Brad Harrub Presentations - Part 1

Hi all

Apologies that it's a bit (i.e a LOT) delayed but here is my summary of Brad Harrub's presentations on young earth creationism given in Palmerston North on the 20th-23rd April 2008. Dwayne Bryant (unsure of spelling), a colleague of Harrub's, also presented over the four nights but his discussion mostly focused on painting atheists in a bad light and such arguments don't merit much response - even if he could demonstrate atheists were the worst people in the world, correlation does not equal causality and the nature of the person who states an opinion has no bearing on it's truth. As it happened he failed completely to demonstrate atheists are any worse (or better) than Christians so the point is irrelevant.

This post covers the first night. The others will follow hopefully fairly quickly.

Night 1: The Evidence for Evolution

Harrub opens with a clear indication of where the rest of this presentation is going by stating:

“If atheists are correct then man is merely a product of evolution. If their religion, if their belief system is true then the only reason that you and I are really here is by chance, by accident, by the right lucky combination of gene mutations. And that leaves us with only two options: Either man was created by god or man is the product of evolution and we imagined god.”

This is precisely the kind of statement that starts things on the wrong foot. Clearly Harrub sees god as being true unless science's view is true and he presents this false dichotomy in several different ways. In fact the entire argument over all four nights rests on the notion that if evolution is false then what he believes is true. This kind of thinking is obviously weak, and it is telling that there was no attempt by Harrub to offer positive evidence for this alternative view. Having said that the audience was mostly sympathetic so perhaps leaving that out was fair enough.

Anyway the bulk of the first night was dedicated to deconstructing the evidence for 28 million years of hominid evolution starting from Aegyptopithecus Zeuxis through to the more recent ancestors like Homo Habilus based on a hominid evolutionary path which he presented and discussed in detail. There were two basic points made through the night:

The first point was that there are not enough fossils to make the conclusions that have been made. Harrub made the point repeatedly that only teeth of some species or only fragments of others had been found. While it is true that we don't have billions of hominid fossils to draw on, one has to remember it only takes one to disprove evolution. As it happens all the fossils found pretty much square up with the predictions of evolution - and even if the details are hazy, they certainly don't show details that disprove it. Also in my opinion he tended to underestimate the ability of science to make inferences from fairly limited data. A lot can be learnt from a single tooth (and the context it was found) and much more from jaw bones and leg bones. It is over simplifying it saying "it was just a leg bone" and dismissing any inferences that followed.

The second point he makes, building on the first, is that in the evolutionary path, the first 3-4 species were clearly apes, the next 3-4 were clearly humans. Seemingly unwittingly he makes one of the strongest cases for evolution in an attempt to discredit it. His point is that the early fossils are all apes, and the latter ones are all humans, so no evolution occurred and there are no transitional fossil. He conveniently forgets to mention two key factors. Firstly evolution predicts that there should be a distinction between human-like and ape-like species over time (which will of course vary depending on how you define "ape-like"). If evolution is true then there shouldn't be any hominids that appear early in the record and that is exactly what we see, and exactly what he said. Secondly each of the species mentioned does show changing traits in a remarkably linear fashion, a transitional fashion one might say.

Harrub also makes an interesting point near the end of his first presentation which turns out to be a recurring theme.

"When you truly evaluate the scientific evidence you realise that the theory of evolution, folks, it can't explain how life came from non-life. It can't explain the origin of the original matter of the universe, it can't explain the design that we find in nature. But there is a theory that can and that would be the creation model."

And that is the crux of the nights discussion - the remarkably fallacious argument that if I can poke holes in the evolutionary theory, that my theory of creationism is true. This might have some credibility if either the dichotomy was real (it isn't) or if he succeeded in falsifying evolution (he didn't) but as it is, it was an argument devoid of a solid foundation of logic.

In the conclusions of the presentation we get offered this gem:

"At what point along that tree that we just looked at, did god finally look down and give man a soul? Because folks, each and every person in this room has one."

So to summarise, he spent the whole night talking about how evolution is not based on real evidence and then makes a categoric statement about something that has infinitely less (i.e. zero) evidence as if it was further proof he was right? I suspect the irony was lost on most of the audience :)

Part 2 coming...