The War Against Science

By John Hickey
Dr. Bruce Terry, chair of the School of Bible and Religion at Ohio Valley University, sought to discredit tenets of mainstream science that he believes contradict the Bible when he spoke Sept. 23 at “America’s Search for a Creation Story.” Sitting next to him on the stage of West Virginia University at Parkersburg’s packed theater, however, was Dr. Ed Crisp, professor of Geology at WVUP, who firmly, though politely, refuted him.

That exchange was one of the few bits of meat to be found in the soup that evening. The primary speaker, Canadian professor Dr. Karl Giberson, warned at length against excessive passion in what he calls “the unholy war between Religion and Science” over the teaching of evolution.

Giberson pleaded for a truce. He said that people have become polarized over the issue and that the advocates for each side are taking a very aggressive stance. Giberson quoted six science writers, including Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking, who he said were “hostile to religion.” On the Creationist side, he cited Henry Morris, author of The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict, who says: “Satan’s rebellion, his long war against God, is founded upon the premise of evolution.”

Terry, whose OVU Bible program says it “prepares ministers, missionaries and educators,” suggested that studies of the fallout from the Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption of 1980 should make us question the standard geological methods of estimating the age of the earth. He said the fact that many layers of ash could be quickly deposited cast doubt on geologists’ conclusions that the earth is billions of years old. Creationists, who take the Bible as a source of geological information, believe the Bible teaches that the earth is less than ten thousand years old.

Crisp explained that geologists do not take layering in itself as evidence of long stretches of time, and that the painstaking observations of generations of scientists enable geologists to recognize quickly deposited layers of volcanic ash. He said the age of igneous (i.e. once-molten) rock within a stratum of earth can be calculated from the changes in trace elements like potassium-40, which changes at a known rate from the time rock becomes molten.

Potassium-40 has been found to decay into argon at a rate that gives it a half-life of 1.3 billion years. In other words, if half of the potassium-40 trapped in a sample of igneous rock is found to have turned to argon gas, geologists know that sample of rock was molten 1.3 billion years ago.

Terry was questioning important findings. In Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, there is a stratum of earth containing the fossils of human ancestors. Covering that stratum is a layer of once-molten rock. Potassium-argon analysis has established that the molten flow occurred two million years ago, and thereby established that the fossils themselves were more than two million years old.

As the evening’s events took place, parents in Dover, Pa., prepared to challenge in federal court their local school board’s policy requiring ninth-grade teachers to discredit the theory of evolution and advance the concept of Intelligent Design. Rev. Nate Williams, pastor of Vienna Baptist Church, who introduced the evening’s speakers, said in a brief interview that he believed Philip Johnson, the lawyer who is the author of Darwin on Trial and one of the Intelligent Design movement’s founders, may be seeking through that movement to bring religion back into the nation’s public schools.

The Sept. 23 event was part of a three-day program sponsored in part by The Manor, a Parkersburg retreat center. In a follow-up session at the Manor the following day, Rev. Williams said he sees the attempt by some religionists to create distrust of mainstream science as an insidious cultural phenomenon. At that smaller session, Giberson also expressed his personal views more pointedly, at one point comparing the Creationist agenda of discrediting science with the agenda of groups who seek on religious grounds to dissuade followers from receiving medical treatment or vaccinations.

If this is a culture war, science is losing. In a Harris Poll in June, 54 percent of a thousand Americans surveyed said they do not think human beings developed from earlier species. This was a 17 percent increase from the number who doubted evolution when asked the same question in 1994. For the details of that poll, see http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=581.

At WVUP, says Ed Crisp, “Surveys of students (many of whom are elementary education majors) in several science classes at West Virginia University at Parkersburg indicate that many are opposed to biologic evolution concepts and most believe that it is only fair to teach creationistic concepts alongside evolutionary theory.”

Crisp says, “There is a current strong movement by creationist and other politically oriented religious groups to undermine real science and foster a mistrust of mainstream science. In fact, they have been rather successful at this in the present presidential administration. I am very concerned about the attempts by creationists to infiltrate local school boards and adopt practices that foster a mistrust of science, and evolutionary biology in particular. Make no mistake; this is a serious attack on science and unbiased scientific inquiry.”