Why creationism matters – and irks so many people
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Version 0 of 1. Why does creationism matter so much? Scientifically, of course, it’s nonsense. Evolution is actually true. But why should this particular bit of nonsense get so many people so very upset? All of the polling evidence and surveys I know of show that the public are pretty confused about evolution – but also that they are confused about everything else that science reveals. A quarter of Americans, for example, believe that the sun goes around the earth. Some absurd proportion of English school leavers believes, or will tell you, that the earth is 10,000 years old. Surveys show clearly that the public believe in homeopathy and in astrology. Yet the only one of these displays of ignorance that is treated as morally culpable is creationism. One very important point about all of these errors is that, with very few exceptions, they don’t have practical consequences, and when they do the costs are largely borne by other people. Climate change denial or even a refusal to vaccinate will harm other people’s children before it harms your own. Being a creationist is no handicap to anyone except a professional biologist. Even a scientist in an unrelated field can deny the truth of evolution with no ill effects to his career – look at Usama Hasan, who gained a doctorate in physics at Cambridge while he was a creationist. When I examine my own revulsion from creationism I find it does have a moral component. It is the same horror I feel when people are ignorant of history; it seems a betrayal of the fragile collective enterprise of civilisation. Knowledge of history, like knowledge of science, is won with difficulty, and by moral virtues as well as purely intellectual ones. To throw them away dishonours our ancestors and cheats our descendants. But this revulsion is itself embedded in a narrative and arises out of it. It only makes sense if you see cultural progress as fragile and constantly threatened. Not everyone does. I’m not sure that any perfect cultural relativists exist – surely they have to believe that cultural relativism itself is superior to all other stances – but there are certainly people who see other cultures as preferable to their own, and for some of them the ideal was reached long ago and all change since then has been falling off. Others believe in progress but think it is inevitable as well as real. This is always going to seem half-plausible in a consumer society since it relieves us of any obligation to join in. We can just enjoy the fruits of other people’s efforts. It’s also attractive to everyone who supposes that we will all in time grow out of religion, and even grow out of the desires and perspectives from which religion springs. For these people, Darwinian evolution comes freighted with moral meaning: it is the knife that cuts our last bonds to childishness and faith. To reject it is then especially immoral in a way that disbelieving or misunderstanding quantum physics wouldn’t be. But the interesting thing about some research presented at the weekend by Amy Unsworth of the Faraday Institute, is that it suggests that most people who reject evolution don’t think it matters much either way. The overwhelming majority of those who think that science and religion are incompatible are not believers but atheists. Very few English people who identify as creationists believe in a young earth: this is partly because most are Muslims, and Muslim creationism has no strong attachment to a literal reading of the Genesis story. For most people, creationism is not a biological explanation, but an assertion that there is something special about humans which sets us apart from all other animals. We are the only species that can argue about creationism or conceive of God. This doesn’t mean that evolution is false, or that there needs to be a supernatural explanation for supernatural belief. But a completely naturalistic account of how spirituality arose in the world can’t say anything about what spirituality might reveal. Eyes also have evolved but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see. |