Geocentrism: Were Copernicus and Galileo Wrong? Creationism: Was Darwin Wrong? The 1985 National Bible-Science Conference

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This is a wild but true story. I was there. I’m fascinated by weird pseudoscience and cultic belief systems. As a seriously interested skeptic I took a weekend in the summer of 1985 to attend this “Scientific Creationist” 1985 National Bible-Science Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. A very small group of skeptics, monitoring Creationism’s claims, had organized to attend this conference as a minority of observers, and I hooked up with them.
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One of the attractions of this conference was that along with the regular Creationist presentations would be some by Geocentrists, i.e., those who believe that Copernicus and Galileo et al were wrong and that the Earth is the immovable center of the universe with the Sun and everything else revolving around it – because the Bible says it’s so. In the West, almost all Creationism is Bible-based, but so is most Geocentrism and Flat Earth belief. (See the work by the late science writer and skeptic Robert Schadewald, whom I mention here later.)
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I had been following the early-1980s resurgence of anti-evolutionary proselytizing in my rural area and had started to investigate it. I bought many core books by the major Creationists of the day as well as books by scientists and scholars who defended Darwin and evolutionary science. I studied most of the Creationists’ main arguments – especially the ones dealing with geology and paleontology. I also subscribed to newsletters from scientists monitoring the Creationist movement, and that is how I learned of the skeptics’ plan to attend the Cleveland conference. I contacted these skeptics and, based on some things I had written earlier, was invited to attend with them.
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I tried as much as possible to be open-minded and objective about both sides in the controversy, hence I immersed myself deeply in Creationist lore, but it became obvious who the real scientists were and who the true-believers and/or charlatans were. The “Scientific” Creationists’ books and arguments were transparently weak and often dishonest. When they quoted famous scientists, they quite often did a lot of misquoting, quoting out-of-context, and even “creative quotation” (i.e., ripping out words and phrases, and then pasting them together to make meanings totally the opposite of the scientist’s original meaning). The Creationists tended to lack scholarly integrity, but they had lots of faith.
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As I learned their arguments I had to learn more about the sciences involved, especially about geology, paleontology, and the fossil record of life on Earth. This got me to attend college again to take geology courses, and from there I went on to study the philosophy of science and then to complete my philosophy degree – and eventually to teach high school history and philosophy. The controversy shook me out of my intellectual sloth. Outrage can be a powerful motivator.
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The Bible-Science movement is quite old, with many different affiliated groups. The Creation Research Society (CRS) has been around a long time. Branching off from it, and becoming one of the dominant Creationist organizations in the 1980s, was the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Representatives from both of these outfits were there. They believe in a very young earth, under 10,000 years old (from Bible clues), and they believe in a scenario called “Flood Geology,” where the entire geological column and stratigraphic rock record (with what the entire mainstream scientific community sees as the evolutionary fossil record) was all caused by Noah’s Flood some mere thousands of years ago.
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Re: the Geocentrism at the conference. To be fair to the Creationist mainstream, Geocentrists are a very small minority in their larger belief group as well as at this conference. But they were there because they too claim (with justification) to be Bible-based and fellow Creationists (although the publicity they generated embarrassed the Creationists enough that Geocentrism was absent at the 1986 convention in Pittsburgh).
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The Cleveland conference that I attended had multiple presentations scheduled to pick from, most of them Creationist themed. Engineer R.G. Elmendorf gave a paper defending Geocentrism which I (and my skeptic friends) found confusing and impossible to follow, except when he used the Bible to back up his theories. Two computer scientists based in Cleveland are prominent in the Geocentric movement. (I must mention that modern Bible-based Geocentrists are usually Tychonian, not Ptolemaic, and much of their theory agrees with naked-eye observations.)
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The crowning event of the weekend conference was a big debate on Sunday night to wrap it all up. It was to be a debate on Heliocentrism vs. Geocentrism by two pair of Bible-scientists. Of the pair defending Heliocentrism, one would present the scientific case (i.e., Galileo et al) and one would argue the Biblical case. Of the Geocentrism defenders, one would present the scientific case and one the Biblical case.
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Unfortunately for me, I had to be at work at 11pm Sunday night and would have to miss this debate, as I had a three-hour drive. But I did order cassette tapes of the debate, which are now in an attic in the States. My fellow skeptics later told me that the hall was packed and that it was a truly bizarre affair, debating science that had been largely settled three centuries ago by Newton.  Our skeptic appraisal of the debate is that the Heliocentric side won the scientific argument, while the Geocentric side won the Biblical argument.
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Other subject matter presented at the convention was also interesting. I was disappointed that there was not much at all about the fossil record, because the famous Creationist fossil “expert” Duane Gish was not there. I had read his books closely, and it was one area I had some solid knowledge.
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But there was a presentation on the latest Bible-science expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. I jumped at this because of my background in mountaineering and the many Creationist books and other books I had read on the history of both the ascent of Ararat and the search for the Ark. Mt. Ararat is close to 17,000 feet above sea level and glaciated at the top portions. It lies in the corner of Turkey that is militarized and politically volatile because it is close to the borders of Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan (the last two being still “republics” within the USSR in 1985).
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The main presenter had led one of the most recent expeditions. He described how they climbed up to a summit saddle and tried to dig through the ice cap with chainsaws (because they lacked ice drills). They tie their hopes to the Ark being under the ice cap since the bare rock slopes do not reveal it. My fellow skeptic Frank Zindler heard the presentation with me, and he emphasized to me afterward that they were looking in the wrong place. If the Ark had indeed landed on the summit of Ararat, after several thousand years under the accumulating glacier ice it would have been carried slowly but surely down the mountain slope as the glacier moved with gravity, and it would have been ground to fragments by the glacial pressure over the rock. If they hope to find anything, they should study glaciology and look amongst the ground-up rock beneath the glacier.
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I made one friend among the Creationist faithful because we had a lot in common. He briefly spoke about the Ararat expedition, as he was their mountaineering expert. It turns out that he was a veteran US Marine and had a lot of mountain climbing experience – much more than me, and on higher mountains. Even though we were in different ideological camps, we remained friends throughout the conference. He told me that on Saturday night he had a phone call from some expedition members who were on the flanks of Mt. Ararat when he last knew, and now bandits in that unruly area had plundered their equipment in base camp and burned whatever they couldn’t take. The expedition had to withdraw.
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Another presentation I went to was about a new Creationist research station on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon area of Arizona. Earlier, there had been a high-profile legitimate scientific study in the news about a unique species of squirrel living on the northern rim of the canyon. Because of this squirrel’s longtime geographic isolation (by the huge canyon gap) from closely related squirrels on the southern rim, its adaptation to a different environment was showcased as a great example of Darwinian Natural Selection. It was big science news at the time. So the old Creationist Research Society (CRS) decided to do its own study, hoping to refute the evolutionist interpretation. Also, because they believe in Flood Geology, they announced that they would do research of the Grand Canyon’s stratigraphy looking for evidence contradicting the fossil record of evolutionary paleontology. The whole presentation was sad more than anything else.
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The presenter was a venerable old CRS fellow, but the audience was very small. He attempted to impress us with the seriousness of their research. The CRS had moderately decent resources, so they outfitted a “research station” on the desert north rim. He used an overhead projector to list the assets of their station. (Now, to be fair, this was 1985 and technology was not nearly what it is today.) He listed an IBM-compatible computer, a good semi-portable model in that era. Then he saved the best for last and triumphantly listed a telephone!
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That was it. The idea that any Creationists would run around the desert trying to study elusive squirrels was a joke. They just don’t have their feet in the ground of strenuous empirical scientific research. Were there any squirrel experts within the CRS? I felt acute embarrassment for the presenter and for the small Creationist audience. It was pathetic.
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Our small group of skeptic observers would meet up several times a day and then get together in our hotel room after the last presentation late in the evening. Finally alone together, we howled with laughter about the mad absurdities we had witnessed that day. On Saturday night, hotel security had to come to our door twice to tell us we were too noisy and disturbing people next door. (Why can’t they ever build hotel rooms with sound-proofing?)
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One in our little group of skeptics was the late, great Robert Schadewald (1943-2000). Bob was a fine gentleman and an internationally recognized expert on weird science. He had one of the world’s finest personal libraries of Flat Earth writings, and he had interviewed the president of the Flat Earth Society – which is Bible-based. (I first read Bob’s stuff in a wonderful chapter, “The Evolution of Bible-science,” in Scientists Confront Creationism (1983), ed. by Laurie Godfrey; and also in articles around that time in Skeptical Inquirer. Science writing lost a master when Bob passed away much too early.
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Sadly, I could not attend the next year’s Bible-science conference in Pittsburgh. By then the Creationists had realized that treating Bible-based Geocentrists as legitimate allies was bad PR, and they excluded them from the next conference, which was called The 1986 International Conference on Creationism. I read the reviews of it by Bob Schadewald and other Creationist watchers.
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It seems that the internal controversy dominating this 1986 meeting was Young Earth Creationists vs. Old Earth Creationists. Young Earthers (CRS, ICR) believe the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, using the Bible as an “inerrant” source. They believe that the entire rock/fossil record is just a jumbled up chaos of sediment from Noah’s Flood and that there is no rhyme or reason to how the different strata were laid down, and to them there is certainly no ordered layers of this geologic column that records, over long eras, more primitive life forms at the bottom (older) strata and more modern ones in the newer (upper) strata as evolutionary scientists see it and predict it.
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Old Earth Creationists usually agree with mainstream science that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that the sedimentary rock fossil layers show a definite change through time, but they also believe that life was divinely created – perhaps through divine fiat, perhaps through divinely directed evolutionary processes (theistic evolution, etc.), depending on the person’s beliefs – just as the fossil record shows. And these guys often really know their geological science.
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A high point of the 1986 conference for the skeptics was the presentation by a respected Creationist geologist – an Old Earther. He has had a successful career as a genuine petroleum geologist who did routine exploratory research to find oil-bearing rock strata, by identifying the ages and layered order of strata by their fossil content just as the evolutionary scenario would predict and just as accepted by all paleontologists and geologists – but directly contradicting Young Earth Creationism. His presentation was dramatic.
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He said that he had hired two recent (and naïve) geology graduates from ICR (the fundamentalist Young Earth school) for a season in the field as apprentice petroleum geologists under his wing, because their common ground is Christianity. At ICR, these grads had been taught that the geologic column – as geologists and evolutionary scientists and paleontologists find it, documenting the evolutionary history of life dramatically – was a pure fiction by deluded evolutionists who were motivated by a “religion of secular humanism.” The ICR grads were taught Flood Geology and were totally unprepared for real-world geologic work.
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As they worked with this senior geologist, the grads sampled the drill-cores of these all-important micro-fossils to identify and correlate the rock strata according to these index fossils (in order to fix the age/order of the strata and search for known oil-bearing strata), and they saw – every single day – that the heretical geologic column, used by evolutionary scientists and paleontologists, was consistent and real, where earlier life forms are found lower and more modern life forms are found higher in the strata, just as the geologists, paleontologists and evolutionary thinkers predict. The empirical evidence was irrefutable, and he said the two grads had to admit its truth, and that they had severe “crises of faith” as they acquired this reality.
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No shit. Sometimes evidence has to hit you on the head like a rock.
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-Zenwind.
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