Another Young Earth Argument: Human Civilization Too Slow

I was speaking with a nice fellow from the chemistry dept. yesterday, and we had a good talk about creationism.

He's a believer, and although he never identified himself as a YEC, he was very familiar with their arguments and seemed to doubt seriously the veracity of things like isochron dating (the classic two assumptions -- initial conditions and the closed system) and star distance measurements (he likened it to measuring the distance between two points in proximity using a gigantic ruler). He also talked about scientific foreknowledge in the Bible (also here), not so much medical, which he admitted was a poor representation, but especially the earth being round and "hung upon nothing." Of course, when people point this out, they always fail to point out that in that same book of the OT (Job) from which they quote, that many references are made to "the pillars of the earth" and implications about its flatness and "foundation" are made. They also fail to point out the poetic context of all of this.

Now another of his arguments I was unfamiliar with, and I happened to find an article this morning, completely by accident, which addresses this very issue! It was quite odd, I thought...This argument was that if modern man came out of Africa 100,000 years ago (or so), that civilization shouldn't have taken so long to form. I didn't know this was a common creationist claim, but it is in the index. Some variants on the claim are about the speed of civilization's progress, or the complexity of ancient civilizations, or that the population of earth is too low for man to have been around so long, or that civilization only goes back about 3,000 years, and thus the Bible's story is believable. By chance, this morning I found an article on sociology by noted Harvard professor Steven Pinker: "On the History of Violence" that directly touches on this.

From the article:

...These sorts of images [Stalin, Hitler] can lead us to thinking that modernity brings terrible violence. Perhaps native people lived in a state of harmony that we’ve departed from.

This, Pinker tells us, is bullshit. “Our ancestors were far more violent than we are.” We’re probably living in the most peaceful time of our species’s existence, a statement that seems almost obscene in light of Darfur and Iraq.

The decline of violence, he tells us, is a fractal phenomenon - we see it over the centuries, the decades and the years. That said, we see a tipping point in the 16th century - the age of reason - particularly in England and Holland.

Until 10,000 years ago, all humans were hunter gatherers. This is the group that some believe lived in primordial harmony - there’s no evidence of this. Studying current hunter-gatherer tribes, the percent of male adults who die in violence is extraordinary - from 20 to 60% of all males. Even during the violent 20th century, with two world wars, less than 2% of males worldwide died in warfare.

It appears that my friend's objection is based on the faulty assumption that humans have generally cooperated during their entire history, rather than acting in tribal-warfare fashion throughout. These are Pinker's explanations for why things were then as they were, and why things are now as they are:

1) Hobbes got it right. “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In anarchy, there’s a temptation towards preemptive violence, hurting the other guy before he hurts you. But with the rise of the Leviathan - the State - there’s a monopoly on violence. This helps explain why we still see violence in the absence of the state - zones of anarchy, failed states, street gangs.

2) In the past, we had a widespread sentiment that life was cheap. As we’ve gotten better at prolonging life, we take life more seriously and are more reluctant to take life.

3) We’re seeing more non-zero sum games, as people discover forms of cooperation that can benefit both parties, like trade and shared peace dividends. These zero-sum games come with technology, because it allows us to trade with more people. People become more valuable live than dead - “We shouldn’t bomb the Japanese because they built my minivan.”

4) Finally, Pinker leans on Peter Singer to speculate about “the expanding circle”. By default, we empathize with a small group of people, our friends and family. Everyone else is subhuman. But over time, we’ve seen this circle expand, from village to clan to tribe to nation to other races, both sexes and eventually other species. As we learn to expand our circles wider and wider, perhaps violence becomes increasingly unacceptable.

I sent this fellow this article, and I hope we talk again about this subject. He was quite willing to admit to most of the evidences for evolution, and to admit the difficulty in "making all the pieces fit" (evidences) for creationism, and for a young earth. He also admitted that many of these arguments are just argumentum ad ignorantium, or "god of the gaps"-style. Most sadly of all, to me, is that he had been suckered by the cronies at the Disco Institute, especially Jonathan Wells. Hopefully, our dialogues will continue, and he'll continue to develop his philosophy of science, and see these shams for what they are.
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