Today being the first Wednesday of the month I attended the local Ministerial Alliance meeting. All was routine up until the last five minutes when the Baptist minister brought up a CD he had received, and brought in to share, about how wrong evolution is. Well, that opened the flood gates. The murmuring around the table was, as expected, strictly pro-creationism and virulently anti-evolution.
One of the minsters, from one of our Christian Churches (the denomination), brought up the new skeleton that was in the news a couple of days ago, Ardi. "Ardi" is short for Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million year old hominid that predates "Lucy" by about 1.2 million years. Lucy is of the species Australopithicus afarensis, closer to us in the chain of things.
The Christian Church minister was positively gleeful over finding Ardi, for he said, "It shows that we are not descended from the monkeys, something that is in all the Biology books." That was curious, since I have never read a real science Biology textbook that said that we were descended from monkeys. I collect old science books and one of my oldest Biology books is an early 1920s "First Biology" for high school students that says, to quote, "Biology does not teach that humans descended from monkeys." A college text I have does not teach that either. In fact all of the modern books that I do have note that we and the monkeys and the apes come from some long extinct common ancestor. All Ardi does is put that common ancestor more distant, structurally, from us than is Lucy.
What tickled me about the ministers gleefulness was that they were using a 4.4 million year old skeleton to "prove" that man did not come from the monkeys. To them a 4.4 million year skeleton should not exist. These guys are all "young earth" proponents! Even 1 million years ago is questionable, since "everything" was created only 6,000 years ago, in 4004 BCE (according to the creationist timetable).
It struck me that creationist's real fear is in being related to animals like monkeys and apes. If, somehow, it can be shown that there are no monkeys in the family tree, then God's peace will again reign on earth. Maybe the idea of being descended from pond scum is OK, just as long as there are no immoral buffoonish monkeys there! After all, we can't be descended from something that swings from the trees and shows off its private parts in great displays of primate sexuality, can we?
Anyway, these good folk are really stuck in an old paradigm. I think that even if God him-and-her-self were to show up and shout, "Yes, I did it using evolution" they wouldn't believe it, for they have too much invested in a literal point of view. Too bad for them, for modern Biological Science and its offshoot, medicine, are dependent upon the validity of evolutionary fact.
If the creationists were to win "the war" here in the United States, all that would mean is that meaningful scientific and medical progress would shift elsewhere. And if the reformation teaches us anything, it will move elsewhere. For in the 17th Century science left Italian and southern European schools (under the gun of the backward-looking Roman Catholic Church) and moved north to Germany, the Low Countries, and England. Galileo was the end of South European science and Isaac Newton represents the flowering of Northern Science. Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church learned its lesson and some great science has come from later Roman Catholic scientists and scholars.
The world will survive creationism.
Sweet dreams and God Bless all. TAD+
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