Our Fatal Sincerity Author's Notes: Creationist Citations

There's a place in the first chapter of Our Fatal Sincerity where I mention that I noticed people pointing out trails of bad citations in pro-creationism pieces of writing and that at the time this contributed to my rejection of creationism. My purpose in mentioning this is to show what information I was encountering at a specific point in my life and how I responded to it at the time, so even if I had later found out that my impression of the prevalence of bad citations was incorrect, I would still have talked about why I had that impression at the time and how I responded to it at the time. Nothing since that point in my life has led me to think that that impression was incorrect however, and since it relates to the topic of bad citations, I thought I should cite an example of what I'm talking about somewhere just to show that, yep, if I check this out nowadays, I still feel justified in making the same accusation.

This citation issue is not just a passing impression I had a few years ago. It's an ongoing symptom of the poor attitudes that exist within creationist circles: Accepted sources are trusted with little scrutiny, which means they get quoted without having their sources checked first, while outside sources are treated with little respect, which means they get summarized inaccurately or quoted selectively by people who assume they don't need to invest much effort in them or their chains of sources in order to understand them correctly. It's not difficult to find examples of this if you read creationist articles and then read the works they cite. I know it's not nice to say this, but I remembered from when I was doing a lot of reading about creationism and evolution that articles on the Institute for Creation Research website were particularly terrible in every way. ICR was one of the primary sources of creationist material (along with Answers in Genesis) that had so much influence on the community I grew up in, and its standards for writing were in my recollection abysmal for anything that calls itself a research institute. I seemed to remember that radiometric dating was the topic of one of those creationist articles I had read a critique of in the past, so I looked up radiometric dating on icr.org, which took me to this page at 9:42 p.m. on April 6th, 2022: https://www.icr.org/creation-radiometric/ . 

At the time, the first item in the Related Articles list on that page was a piece of writing by James J. S. Johnson called "Young Coral Reefs, Quick-Growing at Low-Sunlight Depths" (https://www.icr.org/article/young-coral-reefs-quick-growing-low-sunlight-depth/). I clicked on it and thus ended up finding an example of bad citations with precious little effort expended in the search. This article was posted June 18th, 2020, and discusses a post by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on June 15th, 2020 (http://manoa.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=10716 "Surprising growth rates discovered in deepest photosynthetic corals"). 

There's all kinds of funny business going on here. For one thing, the ICR writer James Johnson implies that uranium-thorium dating, which is used to determine the age of coral reefs, is unreliable. ("But what age-estimating methodology has been used for dating the age of mesophotic coral ecosystems? The 'clock' chosen for the coral was radiometric dating, based on uranium-to-thorium decay. Secular scientists impose many questionable assumptions upon this decay process.") But he is using this UHM article to say that a scientific study shows coral reefs grow faster than previously thought, and how did the UHM researchers determine how quickly the corals they studied had grown? By measuring their ages with uranium-thorium dating. (If you actually read the UHM article, it says, "The research team used uranium-thorium radiometric dating to accurately determine the age of the coral skeletons at multiple points along its radial growth axis—much like one might determine the age of tree rings within a tree trunk.") 

But that's getting off topic. Focusing just on the quality of the citations themselves, let's examine a claim that Johnson makes. He writes, "In fact, young-earth creation scientists have, for decades, shown that coral reef formations are not a valid challenge to the chronology of the Bible. ICR Founder Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. John Whitcombe cited a study 'that found 20 centimeters of coral growth in 5 years.'" (This is also not nice to point out, but he even misspelled Whitcomb's name, which is only so frustrating because it doesn't feel like just a typo when it's paired with so many other signs of carelessness.) It's bad enough that the evidence given to prove creationists have "shown" coral reefs to be young is just that Morris and Whitcomb cited some unnamed study, but let's look at the reference for this quoted figure of 20 centimeters in 5 years. If these numbers "show" that all coral reefs are young, that must mean not just that someone referenced them at some point in the past but that we still have good reason to think this figure was accurate, interpreted correctly, and applied appropriately. 

The source Johnson cites for the figure is just another ICR article, this one posted on January 28th, 2011. It's called "50-Year Study Shows Coral 'Clocks' Unreliable" and was written by Brian Thomas (https://www.icr.org/article/a-50-year-study-shows-coral-clocks-unreliable). The part of Thomas's article that Johnson refers to is, "[...] corals can grow extraordinarily fast in the absence of disease and with slightly warmer water and a gradually subsiding ocean floor to keep the coral near to light. Drs. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris noted this in 1961, citing a study that found 20 centimeters of coral reef growth in five years. They wrote, 'This rate of growth could certainly account for most of the coral reef depths around the world even during the few thousand years since the Deluge.'" So, not only did Johnson not go back to the study his figure came from, but he didn't even go back to the work of Morris and Whitcomb. He saw that Thomas said that Morris said that some still unnamed study said something, and he repeated it.

What is Thomas's source for the 20 centimeters in 5 years figure? Morris and Whitcomb's 1961 book The Genesis Flood, page 408 (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing). Note that the figure being used is at least 60 years removed from our starting point based on this. It had better turn out to be something of unimpeachable quality to justify choosing it over a more recent study that actually comes with a name and a list of people involved in it. 

For the sake of transparency, I confess that I did not obtain a physical copy of The Genesis Flood. Instead I previewed page 408 on Amazon. On that page Morris and Whitcomb write, “Little has been discovered of the growth rate of reefs by direct measurement. Sluiter found that a new reef established in Krakatau after the eruption of 1883 had grown to a thickness of 20 cm. in 5 years, or 4 cm. per year. Other investigators have estimated reef growth at 0.1 to 5 cm. per year.” 

So... presumably the figure used dates back to 1888? (Actually it appears to come from a source I've seen cited as (author) Sluiter CP. (article) Einiges über die Entstehung der Korallenriffe in der Javasee und Branntweinsbai, und über neue Korallen-bildung bei Krakatau. (journal) Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indie. (year) 1890; (issue) 49. I haven't read this source myself to determine which year the data was gathered, so I can't say precisely whether the figure ends up being 130, 131, or 132 years removed from our starting point. If I were writing something to provide information about coral reefs, I would not cite this source since I don't have it in a language I read and therefore couldn't feel confident that I was representing it correctly.) But guess what? I'm not the only one who hasn't read Sluiter. Morris and Whitcomb's citation for this figure comes not from the work of this Sluiter fellow they've mentioned out of the blue but from page 421 of a book called Marine Geology by Ph. H. Kuenen (New York, Wiley, 1950). 

I also previewed the relevant page of this book and found that Morris and Whitcomb appear to have copied from it word for word. It says, "Little has been discovered of the growth rate of reefs by direct measurement. Sluiter found that a new reef established on Krakatau after the eruption of 1883 had grown to a thickness of 20 cm in 5 years, or 4 cm per year. Other investigators have estimated reef growth at 0.1 to 5 cm per year." They also appear to have ignored the point this author was trying to make by only plagiarizing the most favorable sentences on the page. Beginning with the very next sentence after the ones that were copied into The Genesis Flood, Kuenen says, "In general, the higher of these figures applies to favorable conditions and probably does not take account of the openwork structure of the branching colonies. Though the general surface may rise a considerable amount in a few years from a massive substratum at a given locality, the upbuilding of the compact rock mass is a much slower process, as pointed out above. The present writer is therefore inclined to put the average for a whole reef and for a longer period at considerably lower than 1 cm per year.” 

Morris and Whitcomb grabbed a number that suited them without caring that they either could not obtain or did not make an effort to obtain a translation of the original source and with no regard for the fact that this figure was used as an example of an atypical case in the source they did have access to. Their devotees then followed their lead by continuing to cite the figure with no effort to go back to its origin or understand what it actually means in the context of the body of scholarship on the age of coral reefs. 

It was way, way too easy to just pull out on an example of lazy citation like this, which shows why I still feel completely justified in my low opinion of the culture fostered at creationism-focused organizations. I know that bad citations can happen anywhere, even in carefully edited academic publications, and even by authors who try their hardest to avoid them. Everyone sometimes overlooks something or doesn't see in the moment how selective they've been in choosing information that supports their view. In creationist materials the occurrence is just too common and consistent to be written off as an occasional mistake, as this example even shows within itself: We are not looking at one isolated instance of an author cherry-picking a favorable number that was a bit of an outlier. What we have here is a chain of three acts of blatant negligence. Morris and Whitcomb, without even going back to an original source, misused a figure, and then two subsequent writers simply repeated what was said without going back to its origins. 

Bonus Note: I was taught at the Christian junior high I attended to write papers like this in favor of creationism too. One of my science teachers told me a paper I had written was one of the best defenses of creationism by a student he had read, and it was all this sort of thing--just finding statistics and factoids that I could talk about in a way that made them sound like they proved something. I wonder, if I still had a copy of it and could go back through it, how many of the things I referenced would even turn out to be accurate. At the time, I didn't feel like I was making anything up or twisting anything because I held the view I had been diligently taught: that the world was chock full of obvious proofs of creationism that most people willfully overlooked, so when I turned any bit of information I could into a creationist argument with minimal understanding of its wider context, I thought I was just pointing out facts so clear they barely needed an explanation.

For an example of someone critiquing many of the types of arguments I was taught in school (not specifically for citation issues, just for quality of information) check out this blog post: https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/stan-2-2/.