Yes Doug, where are the people?

In both his "Evolution, Creation and Logic" video and the accompanying text on his website, Doug dives in headfirst into a cesspool of bad population math presented with a straight face as fact. If I hadn't seen him do it so often it would be astonishing to see someone drop nonsense bombs with such ferocity onto an unsuspecting population.

Though he makes some ignorant and demonstrably horrible assumptions regarding anthropology, I'm not going to quibble with him about those this round and I'm only going to expose his assertions of truth as merely stupid bad arithmetic (and heck, it's only high school level math at best). I'm not talking about little mistakes here, as you'll see. We're talking mistakes so big that the width of a human hair is turned into tens of thousands of light years.

Now we all make mistakes now and then and I'm sure someone will find the ones I made in this installment and point them out to me (it will be appreciated btw), but we're not talking those sorts of mistake here – we're talking a wholesale disregard for the truth.

Let's get to it. Though I will be quoting the relevant text from the website, here is the link in case someone wants to check up on me (I encourage it). Scroll down to the section titled “Where are the people” if you want to follow along.

Click for original text direct from Batchelor's website

And here is the relevant text from that website:

"Where Are the People?

Consider the world’s population, now approaching seven billion. Around 1960, there were only three billion people; in 1804, one billion. In Christ’s day, only about 200 million people lived on the earth. Calculate this same growth rate back about another 2,500 years — to the time of the Flood — and you get just eight people: Noah, his wife, and his sons and their wives.

But now use this same growth rate, an observable scientific fact, to project the world’s population if man had begun multiplying, say, just 10,000 years ago. (Never mind the millions of years that evolutionists postulate!) We should be standing shoulder to shoulder, 100 deep, over every square foot of the planet! Where have all the people gone? Moreover, there aren’t enough human remains, graves, or even artifacts to account for that many people having lived and died on the earth."

Like most of the topics I'll cover in this series, this little jewel comes up all the time in the YEC (Young Earth Creation) circles. It is passed around and passed around and then passed off to the choir as perfectly good “fact” supported by perfectly good “logic”. Problem is, it isn't even supported by the math described in the assertion.

For the moment just forget the fact that the drivers of population growth are myriad, and that available resources (clean water, food, shelter, health care) have been far more limited in times past than in the present. Yes, let's ignore anthropology altogether and just focus for now on this exhibition of sad, bad high school (maybe even grade school) math.

Again Batchelor:  

“Around 1960, there were only three billion people; in 1804, one billion. In Christ’s day, only about 200 million people lived on the earth. Calculate this same growth rate back about another 2,500 years — to the time of the Flood — and you get just eight people: Noah, his wife, and his sons and their wives.”

Really now? Are you sure Mr. Batchelor? You've been asserting this for many years now so I guess it would be safe to assume you're confident. You also claim in this very video to be a well educated man with a doctorate (we'll look into that claim later in the series) so you certainly shouldn't be able to be duped on low grade math, right? Ok, let's check your work and just see how you did on this math test.

Here's the first problem with Batchelor's assertion -- he offers us 4 dates along with populations and then a gives us a task: “Calculate this same growth rate back about another 2,500 years ...”. Which growth rate does he want us to use?  He doesn't specify, he just gives us the task. Let's look at the options.

Here are the populations and dates he provided:
1: 200,000,000 = Time of Christ (ToC)
2: 1,000,000,000 = 1804
3: 3,000,000,000 = 1960
4: 7,000,000,000 = now

NOTE: I will be using 16CE as the ToC. Batchelor doesn't specify birth or death and that's the near mid-point of his life. I will also be using 2009 as “now” since that's the date on the AF (Amazing Facts) web page from which this came.

Using Batchelor's provided dates and populations, how many different grow rates are there? There are 6 different possible growth rates that he could be using.

Here is the list of the 6 possible periods from which we could calculate potential growth rates.
A: ToC to now
B: ToC to 1960
C: ToC to 1804
D: 1804 to now
E: 1804 to 1960
F: 1960 to now

Now I can tell you that I've calculated all of them and exactly none of them even come close to matching his assertion, but in the interest of time, space and fairness I think we can skip all the odd inbetween options and assume he was talking option “A”, the growth rate from the ToC to now. I find this the most logical option since he stated that we should “Calculate this same growth rate back about another 2,500 years — to the time of the Flood...” and 2,500 years back from the ToC would be in a reasonable range for the Ussher date for the flood.

Based on that reasoned assumption that he intends us to use the population growth rate from the ToC to now, let's proceed with the math and find that growth rate.

The formula for determining yearly growth rate is:
(PopulationNow / PopulationThen) ^ (1/YearsElapsed) -1

Here is a handy link with the relevant formulas if you wish to double check my work  (always encouraged).

We'll need the number of years elapsed years from now back to the ToC and that is: 2009 – 16 = 1993

So, using Batchelor's own numbers:
Growth rate = (7,000,000,000 / 200,000,000) ^ (1 / 1993) -1
Growth rate = ~0.18% (just under two tenths of one percent per year)

We'll also need the number of years that have elapsed since the flood, so as Batchelor requested we'll add 2,500 additional to the 1993 years that have elapsed since the ToC:  1993 + 2,500 = 4,493 (years since flood)

Now that we have our growth rate and elapsed time, let's start with 8 people at the time of the flood and use our 0.18% growth rate to see if his assertion has any merit. If it does, we'll see a final calculated population of very near the 7 billion population that are now on earth.

For a known starting population and a known yearly growth, the formula is:
PopFuture = PopStart x (1+GrowthRate) ^ ElapsedYears

One can also used the FV() function in Excel and save a lot of time (after double checking the formula manually, that's what I did).

(Drum roll please)
So a family of 8 rolled out of the ark and started a population growing at the Batchelor prescribed rate of 0.18% (Remember, this rate is a “scientifically observed fact” according to him). 4,493 years later, they number 25,837 in total - yes, just under 26,000 (This would be less than 7 billion for those keeping track at home).

According to my extensive calculations that would be about six billion, nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred seventy four thousand, one hundred and sixty three short of what Doug claims as truth.

To put it another way, you have to multiply Doug's 'truth' by over 270,000 to get our actual population today.

As a way to visualize just how far off Doug's af (amazing fact) is from an AF (Actual Fact), next to every single one of the 25,837 people that should be on the face of the earth according to Batchelor's calculation, you must place the population of an entire city the size of Newark, NJ. Once you do this you to get our actual current population.

One more visualization: If the actual 7 billion population of the world is represented as the circumference of the globe at the equator (24,901 miles), Batchelor's “observable scientific fact” would mean that the earth is actually less than 500ft  around at the equator and that NYC and LA are barely 50ft apart.

I'm just not convinced that Mr. Batchelor has a freaking clue what an observable scientific fact actually is.

As a quick aside, if Batchelor's assertion were correct and this growth rate was actually steady throughout history, the math shows that the entire population of the earth at the time of the Tower of Babel would have been 10 people (actually 10.43955617, but who's counting) and at the time of the Exodus there were only 36 people on earth. Sort of deflates the drama of those stories just a bit doesn't it. Just imagine the impact when Moses cries "Let my person go!"

And what of Batchelor's assertion regarding wall to wall people? You know the “Where are the people?” question.

This one:

“But now use this same growth rate, an observable scientific fact, to project the world’s population if man had begun multiplying, say, just 10,000 years ago. We should be standing shoulder to shoulder, 100 deep, over every square foot of the planet!”

Now I'm not going to show the math as I'm already tired of typing this stuff, but do the math yourself and you'll see that rather than standing “shoulder to shoulder, 100 deep...”, turns out that after multiplying for 10,000 years at his steady 0.18% growth rate, each individual person still has more than 1.5 square miles (around 1,000 acres) of earth to themselves. That's some right rich country living there.

Ok, let's be fair to poor Doug, his PhD (ahem!) and his lousy version of what he calls a scientifically observable fact – let's make a different assumption regarding what growth rate he wanted us to use. Let's suppose he wanted us to use the current growth rate – based on his prescribed '1960 to now' numbers. Seems reasonable that he might have gone for that – after all, with modern census processes in place, these recent growth rates are actually reasonably close to a scientifically observable fact. Without showing all the math (for the sake of space and viewer boredom) let me give you those numbers.

Growth rate from 1960 to now = 1.74%

Current population predicted by such a growth rate starting with 8 people at the flood:
36,597,185,128,973,100,000,000,000,000,000,000

Notice a problem still? Now Doug is out in left field in the other direction (left galaxy actually as you'll see). Instead of too few humans and needing to multiply by 270,000 to get the correct current population as before, Doug now has a 'too many people' problem.

How BIG is his problem? Well, in case you're having difficulty visualizing the scale of Batchelor's folly this round, let's say that our current population of 7 billion are standing shoulder to shoulder and this entire line of people is represented by the thickness of a human hair. Now let's take the population that Doug's 1.8% growth rate predicts from the flood and lengthen the line appropriately. What was the width of a human hair now stretches for over 28,000 light years from end to end. Again, Truth = human hair – Batchelor's 'amazing crap' = 28,000 light years.

As you can see, there just isn't any way out of this for Batchelor and his “Amazing Facts”. He stands in front of gullible people, tells them he is highly educated and that they can trust him and then feeds them a line of BS pulled right out of his nether. They accept his word as fact, nod, laugh, say “amen” and wait eagerly for another juicy morsel.

People deserve better. If you choose to argue against YEC and for a WWBF (world wide biblical flood), argue using things that are true. Heck, whatever you argue, argue using things that are true.