My creationist

Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.

My creationist is a pillar of the community. She is a well-regarded professional in the town where I used to live. She is a deeply respected and devout follower of her faith. She has studied her specialised calling at a high level and has participated in publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal. And she believes that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago. At least, that's what she says.

She has had an education and now has a professional qualification that is predicated upon empirical evidence, of careful triangulation of fact, of measured and weighed reference to reality. She knows about the scientific method and uses it in her work. My guess is that in trying to apply that approach to support her own faith, something brought her to talk to me, an atheist who loves evolution.

Her interest was originally piqued by my perusing a printout of the tree of life. She leaned in to what I was doing and studied the diagram from the Interactive Tree of Life project. After a moment she pointed at the centre of the diagram and asked "What is right there?"

The answer is, we don't really know what the first organism was, what Darwin called the "ur-organism". I tell her that, and she walks away in triumph.

But then, much later she brings the issue up herself. On a bike ride, and quite without warning, she confessed that she could not understand how evolution could conjure up information from nothing. She saw this as a flaw in the theory that could not be answered. Panting heavily as I tried to keep up with her, I suggested that this could be better answered when we were off the bikes, and had time to think about the question. We agreed to meet and to discuss what we knew of evolution and creation. I remain very glad we did.

Sitting over coffees in our home town she explained that a fundamental flaw in the theory of evolution was that information could not be conjured from nothing, and that this alone causes the artifice of Darwinian evolution to topple. The information contained in the sperm and the egg must be vast and complex, and there is no scientific explanation that tells us where this comes from. Surely holding onto this untruth is as much an act of faith as belief in the biblical explanation for the diversity of life?

It is clear to me that she has been holding onto this argument for some time, that it is one of the arguments used in her church. She is sure it constitutes a slam dunk. But one of the reasons I like her, the reason she is still my friend, is that she listens to the answer.

Carefully I walk through the digital nature of the genetic code, checking with her that we agree on the principles I am explaining. The code is a digital code, not analog. Check. The code comprises four amino acids. Check. The pairing of these acids provides the means by which information is stored and transmitted, check.

The problem is where does all of this lavish, abundant information come from, if not from god? Chance alone is not sufficient explanation, and I suspect that she has heard this debunking of evolution in meetings at her church. To answer, I used the analogy from Dawkins (1986) of the sentence from Shakespeare: "Methinks it is like a Weasel".

It's a lovely thought experiment, and worth describing again even if you are familiar with it. Given time (which as with all things evolutionary is a key word) a monkey at a typewriter will be able to type the phrase from Hamlet "methinks it is like a weasel". The event will happen, but even with a very well motivated and immortal monkey it will likely take longer than the lifetime of the universe to occur. My creationist's argument rests on this fact. The DNA sequence is so exquisitely formed its complexity could not have arisen by chance, and in this she is perfectly correct.

Returning to "methinks it is like a weasel" we need to add a simple ingredient to make this happen: selection. If instead of simply being allowed to type at random the phrase from start, we were to select when the monkey hits the right key at the right time. We then lock those letters in place in the sentence every time the monkey scores a hit. It keeps going in its simian authorship, and the letters of the sentence begin to fill up.

The monkey gets to the key phrase not in the lifetime of the universe, but during lunchtime. Dawkins's analogy for the way that evolution combines randomness with selection is powerful and can be found in various forms on the internet. One nice example is at bit.ly/1hYmMoo

She tests this example with a few reasonable questions, and I talk through how this occurs in nature. She says that this still doesn't make sense because we are the driving force, we know what the target phrase is. But how can an eye, for example, assemble the genetic information needed for its construction? There must be a concept of an eye towards which evolution is striving?

I'm glad of Dawkins in many ways, and again I stood on his shoulders to explain the evolution of the eye. I still have the sketches I made of the patch of photosensitive cells on the skin of a prehistoric and hypothetical animal. There are drawings of a recession that allows that cells to begin to differentiate the direction of light, the deepening of the depression to begin the formation of a pinhole camera. I then have sketched a lens over the hole, and then added an iris, and voila! An eye has evolved through small improvements selected for not by a monkey but by survival. The drawings are poor reconstructions of the clear illustrations in The Blind Watchmaker and at this delicate moment I choose to plagiarise them. I think that citing their source might not be helpful, though we do go on to discuss Dawkins in later conversations.

Over the course of three conversations we cover how microscopic evolution leads to macroscopic evolution, and I can see a struggle taking place. Often a slam dunk criticism turns out to be nothing of the sort. She often repeats dogma from the church that she has brought in from discussions in the side rooms of the sprawling complex that she attends. For example she is aware of a dating anomaly in the rocks of Mt St Helens.

The anomaly comes about because of poor science from a young earth creationist who sent away contaminated samples for testing of mixed rocks from the dome of Mt St Helens. Instead of showing the date of the eruption (1986), the dating of the samples showed an age of millions of years. This, it is claimed, now demolishes the idea that radiocarbon dating has any authority over other sources, for example the Bible.

I don't know (yet) the answer to this one, and she claims a victory with a small yelp. My response is weak and I know it. How old are fossils? she asks. Again, I am not sure. How long does something have to stay in the ground to mineralise? I don't know.

It feels as though I have lost the battle, but looking back I am not so sure. She is very smart, and knows about fallacious reasoning.

We separate and don't talk again about creationism. About a year later we meet and she tells me, out of the blue, that the Bible never contradicts itself. This must count for something. The written work is unique in that it never has an internal inconsistency. I nearly explode, knowing this is untrue, and perhaps pleased to have an answer after being trumped the last time. I am aware of the Bibviz project that maps the contradictions in the Bible, and let her know that to my knowledge the Bible contains thousands of contradictions and logical inconsistencies, all of which can be explored using simple tools at a website, whose address I give her. She walks away and we say no more on that occasion.

Poignantly we meet up and have our last conversation on the issue of faith versus science, and I ask her if she has had a look at the website I suggested for her. At last I see a crack in the armour, and she tells me that the way she has been brought up to think is deeply entrenched. Questioning her faith is also questioning her upbringing, questioning her church and her family. She has too much at stake to easily change from one stance to another. And that is the last conversation we have on the issue.

Reflecting on this, and our still intact but more distant friendship, I see the struggle that plays out for her. If you have spent your life defined as a member of a particular faith how difficult it is to change. Our conversations were a desperate attempt on her part to assimilate science into her world view, and she failed. I don't know for certain where she stands now. She may have walked away from science altogether, but I suspect that the opposite may be true. I think that she remains in the church, continues to profess a faith in what she has always been taught. She continues to live as a member of a community that has nurtured and accepted her throughout her life, but she knows that what they preach to the children in their community is wrong. I suspect she cannot see a way out. I hope she is okay.

Matthew Willey works in schools as an adviser for children with disabilities. He lives in Palmerston North with his family, who tolerate his enthusiasm for skepticism with a kindly forbearance. He is English, but losing the accent. References BibViz Project - Bible Contradictions, Misogyny, Violence, Inaccuracies interactively visualized. bibviz.com Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton. Unreliability of Radiometric Dating and Old Age of the Earth. www.bible.ca/tracks/dating-radiometric.htm Welcome to iTOL! itol.embl.de Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals. noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm