Who is Ian Juby?
Ian Juby hails from Eastern Ontario, Canada. Inspired by Dr. Carl Baugh and the Creation Evidence Museum, he came back to Canada and set out to build Canada’s first Creation Museum, the Creation Science Museum of Canada.
However, Juby is probably best known for his video response to AronRa.
On Ian Juby’s website, one of the first things one happens upon is his “in 7 Days” Crash Course in Creation. This delivers seven lessons over the course of seven days wherein Juby tries to prove the myth of creation over the science of evolution. I plan to debunk Juby’s crash course over the next few blog posts. So let us begin.
Day 1: In the beginning…
The first lesson starts with Juby introducing the Origin Debate between creationism and evolution. There are no claims for creationism or against evolution until half way through the lesson. However, he does say this:
It has been my experience that evolution must hide behind assumptions, ad-hominem attacks, and lawyers. It cannot be exposed to scrutiny because it will disintegrate.
Juby tends to do this throughout most of his work. He projects the faults of creationism on to evolution. Juby also goes on to state this:
I know when I first heard some of the information I’m about to share with you, I was angry. I was not an evolutionist, and I was still angry because it became apparent that someone had lied to me.
I bring this up because Juby claims that he was upset that he was lied to by evil evolutionist, yet his whole crash course is full of half truths, blatant misrepresentations, and what could only be called lies.
After he is done projecting the faults of creationism onto evolution, he moves on to his first claim, which is:
Surprisingly, the debate did not begin with Charles Darwin. The debate actually began with the age of the Earth, via one man, Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell was a lawyer, and put his skills in arguing to work. Though not trained in geology, he has become known as one of the founding fathers of geology. I’m not arguing that a lawyer cannot do geological research. I am simply pointing out that his “geological research” was everything from erroneous to downright fraudulent, and that he made an impression on the science of geology because of his argumentative tactics, not science.
Charles Lyell is indeed one of the fathers of geology because before men like him, there was no such thing as geology as we understand it today. Lyell could not go to school and obtain a degree in geology because no such subject existed until Lyell and others started to investigate the geologic formations found around them. Juby’s claim that Lyell’s research was “erroneous to downright fraudulent” is simply a lie. More importantly is the fact that Juby never brings up most of the evidence Lyell use to show deep time, such as many of the angular unconformities found in Scotland.
Juby moves on:
For example, it was Lyell who coined the phrase “The present is the key to the past.”
Notice what he has done here: He has effectively removed the idea of a global flood from the table, without ever mentioning it. We do not see global floods occurring today, now, do we? Therefore if only the present can be used to judge the past, then a global flood has just been disallowed in the interpretation of earth’s past – whether there was one or not!
No, he has not removed a global flood from the table. The idea of the present being the key to the past does not remove anything from the table except for miracles. One would be able to extrapolate the effects of a regional flood to a global system. A phenomenon happening today can be scaled up or down depending on the different variables we see. Juby simply does not understand how modern geology works.
Juby then goes on to speculate about Lyell’s intentions. According to Juby, the evil evolutionary conspiracy stretches back farther than anyone could have guessed.
In fact, he had secret intentions for his geological research, and his writings. We would not have known his intentions except that after he died, his sister published his private writings and correspondence. He wrote to one friend:
He follows this with a quote and his speculation as to how evil geologists got together to overturn the established teachings of the bible.
Whether Lyell had ulterior motives or not is not evidence against the ideas put forth in Principles of Geology. Lyell lays out the evidence for an old earth very clearly and the fact that Juby never mentions any of it is quite telling.
After this, Juby talks about Lyell’s visit to Niagara Falls where he points out that Lyell’s calculations were incorrect thus Lyell’s estimated age for Niagara Falls was also incorrect. For some reason, Juby feels that pointing out that Lyell was wrong about this is important to know, probably because he believes that if one thing Lyell said was wrong, than everything must be wrong.
Juby never comes out and says it, but it seems clear that he is trying to claim that the age of Niagara Falls is a good estimate for the age of the earth. This is wrong because there is no evidence that the river that created Niagara Falls has existed since the beginning of the earth.
Now we get into Juby’s big guns:
Lyell was also well aware of “polystrate fossils,” due to his visit to the Joggins Fossil cliffs of Nova Scotia, Canada. Polystrate fossils are so called because they are buried vertically in the rock, cutting through several strata or layers of rock. Hence, “poly” for many, “strate” for the strata of rock. It cuts vertically through many layers.
That is right folks; Juby is still claiming that polystrate trees disprove deep time. First off, these fossils are not what creationist wish they were; they do not cut through vast expanses of geologic time, they belong to the same geologic period. They are found in depositional environments that form rapidly, such as swamps. In a depositional environment, such as a swamp, there can be many layers formed that all represent the same geological period that formed over hundreds to thousands of years and not millions.
Juby concludes:
Lyell’s research was fiction, yet everyone who read Lyell’s book concluded it was the Bible that was fiction.
Again, no it was not. The fact that Juby could not be bothered to bring up the bulk of what is found in Principles of Geology (essentially removing his ideas from the table, without ever mentioning them) speaks volumes.
Coming up in lesson two:
You want millions of years? You got it. It doesn’t solve the problems for evolution, and instead causes problems for evolution.