50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  Yes, the Nazis had unscientific ideas about racial superiority linked to flawed notions of “survival of the fittest.” However, nothing they did was morally justified or excused by the theory of evolution. Creationists should recognize that people were quite capable of killing and destroying long before Charles Darwin was even born. We decide for ourselves whether or not to do bad things and we have to take responsibility for our actions. Not only is a connection between understanding evolution and immoral behavior unproven, it is also irrelevant to the natural world. Reality is unaffected by high school curricula. Life will continue to evolve even if every criminal in the world chants Darwin's name while committing their evil acts. Evolution will not stop even if every nice person in the world rejects it. Our intellectual and emotional preferences are not as important to the universe as we might imagine. We may not think it's nice, for example, when warplanes drop bombs on civilians. But gravity will remain with us, nonetheless, even if we were to reject it and demand that an alternative theory be taught to our children in schools.

  Some creationists think people who accept modern biology have adopted evolution or nature as their religion, with Charles Darwin as some sort of messiah figure. This is laughable, of course. For the record, I don't worship at the altar of evolution. I think nature as we see it work here on Earth is a horrible way to run a planet. For example, there is far too much predation—too much pain felt by too many creatures. Yes, I am awed and endlessly fascinated by the story of life and the staggering biodiversity that has evolved here. And I'm always vulnerable to nature's beauty. Whether I am scuba diving, canoeing on the Amazon River or sitting on a park bench watching a squirrel watch me, I easily become entranced by the natural world. But the overall way in which this unintelligent and indifferent nature operates does not warm my heart in the slightest. Look behind the pretty flowers and leaping dolphins and one quickly discovers a vast dungeon of horrors. Those who see the handiwork of a wise and loving god in nature need to look again. There certainly is great beauty to be found as well as countless examples of cooperation and peaceful coexistence, but the natural world is also a constant bloodbath of incomprehensible suffering. Every second of every day, pain-feeling creatures are eaten alive by parasites and predators. The fear of being stalked and eaten is always present for trillions of creatures.

  One of the most powerful memories from my travels in Africa is the sight of blood-soaked lions making a ghoulish feast from the gut of a still-twitching zebra. Predators have to eat too, so no one can fault the lions, of course. But if zebras could talk, I doubt they would tell us that they think lions and all of nature were created by a just god.

  If zebras don't matter to you, try watching a good zombie movie (or a bad one). Wait for the inevitable scene where a minor character is caught and eaten alive by a gang of the hungry undead. Imagine that it is you the zombies are taking apart bite by bite. Close your eyes for a couple of seconds and think about the terror and pain of losing your life, one mouthful at a time. Horrifying, isn't it? But that's business as usual, another day at the office for most life on this planet.

  If I were a god with a minimal amount of compassion and empathy, I certainly would not have crafted a cruel and savage system like the one we have here on Earth. For starters, I think I might have powered all life by photosynthesis or at least made all animals herbivores. I could have tinkered with reproduction rates and natural life spans to avoid overpopulation. There are so many things I would do differently. I certainly would have opted not to create the malaria protozoa, seeing how it tortures and kills thousands of children every day. I might have left out cancer too. No, I don't have limitless love and admiration for nature as we find it here on Earth. I merely accept it as the way life works and find what beauty within it that I can.

  I suppose I should add that I am aware of the Christian explanation for all the horrors of nature that we see today. Some claim that God let the world become as it is because Adam and Eve broke one of his rules in the Garden of Eden. Blaming so much pain, suffering, and death on one guy for biting one apple seems pretty unreasonable to me, however.

  “JUST A THEORY”

  Creationists tell me over and over that evolution is “just a theory” and that no one has ever observed it. This is another example of poor science education in schools in America and many other places around the world. Scientists do not casually toss the word theory around the way nonscientists do. For most people theory means nothing more than a hunch or a guess. For scientists, however, a theory is a formal explanation of something important that is backed up by a lot of very good evidence. It also has to be testable and make reliable predictions about the real world. Evolution passes with flying colors on all counts.

  It's important for creationists to know that evolution has been observed because some of them claim that because evolution happened so long ago it can't be seen and therefore can't be proved. Not that everything in science has to be seen by human eyes to be proved (archaeologists don't see what happened at their sites hundreds or thousands of years before they started digging, but they still manage to do very good work), but I understand that observation can make it more believable to the general public. Fortunately, scientists have witnessed evolution. They have been able to do this because life is always evolving and some life-forms—bacteria, viruses, and insects, and some types of weeds, for example—have relatively fast reproduction rates. Bacteria can clock a thousand generations in a little over one month. By comparison, a thousand generations takes us more than twenty thousand years.5 With that sort of turnover, evolutionary changes occur fast enough for scientists to observe them.

  The claim that life is too complex to have “just happened” is another core argument of creationists. But complexity is not proof of their god's existence or his involvement with life on Earth, just as evolution's explanation of so much doesn't disprove the existence of gods. Our inability to fully understand life may say something about our current limitations, but it does not necessarily say anything about the processes and origin of life. If I brought a prehistoric human back to the present in my time machine and showed her a television, it probably would be a challenge to convince her that the TV wasn't magic and that I was not some sort of a god. But her failure to grasp how a television and a remote control work should not be seen by her or anyone else as evidence that televisions are supernatural devices. Given enough time and effort, “impossible knowledge” often comes into focus. Repeatedly throughout history things that were seen as too complex and forever beyond human comprehension ended up solved and incorporated as standard fodder for high school textbooks.

  Perhaps the favorite argument of creationists is the old watch analogy: If the complexity of a watch reveals that it was designed by an intelligent being, then the greater complexity of a human body must mean that it was made by an even more intelligent being—a god. After all, a watch doesn't just “come together” on its own, so how can anyone believe that humans, more complex than a watch, were created naturally by luck and chance? This is a bad argument for a few reasons. First, we know who makes watches: human watchmakers. Second, we also know what shaped the human body into its current form. It was replication, variation, and natural selection over millions of years. I agree with creationists when they say they see design in the human body. And they are correct that there is a designer. According to the best current evidence, however, the designer appears to be neither intelligent nor divine. We owe our physical structure, both its wonders and its flaws, to the indifferent and blind process of evolution. It's a process that is not random or completely by chance, but there is no underlying intelligent strategy to it. It is merely life's interaction with whatever environment it finds itself in. There is no goal, no ascending ladder, in evolution. Success is defined as anything better than extinction. What appears to be the champion life-form today might vanish in an instant tomorrow when the environment changes. Maybe a god did have something to do with it, but without evidence for such
an idea, how can we justify pretending to know?

  People on both sides of this debate may disagree, but I believe the evolution-versus-creationism conflict has been misaligned from the start. The proper debate, if there has to be one, should be “a natural origin of life” versus creationism. Evolution describes how life changes over time. Yes, it has key implications for the natural origin of life, of course. However, it does not directly address how life started. The key moment when something that was not alive became something alive is not currently understood by science and may never be.

  THE MOTHER OF ALL DEBATES

  I predict that the mother of all debates is yet to come. Currently scientists have interesting ideas about how life may have started on Earth, but it's no secret that no one really knows. That may change, however, as scientists are working in labs right now to create self-replicating synthetic organisms—life. Success in this seems likely and will probably come sooner rather than later. There will always be questions, but if scientists are able to create life, then a very compelling theory of origins may follow close behind. If so, creationists will likely drop evolution as their great bogeyman overnight. They will realize that all this time they have been arguing for a divine origin of life against people who were arguing that life changes—two positions that are not in perfect opposition as most have always assumed. Natural origin versus supernatural origin is the real war. Once that fight heats up, evolution is sure to become standard fare in every science class, even in private religious schools. The outrage and fear over evolution will evaporate just like that other colossal crisis centuries ago over whether or not the Sun revolved around the Earth. Of course, when the irrational battle against evolution falls silent, creationists probably won't pause to apologize for having been so wrong, wasted so much time, and degraded the education of so many children, because they will be too busy fighting the new scientific theory of life's origin. Here we go again.

  LOOK IN THE MIRROR

  Evolution is a fascinating and important topic that has been woefully neglected in many schools and elsewhere because of an unfortunately and mostly unnecessary conflict with religion. As a result, few know what evolution is. Millions of people fear, hate, and reject something they don't even understand. Please don't be misled by mistaken or dishonest claims that the theory of evolution is evil, not well established, or necessarily incompatible with belief in a god. If you want to be in tune with modern science and desire a basic understanding of life on your planet, you must accept that life evolves. The evidence for this is not only found in museums and libraries around the world. It's in you. Every cell in your body is a testament to more than three billion years of life on Earth. Regardless of what you may have been told, evolution is not the enemy. Evolution is you.

  CREATIONISM EVOLVES

  It was long overdue, but in 1987 the US Supreme Court ruled that creationism is obviously a religious belief and as such cannot be taught in public school science classes because it violates the first amendment to the Constitution. But this did not drive it to extinction. As we shall see in the next chapter, creationism evolved to live and fight another day under a new name.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

  Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

  Hazen, Robert M. Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry, 2007.

  Hosler, Jay. Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

  Leeming, David. A Dictionary of Creation Myths. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Loxton, Daniel. Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press, 2010.

  Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002.

  Miller, Kenneth R. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.

  National Academy of Sciences. Science, Evolution, and Creationism. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008.

  Palmer, Douglas. Origins: Human Evolution Revealed. New York: Mitchell Beazley, 2010.

  Pigliucci, Massimo. Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2002.

  Potts, Richard, and Christopher Sloan. What Does It Mean to Be Human? Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010.

  Prothero, Donald R. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

  Sawyer, G. J., and Viktor Deak. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

  Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

  Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design. New York: Times Books, 2006.

  Smith, Cameron M. The Fact of Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.

  Smith, Cameron M., and Charles Sullivan. The Top 10 Myths about Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006.

  Stringer, Chris. Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York: Times Books, 2011.

  Stringer, Chris, and Peter Andrews. The Complete World of Human Evolution. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

  Stringer, Lauren, and Peters Westberg. Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story. New York: Harcourt Children's Books, 2003.

  Tattersall, Ian. Extinct Humans. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

  Ward, Peter. Future Evolution: An Illuminated History of Life to Come. New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001.

  Zimmer, Carl. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

  Other Sources

  Becoming Human: Unearthing our Earliest Human Ancestors (DVD), PBS, 2010.

  Talk Origins, www.talkorigins.org.

  Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to the problem.

  —Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Even noble souls can become corrupted with wrong education.

  —Plato, The Republic

  Creationism is religion. It's about believing in a god in a particular way that forces everything else to fall in line with that belief no matter what facts, logic, evidence, and reality say. Creationism is a problem in a country like the United States because the government and its public schools are supposed to be neutral on matters of religion. The 1987 Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard made it crystal clear once and for all that it is unconstitutional to teach overt creationism in public school science classes because creationism is religion. The ruling did, however, make the point that there is nothing to prohibit the teaching of multiple theories about the origin of humankind, so long as they are scientific and nonreligious. In hindsight, the reaction, to this ruling by determined antievolutionists was predictable. They would give creationism a makeover.

  Some clever creationists figured that by repackaging it as something scientific and not blatantly religious, they could sneak it back into classrooms. They named their creation “intelligent design” (ID). It was a crafty idea for sure, but there were two big problems: it wasn't scientific and it was religion. ID is just creationism all over again. ID's claim is that life is too complex to have happened “by chance” or by natural processes and, therefore, an intelligent designer must be responsible. Of course, savvy ID proponents didn't come right out and say that the designer is their god, but that's the implication, of course.

  WRONG EVEN IF IT'S RIGHT

  At the core of intelligent design is the arrogant idea that life is so complex that it could not exist without an intelligent creator. It is arrogant because it assumes what we don't know now, we can never know. For this reason, embracing intelligent design is wrong even if it should one day turn out to right. Yes, I really mean that. As it exists at
the moment, ID “theory” is so bad, so lame, such a pointless, defeatist, and poorly conceived concept that no thoughtful person should go anywhere near it. Intelligent design is toxic to the mind not because it seems so very wrong but because of the message it sends to people—young students in particular. ID suggests that an unanswered question is an unanswerable question. Everything about intelligent design screams: Give up! Stop trying to figure out how life originated and changed over time. Just say “God did it” and shut up. Regardless of whether or not a god or gods did create life, retreating from the challenge of biological mysteries so early in the game is neither wise nor brave. A more honest name for ID “theory” would be: “Biology is really hard so let's stop trying.” Intelligent design is not science; it's the opposite of science. It's the mass marketing of intellectual surrender. ID should be rejected on principle alone. Look at it this way: if fairies were discovered tomorrow in somebody's backyard, it wouldn't suddenly mean that all the fairy believers of previous centuries were brilliant thinkers who were ahead of the curve and wiser than fairy skeptics. Maybe aliens really did build the pyramids in Egypt. But without one speck of credible evidence, it's an irrational belief one cannot intellectually justify holding today, even if it turns out to be true tomorrow. Should those who believe in intelligent design today ever be proven correct, it would not be because they were more sensible and aligned with science. They would be right for all the wrong reasons.