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The following paper is reproduced with the permission of the author
and the journal. It was originally published in 1996 as: Groves, C.
1996 From Ussher to Slusher, from Archbish to Gish: or, not in a
million years... Archaeology in Oceania 31(1996) 145-151. Copyright
statement is provided at the bottom of the page.

From Ussher to Slusher, from Archbish to Gish: or, not in a million
years...

COLIN GROVES

Abstract

Attempts to construct Biblical-based chronologies of the earth, life
and humanity are reviewed. There are both pre-evolutionary attempts,
such as that by Archbishop Ussher, and modern ones, by the 'creation
science' movement, led by Dr Gish. The models constructed by the
Archbishop and his contemporaries were excusable; the present-day ones
are constructed not in ignorance of modern advances in geology,
palaeontology and archaeology but despite them, and involve contrived
arguments intended to refute them. Resulting world-views can be richly
comic, but their purpose in overturning accepted ways of gaining
knowledge is to control science, the arts and humanities, and so to
exert control over politics and human minds. As such they should be
taken seriously and strenuously combated by the archaeological
profession, rather than ignored as is the usual practice.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Cambrian explosion' began 590
million years ago. About 65 million years ago, an asteroid may have
crashed into the earth off Yucatan, and blotted out the sun for a
while and the dinosaurs for ever. Meanwhile living organisms were
changing and diversifying over the long eons, culminating in the
appearance of animals we might designate as 'human' about 2 million
years ago, and of people indistinguishable from ourselves something
over 100,000 years ago. As for Australia, people burst upon this
unsuspecting continent a few tens of thousands of years ago.

This much we know from the accumulated efforts of about 200 years of
modern scientific endeavour; cosmology, geology, geophysics,
palaeontology, biology, anthropology and archaeology all tell the same
story. Because essentially it is part of a package, we can lump it all
together under the heading of the Theory of Evolution. (One can of
course accept the concept of 'deep time' without accepting biological
change, but this so-called 'progressive creation' is a rare belief,
and I will ignore it here). It has been built up in the way all
scientific advances are made, namely hypothesis testing: observations
are made, inductive inferences are drawn, hypotheses are proposed,
predictions are made from the hypotheses, and if the predictions are
found not to accord with reality the hypotheses are rejected. In the
same way as an apple fell on Newton's head, he made an inductive leap,
and he and his successors tested his conclusions, so Hutton proposed
the concept of 'deep time' and Lamarck the concept of biological
evolution, and the resultant Theory of Evolution too has been tested
and, in the absence of any falsification, has achieved that enviable
status, a Robust (or Highly Corroborated) Theory. And, make no
mistake, it is very easily tested: a single out-of-place fossil - say,
a human skeleton in Mesozoic deposits (under unimpeachable geological
conditions) - would throw the whole package into disarray.

Well, that's what we think, anyway, and I cannot name a single
professional scientist who disagrees. Yet a vast proportion of the
world's population - among them a few, a very few, who really do
possess advanced scientific credentials (and many more who claim to,
but do not) - does disagree. These people will, when pressed, admit to
an untroubled acceptance of a whole slew of Robust Theories in
science: they avoid stepping over cliffs for fear of the Theory of
Gravitation; they don rubber gloves in the presence of a naked wire,
in acknowlegement of the Theory of Electromagnetism; they douse their
fish and chips in vincuar rather than nitric acid, in deference to the
Theory of Valency. The Theory of Evolution is no more, no less, robust
than other scientific theories, so why is there such an outcry in
places like Alabama when it is mentioned in school textbooks? Why does
just this Theory, and no other, generate such hostility?

The answer is, of course, that it flatly contradicts the story told in
Genesis, the first book of the Torah (or Pentateuch), the scripture
which stands at the base of the three great monotheistic religions.
While it may be true that Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians
seem to have no problems with this, many of their followers have a
desperate need to affirm the very letter of the sacred writings. In
response to this, a most peculiar pseudo-intellectual school has
arisen, called 'Creation Science'. The name is an oxymoron in the same
way as Floating-free-in-the-air Science',
'Infinite-divisibility-of-the-elements Science' or 'Phlogiston
Science' would be, but the leaders of the school, the 'creation
scientists', are easily able to persuade their followers, the ordinary
creationists, hungry for certainty in a world of change, that it
really is a valid science, that when properly interpreted the
geological column speaks not of millions of years but of 6000 to
10,000, and that the fossil record cries out not 'evolution' but
'Noah's flood'.

These are the main tenets of modern creationism, but I suppose it all
really started nearly 350 years ago with the ingenuity of one man, the
only one really who had any excuse: the Archbish Ussher.

Ussher's chronology

There is a considerable amount of misinformation circulating about the
dicta of James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh and
Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, arid his contemporary the
Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, John Lightfoot (1602-1675);
despite the enlightening literary research of Brice (1982), the
misconceptions persist, copied from one source to the next.

Lightfoot, not Ussher, came first. In 1644 Lightfoot wrote that 'Man
was created by the Trinity about the third hour of the day, or nine of
the clock in the morning'; two years later he added that this was in
September, at the autumnal equinox, and, by counting back the ages at
which the personages in the Bible had given birth, that Christ was
born 3928 years after the creation.

The idea of an approximately 6000-year history of the earth was
already around: thus Brice (1982) draws attention to a passage from
Shakespeare's As You Like It (Act 4. Scene I): 'The poor world is
almost six thousand years old'. What Ussher wrote in 1650 (in Latin:
English edition, 1658) was simply this: the Bible says that the death
of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, occurred 3442 years after the
creation of the world; history records that he died in 562 B.C.; 3442
plus 562 equals 4004, so that's when the creation happened. In that
year, the Sunday nearest to the autumnal equinox (from Lightfoot's
calculation) was October 23rd. From all this he deduced that the
creation of Heaven and Earth 'fell upon the entrance of the night
preceding the twenty-third day of October in the year of the Julian
calendar, 710', which was, of course, a Sunday.

The year 710 of the Julian calendar? The reader would be quite
justified in asking how Ussher could have calculated all this without
once asking where those lost 710 years could have got to!

For Ussher, it was important to establish the date not only of the
creation but also of Noah's Flood. He knew of four different
calculations for the time between the Creation and the Flood: the
Hebrew text (1656 years), the Samaritan pentateuch (1307 years), the
Septuagint version (2242 years), and an Ethiopian text (2262 years);
as might be expected, he pronounced the Hebrew text most re1iable.

Note a slight discrepancy here. The flood would, according to Ussher's
chronology, have been in the year 2348 B.C.; putting his creation date
of 4004 B.C. together with Lightfoot's calculation of the date of
Christ's birth - 3928 years after the creation, see above - we reach
the conclusion that Christ was born in 76 B.C. Oops.

It was Ussher's calculations, not Lightfoot's that became standard.
His dates for events were printed in many standard editions of the
Bible right into the present century.

Ussher brought up to date

The era of modern creationism may be said to have begun with the
publication of Whitcomb and Morris's (1961) The Genesis Flood, in
which they bravely approached the big stumbling-block for
anti-evolutionists: how come the geological column seems to demand a
long period of time, and the sequence of fossil organisms seems to
argue for evolution? The answer: Noah's flood. Was not the entire
earth covered with water in under a year, and does not rapidly-flowing
water move huge amounts of sediments? So that, ladies and gentlemen,
is why the geological column is miles thick. Do not mammals have
bigger brains than other animals, and do not bigger brains enable you
to see catastrophes coming and avoid them? Thus, dear reader, we find
mammals only at the top of the geological sequence - they had run to
higher ground to escape the rising flood waters. (Question: are
flowering plants more intelligent than ferns and cycads?).

While the reaction of scientists to this scenario has been less than
complimentary, for Biblical literalists this was what one might call a
godsend: it offered a wonderful series of excuses for the apparent
failure of the Book of Genesis to accord with reality. Nothing that
one might be tempted to call actual evidence for their view, of course
that remained for Whitcomb and Morris's successors.

John C.Whitcomb was a Biblical scholar, known among other things for a
book (Whitcomb, 1959) in which he made a valiant attempt, flying in
the face of all the evidence, to construct a personage from thin air
to help the Book of Daniel avoid the charge that it got its history
wrong when it wrote of the exploits of one Darius the Mede. He does
not appear to have involved himself in 'creation science' since his
co-invention of it.

Henry M.Morris has gone on to greater things. Trained as a hydraulic
engineer, he founded and directs the Institute for Creation Research
in (where else?) San Diego, California, and in 1970, 1972 and 1974
wrote books in which he advanced our understanding of the history of
the universe in several startling ways. For example he suggested
(Morris 1972:62) that God may have created starlight, on its way to
earth, before he created the stars themselves, thereby accounting both
for the fact that light was created on the first day but the stars
(including the sun) not until the fourth, and that there are stars
that are millions of light years away yet the millions of years needed
for their light to reach us did not exist. He was inclined to favour
the view that 'the stars may actually participate in human battles...
Certainly the physical stars as such can have no effect on the earth,
but the evil spirits connected with them are not so limited' (Morris
1972:66~7). He has also been able to track down the ultimate origin of
the evolutionary model: '...the entire monstrous complex was revealed
to Nimrod at Babylon by demonic influences, perhaps by Satan himself'
(Morris 1974:74).

Morris's understanding of what science involves had already been
clearly stated (Morris 1970:33): 'No geological difficulties, real or
imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements
and necessary inferences of Scripture'. This is in fact the
underpinning of the entire 'creation science' movement, though its
proponents are rarely that honest.

If the founder of 'creation science' was Henry Morris, one of the
earliest catalogues of supposedly scientific arguments in support was
provided by Harold Slusher, who holds doctoral degrees - but from
institutions which are not, in fact, accredited universities
(Bridgstock, 1986). The mainstay of the movement at the present time,
or until recently anyway, is Duane Gish, who with a genuine PhD in
biochemistry is one of the few 'creation scientists' who has worked as
a professional scientist, though he does not now. These three are all
American. In Australia we have another trained scientist, Andrew
Snelling, who holds a PhD in geology; also the author of the most
complete, and so perhaps the most bizarre, of all the creation'
models, Barry Setterfield (who lists no academic credentials after his
name).

Young earth?

A long list of arguments persuaded Slusher (1979) that the age of the
earth was better measured in thousands, not billions, of years. To a
non-specialist they sound impressive: where is the 'missing mass' of
the universe; interstellar grains are too big to have been formed by
natural accretion; why is the sky dark (Olbers' Paradox); the radius
of the curvature of space is only 5 years; there is too little
meteoric dust on the earth and the moon to have fallen in more than
8900 years; too many asteroids in the solar system; the rings of
Saturn are too young. To a cosmologist or a physicist, however, they
are less convincing: Dutch (1982), for example, shows that they are
based on ignorance. misunderstandings, unwarranted assumptions, and
selective use of the literature.

Undaunted, creationists still quote some of Slusher's arguments, and
add more. Small (undated) pamphlets by one D. Russell Rumphreys, PhD,
are commonly distributed at creationist meetings throughout Australia,
listing 15 'natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary
idea that the earth and universe are billions of years old': Galaxies
wind themselves up too fast, Comets disintegrate too quickly, Earth's
continents erode too fast., right on down to Not enough stone age
skeletons, Agriculture is too recent, and Recorded history is too
short.

The list of 'evidences' is supported by 27 references, at least 18 of
which are articles or books by creationists, Humphreys himself being
the author of two of them (on reversals of the earth's magnetic field:
which, to judge by the titles of the articles, he appears to attribute
in some manner to Noah's flood). The eclecticism of the list is
characteristic of creationist recitals of 'evidences' - picked up from
here and there, way outside the authors' fields of competence (if
any), and thrown in uncomprehendingly for the benefit of an
uncomprehending lay audience, easily wowed by science and anxious to
hear that some science does after all support their deeply held
prejudices. Examples are the last three on the list, which I will
quote directly and in full (except the sources, given in square
brackets), to give the flavour of the standard of literature searches
and what passes for logic in the average creationist tract:

13. Not enough stone age skeletons

Evolutionary anthropologists say that the Stone Age lasted for at
least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men was roughly constant, between one
million and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead
with artefacts. [Ref.: Deevey (1960)].

By this scenario, they would have buried at least four billion bodies
[Ref.: a creationist source]. If the evolutionary time-scale is
correct, buried bones should be able to last much longer than 100,000
years. So many of the supposed four billion Stone Age skeletons should
still be around (and certainly the buried artefacts). Yet only a tiny
fraction of this number has been found.

This implies that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists
think, a few hundred years in many areas.

14 Agriculture is too recent

The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and
gatherers for 100,000 years during the Stone Age before discovering
agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. [Ref.: Deevey (1960)]. Yet the
archaeological evidence shows that Stone Age men were as intelligent
as we are.

It is very improbable that none of the four billion people mentioned
on Item 13 above should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is
more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred
years, if at all. [Ref.: same creationist source as above].

[There is another 'evidence', Recorded history is too short, 
which is much the same as no.14, but asks in this case why writing
took so long to develop if there really were these 100,000 years].

I would suppose that any first-year archaeology student could show
these up for the trash they are, but just in case there is any
confusion, let me make it clear. For the first point: we do not know
what the world's population was during the Late Pleistocene, nor
whether it was constant or grew. It is very doubtful whether all
bodies were interred, with or without artefacts, even granting that
the Neandertal people really did practise burial; even in the
'ethnographic present' many are unaccounted for, and many methods of
disposal are used apart than interment. Burial certainly improves the
chances of a skeleton's survival, but soil chemistry, erosion,
scavenging and numerous other factors make the whole process far more
chancy than seems to be known to Dr Humphreys. In fact there is a
whole field of endeavour, taphonomy, devoted to the study of the
circumstances of the survival over time of bones. Finally, it does
seem a little odd that Dr Humphreys seems to expect archaeologists to
have got around to excavating most of those four billion skeletons in
the couple of centuries since the field really got going.

For the second point: archaeologists, anthropologists and human
geographers for over a century have been debating why some peoples
did, some did not, adopt agriculture; whether it is always an
unmitigated benefit; why some hunter-gatherers live alongside
agriculturalists (and know very well that plants grow from seeds) and
do not themselves choose to start cultivating. This has all passed Dr
Humphreys by; he assumes that anyone who discovers that plants grow
from seeds would at once realise the benefits of agriculture and begin
planting neat rows of wheat.

It may have occurred to readers that there are also some rather
decisive evidences for an old earth, such as radiometric dating. The
validity of radiometric dating is, indeed. obligatorily questioned in
'creation science' writings and lectures. Thus Morris (1985) claims
that radiocarbon and other methods based on radioactive decay rates
are invalid because 1. they assume that the system is closed and no
radioactive parent or daughter enters or leaves it, 2. they rely on
there being no radiogenic daughter in the system to begin with and 3.
there is no proof that the rate of decay is constant. It is as if
geophysicists plied their trade by rote, never studying their methods
and its parameters. The vast corpus of consistent dates -
dendrochronology, varves, radiocarbon, thermoluminescence, electron
spin resonance, to mention only those of archaeological importance -
is never approached in creationist writings. The big picture is never
tackled: creationists content themselves with sniping from the sides.

Meet Dr Gish

The person who is, or was, regarded by 'creation scientists' as their
most prominent activist is Dr Duane T. Gish, formerly a professional
biochemist, now Vice-President of the Institute for Creation Research.
His Evolution? The fossils say no! (1979) was the source-book for
'creation science' until its replacement by a successor in 1985 which
is, in effect, just a new edition of the 1979 book. Gish is also a
cunning and slippery orator, and in the l970s and 80s would floor
prominent 'evolutionists' in public debates, until the scientific
world realised that the issue was not really science at all, and by
meeting him on his own ground began to show him up. One of the first
to get his measure in a public debate was Ian Plimer, Professor of
Geology at Newcastle University (now at Melbourne University), in
1988.

The Gish technique, rather than tackling the substantive issues, is to
take quotes out of context from the writings of noted scientists and,
often by cutting them short or otherwise doctoring them, makes them
appear to be admitting that something is dreadfully wrong with
evolution. In his chapter on human evolution (Gish 1985:130-228),
apart from quoting many passages from authorities from the 1960s to
show that certain key transitional stages do not exist, he uses more
up-to-date ones very selectively. Thus, the late Professor Lord
Zuckerman is much quoted on how the australopithecines are merely
'apes', without giving the reader any inkling of what an isolated
position this was: where Zuckerman was coming from will be clear to
anyone who has read his autobiography (Zuckerman 1970), with its
intemperate and totally uncomprehending lashing out at anyone who
disagreed with him, on australopithecines or anything else. This is
followed by extensive quotes of the arguments for arboreal adaptations
in Australopithicus afarensis. implying that these creatures were some
sort of chimpanzee and with no in-depth analysis of the nature of
australopithecine terrestrial bipedalism.

If not the inventor of this technique, Gish was certainly the first to
use it so widely that it became virtually a substitute for actual
attempts at argument; its use can, of course, be construed as an
admission that there is no argument to be made.

Gish's star appears of late to have fallen somewhat in creationist
circles. A recent creationist book on human evolution (Lubenow 1992),
while barely mentioning Gish, puts totally opposite views to Gish's at
almost every turn. In a review (Groves 1993) I contrasted the two:
Gish, for example, dismisses the 'Java Man' and 'Peking Man' fossils
as apes or monkeys, Lubenow finds them fully human; and there are
other instances where Lubenow has evidently decided that Gish's
writings are of such low quality that they can safely be ignored.

Creationism in Australia

Belief in the literal truth of Genesis, which we are told is near to
50% of the population in the U.S.A., is around 20% in Australia: still
a disastrously high figure, but one which does give us greater
confidence in the future of science and rationality here than in
America. This figure remains relatively low despite the best efforts
of the Creation Science Foundation of Brisbane. Like the American ICR,
the Australian CSF has a proper scientist on its staff, but, unlike
ICR's Duane Gish, CSF's Andrew Snelling has a relatively recent (1980)
PhD, and in a relevant subject, too (Geology). This of course has not
prevented him putting his foot in it, as abundantly recorded, for
example, by Plimer (1994). There is also the rather curious issue of
his genuine scientific publications; thus, at the same time as he was
churning out articles for creationist magazines on how recently the
earth was created, he wrote a paper in a geological compendium
(Snelling 1990) in which he cited with quite evident approval dates in
the millions of years for the formation and alteration of the
Koongarra deposits (see especially section 'Age' [Snelling 1990:811]).
Quite interesting, too, is that the author's address in this paper is
given as 'Consulting Geologist, P.O.Box 302, Sunnybank Qld 4109', with
no indication that it is the Creation Science Foundation that owns
this box number.

Possibly the most bizarre notion that creationists have ever dreamed
up comes from Australia: the proposal by Setterfield (1981, 1983) that
the speed of light is not constant, as physicists maintain, but
started off infinite at creation and has been slowing down ever since
(or at least until about 1940), probably because of Man's Sin. Quite a
lot of inspired nonsense follows from this (Plimer 1994), and
Setterfield has gone on to construct his very own total version of
reality (see below). At first many creationists, at least in
Australia, embraced the 'decaying speed of light' enthusiastically
because of all it meant for rates of radioactive decay (and so
dating), and the length of time it takes the light from distant stars
to reach us, but there has been a noticeable cooling off lately, and
Setterfield seems now to have retreated behind the fortifications of
his own Genesis Science Research centre in South Australia.

How creationists see the world

Does 'creation science' affect archaeology at all?

The world was created about 6000-l0,000 years ago. It took six days,
and every organism was created in much the same form in which it now
exists (though not necessarily exactly identical: everything 'after
its own kind' could mean that, say, lions and tigers separated out
within the 'cat kind'). Adam and Eve, the first humans, disobeyed God
and so brought death into the world (for themselves, their
descendants, and all living things). Being perfect, they had perfect
genes, so the fact that their sons and daughters had to mate with each
other didn't cause inbreeding depression. Before the fall (or, in some
versions, until the flood) all animals were vegetarian, and leopards
lay down with lambs; afterwards, because death had been brought into
the world, they could eat each other.

After a while God decided he'd done the wrong thing by creating the
world, and destroyed it again in a global flood, bringing water down
from the sky (creationists speak of a 'vapour canopy' over the earth
before that) and from within the earth (the mysterious 'fountains of
the deep'). Only Noah and his family and a pair (or was it in some
cases seven?) of each species 'after its own kind' were saved. Most
(or, in some versions, all) of the geological column was formed by
sediments laid down in the flood. When the flood dried up the animals
all ran back to their original homelands, the koalas just managing to
reach Australia before the tigers (who weren't allowed further east
than Bali) could get them. Afterwards, Noah was mocked by his son Ham
and therefore laid a curse on Ham's son Canaan and all his
descendants.

Finally human beings built the Tower of Babel; God was frightened that
they might build it as high as heaven so he confused their languages,
perhaps by making them deaf for several years according to Taylor
(1983), and dispersed them. After that the races were formed: as Adam
and Eve were created perfect, the two of them possessed all the genes
now possessed by different races. Cultural evolution is summarised by
one creationist writer as follows:

...the culture (technology, religion, etcetera) of each racial group
in the world started at a common point - Noah! Each began with
ancestors who had a full knowledge of God and a sophisticated
ocean-liner technology. The current cultural status of the races,
which varies from Stone age to Space age, from animal worship and
spirit worship to Christianity, is not a result of innocent
ignorant people searching for improvement. It is a direct
consequence of whether the ancestors of any race worshipped the
living God or deliberately rejected him. (Ham 1983:11).
All cultures which do not have a correct knowledge of God have got
that way by the deliberate rejection of revelation (Romans
1:21-32). They are not primitives in need of education and
technical aid so that they can understand the gospel. but
spiritual degenerates in need of the gospel of the Creator Christ
so they can appreciate education and the relevance of technology.
(Ham 1984:12)

So much for geology, palaeontology, biology, genetics, anthropology,
linguistics, archaeology, racial equality, and Aboriginal rights.

But, lest there be any mistake, Barry Setterfield (the speed-of-light
man) has gone further, and has produced a glossy coloured wall poster
of world history, Creation and Catastrophe. I am not sure if the world
is really ready for this, but I will try to explain it:

World history was divided into five eras, separated by four
catastrophes. Because of the slowdown of the speed of light, so many
million atomic years equal so many hundred actual years, and lo! the
fossil ages can be equated with periods in (mainly Biblical) history.
The principles of life on earth are writ large at the top: 'All kinds
of life-forms were present originally. Each catastrophe resulted in
some extinctions. The changed conditions allowed some remaining types
to dominate'.

We begin with the creation, which was not in 4004 B.C. as you might
have thought, but 5792 B.C. equivalent to 5 billion or so atomic
years. The Archaeozoic Era came first; because of the predominance of
'warm, geologically active areas', fossils are 'mainly soft-bodied
forms' (the others were there, you see, but were just not common
enough to leave fossils). The Era ended with the Flood in 3536 B.C.

The following palaeozoic Era was humid. 50 favouring ferns, fishes and
amphibians which left lots of fossils. There are a few human traces: a
skeleton from the USA (?), footprints, a sandle, and metal artefacts,
e.g. a hammer embedded in Ordovician rock in Texas (!). It ended with
another catastrophe, causing continental drift and linked to the Babel
Dispersal (which makes the supposed occurrence of human traces in the
Americas a bit curious); this was at 230 million atomic years = actual
date 3301 B.C.

In the Mesozoic Era it was warm, dry and windy, which as everyone
knows favours dinosaurs (also 'high C [speed of light] aids
giantism'). Among the human traces were human footprints alongside
those of dinosaurs at Glen Rose, Texas (most creationists nowadays
regard these supposed human footprints with suspicion). It ended at 63
million atomic years = 3005 B.C., with the Peleg Disaster (Genesis
10:25: 'in his days was the earth divided').

The Cenozoic Era had lots of mammals, of course, and human remains in
plenty (including Africa at last); it ended at 1 million atomic years
= 2826 B.C., with Job's test, marked by vulcanism and rifting,
tsunamis, ice-ages and people taking to caves.

We are now in the Recent Period, but a catastrophe - the destruction
of Sodom, marked by tilting of the earth's axis - seems to have
occurred in the middle of it, at 2345 B.C. Not to worry, people
emerged from their caves and built pyramids ('This is not an
evolutionary trend... it is simply the recovery sequence from a series
of huge natural diasters').

What can, and should, we do?

The response of scientists (including archaeologists and
anthropologists, why not!) has been varied: apathy when creationism
does not affect them; derision when presented with writings by
'creation scientists'; outrage at news of creationist attempts to
meddle with high school curricula; nervousness when creationism
appears to impinge on their own territory. Only a few have taken a
pro-active stance, attending meetings and reading creationist writings
(thereby risking severe brain damage). It is a great mistake to ignore
the threat: it will not just go away, it must be countered.

Three books dealing with creationism from the Australian perspective
are Bridgstock & Smith (1986), a collection of short sharp responses
to creationist claims; Price (1990), which focuses on the political
agenda behind the movement; and Plimer (1994), a no-holds-barred
expose', which is also extremely funny, and I am happy to say became a
bestseller. The late Barry Price (who was hounded with legal action
even on his deathbed by creationists because of his book) was a
Catholic; and the fears of religious students that creationism might
equal the totality of the Christian religion itself will be put to
rest by Frye (1983) or Campbell (1989).

With 'creation science' there is no science, in archaeology or
anywhere else; and along with science vanish the arts, the humanities,
tolerance, and political freedom itself. Barry Price's (1990) book
(see especially chapters 12 and 13) catalogues the full horrors.
Archaeologists, anthropologists and the rest want to be free to pass
on the fruits of their research to students and the public;
creationists want to deny them that right. Students want to study and
learn what interests them; creationists would fail them in their exams
unless they toe the creationist line. Teachers want to pass on the
full excitement of modern scholarship to their students; creationists
haul them through the courts if they do. University libraries want to
stock their shelves with books and journals of the highest
intellectual quality; creationists protest this and, as a fail-safe
policy, instruct their followers exactly how best to deface volumes
with offending passages. Aboriginal people want to rediscover their
past; creationists want to take it away from them. And, armed with
creationist rhetoric appealing to 'science', religious fundamentalists
take new heart. Theatres want to put on plays and films that depict
life in its variety, and many viewpoints; fundamentalists, because
they have now been assured that ~creation science' is on their side,
take new heart in their call for censorship. Christians and
non-Christians alike want to worship, or not, in their own ways and
according to their own beliefs; creationists want them all to conform.
The constitution underwrites democracy, secularism and pluralism;
creationists demand a theocracy. The general public tend to have
little understanding of why all this is simply wrong; even though the
majority of fundamentalists are impervious to rationality, students by
and large are not, and we can hope to arm them with sufficient
understanding to avoid falling prey to creationist fantasy.
Scientists, but most especially archaeologists, are in the front line;
we, not the artists or the politicians, are the ones with ammunition
to stem the tide of creationist rubbish, and relegate it to Monty
Python's Flying Circus where it belongs.

References cited

Brice. W.R. 1982. Bishop Ussher, John Lightfoot and the Age of
Creation. Journal of Geological education, 30:1826.

Bridgstock M. 1986. 'But lots of creationists are scientists, and with
so many brilliant people on both sides shouldn't both be taught?'. In
M.Bridgstock & K.Smith, eds. Creationisin: an Australian Perspective
pp 12-13, Melbourne Australian Skeptics.

Bridgstock, M. & K.Srnith 1986. Creationism: an Australian Perspectve
. Melbourne: Australian Skeptics.

Campbell K. 1989. Some problems with creation science. St Mark's
Review, 137:12-19.

Deevey, E.S. 1960. The human population. Scientific American,
203:194-204.

Dutch, S.I.1982. A critique of creationist cosmology. Journal of
Geological Education. 30:27-33.

Frye, R.M. 1983. 15 God a Creationist? The Religious Case Against
Creation-Science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Gish. D.T. 1979. Evolution ? The fossis say no! San Diego:
Creation-Life Books.

Gish, D.T. I 9~5. Evolution: the Challenge Of the Fossil Record. San
Diego: Creation-Life Books.

Groves, C.P. 1993. Review: Post-modernism in pseudoscience: a
creationist's deconstruction of Gish. The Skeptic. 13.4:20-22.

Ham, K. 1983. The origin of the races. ExNihilo, 6, 4:6-l2.

Humphreys, D.R. nd. Evidence for a young world. Creation Science
Foundation, P.O.Box 302, Sunnybank, Qld., 4109.

Lubenow. M.L. 1992. Bones of Contention: a Creationist Assessment of
Human Fossils. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

Marshack, A. 1975. Exploring the mind of Ice Age man. National
Geographic, 147:6~89.

Morris, H.M. 1970. Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science. Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House.

Morris, H.M. 1972. The Remarkable Birth of the Planet Earth.
Minneapolis: Dimension Books.

Morris, H.M. 1974. The Troubled Waters of Evolution. San Diego:
Creation-Life Books.

Morris, H.M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. 2nd.ed. El Cajon, CA:
Master Books.

Plimer, I. 1994. Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism. Sydney:
Random House.

Price, B. I 990. The Creation Science Controversy. Sydney: Millenium
Books.

Setterfield, B. 1981, 1983. The velocity of light and the age of the
universe. Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 4, 1 :38-8 and 3:56-81.

Slusher, H.C. 1979. Age of the Cosmos. San Diego: Creation-Life Books.

Snelling, A.A. 1990. Koongarra Uranium Deposits. In RE. Hughes (ed.)
Geology of the Mineral Deposits of Australia and Paptia New Guinea,
pp.807-812.

Taylor, C. 1983. What happened at Babel? Ex Nihilo, 6, 2:20-23.

Whitcomb, J.C. 1959. Darius the Mede: the Historical Chronology of
Daniel. Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.

Whitcomb, J.C. & H.M.Morris 1961. The Genesis Flood. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Baker Book House.

Zuckerman, S. 1970. Beyond the Ivory Tower. New York: Taplinger.

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