Long March of the Koalas: And other creationist adventures

by Fred Clark

Radical innovation coupled with a rejection of the prior understanding is not a “conservative” approach. That word does not mean what they think it means.

The most dangerous thing about fundamentalism is not that it sometimes teaches wacky ideas, like that the world is barely 6,000 years old or that dancing is sinful. The most dangerous thing is that it insists that such ideas are all inviolably necessary components of the faith.

You can’t be a young-Earth creationist and be from Australia. I think if you’re a young-Earth creationist, you’re not even allowed to believe in Australia. That entire continent is evolution’s playground, evolution’s showroom. Ken Ham couldn’t have built his Creation Museum in Australia because they already have a thriving Evolution Museum there – it takes up the entire island. The displays are fantastic.

If a theist at sea level heats water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the water will boil. If an atheist does the same thing under the same conditions, the atheist will get the same result. There is no such thing as the “theistic boiling point of water.” The boiling point of water is not contingent upon the metaphysical perspective of any given human who might be observing it. Nor is evolution. Evolution is not a special case.

When religion is reduced to superstition, a crisis of faith becomes inevitable. You can read the stories of those crises in the testimonies of the wounded souls profiled in Stefan Ulstein’s Growing Up Fundamentalist. You can measure the effect of this reduction to superstition at any of the alumni reunions held each year at Bob Jones University. (“Has anyone heard from Jim?” “Oh, poor guy, he accidentally picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine at the dentist’s office and his faith shattered into a million pieces. He won’t be back this year.”) Richard Dawkins hasn’t produced a fraction of the ex-believers that Bob Jones churns out every year.

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.

This is also trickier because we’re dealing with archaeology, which offers a variety of different means for dating such discoveries. Thus the magical invocation of evangelical skepticism about carbon dating won’t work here. “Skepticism” is a generous term for this reflexive dismissal of the science for which Walter Libby earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It amounts to nothing more than a series of stock phrases that can be recited like a protective spell. “Scientists say radiocarbon dating is flawed.” (Really? Which scientists? Name two. And why haven’t they stepped forward to claim their own Nobel for disproving the chemistry and math, correcting this universal error?) Or “Radiocarbon dating is often mistaken.” This assertion is repeated as protective bullshit – in the technical, Frankfurtian sense. It is not stated as something the speaker knows to be true, nor as something the speaker knows to be false. It is stated by someone who is unconcerned with whether it is true or false in the hopes of muddying the waters and changing the subject.