Archy goes to the Creation Expo.

Every year the local creationists hold an expo here in Indiana. I have always ignored it before, but this year, Louise (@Spa_yediMonster), asked me to go and sweated the deal with an archaeologist who likes to show archaeological evidence to prove creationism is real. Sold!

I suppose I should disclose here that I had no clue what creationism taught before going to this. I was interested to see what they offered as evidence, and I brought along some of my past research in anticipation of what I thought would be the evidence. Man was I wrong.

So after getting lost trying to find the place, I found a seat beside Louise (who wrote her own account here) and Nathan. They had sat through most of the opening sermon by a gentleman I later found out was one of the founders of the Creationist movement, Dr. John Whitcomb.

Dr. Whitcomb was a decent speaker, I won’t begrudge him that. He knew his bible, but it was more like sitting in church again then being at a conference or expo. All I really took away from this was the group’s desperate need to be special and important and to be rewarded with fame, glory, and riches in life and in death (things he said). The big thing that I noticed when he talked was that he jumped around the whole bible, picking and choosing single lines and re-weaving them together to make points. Everything was way out of context.

After the sermon, because I refuse to call it anything else, there was a few rousing hymnals and then the speaker I had come to see, Dr. Willie Dye Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Th.D, M.D, D.D, D.D. (no really, that’s how his name is on his business card). I admit I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was black, mainly because African Americans are massively underrepresented in the field of archaeology. I can count on one hand the number of African Americans I have worked with, and it’s always been a sore point to me. Also, I mention this because it is relevant later on.

The title of his lecture was “Separation of the Nations as Understood Through Biblical Archaeology”. I have no idea what that means. Dr. Dye opened with a bible verse and then began to talk about how the whole world was going to hell because America took the teaching of the bible out of schools in 1963. To back that up, he showed a series of slides with astronomical figures on them. Things like violence was up 995% since 1963, teen sex is up 1000%, unmarried couples living together up 530%, SAT scores have dropped 80 points, Teen pregnancy up anywhere from 300% to 553% depending on the age bracket. None of this is cite sourced, and when pressed later he couldn’t really provide any. He basically admitted to making them up, and then tried to claim they were listed on a website somewhere.

Next, he bemoaned the loss of new converts to the church. Basically, his argument broke down to “Since we can’t preach to children in school, they learn to think critically, and then they don’t believe in god.” He also made this weird blanket claim that all single parents are by nature godless, and so in order to save their children, men need to convert. I’m not really sure what this has to do with archaeology, but I don’t have a string of letters after my name either.

Finally he seemed to segway and mentioned a man named F. A. Filby who did some research and found that at some point, every continent had been underwater. This caught me a bit off guard because it was the first true thing he’d said but it seemed out of place. Fortunately, he didn’t give me long to wonder because he told us that this was evidence that the world had experienced a global flood.

First, Dr. Dye is correct, every land mass in the world has been under water at some point. Also, given enough time, every land mass in the world will be underwater again, with or without our help. This does not mean that they were all under water simultaneously, nor does the geological record support that. I’m not sure who F.A. Filby is, but he apparently has no clue how tectonic plates work or stratigraphy for that matter. Still, this was enough for Dr. Dye.

Next he went on about giant fossilized cockroaches and dragonflies with wingspans like football fields. Oh, and he was involved in digging them up. Then he talked about this idea about an Ice canopy that once surrounded the earth and when God used the heat from the Thermonuclear core of the earth to melt it, that caused the great flood, killed all the bad people, and created an atmosphere for Noah and his descendants to live in. Cause before that everything was giant, except maybe humans, and apparently didn’t need air to breath. I have a great video by the Creationist Debunker Thunderf00t to show you here that is much better at explaining why this is crazy. 

Then he rambled for a bit and I really didn’t follow much of it, but he did touch on “kinds” and that AIDS came from men having sex with monkeys. He also drug up a unique form of Afrocentrism where he managed to link black people to Noah’s cursed son Ham, and that all our great thinkers are white, and all black people are good for is athletics and music. This is apparently what he was talking about with the whole “Division of Labor” thing. He kind of broke down around here, and it became a tad overwhelming.

What I did manage to get was that until the Tower of Babel fell, the world was one super continent known as Pangaea (which is a real thing, just not like this). Pangaea was the land that got flooded, it was the same land that was settled by eight individuals, and those eight individuals went forth, had litters of babies, and repopulated the world and created all the cultures on it.

So to be clear, every complex culture that ever existed on the planet was well established BEFORE Pangaea broke up. Then man built the Tower of Babel, and the act of destroying the tower is what caused the tectonic plates to separate and shift into their current states. I really can’t begin to explain why this is crazy! However, here is a handy link to show you how the whole Pangaea thing really works and how though tectonic drift, our planet had several series of continents before the set we have now. I’m not even going to go into the impossible genetics of getting 6+ billion individuals out of 8.

When his lecture was over there was time for Q&A and Louise asked him for the sources of his statistics, and kind of not really got an answer from him. I asked him to confirm for me that he said complex culture and society existed before Pangaea broke up. I got a mini-sermon on God and man and good and evil, but no real answer. I’m not sure if he’s not sure, or if he didn’t understand me, or if he knew I had caught his lie and was challenging him with it. I really think it was the second, I don’t think this ‘Archaeologist’ knew what the terms ‘complex culture and society’ meant.

Before going to this, I had in my head all these great debates and “gotcha” moments I was going to have, but the more Dr. Dye spoke, the more it became clear to me that it didn’t matter. I could sit there all day and point out how what he is saying is not only wrong, but impossible, and it wouldn’t change a damn thing. It was depressing, and frankly scary. It made me want to reach more people with my blog and channel. I can’t help Dr. Dye. Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Ph.D, Th.D, M.D, D.D, D.D. But I might be able to reach one of the 40 people that came to hear him talk. Here’s to trying.