Why Are There Still Creationists?. Jonathan Marks
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understatement. They eschew vaccinations. They take right-wing provocateurs seriously. They vote against their rational interests. They can’t distinguish between gut feelings and informed thoughts, and privilege the former over the latter when they can. And they aren’t all necessarily even the same people.
There is a veritable industry of aggrieved social critics condemning the stupidity of ostensibly modern citizens who reject science. But of course nobody totally rejects science, and maybe they have some reasons for rejecting some particular science. After all, not all science is good. Back in the 1920s, when the science of the age called for solving social problems by sterilizing the poor and restricting the immigration of genetically feebleminded Italian and Jewish immigrants, the people who were anti-science were actually in the right.
We all make decisions about what science to accept, what science to ignore, and what science to reject. You probably don’t give much thought to helminthology, the science of parasitic worms, generally found in feces. Perhaps, like me, you don’t give much thought or credence to exobiology, the science of non-existent extraterrestrial life. You may never even have heard of quantum electrodynamics, but it sure sounds scientific.
This book is about the rejection of evolution, a science more real than exobiology, more familiar than quantum electrodynamics, and more decorous than helminthology. Evolution is the science of where we come from, a question so basic to human existence that all peoples have stories to answer it. It is about ancestry, and the framework of this book rests upon an anthropological truism: The ancestors are always sacred.
Confronting this cultural fact will help explain not only the popular rejection of human evolution, but the often bizarre and vituperative disputes within the science itself. In the 1980s, for example, scholars working on Homo habilis in Kenya fought bitterly with scholars working on Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia over whose fossils were more important to the reconstruction of human prehistory. Today the Kenyan and Ethiopian fossils are reconciled and have joined forces against the upstart fossils from South Africa (Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi). Regardless of the zoological reality of these species, they are the subjects of mythology and nationalism, not to mention fame – which is why zoological realities and paleoanthropological realities don’t necessarily map on to one another well. The fossils are national treasures, and the species they represent are, in the broadest sense, sacred ancestors.
Consequently, when scholars reject “Australopithecus prometheus” or “Homo rudolfensis” as unreal, what they mean is that the fossils allocated to them ought to be called something else. Making scientific sense of the ancestors is no small undertaking.
Neither is making unscientific sense of the ancestors. When evangelical entrepreneurs build Noah’s ark in Kentucky, they must still struggle to reconcile biogeography and adaptation, as did serious scholars two centuries before them. If God made animals to fit where they live – polar bears to the arctic, bison to the Great Plains, koalas to eucalyptus forests – then it seems unlikely that they could have gotten there from Mount Ararat before going extinct, without some other ad hoc miraculous intervention. The problem actually arises from juxtaposing two different ancient sources. The Bible talks about Noah’s ark, but not about adaptation; that is from Aristotle. Moreover, if God made birds to fly, then it is hard to explain ostriches and penguins. Those are the kinds of facts that led scholars 200 years ago to begin to seek explanations in history, rather than in miracle.
It doesn’t matter whether you call the animal-saver Noah, or Deucalion, or Utnapishtim – as the stories from various ancient sources had it – he still had an impossible job of dropping off the various animals in their respective habitats around the world. He must be tasked with dropping the lemurs off in Madagascar, anacondas in the Amazon, armadillos in America, gibbons in Southeast Asia, kangaroos in Australia, reindeer in northern Europe – or else another story needs to be composed and related about how they got there. And that story is necessarily non-biblical – because the Bible doesn’t say anything about it, which in turn undermines the assumption that the Bible is giving us a complete and accurate account of adaptation and biogeography. In fact it undermines the assumption that what the Bible says is even relevant to understanding the facts of prehistory. Early scientists 200 years ago recognized the problems here.
Fossils made the problems with Noah’s ark as a scientific explanation for the patterns of life even more acute. Some ancient animals seemed to cross-cut categories – large swimming and flying reptiles, for example – while others seemed to confuse familiar patterns. Elephants, after all, were only known to be from hot climates, so why were there woolly elephants in Siberia long ago? Certainly being woolly helps you survive in Siberia, but these were elephants, so what was their relationship to the normal elephants of Africa and South Asia? And what happened to them? Was God’s gift of woolliness somehow insufficient for them? And why didn’t the same thing happen to the non-woolly elephants of the tropics? The science of the early 1800s was discovering that the world of the past was a different place than the world of the present, and the Bible afforded no guide to understanding it.
Were there pteranodons and iguanodons in Eden? If not, then how did they get into the fossil record? And if so, then why doesn’t the Bible mention them? The Bible implies quite directly that Eden was populated by familiar creatures. As a character in The Sopranos articulated it many years later, “No way! T. rex in the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve would be running all the time, scared shitless. But the Bible says it was paradise.” And clearly, if you imagined them as somehow uninterested in consuming Adam and Eve, those T. rexes would have had to be the world’s worst adapted herbivores, about as suited to vegetarianism as great white sharks.
It is no coincidence that biblical scholarship and biological scholarship matured together. The coevolution of information and explanation had been a long-term process. Scholars in ancient times had envisioned the relationship between God and His creation as analogous to that of a king and his subjects. He ruled by decree, and could reverse or abrogate his decisions more or less capriciously. For example, God devotes a chunk of space in Leviticus and Deuteronomy to explaining what foods are clean and unclean for His followers. But in Mark 7:19, Jesus peremptorily declares “all foods clean.” In practical terms, that certainly made it easier to be a Christian than a Jew, but it also reveals a God who seems not to be able to make up His mind.
Could the sea part for His followers and swallow up their enemies? Maybe. Could a man live for three days in the belly of a fish? Maybe. Could the sun stand still in the sky for twelve hours? Maybe. Can the dead be raised? Maybe.
By the eighteenth century, however, the image of God as a sort of cosmic despot was being gradually supplanted by the image of God as a sort of cosmic engineer, building stable things that work a certain way, always. The universe now was seen to run according to natural laws, which were inviolable by their very virtue of being divine, which in turn gave less leeway to suspend their operation, for that would plunge the universe into chaos, which was precisely what the Creation had transcended.
To a large extent, this was a consequence of the discoveries of physics and astronomy, which had shown convincingly that the earth moves, that it is a planet like others, that it revolves around the sun, and that it does so because of gravity, which is also what keeps the moon revolving around the earth and reciprocally causes the tides upon the earth. And just as laws keep the moon circling the earth and earth circling the sun, so too do laws keep blood circling through the body. Laws were there in physiology as well as in physics.
Laws are order. Violating them introduces disorder. The earth could not stop rotating for a day without sustaining catastrophic consequences resulting from inertia; and starting it up again would engender similarly daunting implications now predictable from the laws of physics.
Rationalism, the emerging ideology of the eighteenth century, was a powerful antagonist against miracles. It deployed an old medieval weapon in order to define miracles out of existence: If we can explain things without miracles, then why bother with them at all? As for the recollections of the ancients, which explanation is more likely – that there was a temporary suspension of the laws of nature, or that somebody, somewhere along the line, didn’t