Beyond Divide

Back in the 1970’s, I was standing in the cafeteria line with one of my anthropology professors. He had just returned from a major conference on state of the art evolution research. Enthusiasm danced in his eyes as he shared nuggets of recently unearthed data. Apparently unaware of my background, he finished by saying “with everything we now know, I’d really like to hear how Christians can possibly believe in creationist stories.” “Well, you happen to be looking at one.” It was a bold move for my usually timid self. But at the moment I was stunned by the unanticipated joust, not to mention worn a little thin on the whole debate. Looking back, I guess I could have done without the sarcastic overtones. That was my gut brain getting into the act. We’ll be following that little guy’s exploits at length. My embarrassed professor stood there in awkward silence, occasionally shuffling his feet. I began to feel sorry for his plight. Here he was with a foot in his mouth and no easy way to remove it, in front of a student no less. After all, his whole career centered on helping budding social scientists blossom into the next generation of experts, not ridiculing them or trampling their ideas. That was the chemistry of compassion flowing in, something else future pages will cover. The result: my feeling of being under attack loosened its grip on the steering wheel. I shifted gears and began sharing objective observations, much as I would during intellectual give and take with any colleague. “You know, you’re right. Scientific study goes to great lengths to explore the question of where we came from. There’s plenty of data out there for big conferences. But think about it. Pretty much all of those modern scientific papers about early origins conclude that life emerged in about the same order that the Book of Genesis already described. The concept has been around since before the Gutenberg Press. Isn’t this a rather odd coincidence?” He still had no answer, perhaps a little stunned himself. But he did seem to be giving my ideas fair consideration. I was on a roll. “And then, look at scientific method. We accept something as fact only after we can demonstrate it. Demonstration is the very hallmark of scientific method. Yet nobody has demonstrated advanced life emerging from nonlife. Sure, they’ve shown lots of tiny pieces that could conceivably fit in with the overall concept of evolution. But still, nobody has demonstrated life advancing from nothing. Based on how we do science, these pieces suggest only a possibility of how such a thing might have happened. For any other scientific study, with this level of evidence we don’t call it fact, or even theory. We call it a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Sometimes it only rates as conjecture.” My professor could hardly disagree with the basic tenets of scientific method. And I’d certainly taken the wind out of his sails regarding the conference he’d so enjoyed. Later on I felt a little guilty about that part. All the same, the fact that this empirical pothole had never occurred to him illustrates how even scientists may give in to beliefs based on flimsy evidence if the trusted colleagues surrounding them treat them as fact. In other words, in spite of his substantial training and experience in scientific method, he appears to have gotten caught in the snare of groupthink—another human dilemma that weighs heavily in today’s red versus blue discord.