, absent intelligent intervention. This is consistent with his longstanding belief that anything science cannot completely figure out means that his god is responsible. This is the God of the Gaps gaffe and is a common pseudoscience error.

Behe makes no attempt to falsify the idea, nor does he give fellow scientists any experiments to try and replicate. He has not observed intelligent intervention in action, he makes no predictions about how it would function, and he subjects the idea to no peer review. In short, he offers zero science to support his claim that a deity is driving evolution’s key mechanism.

Compare that to what he expects of those with the opposing position. In an essay for skeptic.com, John Jay College professor Nathan Lents wrote, “Behe holds modern evolutionary theory to an impossible standard, declaring it insufficient if we cannot pinpoint every point mutation and every intermediate genetic step, all in the right order.”

Behe argues that mutation should be fatal to evolution because most genes that spark adaptation have been irreparably broken and have also been inactivated by mutations. And a dead gene, he says, tends to degrade further and can only be reactivated by a supernatural agent.

But biology professor Jerry Coyne writes that this position requires ignoring the following: Adaptive mutations which do not inactivate genes, including genes that are accidentally copied twice, with the copies diverging in useful ways; Changes in how and when a gene is turned on and off, such as mutations producing lactose tolerance in milk-drinking human populations; The repurposing of ancient genes acquired from viruses; Chimeric genes that are cobbled together from odd bits of DNA; And simple changes in DNA sequence that alter proteins without breaking them, such as is see in tolerance of low oxygen levels in geese.

Most importantly from a scientific standpoint, Behe only tries to find flaws in the other side instead of offering examples of designed mutations or providing evidence for a supernatural mechanism.

A key point to remember is that evolution never has an end-goal in mind. It’s about adapting to present conditions. It will even reverse course if that is advantageous. While the sci-fi concept of devolution, such as is seen with the Land of the Lost Sleestaks, is a cool one, it never happens in real life. In fact, a step-back is still evolution if that’s what the environment dictates.  

Behe tries to ride the coattails of Richard Lenski to make his case. Lenski oversees an ongoing, 30-year e. coli experiment that started with 12 originally-identical populations. These 12 experienced dramatically accelerated growth and showed a gradual loss of many abilities necessary to thrive in other environments. While this is literally observing evolution in action, Behe maintains it strengthens his position since none of the bacteria have developed creative new abilities.

However, these bacteria are in manufactured laboratory conditions and are not adapting to nature. And even in this environment which Lenski specifically designed to not prod bacteria toward new abilities, the cells have gained functions. Lents wrote that Lenski “has discovered variants of essential genes — not just dispensable ones — for the cell wall, DNA packaging and architecture, and a variety of tweaks that enhance, not diminish, the function of the encoded proteins. Perhaps the most exciting discovery is one culture’s new ability to import and metabolize citrate as a carbon source in an aerobic environment. This is all incredibly unlikely, as only one of the 12 cultures achieving this feat in more than 70,000 generations. This means random mutation has been seen to cause a new function.” That it could do this refutes Behe’s insistence that such a mutation requires divine intervention.

Let’s move from the lab to the outdoors and from the microscopic to what we can see with the naked eye. Behe touts Galapagos finches as an example of how animals can manage only incremental changes without supernatural assistance. He gloats that the birds have failed to develop the large-scale body redevelopment that occurred with organisms during the Cambrian Explosion.

The analogy is lacking since Cambrian diversification took more than 10 times as long and involved smaller, simpler, and faster-reproducing life forms. A larger issue is that when finches arrived on the islands, the Galapagos was already filled with other birds. This meant that the finches’ only path to success was stagnation. Diversification only occurs when animals fill unoccupied niches.

Lents pointed out that Madagascar lemurs provide a spectacular example of how this works. From the first pair 50 million years ago, we now have well over 100 species “including the smallest known primates and nearly the largest. There are burrowers, leapers, grazers, climbers, and everything in between. Lemurs have accomplished this because they were free to inhabit the ecological niches normally occupied by other animals. With no rodents on Madagascar initially, the mouse lemurs emerged. With no true sloths, we have the sloth lemur.”

This breadth of lemurs means the animal has achieved the taxonomic level of Family, something Behe claimed unguided evolution could never do. His retort was to feebly offer that this may have been made possible by “intelligently-provided information carried by the ancestor of lemurs.” He failed to explain how that hypothesis might be tested.

According Coyne, Behe’s rationale for designed mutations is circular. Behe claims biochemical pathways are designed rather than evolved because they’re based on a “purposeful arrangement of parts.” To this, Coyne asks, “Which arrangements are those designed with a purpose? They’re simply the pathways that Behe sees as too complex to have evolved. This is a classic example of begging the question, which is assuming what you’re supposed to prove.”

That last line, in fact, would work as a concise review of Darwin Devolves.

If one’s favored holy book contradicts itself, how is a follower to handle it? For Muslims, the verse which appears later in the Koran overrules the previous dictate. The contradiction is still there but at least there’s consistency with how to approach these discomforting occurrences.

Christians have much more complex ways of dealing with Biblical contradictions. Some deny their existence, but this requires extreme pretzel logic when there are  opposing statements as blatant as what is entertainingly detailed here. Exhaustive lists of such contradictions exist elsewhere and we won’t rehash them here. Rather, we will focus on the way the problem is handled by believers.

Christian fundamentalists tout the Bible as an immaculate work created by a flawless, all-knowing being. But it reads more like a hodgepodge product of Bronze Age Middle East nomads who took their limited knowledge of human nature and the natural world, then came up with magical explanations to fill in the sizable blanks.  

They also created Old Testament rules that were largely wiped out by Jesus. And the afterlife, which received barely a nod or description in the Torah, becomes a focal point of the New Testament, which lays out an everlasting Heaven in glorious detail. The gospels and epistles also introduced the doctrine of the Trinity, which was never referenced in the OT, and which in fact stands in sharp contrast to the overarching theme of that work – that there is one omnipotent, all-powerful, controlling god who gets riled by the notion of usurpers or contenders to his throne.  

The explanation for contradictions that I am most open to is translation errors. The Bible has been copied into many languages and each scribe has been encumbered with his own experiences, biases, and shortcomings. In fact, it would be stunning if there were no contradictions in a voluminous work patched together by dozens of writers over several hundred years. A seamless final effort could be a sign of divine authorship or at least extremely tight refinement and editing.

Now onto some other arguments I find less persuasive. Some believers have described the scriptures as a continuing revelation of God to Mankind. The deity refrained from revealing his full knowledge at the outset, but whenever he said anything, it was true. Some say this progressive revelation continues today.

That’s why Latter-Day Saints leaders keep coming up with new stuff, as do organizations ranging from upstart cults to the Catholic Church. In the 19^th Century, a revelation from God to Mormon leaders decreed that marriage between races be forever forbidden. A later revelation cancelled that prohibition, and in this ever-changing system, the anti-miscegenation dictate could again be pronounced.

A major issue with the progressive revelation explanation is that it comes from persons who demand scriptural support for other positions, particularly iconoclastic ones. And there is no biblical verse which states God’s handiwork is ongoing, which suggests the Ten Commandments were a rough draft, or that scriptures were ever incomplete.

Another argument is that God delivered what folks were ready for, so people in different times and cultures would get told what they needed to hear. Again, this is not Biblical, which should matter if one is zealously defending the Bible. The likes of Ken Ham and Bryan Fischer regularly gloat that the Bible never changes, yet we see many instances of that, including verses involving key messages and doctrinal issues, such as the afterlife, how one gets there, and whether there is one form of God or three.

The most frequent answer is that Jesus is the key, but why would he be the stopping point? What negates later revelations to Mohammed, Joseph Smith, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, and many lesser-known cultists and charismatics? The next-to-last verse in the Bible, Revelation 22:19, reads, “If anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City.” Yet its placement near the end was merely the way the final product was arranged; Biblical books II Peter, Titus, and I and II Timothy were penned after this warning in Revelation.

Blogger Bob Seidensticker noted that after the Bible was complete, “there were doctrinal inventions from 21 ecumenical councils,” which took place from 325 CE to 1965. Besides this, there were “many schisms within the Christian church,” to the point of having 37 varieties of Baptist.   

If the Bible were complete and unambiguous, these later interpretations would have been unnecessary and divisions among those genuinely seeking godly knowledge would not have taken place. A perfect, unchanging text would require no adaptations, interpretation, or explanation.

When it comes to the conflict between science and religion, I argue that, on linguistic grounds, there is none. That’s because a conflict indicates there are two hostile parties. Yet here, the assault is unilateral. No biologists are trying to force churches to teach evolutionary science. No cosmologists are calling for equal time in Sunday School class. By contrast, some activists with a religious agenda make unceasing attempts to foist mandatory creationism and Bible study classes onto public education students.

A second reason why there is, in a strict sense, no conflict is because science and religion are concerned with separate questions. Religion concentrates on rituals, dogma, and attempts to solve moral dilemmas.

As to science, it is a process that attempts to explain the natural world and those who inhabit it by following this method: 1. Define the question; 2. Develop a hypothesis; 3. Make a prediction; 4. Test that prediction; 5. Analyze the results using proper statistics; 6. Attempt to replicate findings; 7. Submit findings for peer review; 8. Share data. The process doesn’t end there, as other scientists use the same method to further test if the conclusions are sound or mistaken.

Religion has its literal sacred cows, while there are no figurative ones in science. The field goes where the evidence leads and positions its thinking accordingly. University of Chicago biology professor emeritus Jerry Coyne writes that, “Religion adjudicates truth not empirically, but via dogma, scripture and authority – in other words, through faith, defined in Hebrews 11 as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ In science, faith without evidence is a vice, while in religion it’s a virtue.”

One problem with relying on faith is that different religions make competing claims. Without witnessing the claims in action, without examining them, without testing them, without experimenting on them, and without utilizing the Scientific Method, it’s impossible to assess their validity.

There are up to 4,200 religions to choose from, and these are forever dividing like cells that some of those religions are probably denying the existence of. There are 37 varieties of Baptist and more than 100 offshoots of Mormonism, which itself an iconoclastic take on Christianity. Judaism ranges from the ultraorthodox, whose adherents hold dim views of gays, women, and other religions, all the way to reform denominations, which emphasize individual autonomy, pluralism, and evolved ethics, and which reject strict beliefs and practices. In between those extremes are orthodox, conservative, and liberal Jews, with each of these categories being broken down to even more specific strains.

Likewise, there are many schools of Buddhism, from saffron-robed, shaven-headed monks who believe in assorted deities and the power of prayer, to Phil Jackson’s form of Zen, which is little more than a leadership and success philosophy served with a side dish of meditation. The massive problem, then, with deciding things on faith is that one has to presuppose that their specific religious view – which they likely were instructed from preschool to adopt – is the correct one.

Yet, no religion has proven or disproven the existence of any god, goddess, demigod, angel, demon, miracle, or fulfilled prophecy. Coyne asks, “How many gods are there? What are their natures and moral creeds? Is there an afterlife? Why is there moral and physical evil? There is no one answer to any of these questions. All is mystery, for all rests on faith.”

Meanwhile, were it not for successful employment of the Scientific Method, you would not be reading this right now. Science has also yielded benefits in the form of medicine, food quality, safety, transportation, and so much more.

Still, some persons chide science for previous errors, but this is to misunderstand the scientific process. It is a means of continually questioning its findings, trying to disprove itself, with an end goal of increasing our knowledge of how things work. It is a self-correcting process. These detractors might, as one example, belittle science for once thinking that asbestos was safe. But these folks are inadvertently admitting that science works because it was through the trial-and-error method which defines the field that we came to know asbestos is dangerous.

Additionally, admitting errors and adjusting a position as justified by the evidence is admirable. That’s a much better response than being proudly stationary and unbending, and remaining incapable of being moved by any evidence, reason, or persuasion.

While some on a religious bent criticize science, they are selective in this derision, as they will latch onto a point if it seems to further their religion. Science blogger Bob Seidensticker told the story of Catholic priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître, who suggested that the universe is expanding and formulated what became the Big Bang theory. When strong evidence for the Big Bang emerged, Pope Pius VII noted Lemaître’s Catholicism and declared the Big Bang to be affirmation of Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light.”

Lemaître responded by calling it a poor strategy for Christians to intermingle science and religion. Because to be consistent, they would also have to embrace science when it contradicted their faith. Such as what happens when one considers the geologic column in light if Genesis, which if taken literally, teaches that fully-formed animals were spoken into existence in their present form 5,000 years ago.

The Dalai Lama said if science and Buddhism collide, you have to go with the science. From the reasonable, supple positions of Lemaître and the Dalai Lama, we venture 180 degrees to find Christian apologists such as Ken Ham, William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, and Frank Turek. Cosmic background radiation and the amount of light elements provide strong evidence for the universe being 13.4 billion years old, yet even that amount of time would be insufficient for Ham to make the same concession about his religion that the Dalai Lama made with Buddhism.

Ham and the rest have zero interest in the truth and are only interested in furthering an agenda. As Seidensticker noted, “The last thing they would do is say, ‘If you show my scientific claims to be false, then I will no longer believe.”  Ham admitted as much in his debate with Bill Nye. They arrive at their conclusion first, seek out confirmatory evidence, and dismiss anything that disproves their idea.

Craig, Strobel, and Turek are not submitting work for peer review, are not increasing our understanding of the natural world, and are not collaborating on papers with biologists, astrophysicists, and chemists. Instead, they pose questions that might make for intriguing parlor games, but whose answers rely not on experiment or evidence, but on faith.

One example would be the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The gist of this logic is: 1. Whatever begins to exist had a cause; 2. The universe began to exist; 3. Therefore, the universe had a cause; 4. The god I believe in was that cause. Other instances are the fine tuning and design arguments, which assume things could only have turned out this way if given a supernatural boost. This is the begging the question fallacy and fails to satisfy even the first step in the Scientific Method. It neglects to even define the question and jumps to the conclusion that the Christian god did it.

The earliest humans invented and rationalized supernatural beings as a way of trying to explain the world around them. It provided a handy answer for wind, lightning, and natural disasters. Later, it might have been used to answer why there was disease, death, or misfortune visited on a tribe or village. As science explained more, there was less need for a deity, and gods were relegated to increasingly-shrinking gaps. Religious believers still issue challenges as to how the first living being came to be or how humans acquired a sense of right or wrong. They insist that if science has yet to find the solution, the challenger’s favored god must be squeezed into the equation. So far, however, neither magic nor the supernatural has ever proven to be the answer.

Since Intelligent Design is not testable, falsifiable, or provable, it has no place in science class. It would be OK for philosophy course, but even then the idea withers under scrutiny.  While the body has some amazing attributes, its numerous flaws speak against the notion of it having been designed by a flawless, all-knowing, all-powerful being. However, our bodies make sense when one considers the limits and misfires of evolution.

The SkepDoc, Harriet Hall, wrote that examples of a lack of design in humans would include backward retinas, tail stump remnants, and an inability to naturally produce needed vitamins and minerals.  

Most Young Earth Creationists accept what they call microevolution, or minuscule changes within a species. This might include fur becoming darker so the animal can blend into brush to escape a predator. But an intelligent designer creating flawless masterpieces should produce flora and fauna that never require any change.

However, we do change and are mostly the better for it, but it hasn’t always gone well and there have been some evolutionary errors. This is to be expected in an ongoing, imperfect cycle of random mutation and natural selection. These defects come in three types: Characteristics that developed in our distant ancestors as they fought to survive in a prehistoric world much different from the one we occupy; incomplete adaptations, such as the knee being ill-suited to our bipedal stride; and shortcomings that are constrained by evolution’s limits. For example, we have inherited structures that are inefficient but will never be re-designed through random mutation. Or as Hall put it, “No robot arm will ever be designed to imitate our nonsensical bone structure.”

And it’s not just arms that are the issue. There exists a great meme of Ken Ham calling the eye a perfect organ created by a perfect designer – said while Ham is wearing glasses. The only thing Ham and I have in common is that we use eyewear, as do one-third of Westerners and a whopping 75 percent of Asians. This would never happen with perfect design, to say nothing of those who are born blind or become so through congenital defects.  

Meanwhile, the eye’s facial neighbor, the nose, contains nasal sinuses that drain up instead of down.  Not only does this fail to take advantage of natural gravity, it leaves us move vulnerable to colds and sinus infections than other mammals, whose sinuses run the other way. Then there’s the question of why illness would exist at all in a world created by a benevolent being incapable of error.

But with evolution, this again makes sense. Biology professor Nathan Lents explains, “Evolution cares little about the individuals who will die of cancer. This is a sacrifice worth making for the diversity that comes from mutations.” Hall adds, “If a mutation causes harm late in life after the individual has reproduced, such as in Huntington’s disease, natural selection is powerless to stop it.”

Moving down to the throat, the windpipe’s positioning opens the possibility of choking to death through accidental inhalation of food. An intelligent designer would place the path to the lungs and the path to the stomach in separate compartments.

Hall wrote about another throat feature that belies intelligent design: “Our recurrent laryngeal nerve loops under the aorta, following a circuitous path that is more than three times as long as it needs to be. The error originated in fish, which don’t have necks and have a circulatory system very different from that of humans.” Again, this would never happen with intelligent design but can be seen as the result of man and fish having common ancestors.

Those are some flaws in our bodies, now consider what we have to put in it and how that also discredits ID. Unlike most animals, humans are incapable of making nutrients that our diets lack.  To maintain optimal health, we need to eat a varied diet to provide vitamins and micronutrients because we are incapable of producing them internally.  

But that eating often does us in. In the wild, one never sees a fat feline, obese ostrich, or rotund rabbit. But some humans overeat to the point of obesity and this is partly the result of the evolutionary drive to stuff ourselves in order to offset the long stretches of being unable to successfully forage or hunt. So if all this has been produced by an intelligent designer, that creator is also getting in a cruel joke at our expense.