who or what do “we” lose to “evolution”? (pt. 1)

In my searchings in response to Richard’s comment the other day, I wandered across a creation education ministry known as Project Creation. On that site, I found an article referring to Ron Numbers, University of Wisconsin historian of science, author of the definitive history of creationism, Creation Science, and the conjunction between evangelical Christianity and biological origin stories, called The Creationists.

In this article, the reader is presented with an argument that goes like this:

1. People in their early twenties tend not to go to church and not to self-identify as Christians, even if previously they did.
2. The reason these “lost” young adults “lose” their faith is because “the church seemed irrelevant to them.”
3. Evolutionists, especially in public school, have encouraged “this opinion” [I think the "opinion" = "church is irrelevant"].
4. The way evolutionists go about making church seem irrelevant is by presenting a dichotomy between (a) Science, “by which they mean evolutionism” and (b) the Bible [presumably not a book where you can find "evolutionism"].
5. Evolutionists use their “science” to demonstrate that (a) there is a conflict between science and the Bible and, (b) “some” students are going to accept the evidence and the dichotomy.
6. By accepting the evolutionists’ science (so-called) and their dichotomy, students are left a non-choice: believe in science and become and athesist who cannot accept the Bible or throw out the evolutionism, the “evidence” for it, and stay a Christian.

Then the article goes on to offer Ron Numbers as an unfortunate believer in evolutionism and, therefore, an atheist who has turned his back on the faith of his childhood.

Problems abound. One of the problems is that Numbers has been misrepresented. Numbers grew up a Seventh Day Adventist. As well as being one of the most respected historians of science in the world, he’s served as director of the American Society of Church History. He describes himself as someone who sees common ground between most Christian scripture, doctrine, and practice, and most aspects of evolutionary biology. And he distinguishes himself from those like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Michael Dennett who view evolution (however described) as the keystone argument for absolute (metaphysical) naturalism and, its logical (but not necessary) corollary, atheism. These are hardly credentials sported by a thorough going atheist. So on this point, the Project Creation author is simply misinformed.

Another problem is the series of leaps s/he makes between points #2 + #3 and #4 + #5 of their argument. And then there’s the Either/Or of point #6 (at least as it’s presented here). It’s just downright wrong. But rather than wrangling through the argument itself, perhaps I should illustrate what we are losing to “evolutionism” with a bit o’ personal narrative.

I was taught in elementary school (first out of the KJV, then the NAS) that the world was roughly 6,000 years old. My parents, not themselves Christians in any substantive sense, had no idea what I was being taught and continued to give me dinosaur books that said—just as glibly as in the Bible stories—that Earth was billions of years old and that the last dinosaurs had died out roughly 60,000,000 years ago. At the time, the additional four zeros on the end of the number of years old things were didn’t bother me. Six thousand years is an incomprehensibly long time. Heck, as a kid 10 minutes seemed like a long time. So millions of years didn’t seem substantively more preposterous.

But there were things that did bother me. In one account, all the crazy looking creatures that have wandered over the surface of the planet—things with bones and shells and horns and teeth in all kinds of configurations that we don’t see anymore—did so in a kind of slow, ordered procession. Mastodons followed Triceratops, predated elephants, coexisted with saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. In the other account, everything was slammed together on the same planet; then in the same Ark. So our ancestors ran and hid from Deinonychus, hunted lumbering Apatosaurs, and just hoped to stay out of the way of Tyrannosaurus, the lizard king. The foreshortened timeline was certainly more exciting: after being chased out of the Garden of Eden, Adam didn’t just have to work the fields, he had to build scarecrows large enough to keep enormous Haast’s Eagles (big enough to eat an ostrich!) from eating him as he dug away with stick tools. But then, as I was reminded by my seventh grade history teacher, Mr. O, Adam wouldn’t have been scared—according to Genesis, everyone was a vegetarian until after the Flood.

“What did the Tyrannosaurs eat, then?” I asked after hearing this tidbit of biblical history and with a little concern in my voice (I’ve always been partial to dedicated carnivores).

“Plants,” was his reply.

“How?!” I asked, the young nerd in me troubled by minutia like anatomical consistency and the problem of physiological function on morphology. “T. rex had six-inch-long serrated teeth curved like daggers, no incisors, no molars, no well-muscled lips to grind up and swallow mashed up plant material. And every herbivore we know about is a quadruped; T. rex was bipedal.”

[No joke. I actually did talk like that in seventh grade. And played offensive line, doubles tennis, threw the shotput, and swam butterfly. I really tried to mix 'geek' with 'jock.' But when you're reading books like Bob Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies in middle school, that 'jock' moniker is only going to last for so long. And I got picked on a lot. I probably deserved it—who says "quadruped" to their teacher just out in public like that?]

Needless to say, I wore out the patience of my Creationist teachers pretty quickly. I meant no offense. It’s just that, when faced with such an overwhelming pile of contradictory claims presented in book, journal, newspaper, magazine, and video formats, it’s hard for any one teacher to address so many discrepancies. And, gradually, as adulthood nears, one is faced with some hard choices.

Is one side lying? And, if so, is there some sort of conspiracy of interlocked lies? In Christian school, I was taught—usually implicitly, though some teachers tipped their cards more than others—that there was indeed a conspiracy on the part of paleontologists, archaeologists (no they’re not the same thing), geologists, biologists, etc., to bring God down a notch. Evolution (usually with that tell-tale “-ism” attached) is a series of lies so well concocted that they can only come from the Devil himself, promoted by anti-God, anti-American minions taught in public schools and (illegally) supported by—wait for it—tax dollars, yours and mine.

Unfortunately, when one begins to think and talk about science and religion in these stark alternatives—evolution is a godless lie concocted to make Christians follow the Devil (or some variant of this) whereas Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is the only acceptable biological/geological worldview that gets both the Bible and the science right—there is little wiggle room left for any new information that comes to light. Everything must either be part of the true, biblical account, or the made-up atheistic one.

So, unlike the proclamation of our Project Creation writer, it’s the Creationists, not the evolutionists, who have presented school kids (and everyone else) with the tenuous dichotomy between what the evolutionary scientists say and what the YEC interpreters of the Bible say (that’s point #4). I stress “say” because in these cases it’s a struggle for authority rather than a presentation of evidence.

Evidence comes into play at point #5. But even our Project Creation author admits that it’s science, and presumably scientists, who adjudicate what counts as evidence for this debate. This point is often then one where young Christians interested in the world outside of their churches and schools, people like me and, Ron Numbers it sounds like, meet their Waterloo. More on that later….