Most readers of e-Skeptic will know who Vince Sarich is: the U.C. Berkeley anthropologist who played a key role in the molecular dating discovery of the split between humans and the other great apes roughly six million years ago, who has also been controversial for his views on race and intelligence, but especially for his tireless efforts in debating and combatting the creationists. Vince's view on the latter is one that I agree with: that is, if we have nothing to worry about the theory of evolution, why not engage the creationists head on with superior data and arguments? Instead of choosing the tactic of "not dignifying them with a response" (judging by the results so far this is probably not the best strategy), why not take the gloves off, get into the ring, and cold-cock 'em into the cheap seats? Anyone who has seen Vince debate Gish will know that he has done just that. Of course, someone out there is already saying "then why does Gish keep coming back?" The answer is that there is no hope in converting the true believers. We are after that 45% of the population who does not accept evolution but are certainly not biblical literalists or fundamentalists. Perhaps one answer to the question of "why people believe weird things" (creationism being one of those things) is that they have not been given a proper explanation. Short of that they just accept whatever they have heard in the popular media, or at church.

Start with a Gallup Poll published a few years ago in the U.S. News and World Report of 23 Dec 1991, pg 59:

IN THE BEGINNING

According to a new Gallup Poll, the percentages of Americans who believe:

1. God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

2. Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation.

3. Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.

These figures have not changed significantly over the last 8 years.

So, with respect to the latest in the evolution/creation wars, we begin with two facts:
(1) something close to a majority (47%) of Americans believe that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
and (2) we live in a democratic society.

Those two facts make actions such as those of the Kansas Board of Education (and similar recent others) expectable, and, in my opinion, perfectly legitimate. That doesn't, of course, make them either desirable or beyond challenge. The question is what form that challenge might take?

I see one currently popular option -- using the legal system to declare such decisions of school boards or legislatures as somehow unconstitutional -- as a particularly counterproductive way to go. If we really believe in education and its necessary connection to democracy, then let's educate, not hide behind irrelevant legal technicalities. Look, we've been pushing evolution for some 140 years now, and we don't seem to have all that much to show for our efforts. We could no doubt teach evolution more effectively, but that wouldn't address the real problem here -- that, as it now stands, teaching evolution seems to be going on without challenging creationists and creationism directly. The battle has not been joined, and it is, unfortunately, the evolutionists who seem to have no stomach for it. Their policy of "keeping creationism out of biology classrooms" in effect rules out any such confrontation in the one place where it might be most effective, and, worse, encourages the sense of:

What are these guys afraid of, anyhow? Why do they feel that they have to hide behind one clause of the First Amendment to, in effect, nullify another? Why can't they, and the courts, see that we're dealing here with the most profound and important of all questions concerning our existence; one, therefore not one to be dealt with in so mundane a fashion.

In a very real sense there has been a concerted effort to try to turn the sacred into the profane, and we humans tend not to be very comfortable with such efforts, nor convinced by their results.

What, I would ask my fellow evolutionists, do we have to lose here? We aren't doing very well as it is -- how much worse could it get? Would a direct confrontation be so awful? Is our case so weak that we are afraid of losing the battle? Or are our stomachs so weak that we just don't like battles in the first place? Do we really think that the creationists have a case to make? And if we don't, then why do we seem to be so afraid of giving creationism"equal time" in the classroom, or in textbooks? Just possibly "evolution" would lose in such a confrontation, but if so, then it's soon going to lose at the ballot box as well, and then we are going to be in real trouble. We'd better start doing something that will work towards reducing that figure of 47% so that we don't, in effect, get ourselves voted out of office.

O.K., you ask, "do what?" Well, I suggest that we try something different; something that begins with a recognition that there is no necessary conflict here, but which does not achieve the peace by dividing the field between "science" and "religion". No, that tack enervates both science and religion.

This something different is not new; it in fact dates from 1857, when an eminent English naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, published a volume entitled Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot ("omphalos" is Greek for navel). In it, he anticipated Darwin's Origin of Species, which was to appear 2 years later, but it would appear that, most unfortunately, neither man ever acknowledged the existence of the other. If they had, I'm certain that I would not be writing this, nor would there have ever been any reason for anyone to assay anything similar, for the evolution/creation debate would have been over before it had ever started.

What Gosse did was to ask a question studiously avoided by almost everyone, evolutionist or creationist, both before and since. To wit:
What would a newly created world look like, and how would we be able to tell whether it had been created, or had evolved?

In his framework, we would ask the hard-core creationists who believe that:
God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

to consider the implications of that belief -- to imagine some aspect of that creation event -- Adam in the Garden of Eden, for example, to make it something familiar. And then focus on two things: Adam, and trees. Adam would have a navel, and the trees, once he cut one of them down, would be seen to have rings. A candidate person without a navel is not a person, and a candidate tree without rings is not a tree. Yet both characters imply a past which could not (emphasis here on "could not") have had an existence in real time. The navel is part of a live body, but it also implies an umbilical cord, placenta, uterus, and woman/mother carrying that body through its development. And if you want to quibble about navels, what about bones, or hair, or teeth, or fingernails, and so on and on -- there being no part of his body that did not evidence a previous history of growth and development. But that's hardly even a beginning.

Adam must have been created as a functional adult, and this means that not only is his body going to evidence a past, but so too must his mind. That mind must contain a language and a culture, and, of course, memories; and it then follows that Adam must have been created as part of a working social group and of a population with individual and variable members. This is inescapable. A tree must have rings, a human body must have a navel, a human mind must have a soul, and humanity must have language, culture, and social organization. A lone human being is no more a human being than a tree without rings is a tree.

Martin Gardner, in his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957, pp 124-127), continued in this vein:
"The same is true of every plant and animal. As Gosse points out, the tusks of an elephant exhibit past stages, the nautilus keeps adding chambers to its shell, the turtle adds laminae to its plates, trees bear the annual rings of growth produced by seasonal variations. "Every argument," he writes, "by which the physiologist can prove .... that yonder cow was once a foetus .... will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created cow was an embryo some years before creation." ......

In short -- if God created the earth as described in the Bible, he must have created it as a "going concern". Once this is seen as inevitable, there is little difficulty in extending the concept to the earth's geological history. Evidence of the slow erosion of land by rivers, of the twisting and tilting of strata, mountains of limestone formed by remains of marine life, lava which flowed from long-extinct volcanoes, glacier scratchings upon rock, footprints of prehistoric animals, teeth marks on buried bones, and millions of fossils sprinkled through the earth -- all these and many other features testify to past geological events which never actually took place.

And the reaction to this argument? Well, the usual is some version of what Charles Kingsley wrote to Gosse: that he could not
"believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie."

But must it be an enormous, and, especially, superfluous, lie? Hardly. The fact is that it is a necessary truth, a truth perhaps best put by Dorothy Sayers some 60 years ago:
"... if the theologians had not lost touch with the nature of language; if they had not insensibly fallen into the eighteenth-century conception of the universe as a mechanism and God as the great engineer; if, instead, they had chosen to think of God as a great, imaginative artist -- then they might have offered a quite different kind of interpretation of the facts, with rather entertaining consequences. They might, in fact, have seriously put forward the explanation I mentioned just now: that God had at some moment or other created the university complete with all the vestiges of an imaginary past.

I have said that this seemed an extravagant assumption; so it does, if one thinks of God as a mechanician. But if one thinks of Him working in the same sort of way as a creative artist, then it no longer seems extravagant, but the most natural thing in the world. It is the way every novel in the world is written.

Every serious novelist starts with some or all of his characters "in perfect form and fully grown", complete with their pasts. ...."

Yes, precisely.

Look, Sayers is saying to that 47% who argue that God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years -- just think a bit. How could the Creator have created a world without a past (apparent or not) that flowed seamlessly flows into a present? What could such a world look like? Has anyone, creationist or not, but especially creationist, ever faced up to that question? I know of no such effort. I cannot even conceive of what form such an effort might take. How can you create a real present that has no apparent past? Well, a creationist might respond, "that is just evidences your lack of imagination." And so, of course, it might be. But if I can't do it, and no one else has ever done it, then just maybe it can't be done. And if it can't, then the creationists don't have any case. And if they don't? Well, then we've got a real problem, and its nature is made clear by applying the Sayers perspective to Kingsley's criticism -- an effort that tells us that he was, in effect, second-guessing his Creator -- telling Him that he, Kingsley, knew better than the Creator Himself as to what the nature of Creation must have been. This is the ultimate in hubris. And this is what our 47% continue to do. Instead of contemplating the works of God with His greatest gift -- the mind of man -- they somehow continue to insist on choosing to believe a few words of man rather the entirety of the works of God.

To deny that we have an evidenced ancestry extending over far more than 10,000 years, and to support that denial by reference to those few words of very fallible men, we have to ignore along the way all those myriad works of God which tell us a very different story. In it the Creation was, in effect, the opening of a book to page 137, with pages 1-136 also there to help us make sense of things -- along with, of course, a mind which could contemplate such matters.

But our problem 47% have chosen to use their minds to deny the existence of those first 136 pages. For them a garbled and truncated version of page 137 is all there is -- and never mind that such a position is, as Gosse noted, logically untenable. Their faith remains with those few words of man -- a faith which enables them; indeed, forces them, to deny the evidence of the works of God -- and which also seems to allow them to avoid even asking as to what that newly created world would have looked like.

But to ask that question is to answer it. That newly created world must have borne unmistakable evidence of a past existence through which its current state had developed. It could not have been otherwise. Now one can still be concerned with whether that past existence was in "real" time, or in the Creator's mind, but that concern cannot be objectively addressed -- whichever it was, the appearance of the world produced would not, could not, show it.

Now I've written this as though I were a believer in a Creator as it's easier to do it that way, and it makes the real issue here stand out in stark relief. What our 47% are doing is pure and simple blasphemy. They are using that greatest of all gifts -- the human mind -- to choose the words of man over the works of God. That is the ultimate in human hubris -- the ultimate in insults to God -- the ultimate in "impious irreverence" -- the ultimate in blasphemy. That's what those 47% are doing, and isn't it about time they were called directly on it?