Creationism Versus Evolution

The immiscible patterns of thought that concern us in this book arc those of creationists and evolutionists. Christian fundamentalists accept without question that divine creation is the explanation for the diversity of life wc sec today—the many different species of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that flourish around the globe. Their position is based on their reading of Genesis, with its familiar story of the creation week—six days during which God created all of nature. On the first day God created heaven and earth and light and darkness; on the second He made the firmament and divided the waters; on the third day He separated land from the seas and created the land plants; on the fourth day He created the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies; on the fifth day animals in the sea and birds in the air came into being; on the sixth day the land animals appeared, and God also created, in his own image, two human beings. Until recently the accepted date for creation, based on a tally of the generations ("begats") listed in the King (ames version of the Bible, was 4004 B.C. Creationists assume that all creatures living today arc the same as when they were created. That is, there has been no evolution.
The scientific version of these events is quite different. Tentative estimates place the origin of the universe in the neighborhood of 15 billion years ago. The sun—a second-generation star—and its orbiting planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago from the interstellar debris created by the explosion of massive first-generation stars. The Earth started out in a molten state but cooled enough to form a solid crust by about 3.8 billion years ago. The first evidence of life dates to about 3.5 billion years ago and consists of very simple cells without a nucleus (prokaryotcs), much like bacteria living today. The oldest known cells with nuclei (cukaryotcs) date to about 2.7 billion years ago. The earliest multicclled organisms discovered so far date to about 1.7 billion years ago. Fossils of the first members of the animal kingdom date to about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of the Cambrian period, about 570 million years ago, animal life became abundant and highly diversified; the fossil record from this period is much better known than that of earlier times. From that point until today, there has been an incredible evolution of life (both plants and animals), with different species appearing, flourishing, and then becoming extinct or evolving into still other species.
The evolutionists' and the creationists' accounts for the origins and diversity of life could hardly be more incompatible. Strict creationists base their account on faith—a belief that Genesis was divinely inspired and provides the only true explanation for the origins of the universe, living creatures, and the many variations in organisms that wc observe today and find in the fossil record.
beliefs, do not understand why any person familiar with the data would reject an explanation based on confirmablc knowledge and accept instead a supernatural concept based on faith alone. Similarly, deeply committed fundamentalists wonder why anyone would reject the Word of God in favor of what a bunch of scientists has to say.
The long strands of human history have seen many conflicts between science and religion, and sadlv, thev have often turned violent and bloody. It is fascinating to consider how individuals come to hold such conflicting explanations for the same phenomena and whv thev hold them so tenaciously. Wc know that parents and society arc remarkably efficient in transmitting patterns of thought and behavior to successive generations. This cultural inheritance sets up rules for behavior that help individuals get along within their group. It also provides each generation with an avenue for learning new things, and it creates order within the society. But beyond these practical advantages, a culture's unique belief systems may retain their enormous power from generation to generation in large part because they supply impressionable young people with answers to many questions they quite naturally ask, such as "Where did I come from?" "Who made me?" "Who will take care of me?" "Why do people die?" "What happens to me after I die:"
Such inquisitiveness seems to be part of our human inheritance. For hundreds of thousands of years, carlv human populations were illiterate and encapsulated in small tribes whose very survival was regularly endangered. Human beings lived a marginal existence like all other animals, dependent on the ability of the environment to sustain them and on their skills and knowledge of how to obtain food, water, and shelter. But within every society, some individuals must have cx-hibitcd a much stronger desire than their peers not just to survive from moment to moment but to understand themselves and the world around them. They asked questions and sought answers. According to anthropologists who have studied hunter-gatherer cultures, the explanations inquisitive tribe members come up with usually include both natural and supernatural elements. Natural things and processes arc those that can be observed: wind, rain, birth, death, animals, plants, fire, night, day, and the seasons. But for each of these observable entities, a supernatural clement of some kind usually figures in the explanation as well. For example, although death is now accepted by most people in Western societies as due to natural causes such as disease, accidents, or the ravages of age, people in some parts of the world still believe that death results from the displeasure of a god or spirit or the effects of a curse such as the evil eve.
The tenacity with which people hold onto beliefs in the supernatural or paranormal has been the subject of much scientific investigation. The results arc complex and unexpected. Two psychologists, Barry Singer and Victor A. Bcnassi (1981, 49—51), made an extensive study of occult beliefs in the United States and offer this summary:
Far from being a "fad," preoccupation with the occult now forms a pervasive part of our culture. Garden-variety occultisms such as astrology and ESI* [extrasensory perception] have swelled to historically unprecedented levels.... Belief in ESI* for instance, is consistently found to be moderate or strong in 80—90% of our population;... in one survey it ranked as our most popular supernatural belief, edging out belief in God in strength and prevalence.
Experiments which have attempted to encourage discontinuation of occult or illusory beliefs by motivating subjects to think through their judgments more carefully ... have uniformly revealed an astonishing resistance to change of such beliefs.... [Such] stubbornness of illusory and occult beliefs is typical rather than exceptional.
By way of explaining the origin of beliefs in the paranormal, Singer and Bcnassi point out that if human beings do not understand the reason for a given event, thev tend to invent one, and the kind of reason they invent will depend on the intellectual baggage they carry with them. A simple, rational, natural explanation might be preferred, but if that cannot be developed, the need to explain remains and supernatural causes may be invoked. Thus, according to these investigators, one factor in the great increase of interest in the occult in the Lnitcd States is inadequate science education in the schools. Over half of the students they tested did not know, for example, that the level of water in a partially filled glass remains parallel to the Earth's surface as the glass is tipped.
Singer and Bcnassi suggest that the "iffincss" of science is a second factor that weighs against the acceptance of scientific explanations over supernatural ones. Scientists tend to resist claiming that their statements arc true by any absolute measure, stating only that they represent the best available explanation based on existing data. As Thomson (1997,219) expresses it, the facts of science arc "temporary way-stations on the long path to the refinement of knowledge." For many people, this tentativeness is a pale substitute for the finality and certainty of supernatural explanations.
A third factor that has increased interest in the occult is the media, which report stories about UFOs (unidentified flying objects), psvehic healing, people who claim that the dead speak through them, and ghosts. Splendid examples of articles of this kind can usually be found in publications stacked at the checkout counters of supermarkets. The media rarely provide scientific analyses of these reports. Added to this "news from the other side" arc highly entertaining motion pictures and television dramas that contain supernatural and superhuman feats. And of course even our own dreams can be quite extraordinary and entertaining, carrying us into compelling worlds where the constraints of waking reality no longer apply.
But Singer and Bcnassi found that the biggest factor bv far in people's acceptance of the occult is organized religion. Most people profess a belief in some religion, and essentially all religions accept miracles as a given. This institutionalized belief in miracles, according to Singer and Bcnassi, has a spillover effect into other realms of life and accounts in large part for people's acceptance of paranormal events ranging from visits bv angels to alien abductions.
Just how rigid occult beliefs can be is documented in an interesting experiment done with students in a psychology course at Concordia Lnivcrsity in Montreal (Gray 1984). The course was called "The Science and Pscudoscicncc of Paranormal Phenomena." Students were given a test at the beginning of the class to sec whether they believed in ESP, ghosts, or miracles (sec table 1). At the end of the semester they were asked the same questions to sec what effect studying these phenomena would have on their beliefs. Then, to get an estimate of the stability of anv change in beliefs, the students were asked the same questions a year later. Occult beliefs declined by the end of the course but usually bv trivial percentages. After one year, belief in the paranormal had moved back to levels close to those before the course was taken. In some cases it was slightly higher. This one-semester course designed to reduce students' belief in the paranormal was not a success. Lawson and Wcscr (1990, 589) report similar findings in another study and note that "the less skilled rcasoncrs were more likely to initially hold the nonscicntific beliefs and were less likely to change those beliefs during instruction. It was also discovered that less skilled rcasoncrs were less likclv to be strongly committed to the scientific beliefs."
Should we conclude that a willingness to accept supernatural explanations over scientific ones has been hardwired into the human brain—that it is "human nature" to seek meaning bevond the confines of the natural world: Perhaps, but an alternative—and to my mind more probable—hypothesis is that one's patterns of thought and belief arc the result of influences very early in life associated with family, church, friends, community, books, other media, and the schools. Children almost always develop the habits and beliefs of the family and culture to which they belong; indeed, the fidelity of cultural inheritance often seems as strong as the fidelity of genetic inheritance. Most children in the Lnitcd States grow up in communities where thev see.