The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought at the time that this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. If you are an environmentalist creationist, you are embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Twelve: The Future

In this final essay of the series, I will consider the difference between a religious view and a scientific view of the future. It is a superb way to start the new year, is it not? In one sense, there is a similarity between science and religion in this respect. Both religion and science accept that the future is more or less determined: in one case by God, in the other by the laws of nature. And there is a little bit of uncertainty about the future. In religious traditions, a prophecy of destruction can actually fail if people hear the prophecy and repent. This is the plot of the really witty story of Jonah. (Most people just know the whale part, but I recommend reading the whole story.) In science, there are historical contingencies that can alter the outcome of a course of events.

The big difference is in the way that we can “know” what the future will bring. Scientists can study current rates and processes, and project them into the future. We can predict how much global warming will occur, or how much rainforest loss. But with each such projection there is uncertainty. With regard to global warming, climatologists typically make a set of projections: one projection for “business as usual,” that is, if we do nothing to reduce carbon emissions; another with moderate carbon emission control; and another if we get really serious about controlling carbon emissions. And there are always uncertainties caused by unmeasured variables. For example, Brazilian rainforest loss may be correlated with the Brazilian economy.

But fundamentalist Christians claim that there is no uncertainty about the future. They believe that every detail of the future is foreordained. They read the book of Revelation and tell you exactly what is going to happen. With this assumption comes a great deal of arrogance. They believe so strongly in their Bible-based predictions that they ignore the evidence right in front of them. For example, Revelation does not mention global warming, therefore it is not happening—even when the data are right there to be seen.

Scientists reject any pronouncements about the future that are based on assertions of authority. Indeed, even if there were scientists two thousand years ago as good as those today, two-thousand-year-old predictions would be found to be wrong today, because the range of uncertainty gets greater and greater with the passage of time. We can predict 2025 quite accurately, but not 2125.

Many religious people believe that their scriptures describe human nature but do not make specific predictions of events. This generalized religious view is not the one that I am here criticizing.

A major problem with “Revelation thinking” about the future is that fundamentalists interpret the visions and then assume their interpretations cannot be wrong. They calculate timelines from it, and declare when the world will end; and then it does not; but, with no apparent sense of shame, they predict it all over again. Harold Camping had to be wrong three times at predicting the end of the world, most recently in 2011, before he admitted he wasn’t very good at it. One student at our university, in the freshman class of 2004, believed strongly that the battle of Armageddon had in fact begun when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Many people in Durant, Oklahoma, where I work, are confident that Barack Obama is the antichrist and they adjust their Revelation timeline to the dates of his presidency. They claim it is because he is a Muslim (which is not true) and Revelation describes Islam as the ultimate attack on Christianity (which it does not).

In 1917, a book published by the Seventh Day Adventists confidently predicted that the Great War (now called World War I) would be the end of the world and the beginning of Christ’s rule. They even drew a picture of what the Battle of Armageddon might look like (see above). They confidently predicted that the Imperial Russians would be on the same side as the Americans, against the Chinese. The year had not even finished before the Russian Revolution changed the geopolitical landscape.

Therefore the conservative religious approach to predicting the future follows this series of steps, all of which science rejects: 1. Assume that Revelation accurately predicts the future. 2. Make wild guesses about what the visions of John the Revelator actually mean. (Visions? They are more like hallucinations. John must have gotten some bad hash from Damascus when he had those visions.) 3. Derive a timeline from combining these two processes. Despite these wildly off-base assumptions, religious fundamentalists are confident enough in their predictions that they are willing to bet the future of the world on it. For example, why try to save the planet if God is just going to kick the hell out of it next year? (Well, what if God isn’t going to kick the hell out of it until the year 2500? They cannot imagine that God could wait that long.)

This way that religion and science differ is the most dangerous of all.

The Capacity for Evil

I have frequently written about the importance of altruism in the evolution of the human species. We are the most altruistic species that has ever existed on Earth. We do not have kin selection as strong as that of bees, but we make up for it with indirect reciprocity, in which individuals gain social status by being conspicuously generous.

But we are constantly reminded of the dark side of human nature—how humans can exult in destruction and torture. Under certain circumstances, such as in Bosnia in the 1990s and Sudan in the 2000s, this capacity for evil can emerge in an insane fashion. But it is always there. What we must do is to starve it as much as possible, occupying our minds with good things.

In rural Oklahoma, where I live, some people are cultivating the enjoyment of evil. When I was driving along the highway, I saw a fence line on which half a dozen coyotes had been impaled. I stopped to take photos, two of which I share here with you.

I hope you find these photos as deeply disturbing as I do. Now, it may be necessary to cull a coyote population. But there is no need to put them gruesomely on display. Of course the coyotes were dead before they were impaled (I think). But there could be only one reason for doing this: the hunters relished the fantasy of torturing animals, and wanted to make a proclamation to anyone who was driving down the highway. And what is that proclamation? They want everyone to know how much they hate the natural world. Many of these rural people are creationists, but they apparently think that God made animals so that we could enjoy torturing them. Remember this is the state in which a law against cockfighting barely passed.

We would like to think that these people who fantasize about animal torture make an absolute distinction between animals and humans—which their creationist beliefs tell them to do. But I am not entirely confident of it. When they get really mad—and the conservative political movement encourages them to do so as frequently as possible—they might take thoughtless action and do something that they would not rationally choose to do. Might their rage spill over into cruelty against humans?

I hope that my fears are excessive (and I do not sit around thinking about them). But January 31 was the 135th anniversary of the law that forced all Native Americans onto reservations. It was not long ago when some of my Cherokee ancestors were considered to be not very different from coyotes. For black people, the memory is even more recent. In east Texas, in 1998, a black man was dragged to death behind a pickup truck.

These same people believe that Jesus will return and usher in a battle of Armageddon in which millions will be tortured and the earth will literally run red with blood; one radio evangelist said it would be literally as deep as the shoulders of horses. The Jesus whom these people worship is a demon who loves to exult in torture. Of course, this does not resemble the Jesus of any part of the Bible other than the book of Revelation, which should be torn out and thrown away. And of course the Armageddon blood will be human, not coyote, blood. Before you say it can’t happen here, think carefully. I hope that, in fact, it cannot.

Evolution has given us a spectrum of options, from altruism at one end to torture at the other. In my writings, I emphasize the former; but many creationists in rural Oklahoma seem to focus on the latter.