Christian Answers: Christozoology

I feel, gentle readers, that lately I've had too big a focus on religion and not enough of a focus on some really high-quality woo. I wanted to find some woo to fisk today, but today is Christian Answers day. Luckily, I was able to find a Christian Question that fit both criteria. Thus it is that I present to you another in my series of take-downs of articles from the Kid Explorer's section of Christian Answers:

Are any dinosaurs alive today?

This fantastic Christian Answer mixes shitty apologetics with that bastard child of animal science and Indiana Jones fantasies, cryptozoology. They begin with

There is some evidence that a few dinosaurs and great marine reptiles could still be alive, teetering on the edge of extinction.

Right off the bat they're being dishonest. I don't want to call it lying, because there is, strictly speaking, evidence of these things. It's just really bad and/or fabricated evidence. The first paragraph ends with:

Scientists are still discovering unknown animals each year.

which is footnoted with the following:

As late as 1965, the National Geographic Society stated that the number of new animal species discovered each year averages approximately 50 mammals, 100 fish, 15 birds, and 5,000 insects.

At first blush, these seem like innocent facts, dropped for the edification of the dinophile children reading the website, but they're meant to teach the children an important religious lesson: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The footnote serves to reinforce their fallacious appeal to "science doesn't know everything." If that applies to dinosaurs, why then, golly gee, it must apply to god, too! At least that's what they're getting at.

They start off with sauropods:

Natives in a very remote jungle in Africa repeatedly told of seeing large animals a lot like the sauropod dinosaurs. The sauropods included the Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and others like them.

And then, to support claims of living pterosaurs, they also say

Natives living in northern Zimbabwe described a strange flying animal which they called the "kongamato." It was not a bird but more like a reddish-colored lizard with bare, bat-like wings. The distance between its wing tips was four to seven feet.

Penn Jilette dismisses claims like these on the cryptozoology episode of Bullshit! with a cry of "The locals are fucking with you! The locals always fuck with you!" I think that his sentiment, while funny, dismisses the problem without really looking at it. I believe there's more going on.

The cultures that claim to see giant "sauropods" (usually referred to as "mokele-mbembe") and "pterosaurs" are jungle-dwelling, pre-literate tribes. They are ignorant of the fruits of modern science, and, more importantly, they are highly superstitious. These are cultures that run on oral traditions, and when the oral tradition includes a sauropod-type creature, a superstitious tribesman (or -woman) is likely to "see" the creature thanks to an overactive imagination and the confirmation bias. Religious people reguarly see something where there is nothing, like a cheese sandwich or a stump, and these are often city-dwelling folk who are at least passingly familiar with modern culture and science. They hold a belief that god and his emmisaries show themselves regularly, and so when something bears even a slight resemblance to Mary or Jesus or St. George, they believe it to truly be that person.

I believe that such religion-driven pareidolia is a likely explanation for mokele-mbembe sightings by the pygmy tribes of the Congo basin. Infused with their local spirituality and superstition, they use that as the framework to understand things they see but cannot explain. That is one of the major purposes of religion in general. Their tradition includes age-old stories of the creature known as mokele-mbembe and what it looks like. It is only natural that, seeing something large and strange in the jungle that looks like it has a long neck they would assign that particular part of their culture as the explanation. This is a far more likely hypothesis than that mokele-mbembe actually exists.

After all, repeated expeditions into the Congo Basin have turned up not a single shred of evidence for the creature. Not only that, such a large creature as mokele-mbembe would require a lot of food, and any creature would require a large enough breeding population to survive. I highly doubt that an ancient sauropod population lies hidden in the jungle and leaves no evidence whatsoever. This is what Infophile likes to call the "modus tollens exception" to the "absence of evidence" claim. It breaks down like this, using the modus tollens form of argument: If a creature/event/thing would perforce leave behind evidence that it exists, and after duly searching no evidence is found, then it can be said that the creature/event/thing does not exist. More formally:

1. If Thing X existed, it would necessarily leave behind detectable evidence.
2. No evidence exists for Thing X.

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3. Thing X does not exist.

As an example, look at a nuclear bomb. Say that you say to me "I saw a nuke explode across the street from McDonald's the other day!" Naturally, I'm skeptical, and I ask for evidence. You say "I don't have any, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, so you can't tell me I'm lying." Well, I say, that's sometimes true, but a nuke would necessarily leave behind traces of its existence in the form of radiation. I take out the geiger counter that I keep under my bed for just such occasions, we drive down to McDonalds, and I set about performing my measurements. No radioactivity is found. Thus can it be concluded that, lacking the evidence that a nuke must necessarily leave behind, there was no nuke. In this case, absence of evidence most certainly was evidence of absence.

This works with mokele-mbembe and "pterosaurs" (and Bigfoot, and Loch Ness, and Champ, etc). If these creatures existed in large enough numbers to support a population that goes back the centuries since the sightings began, even if they remained unseen by human eyes they would still necessarily leave behind mountains of evidence that they were there: dung, prints (and real prints, not ones made with wooden feet), fur or skin, carcasses, blood, eggs, nests or colonies, and so much more. None of these things has ever, ever been found, and people have been searching exhaustively for these creatures for a long time, often using very high-tech equipment. To claim "Well, but absence of evidence and all that..." is ridiculous. In these cases, the absence of evidence doesn't merely preclude active belief, it reinforces the claim that the creatures don't exist at all. Add that to a much more plausible explanation (pareidolia) for which evidence is readily available, and I have no problem whatsoever saying that mokele-mbembe doesn't exist, "pterosaurs" are not still around, and the people who claim to see them are mistaken.

The quality of the evidence that Christian Answers offer for these assertions is pathetic. It adds up mostly to hearsay, but this interesting tidbit is implied to be something more robust:

The scientist showed the natives pictures of various animals, both living and extinct. Each person interviewed said the Pterodactyl (TEH-ro-DAK-till) was most like the Kongamoto [the native name for the "pterosaur].

This is not proof that the natives saw a pterodactyl. This is proof only that the natives thought they saw something that bore a resemblance to a pterodactyl. Until and unless actual physical evidence of the creature surfaces, we have no reason to believe it is there, and every reason not to.

Then they decided to piss off this humble myth buff with lies and misrepresentations:

The folklore of the Sioux Indian tribe also tells the story of a flying reptile, named the "Thunderbird", that was seen falling from the sky after being struck by lightning. It has appeared in Indian tales ever since.

The thunderbird is not a reptile. It is a bird. It is a large bird, or many large birds, depending on whose myth you're reading. They have feathers. They are magical creatures, to be sure, who ride the lightning like James Hetfield in the electric chair, but the myths and stories describe them as birds rather uniformly. The lies, they burn!

All of this strikes me as implying something similar to what Eastern "medicine" woos often say outright: the traditions and superstitions of old, bronze-age cultures are equal or superior to the power of science. Because these natives say they see these creatures, we must concede that the creatures exist. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Old belief is inferior to new evidence.

They take a different tack when dealing with the dreaded sea monster:

An ancient Hebrew legend says that the only animals to survive the Flood, besides those on the Ark, were "the giant og, the monster reem and the fishes." The word "og" means gigantic and long necked--a good description of the big plesiosaurs (PLEE-see-o-SORS).

First off, "og" means only "gigantic." "Long-necked" does not enter into it. Second, "the giant og" does appear in legend, but he also appears, conveniently, in the Old Testament:

Then they turned and went up along the road toward Bashan, and Og king of Bashan and his whole army marched out to meet them in battle at Edreil. (Numbers 21:33)

Og, you see, was a large person, not a sea monster. Legend says that he survived the flood by walking through the water behind the Ark. So what we have is a flat-out lie about a character from the Bible and an ommission of the patently ridiculous circumstances under which he survived the Noachian Deluge, perhaps because saying "Well, see, he was so tall that he could walk through the ocean with his head above water" sounds dumb even to the densest of faithheads. Nice thou-shalt-not-lying, Christians, nice. More:

There is more sworn evidence for "sea monsters" than would be needed to prove any ordinary case in the court of law.

What? Fucking what? It takes far more than eyewitness testimony (excuse me, "sworn evidence") to win a case in the American court system. People get confused. People make mistakes. People out-and-out lie. It is widely acknowledged that eyewitness testimony is far from sufficient when trying a case. What is needed is, of course, that old standby of actual physical evidence.

Saying things like this to children not only increases their credulity while decreasing their scientific literacy and grasp of reason, it teaches them falsehoods about the burden of proof and what constitutes good evidence. It is all around dishonest and intellectually abusive. Kids deserve better education than this tripe.

There's more to the article, but after a few more bits of poor evidence and hearsay that would make Charles Fort proud it switches gears into something else entirely. I have dealt with the main points of the article, and, lest I start getting too repetitious, I will leave it at that.

Once again we see that the people who write apologetics are at best incompetent and at worst flat-out liars. Join me here next week, same Action time, same Action channel, for more of these bastards and their neverending deceit.