Darwin's Election Campaign and The Hidden Truth of Creationism

Tom Smith: A few days ago, Charles Darwin came second in an election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He received more than 4,000 write-in-votes in protest against the unopposed campaign of Republican Paul Broun who gave a speech in September denouncing the big bang theory and evolution as "lies straight from the pit of hell". Along with this he believes that the earth is 9,000 years old, and was created in six days.



While this is just the latest atheist/creationist spat to come out of the U.S., it does at least lead one to ponder, however, about what creationism has to tell us about our civilised culture. We could say, for example, that  on one level Paul Broun and other creationists aren't actually all that far removed from most anti-Judaeo-Christian segments of the population. To creationists and most people growing up in the confines of civilised narratives (including atheists) the world - or at least the element that matters - is only about 8,000-10,000 years old. Let's not forget, after all, that theism is a direct product of agricultural societies - and both date to the time that Paul Broun states.

Lately, on this topic, I've taken to drawing a metre-long line for people of all religious beliefs and ethnicities, and telling them that each centimetre represents 1% of our species time on the planet. I then ask them to mark where along this line they think farming/civilisation/writing/cities arise. Without exception (and remember that this is after at least 14 years of supposedly scientific and objective 'education' in school) they put the mark towards the start of the metre-long line, presuming that humans have been civilised as long as they've existed as a species. This is complete revisionism, ignoring the vast majority of our species' history. Of course, it provokes shock and denial in people when you place the true mark in the confines of the last 1% of the metre.

Such poor knowledge is clear across all spectra of society including, I would posit, those who wrote Darwin down on their ballots in protest against creationism. So yes, it is absurd to believe that a man created the world in six days, but is it not equally so to be convinced that humanity didn't exist outside of civilisation? This is surely a key element in holding together our Stockholm Syndrome-like beliefs that, despite 10,000 years of almost incessant famine, disease and war, that there is no alternative to civilisation. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" the apologists say, while forgetting that most of the world in that 1% of our species history actually hasn't been fed by anyone or anything, that starvation was a regular occurrence. That it's only in the last 150 years - two lifetimes - with the drawing down of millions of years of solar energy in the form of fossil fuels that the majority of any part of the planet (remembering that the ruling minority have always been so safe) has escaped the jaws of hunger for any prolonged period of time.

Anti-creationists are always posing the necessity of critical thinking and objectivity. Perhaps they should examine the genesis of their own beliefs first.