Creation versus evolution debate coming closer

Stan Darling - 1 November 1987

Stephen Jay Gould, the world’s best known palaeontologist, was approached by a creationist in Auckland after a lecture.

The man said the talk had been about 95 per cent ridicule of creationism and five per cent fact. Professor Gould replied that creationism itself was about five per cent fact and 95 per cent ridiculous.

Gordon Hewitt, a senior zoology lecturer at Victoria University and dean of the science faculty there, told that story in Christchurch recently.

A Wellingion member of the New Zealand Sceptics, Dr Hewitt was talking about “the hoax of creationism,” and the way so-called creation scientists were trying to gain a foothold in the teaching of science, especially in America.

Creation scientists argue that science proves Genesis, first book of the Bible, which says that the world and all that is on it were created very quickly, at about the same time, between 6000 and 10,000 years ago.

Could a movement towards a balanced teaching of evolution and creation-science in public schools happen here?

Maybe, said Dr Hewitt. “How is it kids are not falling all over the place laughing when creationist arguments are heard?” he said. “Is it because of very serious gaps in the way we teach science, particularly historical science? We are doing some things wrong in our teaching, and we need to get our act together.

“I think they are a serious threat.” he said of the creationists. “It is very hard for kids to tackle these issues if they are presented as a bewildering array of possibilities in schools.

“I don’t think the Government would decree a curriculum balance here. Even Merv Wellington wasn’t ready to take that step.”

He is concerned that teachers inclined toward the creationist theory could be entering schools through the training system.

Someone asked how creationists should be approached. Should people laugh at them, debate them or show outrage at what he called their moral dishonesty?

All three techniques should be used, said Dr Hewitt.

“I’ve been using creationist methods tonight,” he said. “They use debating techniques. They are not doing science, they are getting audiences in public halls and doing performances.

“Scientists criticise each other’s ideas, and their own. The creationists go through the literature, looking for things they can quote by the evolutionists against them.”

Creative quoting is one of the techniques, taking passages that make it appear evolutionists are questioning the basis of their own theory.

All evolutionists, he said, have sometimes questioned strict Darwinism. Just because they question the way evolution works, thal does not mean it does not happen.

“Biologists know evolution happened,” said Dr Hewitt. “What they love arguing about is how it happened.”

He said it is “understandable that people regard science with something of a jaundiced eye. What we have done to man’s belief system — what we’ve done with man’s idea of his place in the universe — is far more complicated than technological changes.

“People look for simple ways to explain things. It is not surprising they turn to these things, such as astrology.

“Some people want a religion that absolutely defines the universe for them, something that can’t be doubted. They cling to ancient writings. Just about every group on Earth has its own view about where we Started from.”

Equal time in schools

A sceptic who observed National Bible-Science Conference sessions in the United States in 1984 and 1985 said that five of 18 speakers favoured geocentrism — the idea that the Earth stands at the centre of the universe, and does not revolve around the sun. The observer said that idea seemed to be gaining ground among some fundamentalists.

Dr Hewitt said the creationists were attempting “to get equal time in schools for religion. Should we give equal time, too, to flat earth and round Earth theories’

The movement is “based on a fundamental belief that evolution is to blame for the downfall of civilisation,” such as the permissive society.

In the United States, the fundamentalist movement is so strong that every living Nobel laureate has told the Supreme Court that creationism is a religion, not a science. Creationists use the same argument about evolutionism.

“When people are scared, they look for a scapegoat,” said Dr Hewitl. “These people hold a firm view — that people would have kept to true religion if evolution hadn’t been taught.”

A few years ago, he visited the headquarters of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego. “They were very sincere, convinced people,” he said.

He had doubts, though, about the activities of the National Creation Science Foundation in Melbourne. They had received $250,000 from sales of books and donations in 1985. Of that, only $850 had been spent on research.

“They simply pinched their ideas from the San Diego group,” he said.

Institute of Creation Research literature says that creationism has a liberating message: “When suddenly they learned with certainty that the Bible is confirmed by all genuine science and can be confidently trusted in all things, it was nothing less than release from bondage … The world no longer is a decadent remnant of vast eons of grinding Struggle and chance mutation, but is a beautiful, friendly world

It is a “freedom from the need to compromise with man’s errant philosophies …”

Promoters of creation science teaching are urged to stress the scientific, rather than the religious, aspects of the issue.

Dr Henry Morris, the institute’s director, wrote that religious creationists who claim a belief in both creation and evolution — seeing evolution as God’s method of creation — are more disturbing than atheistic and Political evolutionists.

“If evolution is true, there have been three billion years of suffering and death in the world of living things leading up to man,” he wrote. “Billions of animals suffered and died, for no apparent reason.” The God of the Bible is not the kind of God that would use such a wasteful, cruel process.

Dr Morris said that “ancient Pagan evolutionary philosophies began to be revived and promoted by the various revolutionary movements of the times” in the 18th and 19th centuries.

He objected to the indoctrination of young people without equal exposure to evidence and arguments supporting creation.

“Since evolution in the large picture is not testable, it is not science, any more than is creation,” said Dr Morris. “People believe in evolution, but they don’t see it, because it moves too slowly. Therefore, it is just as much a ‘religious’ theory as is creation.”

Dr Hewitt said that creationists argued that they did a lot of scientific writing that was not published.

A 1982 computer check showed that of 135,000 papers submitted to 68 scientific journals over four years, 18 were from creationists, 12 of them to a single science education journal.

None of the papers was accepted, on the grounds that none had a high enough standard. Some editors said they would accept creationist work if it had a high standard.

Dr Hewitt said that creationist field work looks for fossils that are out of place according to the theory of evolution, such as supposed human footprints found along with dinosaur prints in a Texas valley some years ago.

Other scientists argued that it was only creationists who saw human footprints. Others saw erosion marks, parts of dinosaur Prints and the results of possible fakery. Most creationists later withdrew the claim that human prints had been found. “For once, they have actually slightly backed down,” said Dr Hewitt. Using creationist standards, all sorts of modern fossils, such as chicken bones, should be found along with fossils that should be much older.

He said the creationists do not like the findings in human evolution, since “a vast amount of human and pre-human skeletal material has been found. There is now a very good series leading up to modern man.”

Creationist claims that all fossils were laid down in sediment deposited during the great Flood described in Genesis are easy to dispute scientifically, said Dr Hewitt.

“Show me one whalebone in among the early fish,” he said. “You don’t find it. That would show that something very strange is going on.”

Such a great flood would not have produced tidy seabed layering, but a chaotic jumble.

“Thinking about Noah’s Ark, it was simply much too small to hold the 1.12 million organisms on Earth today,” he said. “That is animal species, never mind the plants, which presumably could have gone on as seeds.”

Since the ark would have contained about 56,000 cubic metres that would have left about a twentieth of a cubic metre for each animal.

“Two elephants at sea would have needed about a thousand bales of hay,” said Dr Hewitt. “And the job of Cleaning out the ark must have kept someone terribly, terribly busy.

“It has been calculated that for a flood to have covered Earth to a depth that covered mount Ararat, there would have to be 187 inches per hour. That is going to homogenise everything

— including, I would have thought, the ark.”

Dr Henry Morris, a hydrologist, wrote that the great Flood was not simply a local one in the Middle East, in spite of the same river valleys as exist today being mentioned in Genesis as existing — presumably in similar form — both before and after the disastrous Flood.

“Furthermore,” he said “God’s promise never to send such a flood again, sealed with the continuing testimony of the rainbow, has been broken again and again if the Flood was only a local flood.”