 Scientists thought it was settled. The universe they had decided is about 20 billion years old. And Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than 3 billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from non-living matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes, and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than 4 million years ago. Homo sapiens itself, the present human species, people like you and me, has walked the Earth for at least 50,000 years. But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine creator, as eternally separate variations of beings, and that there has been no evolutionary process. They are creationists. They call themselves scientific creationists, and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view. And in other, strong movements are gaining momentum. They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning, as the creationists do, and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies. Yet though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth, and accept much of it as symbolically, rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even an intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions. To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream. A sudden reliving of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night, risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment. The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the science that makes their views scientific? Here are some of them. One, the argument from analogy. A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creations. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, far from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed spontaneously from the sands of the desert. By analogy then, if you consider humanity, life, earth, and the universe all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it just happened. It too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more than human hands, in short by a divine creator. This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used, even though not often explicitly expressed, ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to pre-scientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding will would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might well have gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer. There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science. But ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. In short, the complexity of the universe, and one's inability to explain it in full, is not in itself an argument for a creator. Two, the argument from general consent. Some creationists point out that belief in a creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surely, this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie. General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a God or gods, and each group invents full details for the story, no two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on, all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as just myths. The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale. Two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam and Eve in Paradise story with man created first, then animals, then woman. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days with animals preceding man and man and woman created together. These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing. There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch. Three, the argument of belittlement. Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is only a theory, giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of rogue for cheese and instantly advances the rogue for cheese theory. A theory, as the word is used by scientists, is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally. For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms, the cell theory, of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule, the theory of gravitation, of energy behaving in discrete bits, the quantum theory, of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity, the theory of relativity, and so on. All our theories, all are firmly founded, all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued, and more thoroughly accepted than the theory of evolution. If it is only a theory, that is all it has to be. Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence in the scientific sense that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as only a myth. 4. The argument of imperfection. Creationists in recent years have stressed the scientific background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationist beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology, and produce textbooks that embody those beliefs. Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insist, for example, that evolutionists cannot show true transition states between species and the fossil evidence, that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain, that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible, and so on. Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists in supporting evolution are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism. To an extent, the creationists are right here. The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years. And it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor has the process finished. It can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers. The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great a thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole? Consider, I drive a car and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run or that it does not exist? Or if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horse since our engine theory is imperfect? However much scientists argue they are differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself. Five, the argument from distorted science. Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive, is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates that evolutionary process to be impossible. In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder, that is, in a downhill direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving uphill. According to the creationist argument, since by the evolutionary process complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true. Such an argument implies that the clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law, and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens. To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a closed system, that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole. Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in line with the dictates of the second law. Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system, the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually, moves downhill, as it does, at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to see shining, evolution would stop, and so eventually would life. Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationist distortion. There are many other scientific arguments used by creationists, some taking quite clever advantage of present areas of dispute and evolutionary theory, but every one of them is as disingenuous as the second law argument. The scientific arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, while they discuss geology, paleontology, and biology with correct scientific terminology. They are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking, on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative. Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exists other than the Word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy to not use. Six, the argument from irrelevance. Some creationists put all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for Ion's long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radioactivity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion. Of course, the argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. It is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes ago, complete with all its history books, describing a non-existent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory. You, for instance, in the process of watching this video and midstream with a memory of what you had seen in the beginning, which you had not really seen. What kind of creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom he had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and caused them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and development of life on Earth. Why? Does the creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the creator is a cruel and malicious prankster with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor? 7. The Argument from Authority The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired Word of God. To the average creationist, this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics and atheists who are not satisfied with the clear Word of the Lord. The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would mean that their argument is a religious one and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science no matter how badly it fits and call themselves scientific creations. They also speak only of the creator and never mention that this creator is the God of the Bible. We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their scientific and philosophical points, they would be helpless and a laughing stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high and they are a strong and frightening force impervious to and immunized against the feeble lance of mere reason. Even if I am right and the evolutionist case is very strong, have not creationists whatever the emptiness of their case are right to be heard. If their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? Can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident in their case as they pretend? Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice? First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed. Schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance even with evolution. But many of the less modest and citified churches are bastions of creationism. The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas in thousands of subtle ways, in the nature of holiday observance and expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpoint. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control, but only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards, upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence. Then too in schools, students are not required to believe the evolution merely to parrot it back on a test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two. In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists can control the church and the society they live in and to face the public school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possibly favorable way. Find that they cannot stand even so miniscule a competition and demand equal time. Do you suppose their devotion to fairness is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches? Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want their equal time. In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost it. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creations, placing myth above reason, refuse to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine. What a precedent this sets. If the government can mobilize its policemen in its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established the full groundwork, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who face a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science regardless of the evidence. This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible. There is also a pervasive uneasiness, even an actual fear, of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creations. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision. Observations are open to a variety of interpretations and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think. Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary. An enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care. A world in which you are his particular concern and where he will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher. Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the day of judgment in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers rive forever and torment. So why might they not win? There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumph ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial that bubbled up in other nations of western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted. Are we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses, ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow. We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simple-minded as their science. If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish. Thanks for watching.