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Two questions for Creationists

"For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you, who have this knowledge, eating in an idol's temple, won't he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall." – Paul, I Corinthians 8

Even though it has been over eighty-five years since the Scopes Monkey Trial, where two titans, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, squared off over the question of evolution being taught in the public school, it is easy to understand why fundamentalist America became entrenched in their anti-Darwinian perspective. Much of the American ethos has been suspicious of “book learning” and so we have done a poor job educating our children. At the beginning of the twentieth century the federal government estimated that less than half the children in this country attended school at all. Among minority groups, this number dropped to roughly a third. At the time of the Scopes trial, only 56 percent of kids finished high school and in the major cities where evolution was most likely to be taught the percentage was much lower. For example, in Philadelphia, only 19 percent of children left with a diploma. This meant that most Americans were more likely to have heard Dr. William B. Riley, Frank Norris, or Ames’s Billy Sunday’s attacks on evolution than have a teacher or expert explain what Darwinism really was. These religious men were skilled in rhetorical tricks appealing to their audiences anti-Semitism by noting that the evolutionary theory was really an “international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy,” that those who taught it were clearly “atheists,” and that it was “materialist socialist propaganda.”

While Scopes is remembered as a victory for evolution because of the reporting of H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun and the 1955 movie Inherit the Wind, it was really a legal and social victory for the fundamentalists and one of the reasons the ACLU is still demonized by the right to this day. While at the time only three other states, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, had dealt with the creationism/evolution question. In the aftermath of the Tennessee trial, bills or resolutions were introduced in forty-one states supporting anti-evolution stances and laws. Most of these measures were defeated. Still, textbook publishers are not going to touch a hot stove, especially if it means they will not be able to sell their books in states like Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas and in many other school districts throughout the country. So, they left evolution out of their science textbooks! Even with textbooks that included it, it is easy to understand why a teacher would be gun shy about teaching the subject,

Over three decades of teenagers graduated high school without hearing about Darwinism in their classrooms. It was the godless Communists who helped reintroduce evolutionary theory to our kids, just not the way you think! In 1957, Americans were shocked that the Russians were the first into space with Sputnik. With John Kennedy’s call to go to the moon, the nation embraced science and technology because we could not let the Communists win the space race. National and educational leaders insisted that evolution, a backbone of scientific thought, should be taught in public schools. Yet, it was not until 1968 that the Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that banning “Darwinism” violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. To put this in perspective, a new show called Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood had just debuted, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been killed, the future James Bond, Daniel Craig, was in diapers and an eight-year-old Barack Obama was attending school in Jakarta.

Given America’s long history of mistrusting education and the relatively new status of evolution being taught in the classroom, it is little wonder that only four in ten Americans, 39 percent, according to a Gallup Poll, believe in evolution. That is not to say that most Americans reject Darwinism. Thirty-six percent of Americans have no opinion. Only a quarter of Americans completely reject the notion. While Clarence Darrow, myself, and many others have rightly argued that belief in evolution can stand with belief in God, one-in-four does not believe that is true. I would like those who reject Darwinism to answer two simple questions.

Is God a trickster God? Through a variety of ways we know the earth is much older than the 6 to 8 thousand years claimed in the Bible. Whether it is through ice core samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica, single-celled algae blooms that have fallen every year to the bottom of Lake Suigestsu, Japan, the depth of dust on the moon, the thickness of coral reefs across the world, meteor, asteroid and comet impact craters, evidence of multiple ice ages, or a thousand other ways, we know that the earth is extremely old. In the rock and sediment we have discovered fossils. The way these fossils are arranged indicates the development of very simple organisms into more complex ones. It gives a timely order of when creatures appeared. There is stratification of animals and organisms. We do not find the evidence of dinosaurs existing with humans or squirrels. If everything were created at once, we would expect to find dinosaur bones with ancient Homo sapiens. That is not the case. Through DNA and other evidence we can see the remaining characteristics of the organisms that creatures have evolved from.

Okay, if you are still awake, what does this mean? Either the earth is old, and life has evolved, or God is screwing with our heads. To be a creationist, you have to believe that He is running around with a divine shovel burying phony fossils in a certain order, all at the same strata, across the world and planting evidence of an extremely old earth like a dirty cop trying to frame a suspect. Now this would seem like a lot of work, but God being God and having all the time in the world has to take it one step further by planting counterfeit data in various animals’ genomes in the form of junk DNA. You can almost imagine God putting His hand over His mouth and laughing as He plants evidence in a chicken’s DNA that their ancestor had teeth and that a giant whale’s ancestors had legs. So, is God a trickster or not?

Is belief in Neo-Darwinism a salvific question? In other words, when someone gets to heaven does God ask him or her if they believed in evolution? If the individual answers wrongly, does God go, “Peter, tell this poor soul what they just won.”

St. Peter then booms, “Well God, he wins a one way trip to hell and a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat.” The poor individual blurts out, “But I believed your son was the savior…”

God responds, “It’s doesn’t matter. You believed your eyes and trusted your brain. In the eternal game of Chutes and Ladders, you get the chute, sorry.”

If it is not a salvific question, then why are you causing other brothers and sisters to stumble? How many Christian young people have been lost because ministers and church leaders have told them they need to choose between faith and evidence? “Well, my pastor says that Darwinism is bunk but my professor in college has all these fossils and data that I can test, explore and judge. One of them has to be right and one of them has to be wrong.” When given the choice between their senses, rational thought, and evidence, or Christian belief, especially when church members have fought tooth and nail against Darwinism, how many young people have walked away from the faith? What if you are wrong on the evolution question, would you not be responsible for all those who have turned away from Christ because of your insistence on the matter? I wonder what St. Paul would say on the matter?