"Arkansas Democrat Gazette" April 4, 2001
Gene Lyons
Fundamentalist Theology vs. Scientific Method

A gorilla, true enough, cannot write poetry and neither can it grasp
such a concept as that of Americanization or that of relativity, but . .
.in some ways, indeed, it is measurably more clever than many men. It
cannot be fooled as easily; it does not waste so much time doing useless
things. If it desires, for example, to get a banana hung out of reach,
it proceeds to the business with a singleness of purpose and a fertility
of resource that, in a traffic policeman, would seem almost
pathological. There are no fundamentalists among the primates. They
believenothing that is not demonstrable. When they confront a fact they
recognize it instantly, and turn it to their uses with admirable
readiness. There are liars among them, but no idealists.
                        --H.L. Mencken

 God must have a terrific sense of humor. During the same week that the
learned theologians of the Arkansas Legislature debated yet another
creationism bill, the president of the International Flat Earth Research
Society died in his sleep. According to his obituary in The New York
Times, Charles K. Johnson called himself "the last iconoclast." He
referred to Copernicus, the 16th century astronomer who first
demonstrated that the earth orbits the sun, as "Co-pernicious."

Johnson, see, feared that human dignity would be much diminished by
taking man off center stage. He spent his life promoting the idea that
the earth was "actually a flat disk floating on primordial waters
instead of a ball spinning and orbiting in space."

 Johnson sounds as if he'd have made a dandy candidate for public office
in Northwest Arkansas. According to the Times, he "regarded scientists
as witch doctors pulling off a gigantic hoax so as to replace religion
with science. He based his own ideas on the Old Testament references to
a flat earth and the New Testament saying that Jesus ascended into
heaven."

  Sunrises and sunsets he dismissed as optical illusions, the moon
landing as sham scripted by science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke.
He and his late wife, Marjory, reasoned that only a flat earth could
explain why she hadn't spent her childhood in Australia hanging
upside-down by her toes.

 We're confident that Rep. Jim Holt, the Springdale Republican
responsible for House Bill 2548, formally entitled "An act to prohibit
stateagencies and other public entities from using tax dollars to
purchase or distribute material that contains, or presents as factual,
information which has proven false or fraudulent," is not a member of
the International Flat Earth Society.

  Without earth-orbiting satellites, after all, Pat Robertson's
Christian Broadcast Network would be out of business, and President Bush
II's to spend untold billions building a space-based missile defense
that Chicago Sun-Times columnist William O'Rourke aptly describes as "an
Maginot Line in the sky" would be not simply impossible, but literally
inconceivable.

Even so, the reasoning behind this latest attempt to substitute
fundamentalist theology for the scientific method in Arkansas schools is
noless laughable.

Exactly like the Flat Earthers, creationists begin with conclusions and
backward to facts. They reject the procedures of science while claiming
its cultural authority. They don't know what a scientific "theory" is:
not a guess or hypothesis, but a systematically organized body of
knowledge based on falsifiable and repeatable assumptions.

Most revealing are the remarks of Rep. Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, who
fears that if children are taught that they are descended from animals,
they'll act like them. It'd be interesting to know which animals Altes
thinks behave worse than human beings. Or which gods.

Mark Twain liked to quote Numbers 31:1-18 in which the Lord instructs
Moses to exterminate the Midianites. After putting all the men to the
sword, the Israelites were given this divine injunction: "Now kill all
the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for
yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

In Deuteronomy 20:16-18, the Lord calls for even sterner measures: "In
the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an
inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely
destroy them--the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites
and Jebusites--as the Lord your has commanded you. Otherwise they will
teach you to follow all the  detestable things they do in worshipping
their gods." We call this kind of thing "ethnic cleansing" today. Even
Mike Huckabee's against it.

Last time the Arkansas Legislature passed a "monkey law" back in 1981,
12 Methodist Episcopal bishops of Arkansas. Presbyterians, Southern
Baptists and Jews also were represented. of the 23 plaintiffs in the
successful ACLU lawsuit to overturn it were religious leaders, including
the Methodist, Catholic, Episcopal and African Methodist Bishop Kenneth
Hicks wrote an unusually articulate statement explaining the absurd
presumption underlying fundamentalist bibliolatry: that puny man would
limit divine power to the dimensions of his little mind.

"The universe is not only queerer than we imagine," wrote British
scientist J.B.S. Haldane, "it's queerer than we CAN imagine."

It's precisely this sense of awe at the fathomless complexity of space
and time that scares the fool out of people like Holt and Altes.
Creationism flourishes among the semi-educated who deem themselves
members of contemporary Puritanism's visible elect and yearn to enforce
the old-time Adam-and-Eve, Dick-and-Jane storybook theology that makes
their little right and everybody else's wrong.

The irony is that efforts like theirs have, if anything, quite the
opposite effect. Science teachers aren't intimidated, and creationists
end up looking like goobers.

Thomas Jefferson, bless him, saw all this coming. His own scientific
studies convinced him that nature showed evidence of intelligent design.

"Is uniformity [of religion] attainable?" he wrote. "Millions of
innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of
Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have
not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of
coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half
hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

Hence, the First Amendment, which makes this silly proposal, if enacted,
unconstitutional on its face.
 
 

Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National
Magazine Award.

This article was published on Wednesday, April 4, 2001

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