intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his
search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a
Creationist!
I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most
important argument that his group had to make about scientific
creationism.
"Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion," he
told me. "It's the science of one religion versus the science of
another religion."
The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called
religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this
message the single most important point they can make; far more
important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific
facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral
entrepreneurs in a battle of world-views. It is no accident, to their
mind, that American schools teach "scientific" doctrines that are
inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a
question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should
quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus
nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline
versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal
souls created in God's Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral
consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value
themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their
freedom.
Science education, for its part, degrades the American school
system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic
institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination-
machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big
Government and Big Science.
Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most
people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation
and evolution. Most people don't really care much if the world is six
billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn't
impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have
done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher
education -- university level or above. They are willing to let Big
Science entertain its own arcane nonsense -- as long as they and
their children are left in peace.
But when world-views collide directly, there is no peace. The
first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,
when high-school education suddenly became far more widely
spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children
openly contradicting God's Word and they felt they were losing
control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in
the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.
In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John
Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his
science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his
case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the
"Scopes Monkey Trial" was a triumph for science education, and it
was a moral victory in a sense, for the pro-evolution side
successfully made their opponents into objects of national ridicule.
Scopes was found guilty, however, and fined. The teaching of
evolution was soft-pedalled in high-school biology and geology texts
for decades thereafter.
A second resurgence of creationist sentiment took place in the
1960s, when the advent of Sputnik forced a reassessment of
American science education. Fearful of falling behind the Soviets in
science and technology, the federal National Science Foundation
commissioned the production of state-of-the-art biology texts in
1963. These texts were fiercely resisted by local religious groups
who considered them tantamount to state-supported promotion of
atheism.
The early 1980s saw a change of tactics as fundamentalist
activists sought equal time in the classroom for creation-science -- in
other words, a formal acknowledgement from the government that
their world-view was as legitimate as that of "secular humanism."
Fierce legal struggles in 1982, 1985 and 1987 saw the defeat of this
tactic in state courts and the Supreme Court.
This legal defeat has by no means put an end to creation-
science. Creation advocates have merely gone underground, no
longer challenging the scientific authorities directly on their own
ground, or the legal ground of the courts, but concentrating on grass-
roots organization. Creation scientists find their messages received
with attention and gratitude all over the Christian world.
Creation-science may seem bizarre, but it is no more irrational
than many other brands of cult archeology that find ready adherents
everywhere. All over the USA, people believe in ancient astronauts,
the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, the shroud of Turin,
the curse of King Tut. They believe in pyramid power, Velikovskian
catastrophism, psychic archeology, and dowsing for relics. They
believe that America was the cradle of the human race, and that
PreColumbian America was visited by Celts, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Romans, and various lost tribes of Israel. In the high-tech 1990s, in
the midst of headlong scientific advance, people believe in all sorts of
odd things. People believe in crystals and telepathy and astrology
and reincarnation, in ouija boards and the evil eye and UFOs.
People don't believe these things because they are reasonable.
They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.
They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional
modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its
ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold
intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.
They believe these odd things because they don't trust what they are
told by their society's authority figures. They don't believe that
what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their
interests as human beings.
The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has
mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in
some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a
hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the
sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox
American Christian theologians and church officials, wary of a
breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.
It may be that the most determined backlash will come not
from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other
fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms
around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi'ite, from
Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant
Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist
world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do
these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made
the West powerful and rich?
Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity -- even though
rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,
and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it
happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves
the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.