Back to the Dark Ages

I've been pretty silent on Creationism lately. I figured I'd pretty much heard both sides, commented on what I saw and left it there. Being an atheist, a Deity is not congruent with moral decision and Sunday becomes the second day of the weekend.

Until I discovered the Answers Research Journal, as nasty an anti-science rag that was ever spawned from human consciousness. It is a very pleasant, misleading and extremely hypocritical journal that purports to put up scientific, peer-reviewed journals in support of creationism.

Now, I don't particularly have a problem with fundamentalists per se. As I've said in previous posts, once you posit an all powerful God, there's no proof that we all didn't suddenly appear de novo about thirty seconds ago, universe and memories intact. Nor is there any proof we could not have just appeared, equally de novo, six thousand years ago, fossils and all. Through metaphysics and religion, all things are possible. I don't believe it but so what? Faith, or lack of it, has nothing to do with intellect.

But one must be consistent. If such a thing had happened, then the world was created as it is. Not how Creationists want the world to be. That means it was created with all of those nasty evolutionary relationships functioning and intact. That means that the DNA homology between humans and chimps was there at the beginning. The phylogenetic evidence of vertebrate history would be there as well. (Hey! Guess what! All mammals share the same bone structure. Surprise! Look! Most of the mammalian bones are homologs of reptiles! Wow!) In short, all of the evidence that scientists use to support evolution would be there on the morning of the seventh day-- or at least after the expulsion from Eden. I'm not willing to speculate on the DNA make up of animals before the introduction of sin into the world. But afterwards, they had the same DNA relationships they do now.

Enter the Creationist Lobby.

Not content to look at the world as it is, they try to make the world into what they think it should be. They try to blind themselves (and anyone else they can snag) to the evolutionary relationships right in front of their eyes.

I was at the Saint Louis Zoo a few years ago and they had a chimp with a rare disease. The disease caused all of the hair of the chimp to fall out. I came up on the exhibit so that the chimp was leaning forward, her head out of sight as she looked at the ground at something. All I could see was her back, shoulders and arms. The first thought I had was: what's a naked person doing in that cage? You could not tell that chimp was not human from that perspective. The kinship between us was undeniable.

Now, if you were a truly religious, thinking person, you could say something like, God has built us all according to His plan. Our kinship is obvious since we all have been built by the same Creator. When He created the world, according to His plan, it was one thing and it is incumbent on us to understand that Creation in order to understand His thoughts. We must look at the world as it is. Not as we, fallible children of Adam, would wish it to be.

But someone who was unscrupulously manipulating the gullible might instead say, there is no relationship between us and anything else. We were made last and singular. That the same physical forces that drive generators and light bulbs say the stars are many thousands of light years away is an evil lie perpetuated by evil scientists. That the same biological understanding that enables us to save premature babies and develop life saving drugs demonstrates evolutionary relationships is a story by God hating humanists bent on leading us from the true path.

This is not just fundamentalism. This is propaganda. This is the same mental bait and switch so beautifully characterized in 1984. Don't try to fight truth head on. Instead, change the frame of the debate. The Creationist Lobby as Big Brother.

I have no idea what the goals are of the Creationist Lobby-- except, possible indoctrination of the young, satisfaction of a constituency and the pursuit of power and wealth. As we know from Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson, none of these people ever lost money doing this sort of thing.

What the Creationist Lobby is doing, and what I find so offensive, is trying to impress their own narrow definition of God onto the natural world. If God is infinite and nature is the expression of Him, then understanding the natural world on its terms is one of the highest forms of religious pursuit. Attempting to impress some tiny God onto nature is a level of arrogance I cannot stomach. People doing so show themselves to be insignificant in their thinking and trivial in their faith.

Pity so many people believe them.