Trust the Science - Tract #282 (TRSC)
Art by David W. Daniels - © 2023 Chick Publications
Trust the Science - Tract #204. Art by David W. Daniels. © 2023 Chick Publications
Why do we believe in Jesus? It's not science. It's the eyewitnesses!
First Published: April 26, 2023
Introduction ⇑ ⇓
Anna | How far the apprentice has fallen from the master if the art is anything to go from. Perhaps an early retirement is in order. |
Jessica | That is certainly an understatement. If you compare this to Chick's cartoony but heart-felt art on early (pre-stroke) works like A Demon's Nightmare or Somebody Goofed and Carter's vivid, realistic renditions in Doom Town or The Letter these look like the scribblings of a Parkinson's riddled senior. |
Boudreaux | The artist certainly seems to have abandoned any attempt at bilateral symmetry. |
Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Perhaps it is just me, but if you follow the line for this person’s skull shape, it looks almost like every basic drawing of a skull, including the skull emoji. I’d recommend he seeks medical attention for the head shape and that he lawyers up, in case a certain film production company wants to sue for copyright infringement on the emoji head. |
Jessica | The laziness of this tract truly knows no bounds. Daniels didn't even bother to remove the border around his slapdash clipart sketch of this misshapen scientist before he hastily slapped it on there cover here and called it a day. |
Page 2 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | What gives you the right to order someone around? Because you made a discovery involving C14 test results? You are not above other people because of that. If you were one of the people who developed the Haber-Bosch process then maybe you'd have some of my respect. As it stands, you do not deserve it. |
Jessica | If Daniels is anything like Chick was, I'd venture that he assumes he can
because she's black. |
Boudreaux | Why does the first panel remind me of this? |
Page 3 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Just because you do "science" doesn't give you the right to get people fired for them not getting you coffee. And what happened to your enthusiasm about your discovery? |
Boudreaux | Going with the Chick tradition of making representatives of secular institutions complete jerks. A bit surprising for a Chick tract, the antagonist is shown as the jerk he is, by assuming a black woman must be a subordinate. |
Jessica | Where exactly is this taking place? And who are these people? There's absolutely no context for what is going on here and I am having a hell of a time even following the plot. |
Anna | Considering the spiky effects coming off that coffee cup, that thing must be so full of energy that it’s equivalent to several street lights. I’d love a cup of coffee with that much energy. |
Page 4 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | No laboratory technician/scientist is going to tamper with results and experimental parameters if they care about actual scientific validity and aren't trying to push some narrative to suit their own agenda (i.e. corrupt). However, I can say that this is perhaps what you think scientists do given your presumptions on this page. |
Boudreaux | For an example of how C14 testing is done in the real world, this is how the Shroud of Turin was tested. |
Jessica | In contrast to the pseudo-realistic art style employed (poorly) with the other characters in this tract, this scientist looks like a two-dimensional carnival cardboard cut-out. |
Page 5 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | There is way more to it than just 'trusting the SCIENCE!'. What is the hypothesis? What are your experimental parameters and can they be replicated by other scientists? Or are you perhaps grasping at a straw man version of actual science to push your narrative that anything and anyone who doesn’t immediately accept what you say as truth is evil? Careful, I might do the same on the basis that you are being misinformative and think non-believers are lesser beings than yourself. |
Jessica | The artist seems to be attempting a Warner Bros. / Merrie Melodies sort of cartoonishness with these circling birds and the two-headed monstrosity up on Page 2. I assume he thinks it helps to make his antagonist look ridiculous and comes off as funny... it does not. |
Page 6 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | I think there would have been more than 300 Vikings in 'The Great Heathen Army'. And the Vikings themselves (or Scandanavians if you prefer) were definitely active in waters and areas surrounding the British Isles before 865-878 AD. Written records of their exploits existed back then as well, like this particular entry dated 793 AD from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle detailing a raid on an island (Lindisfarne) just near the coast of England, which is considered English territory. |
Jessica | This Viking clearly intends to swallow your entire head. |
Page 7 ⇑ ⇓
JessicaBoudreaux | To no one’s surprise, the ICR very much misrepresented the actual research. Helpfully they did link to it. If you read the paper, skeletons were found with both 9th century and earlier C14 dates. There was no question that at least some of the skeletons were part of the Great Army. The earlier ones were at first thought to belong to a separate burial, but they refined their local diet calibration based on additional information, and their dates came in as being from the 9th century as well. This is how science in the real world works. If your data is inconsistent, you need to either revise your hypothesis, or find out why the data is divergent. Creationists seem to have this strawman view of science where any discovery is treated as revealed truth. In the real world, our view of the natural world changes over time. This is working as expected, and has been for the roughly 400 years modern science has existed. |
Anna | As to be expected. When the science doesn’t fit your argument, distort it to feed the narrative you wish to push onto people.. |
Page 8 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | You cannot count the father if he was not conscious during the recording of the birth date and time. And as we will get into later, eyewitnesses are only reliable to a point. They are not equivalent to immutable fact. |
Jessica | Indeed. As has been observed, eyewitness testimony is generally considered to be among the weakest forms of evidence for a given assertion. Your memory changes and degrades over time, and your brain fills in memories that never happened to cover the gaps. Gullible laypeople just generally assume eyewitnesses to be completely reliable, and it has caused no end of problems for a number of legal defendants. |
Boudreaux | There are some testing methods that can come startlingly close, in certain instances. For example, dendrochronology can determine the exact year that a tree was cut down. And in fact this data is used to fine tune C14 dates. Dendrochronology is usable to over 11,000 years ago, which is older than the age of the earth according to most creationists. |
Anna | You could look at the growth and development of human bone (and its subsequent weakening as we get older) to get a decent approximation of the age of a person. Short of them having a medical condition like Münchmeyer disease that is. |
Jessica | Yeah, they wrote down the date and signed it… and while they probably had no reason to, they very well could have lied! Just because somebody wrote something down once does not make it the gospel truth or even guarantee that it ever happened in the first place <hint hint>. |
Page 9 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Written records can also reconstruct the past, which science regularly has and
continues to provide, and also go into far more detail than eyewitnesses ever could (and are written
by eyewitnesses). As for your claim of eyewitnesses for Jesus, I call that distorting the truth to push
your point. It's been established several times that sections of the Bible were written by people who received 'divine inspiration' (to play thematic equivalents) to write the Bible after the events themselves. Receiving a second hand account isn't the same as first-hand eyewitness testimony. |
Jessica | Take for example the experience of the resurrected Jesus by the 500 witnesses described in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. At first glance, this seems like a slam dunk for supporting the idea that Jesus rose from the dead because how could 500 different people have been mistaken by what they saw or have lied about it. But if you think about it for more than a few seconds, it falls apart almost immediately… who were these people? How does Paul know this? Is there any supporting evidence for these claims? While apologists want to try to either write this off by saying the records could have been lost during the conquest of Israel or else just handwave it away, you quickly realize this isn't really a case of 500 different people lying… it's only one. And that is a far smaller bill to write off. |
Anna | Dare I say it’s a case of pot calling the kettle black? |
Page 10 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | And yet, there are fights that seem to keep breaking out between different groups of Christians over the use of different translations and what is considered canonical and not. For a seemingly ‘well-documented’ manuscript, it’s strange that there is a lack of consistent and universal consensus on the correct translation and source. Especially considering your particular brand of Christianity seems to believe that a certain translated Bible (KJV) is the only ‘True Bible’, despite it being a translation written several thousand years after the fact and contains translation errors from the original source. |
Boudreaux | The Bible is certainly not reliable history. Many errors have been identified, here are a few. To marvel that the Bible does get many historical events right is a bit silly, as it was written in roughly the same time period as those events occurred. |
Jessica | All of these characters are obviously bad trace jobs done off of photographs, but that makes me wonder who they actually are (or are supposed to be). Likewise with the African-American protagonist. |
Anna | Assuming these random people are other scientists and technicians, they have much better things to be doing than listening to you two bicker. Did you perhaps photograph them to use as tracer material without telling them truthfully what they were agreeing to have their likeness used for? |
Page 11 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Revelations details events that have yet to pass and is often considered one of the Gospels. Last I checked, you can’t be an eyewitness to future events that haven't occurred yet. And there is a far more common tradition of preserving history that existed before written records, but it tends to distort the message over time. You might have played it in a game form as a child called "Telephone". A little game that shows what happens when humans try to recall messages over multiple generations without written records. |
Jessica | Thousands of people (hundreds of millions, actually) DO dispute their story, you absolute numpty! |
Boudreaux | Here we start a list of the many events in the New Testament that must be true because it was witnessed by many people. A little known fact is that the first century is one of the best documented periods in antiquity. There were dozens of historians active in that time and region. Yet none of them mentions Jesus. Even though far more obscure preachers, with smaller flocks, were well documented. To rely on the Bible alone is contradictory to the earlier panels stating that there must be supporting data to reach a conclusion. |
Page 12 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | So as weird as this will sound, generally speaking, Christ's Baptism is
capitalised as it represents an important event in his Ministry (and same as ministry). Tsk, I expected
more from you. How disappointing. I do like the carpentry set-up though - something about its simplicity. I’ve used a similar set-up in the past for “carpentry” as well… |
Boudreaux | Matthew 27:51-53: "At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from
top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people
who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went
into the holy city and appeared to many people." And this miraculous event appears exactly nowhere else than the Bible. If it actually occurred, wouldn’t we expect to see many accounts? |
Jessica | It would be kind of hard to overlook a full-on zombie invasion, don't you think? If something like that actually went down, you'd assume somebody would have jotted down a quick footnote about it. |
Page 13 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Think the multitudes also traded Christ for a convicted criminal (Barabbas) so
if anything, if Jesus hadn't asked His Father to forgive them, I'd be expecting fire and brimstone at a
minimum. Or perhaps the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are friends of mine and are an inspiration.
A special mention to the Fifth Horseman as well. I’ve been meaning to place an order with him again. |
Jessica | I hate to keep harping on the absolutely atrocious art in this thing, but Daniels suffering Christs just cannot begin to hold a candle to some of Fred Carter's versions. |
Page 14 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | It can be argued as a result of the fear of Roman persecution and persecution by non-Christians, they would have likely written it after the events themselves by a number of years. |
Boudreaux | The Jack Chicks of the world seem to have this bizarre belief that things like this only exist in the Bible. For example, the Quran describes numerous miracles performed by Muhammad, witnessed by multitudes. The Quran is at least as historically accurate as the Bible. Why accept one and not the other? |
Page 15 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | You can use historical written documents and other historical written sources, such as cave paintings. These are a tad more reliable than eyewitnesses. Unless you happen to cast Raise Dead or Summon Spirits and get eyewitnesses that way.I haven’t mastered necromancy yet, so sadly I can’t revive Chick and Carter. But if I could, even in their revived states, I imagine they might draw better than the artist for this tract. They’d definitely draw better than me, not that I care to draw anyway. |
Boudreaux | Here we get the Creationist shibboleth that draws a distinction between
historical and experimental science. Of course the two often overlap. And if you exclude historical
information from science, huge swaths need to be discarded, for example, cosmology, astronomy,
astrophysics, geology, paleontology and archaeology. And if eyewitnesses are required for certainty, then a large percentage of prison inmates need to be released, as there were no eyewitnesses to the crime. This video segment is good for demonstrating the absurdity of this argument. |
Page 16 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | *mad/pained laughter* So many voices... *breathes slowly* My
apologies. I lost myself for a moment. Truly a marvellous way to discredit Jesus (and God by extension) by saying that He believes in Creation and the Flood, rather than, as said by your primary reference text, being directly responsible for them. |
Boudreaux | Unscientific should not be in quotes. Creationism is religion and is in no way scientific. |
Jessica | Is this supposed to be Adam and Eve? Make a mental note: Compose a "Faces of Daisy" style animated gif comparing all the different versions of the first couple they've concocted over the years. |
Page 17 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | A single global flood does not answer all the various fossils for a multitude
of different organisms that have been fossilised and the different depths at which they were found. One
single flood as the sole extinction event would mean all fossils were found at very similar depths in the
Earth. Which they were not. Also, to nitpick, but your drawing of a fossil seems to be of an Ichthyosaur. I’d love to have your experimental data detailing how several prehistoric aquatic animals can drown during a single flood event, as I need to be able to replicate your results. |
Boudreaux | Real science has determined that the continents have changed dramatically over time, areas that are now land were previously under water. Leonardo da Vinci essentially figured this out back in the 15th century. And if the creationists are correct, it should be easy for example to find a Cretacious rabbit. Funny thing, all the early geologists were creationists. And they used the fact that certain fossils are only found in certain layers, allowing those layers to be readily identified. William Smith published the first stratigraphic map 10 years before Darwin was even born. |
Page 18 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Yet here we are, dealing with one side of the story. There is a reason that
police convictions require more than just eyewitness testimony. And incidentally, I doubt the creators of this tract were there at the time the world was created as well. So if the creators of this tract can, by faith, believe that God made the world, then I, by faith, can believe that the world would be far happier without the creators of this tract (or other such tracts) on it. |
Page 19 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Faith alone without good works accomplishes nothing, and I'd argue your current and past tracts, with their rampant
misinformation and outright despisement of those who do not belief what you believe is a far cry from some
of the statements Jesus said would help a man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Since the tract creator
seems fond of quoting Mark, I will do so as well. I wonder how well the tract creators adhered to this... |
Page 20 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Which witnesses? The ones that wrote sections and Gospels of the Bible several
years after the events and were somehow witnesses to events that haven't happened yet, like
Revelation? If so, then I'm a witness to the fact that in the future, an unspecified number of people will die as the result of an epidemic of rabies that results in numerous animal attacks involving rabid sloths and giraffes. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm a credible witness based on the logic of this panel. *sigh* One can only hope and dream… |
Jessica | These people are clearly drawn from photographs… and not in a competent Fred Carter copying famous actors kind of way. Who exactly are they? And are they aware of what their likenesses are actually being used for? |
Page 21 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | Dr Gull’s face is unbelievably smug - something which I can only assume
is intentional, as if to assert a form of superiority and triumph over the “evil”
non-believer. Let’s see about addressing that, shall we? For a supposedly "devout" person, it's unbecoming of you to be this smug and arrogant, especially if the verses of the Bible relating to humility hold any significance to your beliefs. |
Jessica | See, for Daniels' audience, part of the humor derives from the realization that the "doctor" in charge is a black woman. To them that concept is just absurd because "those people" should just be serving coffee. Of course, since whatever unknown science establishment this seems to be taking place in appears to be run by a Creationist, I would argue the fellow would be better off going to an actual (credible) research center for better results. Who wants to bet that this woman's doctorate holds about as much value as "Dr." Kent Hovind's does? |
Anna | I would take that bet, but I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to betting on things with such a high degree of certainty of being true. After all, where’s the fun on betting something that is most likely fact? |
Page 22 ⇑ ⇓
Anna | If I didn't know better, I'd say you were trying to apologise for flimsy
strawman arguments by giving me photos of the newest members of the TalkingWindows™ family; Talking
DoorFrame™ and TalkingElbow™. While I’m bemused by the idea, I’m afraid you are
not spared from future dissections by this gesture, as kind of you as it was to show me the newest members
of the Talking™ family. |
Conclusion ⇑ ⇓
Anna | I feel like something is missing from this tract. It had a bunch of inane arguments like
other tracts, but it's missing that level of craziness like the earlier tracts. And the art is lacking,
especially in relation to Chick and Carter. Perhaps they will reach the standard that I had seen in the earlier tracts over time as Daniels gets his bearings, but as the first tract of 2023, I must profess disappointment and hope he would not subject us to this same level of tedium and dullness next time. |
Jessica | I've been hip deep in Chick's work for a significant portion of my adult life. One of the primary reasons this site was started in the first place was to address the horrible, harmful things fundamentalist / evangelical religion inflicts on society. And even at his most innocuous, Chick's stuff was still demonstrably terrible. But I have to admit that looking at this piece actually makes me sad the old crank is dead. He was a conspiracy theorist of the worst kind and an almost unparalleled bigot, but he put genuine effort into both his arguments and his artwork. In his heyday, Carter was an artist of nearly unparalleled skill, even when producing imagery pushing the most odious of themes and concepts. Compared to them, Daniel's work just comes off like an irresponsible middle-schooler's art assignment hastily thrown together during the morning's bus ride to school. The characters are one-dimensional with paper-thin personalities, the arguments are sad and pathetic, the art is hideous and the plot and layout make it almost impossible to determine what is even supposed to be taking place. Mocking or refuting this almost feels wrong on some level… like making fun of a child with special needs. Chick Tracts are clearly entering the sundown phase of their existence and a small part of me regrettably mourns that fact. |
Anna | I much prefer if they were to go gently into that good night, and whimper against the
dying of the light. Until next time, dear readers. May your days and dreams be kind to you. *curtsies, before turning and leaving* |
Further Reading ⇑
- Product page at Chick Publications
- Hear from the Artist (Youtube Video) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO2EUEbWz4o
Jessica
Anna
Boudreaux