Book Review: Tornado in a Junkyard

Author:	James Perloff	Rating:	***** (3)
Date read:	Feb, 2010
Evolution vs. Creation Book:	2

This is my first creationist book, which I read right after “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Overall I found the book well organized and methodical, and very informative. To a certain extent, there was a tendency to disparage evolutionists, though not nearly as strong as the anti-creationist attitudes in Richard Dawkin’s book. I also found the book to be a little more religious than it needed to be, which I suppose is to be expected, and in some cases promoting the American so-called Christian, right-wing belief system, with which I and many other believers are at odds. In spite of these shortcomings, the book was very informative and helped me to understand the other side of the arguments made by evolutionists, which is exactly what I wanted. The key points for me were: evidence for a young earth, the description of uniformitarianism vs catastrophism, the nature of large numbers of fossils indicating instantaneous fossilization, the disagreements among paleontologists and other scientists regarding the “missing links” in the fossil record cited by Dawkins, and the explanations regarding the various modern dating methods not being as reliable as we are led to believe. All the information was backed up by multiple citations from scientists past and present, including many biologists and other life scientists; even evolution-believing scientists are quoted on many topics.

One of the sections I did not appreciate was the chapter on social consequences of belief in evolution. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are cited as examples of monsters whose actions were either based on or excused by evolutionary concepts. This is easy to do when addressing an audience of not-very-well-informed conservative Christians in the United States (the obvious target market for this book), but doesn’t hold up very well in a more objective view of history. Many monsters committed horrible atrocities before Darwin came along, and many of them did these things in the name of God or their religion. The inquisition comes to mind, along with the centuries-long oppression of the masses by the church through the middle ages into the reformation period. In the 19th century and before, “Christian” leaders in the U.S. preached and taught that the Bible approved of, or even encouraged, slavery. Both the North and the South in the American civil war thought God was on their side. The invasion of Iraq serves as a contemporary example of the same “God is on our side” warmongering. (Bob Dylan has a good song on this topic, titled “God on our Side,” relating to American history.)

My anti-evolution arguments having been formed from information that was at best decades old, it was interesting to read more up-to-date information countering some of the evolution “evidence.” In “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” Dawkins presents the material on evolution so unquestioningly and with strong assertions, either explicit or implied, that all thinking modern scientists know these things are incontrovertible facts. It was eye-opening to find that the reality is there is much disagreement in the scientific community over many of these points, and there are many assumptions behind even the things most of the evolution-believing scientists agree on. The evidence presented in “Tornado in a Junkyard” is not absolutely convincing, but it does a good job of presenting the other side reasonably and logically.