Reasonable Doubt: Creating a stir by supporting science
(By JIM GAINES, The Bowling Green Daily News, August 23, 2009)
All the furor started with a seemingly simple question: What should be taught in public school science classes?
Science, obviously. But it quickly became clear that many people are hazy on what science actually is, especially biological science; and how it differs from moral allegories in religious texts.
A monument to this confusion, and abettor in its deliberate perpetuation, is the “Creation Museum” in Petersburg, run by Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis. I toured it with biology professor P.Z. Myers and a large skeptical group, and found the exhibits bogus, full of holes and often pointing to ludicrous conclusions.
Pointing that out drew the heaviest response I’ve gotten in 21/2 years of writing this column. So far, I’ve seen three angry letters, one criticizing my style of argument (but, unsurprisingly, not mentioning the inflammatory rhetoric of letters denouncing me), and one long personal plea for my soul. The last was nice, but misguided - the writer unintentionally makes one of my major points for me: That the anger stems not from real debates over the search for scientific facts, but from fear that those facts might discredit particular moral beliefs.
The positive reaction, however, has far outweighed the negative. Now a couple of supportive letters have come in, and I’ve heard personally from about a dozen local residents and frequent readers, all positive. I’d like to thank them all.
Both my column and some of the printed reaction have made the rounds of the Internet, drawing about 40 brief comments from across the United States and Canada. All of those have supported the column.
Of course, popularity is no guarantee of correctness. That’s why I view with a skeptical eye any claim unsupported by testable evidence. I don’t reject everything else outright, but unsupported or contested claims are, at best, to be treated with caution and hedged about with qualifications.
A few of my readers, however, have no such reservation about making wild charges.
For criticizing Ken Ham, I am accused of “attacking Christianity and all who believe the Bible is the inspired word of God.”
I must apologize. I did not realize that Ken Ham was numbered among the prophets, or that his cartoonish interpretation of the Bible was accepted as, well, gospel by the 2 billion or so Christians on the planet. If that was true, however, one would think his attendance numbers would be a bit higher. Where else can you go see a prophet nowadays?
Seriously, though, I’m very tired of seeing crackpots like Ham hide behind respectable Christians, claiming that they’re all being persecuted because one person making ludicrous assertions also claims to be a Christian.
Doing so begs the question: What does it mean to be a Christian?
Most people assume that the definition is obvious. But anyone can claim to be a Christian, and many very strange people do. Sun Mung-Moon does. The Holocaust Museum shooter does.
And so does Fred Phelps, the ranting lunatic who pickets soldiers’ funerals because he thinks we don’t stone enough gay people to death. In fact, Phelps runs his own church, Westboro Baptist in Topeka, Kan.; just like Ken Ham, he claims to be doing God’s work.
Would anyone like to tell me that anyone who denounces Phelps’ hysterical bigotry is also “attacking Christianity?”
Yet Phelps and Ham are actually doing the same thing, trying to hide their absurdities in the Bible’s aura of sanctity. They both quote biblical verses in their own defense. Phelps is rejected by the larger Christian community because his idiocies are more publicly offensive than Ham’s, but their method is the same.
The apostle Paul said that Christians are justified by faith; that’s all well and good, but your neighbors can’t see faith itself. So the standard Jesus himself set, in Matthew 7:15-23, was what results come from that faith. At that point, he specifically denounces those who speak in his name yet “bring forth evil fruit.”
If someone says to me, “I’m a Christian, which means I think we should all be kind to one another, as Jesus taught,” then I reply, “That’s fine. In fact, that’s admirable.”
But if they say, “I’m a Christian, which requires me to believe that Jesus rode around Galilee on a pet dinosaur,” my reply is, “That’s ridiculous.”
And if they maintain, in line with Ham’s museum, that God doesn’t mind men having sex with their younger sisters so long as they can avoid having children with birth defects, I have said and will continue to say, “That’s revolting.”
And I’m far from alone on this. The National Center for Science Education posts a long list of endorsements from major religious groups, all supporting the teaching of actual science - evolution - in science classes.
About 230 million Americans identify themselves as Christians, and organizations representing more than one-third of those people accept that the scientific evidence for natural selection does not cause a conflict with their religious faith. So, really, Saint Ham and his flock have much bigger problems than annoyingly rational newspaper columnists. One Christian in three is, by Ham’s standards, out to corrupt the faith from within.
I am told by one reader that there is “much scientific evidence out there in favor of creationism.” Well, that “evidence” is exactly what the Creation Museum purports to show. I’ve already mentioned a few - just a few - of the gaping holes in its narrative. But if you don’t grasp those, how about outright falsehoods?
Example: One of the signs narrating Christian history says Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered “burning of all Bibles.”
No he didn’t.
Diocletian oversaw a haphazard persecution of Christians from 299 to 303. But the Bible upon which Answers In Genesis relies so utterly did not exist at that time. Most churches used the Old Testament, by then well-established; but the New Testament had not been settled. There was no general agreement on which books were authoritative, and there were dozens of other contenders, now lost or forgotten. The first compilation naming only the books now accepted as canonical dates from 64 years after Diocletian’s persecution ended, and a church council didn’t confirm that for 25 further years.
In most other contexts, this may seem a minor point, but for a “museum” based on the absolute literal truth of a specific set of texts, the inability to accurately describe that collection’s history and contents is a startling gaffe.
They’re no better on philosophy. One exhibit attributes the statement “Man is the measure of all things” to Rene Descartes. Nope, that was Protagoras, who died 2,000 years before Descartes was born.
One letter-writer says my “statements about our beliefs regarding creationism were often incomplete, inaccurate, totally misconstrued, or at best misunderstood.”
Look, I recited what the museum itself says. I’ve got pictures of the exhibits and accompanying signs. Go and look for yourself. You’ll see the same thing.
But take your wallet. Traveling with P.Z. Myers’ group, I got the group rate of only $10. Normally, Ken Ham charges $21.95 per person. And for that price, all you get is the spectacle of Hamites perverting the Bible into something it’s not: a science book instead of a moral guide.
I also got the old argument that it takes as much faith to accept scientific conclusions as it does to believe in religious assertions. This demonstrates a feeble grasp of the nature of science.
One of the foundations of rational, empirical investigation is that anyone is, theoretically, able to check the facts for themselves. That’s why scientific research is published in detail, though few except scientists themselves read the technical journals wherein such results are laid out for critique. While complex genetic experiments and archaeological investigations are beyond the reasonable ability of most people, real scientists’ conclusions are repeatedly verified by numerous researchers, often rivals seeking to best one anothers’ work, not find agreement.
Evolution is scientifically accepted because it has withstood 150 years of that criticism, and only grown stronger as more research has been done.
“Creation science” has does none of this. It starts from an unquestioned text, ignores discordant evidence, mangles its textual foundation to conform to what remains, and then ... just stops asking. Any contradictions? It’s a miracle, now shut up. Any unexplained lapses in your story? Goddidit. Quit thinking about it, or you’ll be numbered among the heathen.
And yet creationists claim that scientists do exactly the same thing to them, “persecuting” or “censoring” creationist arguments. But the dozen or so standard creationist arguments are now given short shrift because they, unlike evolution, did not stand up to careful scrutiny. Although they were discredited a century ago, most who now argue for a 6,000-year-old Earth have never bothered to learn that background before presenting those old arguments again.
When the blatant inconsistencies in Ham’s museum are pointed out, the standard cop-out is to write them off as miracles. It was all God’s handiwork, after all; so it can’t be expected to match what’s now understood of natural laws.
But the point of the Creation Museum is to argue that the Genesis story is real science, and conforms to scientific standards. You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be a law-violating miracle and perfectly logical at the same time.
That’s why creationism is not science, and hence doesn’t belong in science classes. The Bible’s moral message and spiritual message has nothing to do with genetics or geology, and that message is not diluted by realizing that Genesis is just as allegorical as Jesus’ parables. Are those rendered worthless by not listing the names and addresses of their hypothetical participants?
