Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  ‘That’s bunk! That’s bunk! By the time he got done with his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he hated Christianity with a passion, because of Fitzroy’s fanaticism.’ (Fitzroy was the Captain of the Beagle and a devout Christian.) ‘I mean if you know anything about Fitzroy or if you’ve read anything about it … He committed suicide! He was a fanatical individual. Darwin left the boat many times just to get away from Fitzroy. Collected specimens for that reason.’

  I look at him in amazement. ‘You think he gathered all that information and then threw together the theory of evolution just to irritate Fitzroy?’

  ‘No, no, but my point is he wasn’t a traditional Christian; he was not a Christian. He was not a believer in God. There is no way you could make that argument. He is not a believer in the God of Scripture.’

  In that case, I ask, would he have gone to hell?

  ‘If he did not believe in Jesus Christ as his personal saviour, he went to hell, he is in hell. That’s the entrance requirement.’

  This seems so harsh and forlorn that instead of feeling sorry for Darwin I feel sorry for Kurt. I suggest that the tension between the two sides of his life, the scientific and the religious, must be very painful. Does he get lonely at times? He nods. Like everyone else, scientists crave the recognition of their peers. When Kurt goes to a scientific meeting, his fellow scientists often clamber across chairs to avoid walking down the same aisle as him. He often wishes he was not a young-age creationist. Life would be so much better. But he cannot. ‘The Bible makes it clear where I must stand—and there I must stand. Like Martin Luther, here I stand. I have no choice.’

  He tells me this with real regret, the last statement about Martin Luther lying at the end like something dead, almost as if he knows that no matter how courageous his stand, no matter how brilliant his work, ultimately his is a Quixotic journey which will consume his life. I am both touched and fascinated by him. He is so clearly intelligent and so completely without guile. I ask a question and he answers it like a scientist, on its merits. He does not say—you don’t get the impression it even occurs to him to say—‘What business is it of yours?’ or ‘Who do you think you are?’ He simply looks at the question as he might at any question about the natural world, and then replies as truthfully as he can.

  When I ask him when he became interested in science and at what point he realised it would come in conflict with the Bible, his answer is so strange and so highly personal I find myself in a state of almost trance-like fascination.

  ‘I would say the two paths converged very early on,’ he tells me. ‘At age nine, I was struggling with issues of reality, of what exists and what does not. I was going through—I didn’t know it then, but what I now understand to be—deconstructionist philosophy. I was asking myself, what do I know for sure … I had this thing I called my imp which was inside of me, and this imp was controlling my emotions, my sensory perceptions, and making me believe things existed when they didn’t really exist.’

  Perhaps this imp, which began to look increasingly evil, had created Kurt himself, as an illusion, and then fooled him into thinking other things existed which did not, in order to distract him from his own non-existence. He might, in fact, be nothing more than the imp itself.

  ‘I concluded I didn’t know that anything in the universe existed for sure. All I really knew was that evil existed … If I rejected the existence of everything else, if I went back to the only thing I knew … the only thing I knew was that evil existed.’ As an example of the kind of evil he is talking about, he describes watching his dog find a ‘rabbit’s nest’ and how it ate one baby rabbit after another. This was ‘evil’ because he knew the dog was well fed and didn’t need to kill. He also saw tornadoes and the destruction they caused. This was the evil which haunted him, not moral evil, but what modern philosophers call ‘natural evil.’

  He sits back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head and says:

  ‘And that drove me to … actually to suicide.’

  I remain very still. He is talking about himself when he was nine.

  ‘I decided I should destroy myself, because either I was the incarnation of evil or I was the imagination of evil. Either way if I committed suicide, I’d either destroy evil, which was good, or I wouldn’t do anything because I didn’t exist. I was in my tree-house at the time—I said, “One week from today,” that was a Wednesday—“I’m going to come back up here, and I’m going to figure out the most efficient way of killing myself.” I had my day chosen and everything and I would have done it without telling anyone. People say that people who are going to commit suicide will warn people and leave a note, but that’s stupid because not in all cases. I wouldn’t have left a note because no one else existed! ’

  Again, a big laugh.

  However, that Sunday at the independent Baptist church where his family worshipped, his life was saved. The pastor read from Romans 5.8, ‘But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we’re yet sinners Christ died for us.’ He realised that if Christ had given his life for our sins, and if he, Kurt, also wanted to destroy evil, even if it was his own evil, then evil couldn’t be all there was.

  He goes on to talk about his relationship with God, how powerful it was at that moment and how, over the years, it has become like an old friendship. The way he describes it reminds me of the relationship I imagined having with God when I was a child.

  His love of science continued without coming into conflict with his love of God until his sophomore year in high school. Suddenly he knew too much about both to be able to ignore their contradictions. He had to decide whether or not the Bible and science, specifically Darwin’s theory of evolution, could co-exist in his life and he came up with a bizarre physical test which he hoped would resolve the problem.

  He went out and bought another Bible and took it home secretly. Each night, underneath the covers with a flashlight, he systematically read through it from Genesis to Revelation. The idea was to see how much would have to be thrown out if evolution were true. Whenever he came to a verse that made no sense in the light of evolutionary theory, he cut it out. Actually, to be fair, he cut out every other verse, because when you cut out one side of a page, you also cut out the other. He poked around the verse with the tip of his scissors, leaving the margins intact, and then extracted the verse, leaving a rectangular hole in the page. It took him a year and a half.

  The last verse which had to be excised was from Revelation. It is the third from last verse in the entire Bible, and an ominous one: ‘If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city.’ The book of life is a list of all the names of the people who end up in heaven. As heaven would not exist under the mechanistic theory of evolution, he cut the verse out with trembling hands.

  ‘The question now was, could I physically pick the Bible up? Would it hold itself together? This was the purpose of it all. It was a physical test of how important the concept of evolution was in undermining Scripture. I knew what the answer was going to be, and I’d known it for months, but I didn’t want to come to this point because if the Bible didn’t hold together I was going to have to reject evolution—and that meant to me rejecting science, which was everything I loved.’

  He takes hold of the Bible on his desk, lays back the covers, and holds the outer margin of all the pages between finger and thumb. ‘I tried very hard to pick it up, but each time it would start to tear. I’d put it back down and try a different spot. I was trying to find a place—I was desperately trying to find a place—where it would hold together. But it wouldn’t.’

  He lets the pages fall, leans back in his chair, and looks out of the window for a while before going on. ‘My encounter with Jesus Christ had saved my life spiritually and physically, so I couldn’t reject him and I came to know about him through that Bible so the words of that Bible had to have a higher priority than the claims of science. So I rejected ev
olution.’

  Nothing could be more tragic. He sank into a long depression. There was a part missing in his life. After a few weeks, however, and quite by chance, he heard about creationism. Here was a way out of his dilemma. At first he swallowed all the material uncritically, but soon realised that most of the creationists were mediocre scientists and most of their theories untenable. There followed a period of disillusionment out of which he emerged with the basis for his life’s work: he would start over, go back to the beginning, rebuild science from the ground up—and in the process exclude evolution.

  ‘You still include evolution,’ he amends, ‘you know, it’s just certain types of evolution that are excluded.’

  He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he studied astrophysics. He was trying to stay away from his first love, palaeontology, but after a year, he could resist it no longer and changed his major. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Geophysical Sciences and applied to five different graduate programmes, one of which was Stephen Jay Gould’s at Harvard. No one mentioned on any of the applications that Kurt was a creationist. Gould accepted him without knowing and didn’t find out until it was too late. On the day—or rather night—when they met, Kurt had driven his sister down to her college in South Carolina and then driven another fifteen hours up to Harvard. By the time he arrived it was one-thirty in the morning and he was exhausted.

  ‘I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t even know where my dorm was. I stepped out of my car. Went twenty feet. Ran into Steve Gould. One-thirty in the morning!’ He laughs. ‘He’s going to his office!’

  According to Wise, Gould wakes up at seven in the morning and goes to work. After a normal workday, he returns home to spend the evening with his family, goes to sleep with his wife at a regular hour, then wakes up around one A.M., and returns to work. After a few hours, he then goes home again, hops into bed for an hour, and wakes up to have breakfast with the family.

  ‘I just ran right into him and he chewed me out right there. It’s like, “Oh, my word.” I mean I was completely out of it and I’m going, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. It really wasn’t my intention. I didn’t know they hadn’t told you. I thought they would.” ’

  The issue of creation didn’t come up for another two years. One day Gould stopped and asked him, ‘Do you still believe the same way?’ ‘Well, I’m still a creationist, if that’s what you mean.’ ‘Oh, okay,’ replied Gould. Another couple of years later, it came up again when Kurt was sitting in his office chatting. Again Kurt reaffirmed his position. Since then they have spoken of it calmly and seemingly without tension. Unfortunately, it was not this easy with everyone. One graduate student declared war on Kurt. ‘I’m going to do everything in my power,’ he told him, ‘to make your life hell while you’re at Harvard.’

  ‘And he tried.’ Kurt laughs, but you can see, beneath the laughter, memories of considerable pain.

  Because he had to stop and work—as a landscape gardener—to be able to afford to stay at Harvard, Kurt was twenty-nine when he finally got his Ph.D. Since seventh grade, he had dreamed of teaching at one of the more prestigious secular universities, but when the moment came to look for work, he no longer wanted to and applied only to Christian colleges.

  He had never heard of Bryan College until he applied for the job he now holds. It is, he states, the ideal situation. In a secular university he would never be able to conduct creationist research. His wife, whom he met in church and is not an academic, home-schools his children and runs a day-care centre in their home.

  ‘And so you’re happy here?’ I ask.

  He nods.

  ‘It must be a big relief to be at a place like this after all these years.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says and nods again, ‘to be released of that pressure …’

  ‘Do you find, if I may be candid here,’ I say, lowering my voice, ‘do you find that you don’t encounter people here who are as intellectually stimulating as you might like?’

  ‘That’s been my universal observation, no matter where,’ he answers, and then yelps with laughter before catching himself. ‘Here at Bryan College,’ he says more judiciously, ‘there are students and fellow professors who are challenging for me and that’s good.’

  Still bewildered by the idea of a nine-year-old contemplating suicide for ostensibly philosophical reasons, I ask him if he can remember anything else that could have made him so unhappy. He thinks for a long while, wondering, it seems to me, how best to express what follows.

  ‘There was a recurrent dream,’ he says after a while, ‘that I had just about every night. I would lie down in bed and whatever the attitude of the window—you know, you’re looking at it kind of weird, it’s kind of a weird shaped thing—when I closed my eyes the window’s still there, still that light … that shape of lightness, and the whole dream was just that window, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, very, very slowly, and I would wake up screaming. And this for years. I knew precisely what it meant, it was the greatest fear I had as a child: I realised as soon as I began to talk to people that they knew instantly—they labelled me instantly—as a brain, and they rejected me instantly in like manner. I tried to speak differently, unintelligently. I did everything I could to thwart my intelligence. I was afraid that my intelligence was distancing me from people, from relationships. It was a terrible, terrible fear, and I did a lot—and I think successfully—to reduce the intellectual potential I had at that time, trying desperately to hold on to relationships …’

  We sit in silence for a moment. I’m exhausted, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. I can think of nothing more to ask him.

  ‘It’s been very interesting talking to you,’ I tell him truthfully.

  ‘Well, it’s weird, I know,’ he says, and laughs his high, boyish laugh.

  Out in the corridor, I photograph him leaning against a specimen case containing fossils which would to 99 per cent of all the scientists in the world provide incontrovertible proof that the world is thousands of millions of years old, and then we shake hands.

  ‘Lord be with you,’ he says and next thing I know, I hear myself saying:

  ‘And Lord be with you too.’

  All my adult life I’ve despised religion, in particular its resistance to scientific progress. Galileo is a greater hero to me than any saint. Yet here is Professor Wise, one of the most influential creationists in the world—and a religious nut by all previous standards—and I like him and feel sympathy for him. I didn’t tell him I was a descendant of that hell-dweller, Darwin, but from my questions he must have known I was neither a believer in the young-age creation theory nor a fellow Christian, and yet he generously revealed himself to me. My intellectual views remain the same, but in some significant way, my feelings have changed. Faith in God or any of the fairy tales that surround Him may be absurd, but the need for faith is anything but. When you encounter someone like Kurt, you realise that faith is sometimes an absolute necessity.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  How to Get Along Sensibly with Girls

  St. Christopher’s was a school for the semi-delinquent children of the relatively rich. It was vegetarian, the idea being, I think, that avoiding meat would reduce the violent or sexual urges in these sorry offspring. After a year, I opened an account at a local grocery store and ordered in thirty cans of corned beef. I had eaten about four of them when I read in the paper that several people had died of food poisoning from just such cans as these—I think it was typhoid—and so I had to go back to subsisting on nut-meat rissoles and banana cakes. My violence subsided to some extent, not through lack of meat, but through the sudden, wonderfully civilising presence of the opposite sex.

  At last I was among girls again! Oh, the bliss of their little bodies and their shy glances, the smell of them, the way they giggled, the movement of them, the tenderness and malice, the promise in their blushes, the taste of their soft lips, the flick and whip of their skirts, and the marvellous hot, differen
t swell of them. So many characters, so many different shapes, so many romances to be had, peeks to be taken, and feels to be felt.

  Resurrection! Praise the Lord!

  I was coming in at an unusual time and so my arrival was closely noted by the girls. A fresh boy. A good-looking boy. By now, mercifully, eczema no longer came to my face, and only flared up periodically—usually between my fingers, more rarely now in my elbows, at the back of my knees and on my ankles. If I remained dressed and kept my fingers pressed together, I could pass as normal. I arrived with my flowing locks and three years of pent-up desire pumping in my athletic body—and the girls, the girls wanted me! I did not select, I simply allowed myself to be carried off by the most insistent of them. I’d been in an all-boys school for over three years; anyone was welcome.

  No sooner had I acquiesced to whichever girl it was, than the others turned against me. Spurned hormonal girls formed into a lethal pack and loving lips became blowpipes from which, instead of murmurs of encouragement and flattery, came barbs of sarcasm and spite. One girl dubbed me Mr. X, a reference to my eczema, which had been discovered. The boys, resenting my romantic success, also hated me. I had several fights, most of which I won. Finally, when I was dumped by the first girl, I was forgiven by the boys. William, one of those who’d beaten me in a fight, became my friend and remained so, even after I was expelled three years later.

  The school was in a town called Letchworth in Hertfordshire, about twenty miles from my family’s home. Letchworth was a ‘garden city,’ an experiment in idealistic urban planning intended to do away with tenements and inner-city squalor. It had succeeded: it was an utterly boring suburb. The main part of the school, which was on the edge of town, was a large red-brick house with lots of additions—an assembly room, classrooms, extra dormitories scattered around it with little or no thought to aesthetics. On the other side of the playing fields were two more ‘houses’ which functioned as dormitories for the younger children.