Evolution, Creationism & Other Modern My: A Critical Inquiry

Introduction

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO the Kansas State Board of Education decided to
de-emphasize the teaching of evolution in its curriculum, setting off a
brouhaha of no small proportions. Commenting on the case, Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould reminded us that Kansas has usually been
associated with the land of Oz in our folklore and dogmatically declared
evolution to be a "fact"-although his definition of a fact lacked certain
logic in itself. Hordes of scientific Chicken Littles proclaimed the end of
the intellectual enterprise, and school principals searched their classrooms
for teachers who might be offering a critical analysis of Darwinism to minds
as yet not fully shaped in beliefs approved by the scientific establishment.
No matter that the bookstores were filled with volumes pointing out the
flaws and frauds inherent in the present articulation of evolution.

I followed this controversy with some fascination, since many well regarded
thinkers have issued consistent and prolonged criticism of Darwinism for
decades. The astounding thing about the uproar was the knee-jerk reaction
among academics, most of whom could not have spoken intelligently on
evolution for five minutes and who used examples that bore no resemblance
whatsoever to evolutionary theory. I concluded that evolution had become a
major tenet in our civil religion and, like patriotism and other
generalities, was whatever anyone wanted it to be. More to the point was the
realization that almost everyone involved in the debate had picked up their
knowledge of scientific theory from The New York Times Sunday science
section, Newsweek, or USA Today. When I turned to various "authorities:'
they seemed to know less than I did-about their own fields, in many cases.

The fundamentalists wisely hid in their bunkers during this struggle, since
it was not at all clear that advocates of intelligent design and of the
anthropic principle, which are intellectual ways of describing an
anti-Darwin belief in patterns and purposes in nature, would come down on
their side of the equation. It became clear that in addition to the age-old
perspectives of science and religion, there was a third way of looking at
the data, one that comforted neither the Darwinians nor the creationists.
For nearly two thousand years we have believed that our solar system, indeed
the cosmos itself, was a smoothly operating mechanism and that the Earth was
a special project of either mother nature or god. Then the Shoemaker-Levy 9
comet hit Jupiter, and studies of the meteor/asteroid/comet hits on our
planet suggested that we live on a small bull's eye that has been frequently
visited by monstrous disasters of cosmic origin.

Today we receive our scientific knowledge piecemeal from two-inch newspaper
columns, and each discovery is trumpeted as affirming what we already
believe, so that only minor adjustments in our worldview need be made with
each item. When enough discoveries begin to accumulate, however, the
implications become clear: We need a major shift in our interpretation of
data, and we can no longer cling to the other ways of understanding. If each
meteor hit exterminates close to 90 percent of the living organisms on the
planet, how can the Darwinian "trees of life:' which are supposed to show
how creatures evolved, be produced? If a tsunami can deposit strata hundreds
of feet thick in a matter of days, what does that imply about the validity
of the slow erosion and deposition process, which has been taught as fact
for more than a century?

When the smoke clears and we make all the proper adjustments in our
thinking, we will come to understand that quite possibly we are not the
first humanoid species to live on this planet: that there is a rough
repeating pattern in the Earth's history in which the planet is transformed
and new biospheres come into existence through processes of which we have
not yet dreamed. This worldview is found in the traditions of non-Western
peoples, including many tribal peoples. Such beliefs, which we may have
previously rejected as childish superstitions, may turn out to be our only
glimpse of the real planetary past.

This view, many people tell me, represents a retreat to the past. But
non-Western people did not "evolve" their beliefs; they remembered events
that they survived. We have cast aside these experiences because they did
not fit into a neat package that explained creation, be it YHWH or the Big
Bang theory, and spent our time convincing ourselves that we are the only
example of intelligence in the universe. Thus our present knowledge is
illusory because we have excluded so much data that the anomalies now
outweigh doctrinally compatible evidence.

This book sketches an outline for a new way of looking at the world. The
footnotes refer primarily to newspaper articles that have announced our
great triumphs, but their arrangement supports the emerging paradigm, not
the old one in which they are now located. I offer no comfort to religious
fundamentalists or evolutionists. The views of both are passé and represent
only a quarrel within the Western belief system, not an accurate rendering
of Earth history. Like my earlier book, Red Earth, White Lies, this book
will initially be bitterly attacked by smug academics, later will appear as
a supplementary reading, and finally will become a major part of some
college courses.