Last night we found ourselves watching Waterloo Road, a serial drama set in a rather difficult secondary school. We began watching just before an American in a smart car drove up to the school – it was at this point that I said to Amy in that annoying way that people who talk while watching TV do: how much do you want to bet that he is a creationist evangelical Christian who is going to fund the school (in the same way as the high profile Emmanuel Schools foundation). Sure enough this was the case, fairly predictably. Said American proceeded to be arrogant and single minded, bringing Creationism into the first conversation he had with a student, telling her that dinosaurs were created the same day as humans and the only ones that survived the great flood were those who could swim, like the Loch Ness Monster. Although this was in my opinion an unfair stereotype (he also repeatedly got the students name wrong painting him to be superficial in his concern for said student) that is a scriptwriters prerogative. What alarmed me more was the reaction of one of the teachers when he discovered creationist history books on the same students desk (and was incredibly rude and unprofessional to her). He went on to the internet and found out that the American backer was involved in funding creationist science, opposed homosexuality and – shock and horror – was pro-life! He then ranted at the headmaster that they were going to breed fundamentalists etc etc and all their jobs were at stake (which in reality is fairly likely if the backer really wanted to teach creationism alongside evolution – although I still uphold that you would be hard pressed to find many teachers in England who are creationists).
I am not going to have a go at creationists – I think there are enough people doing that already – I wanted to have a bit of a rant at the script writers of the above drama who clearly feel that it is extremely dangerous for us to have schools funded by people who are conservative on sexuality and anti abortion. Especially when that describes every RC school and (to a lesser extent) Anglican school in the country. I know we get nervous about education, it is obviously very important what our children are taught and how they are taught it, but is being pro life really an unattractive stance these days?
In terms of teaching creationism alongside evolution in science is concerned – this is a harmless although entirely pointless exercise in England. We don’t have any outspoken creationists in parliament (to my knowledge) and in all my travels as a Christian in many different kinds of churches and traditions I have to date one creationist friend and have heard it brought up by one creationist church leader. Last year at spring harvest they were hard pushed to find any creationists to argue that corner – there are simply very few of them around. I would say it was harmless because it is being taught ‘alongside’ evolution (only in secondary school mind). I was always taught that my education was about equipping me to make my own mind up – if it is as weak scientifically as I am told then surely it is a good exercise in helping the kids decide truth from falsehood.
I am more in favour of it being taught in America, as kids in the US do need to know what a large amount of the population believe in (I think the president might fit in to that category). I would prefer it to be taught in RE or a more culturally motivated subject, because that’s what it is – a cultural belief. People don’t tend to become creationists in a vacuum.
I also wanted to talk about the problems with atheism and evolutionism. I am, like Bill Bailey, a relaxed Empiricist when it comes to things which I don’t have to base big decisions on;
“An empiricist is someone who demands proof of something before he believes it to be true. A relaxed empiricist is someone who believes something is true if some bloke down the pub that he knows quite well says ‘that’s pretty much what happened..’”
Therefore from this viewpoint I am an evolutionist. I am not a scientist, I am not tremendously clever and have largely accepted that the theory of evolution is true because teachers/clever studenty phd friends say it is. It doesn’t affect my reading of scripture as I believe in a little thing called genre, and I wouldn’t mind terribly if I found out in the end that Darwin was simply justifying a relaxing cruise at the Navy’s expense. There are very few life choices I have to make that are affected by the age of the earth, so rightly or wrongly, I don’t care too much. However I am alarmed by the number of people who not only take it on trust but get very uptight when people question it, when I am sure I am not in the minority of people who just don’t understand it entirely. Recently Amy and I were discussing evolution with two older public school teachers, who are educated and cultured and intelligent, from the premise that of course the theory of evolution was true, but let’s try and get our heads round it. Between us we couldn’t come up with a single example of natural selection working in practice, all we could manage were befores and afters and why something might have happened rather than how. This doesn’t mean we don’t believe it – we just don’t understand it.
Either we have all been taught incredibly badly (Amy and I both got A’s in science GCSE’s, go us!) or we have no choice but to trust experts in this field, and i don’t have that much of a problem with that. In the same way I get annoyed when people treat the bible as a fully accessible entirely historical narrative with no depth or culture or appropriate genre.
Enter Richard Dawkins, who dismisses anyone who does treat the bible with the seriousness and respect it deserves as liberal and inconsistent, preferring to label bible belt creationists as truly bible believing. This man also annoys me when, in his channel 4 programme “The root of all evil”, he often says that someone he has met (who does/thinks bad things) is a “good person” in order to justify his theory that “to make a good person do evil requires religion”, when one of the things he thinks is terrible about religion is their deciding what is good and what is bad.
The following clip is painful to watch because of the arrogant and horrid way the Christian speaks to Dawkins, although his points aren’t altogether invalid (I have a feeling it has been cut excessively);
What I find interesting is Dawkins insistence that no one has ever said evolution happens by chance (this is a hobby horse of his) when that is pretty much what I have been told my entire life – it is certainly the popular understanding of how evolution works – certainly how the universe began. Dawkins expands on this later in the programme by explaining that we are “grotesquely lucky”, because most people will never even be born. We are lucky because of the number of events which had to happen in order for me to exist and tap away at my keyboard boring you all when I should be essay writing. As far as I’m concerned this is just the humanist spin that Dawkins puts on it – I don’t see the difference between saying this and saying that we are here by accident, it’s just a bit more depressing looked at that way.
In conclusion, I think people get too het up over creationism and evolution (take this blogpost for example), and we pretend to ourselves that we are free thinkers, when in fact we trust others just as we always have. As for Dawkins and other evangelical atheists – they play an important role in discovering truth, but when they make unscientific qualitative statements they become as helpful as megaphone evangelists. We need better teaching of big topics and more tools to think for ourselves, but respect for the beliefs of others, even when they seem silly and unbelievable.