FaithShatters: ABC Takes an Ill-Informed Whack at Creationists

What would Holy Week be without a Big Media attack on religious faith?

Two days before Good Friday, ABC's Nightline ran a segment dripping with contempt for the views of two Biblical creationists leading an anti-evolution tour through the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Introducing a segment of the Nightline series “FaithMatters,” anchor Terry Moran noted a Gallup survey finding that the country is divided equally between people who believe in evolution and people who believe in creation.  Moran continued by warning, “But one bastion for evolution's advocates has always been the museum, where science reigns. Well, a group of Christians has now invaded the hallowed halls of fossils and prehistoric artifacts to challenge evolution on its own turf, and make a school kid's field trip out of it.”

Reporter Brian Rooney devoted himself to refuting and marginalizing the views of Bill Jack and Rusty Carter, tour guides for B.C. Tours.  “Biblically Correct” Tours is a Colorado-based ministry that teaches creationism in tours examining evidence found in museums, zoos and nature. 

Rooney attacked creationism from a number of angles:

They are what's called young earth creationists. Earth is only 6 to 10,000 years old, not the 4 1/2 billion estimated by science.  

Their time line for their 6,000-year history is a little hazy.

They say Adam and Eve walked the earth with dinosaurs.

They say that Tyrannosaurus Rex, with those enormous ripping teeth, was designed to eat . . . vegetables.

They point to all those bones and fossils in the museum. Probably the product of Noah's flood. They dismiss many exhibits as artwork, not science.

Why are human and dinosaur remains not found in the same sedimentary layers?

To them, science that does not support their faith is not good science.

Rooney brought in museum curator Kirk Johnson to contribute a few expert attacks on creationism:

They're misrepresenting science in a fairly dramatic way.

Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.

They walk through the exhibit knowing already that the world is 6,000 years old, knowing already that all life was created by a creator and so they have to force fit all science into a pre-existing dogma.

Darwin's theory of evolution, of course, is full of dogmas of its own, which rarely are questioned by the liberal media.  Rooney's story would have been much more interesting, and a bit less predictable, had he challenged evolutionist Johnson to answer some of the points raised by Jack and Carter during the tour.  For example, where did physical matter come from in the first place?

Jack dismissed a museum drawing purportedly illustrating the evolutionary development of fish from small, simple forms to large, complex forms as a “fairy tale.”  Jack exhorted the kids on the tour, “How do they know your teeth evolved from scales?  You have to ask that question.  How do you know?”

Jack's point touches on one of the greatest weaknesses of evolutionary theory, the absence of “transitional forms” in the fossil record.  If Darwin was correct, the fossil record of any given species should show gradual development from one form to another to another, with numerous intermediate stages between forms.  However, the fossil record has not provided a single example of a species that changed into a substantially different form.  A saber-toothed tiger appears in the fossil record as a fully developed saber-toothed tiger.  Its fangs may grow a bit longer or shorter, but when it disappears from history, it's still a saber-toothed tiger. 

Brian Fitzpatrick is senior writer at the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the MediaResearchCenter.