The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
Read The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Online
Authors: Will Storr
Tags: #BIO000000
FICTION
The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone
(2013)
NON-FICTION
Will Storr vs. the Supernatural
(2006)
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected]
, or write us at the address above.
Copyright © 2014 by Will Storr
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0981-2
For Farrah
for ending the madness
2: ‘I don’t know what’s going on with these people …’
3: ‘The secret of the long life of the tortoise’
5: ‘Solidified, intensified, gross sensations’
6: ‘The invisible actor at the centre of the world’
9: ‘Top Dog wants his name in’
10: ‘They’re frightening people’
11: ‘There was nothing there, but I knew it was a cockerel’
12: ‘I came of exceptional parents’
13: ‘Backwards and forwards in the slime’
14: ‘That one you just go, “Eeerrrr”’
‘And then he said to me – this is honestly true – he said to me, “Well you can prove anything with facts, can’t you?”’
S
TEWART
L
EE
How I Escaped My Certain Fate
(2010)
‘A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce.’
J
EROME
B
RUNER
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life
(2002)
‘It’s like treason’
It is Friday night in a town called Devil and the community hall is full. Over two hundred people are gathered here in shuffling, expectant silence. There are elderly couples and clean young families, their prams parked squarely at the end of rows. A modest distance away from the front sits a line of pale women in Amish headwear. Their sturdy patriarch is planted beside them, his forearms crossed in front of his starched white shirt. Above our heads, suspended from the ceiling, two huge fans chew the heavy tropical air.
A local elder stands up and shuffles his way to the microphone. He is in his eighties, at least, and looks pale and fragile, like a drift of smoke. There is a squeal of feedback. He clears his throat. The sound of it bounces off the parquet floor.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says. ‘Without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to, er, be able to introduce to you a man whose work I’m sure you’re all familiar with. We’ve been looking forward to his talk for a long time now. He’s, er, travelled a long way to see us tonight, so please give a very warm welcome to Mr John Mackay.’
Proudly, down the centre aisle, I watch him come: the man we all want to see. With his white prophet’s beard, charismatic glimmer and wide-brimmed bushman’s hat, he clutches in his right hand a thousand pages of visions, violence and lore, of science, sects and sorcery, all the wisdom of all the worlds, everything anyone needs to know about anything. Mackay walks slowly through applause, takes his place at the front of the hall and waits for the crowd to settle. Once silence is regained, he finally begins.
‘Charles Darwin wrote a book,’ he announces. ‘Does anyone know what its name was?’ His sparkly eyes scan the rows. ‘The name of his book was
The Origin of the Species
. I have another book here.’ He holds up his leather-bound volume, its pages, weary at the corners, flop open. ‘It’s called the Bible. Tonight, the choice you have to face up to is this – do you put your faith in Darwin, who wasn’t there? Or God, who was?’
As Mackay speaks, the hands of the church clock, down in the town centre, clunk to 8.30. By now, the place is almost entirely deserted. That is what it is like up here, a hundred and sixty miles north of Brisbane, Australia, on the humid banks of the Mary River. It is a place of early closing and close community; of pineapple plantations, clapboard churches, empty roads and old Holden Utes rusting in silent fields. The landscape itself is lush and strange, with its sinisterly christened creeks, monster cacti growing in gas station forecourts and vast rock formations that jut out of the land like ancient tumours. The locals – dairy farmers, timber men and the descendants of gold-rush pioneers – know the town as Gympie, an Aboriginal word meaning Devil. It is actually named for a freakish native tree, a murderous hermaphrodite called the gympie-gympie, whose flowers are simultaneously male and female, whose fruit is a lurid, tumescent purple and pink and whose pretty heart-shaped leaves are covered with hairs that contain a toxin noxious enough to kill dogs, horses and sometimes men. The gympie-gympie is a hysterical nightmare of nature; evidence, I believe, of the conscienceless magnificence of biological evolution. But, right here, right now, I am in an intimidating minority of one. Because all of these people and tonight’s main attraction – an international Creationist superstar and tireless prosecutor of the diabolical trinity Darwin, Dawkins and Attenborough – believe the gympie-gympie’s malevolence to be a direct result of Adam eating forbidden fruit and introducing sin, death and nasty prickles to a perfect world.
Mackay clicks a button. An image of an enormous bird flashes on to the overhead projector.
‘What’s the name of that funny little chicken?’ he says.
Nobody responds.
‘Emu!’ he says. ‘They can’t fly, but they can run like crazy. The interesting thing is, if you dig up their fossils, they used to be twice the size they now are. That’s change, but it’s not evolution.’
He allows the last sentence to unfurl slowly in the sweating air above him.
‘If you take your Bible seriously you will notice that Genesis is emphatic that when God made the world there were no killers. Everything only ate plants. Now that is different to Charles Darwin’s picture of evolution. Genesis one and two are dogmatic. God made everything very good. Do you realise that means there was a world where even broccoli tasted good? Can you believe that? That’s what it’s talking about. It meant no killers, no carnivores, no competition and no struggle to survive. But what is that catchphrase you learned in biology at high school? Survival of the …? Fittest. But no such competition occurred back in God’s world. There was no struggle to survive at all. Everything survived.’
Mackay presses his little button again and the famous silhouette depiction of ‘the evolution of man’ appears.
‘You see the chimpanzee on the left?’ he asks. ‘You see the man on the right? That’s the history of the world according to most high-school textbooks. You and I are just hydrogen and somehow or other we turned into people. But if you look at your Bible, it says that everything started perfect and went
downhill
. Man sinned, God cursed the ground and death entered the world.’
He turns to face his screen.
‘Let’s put that in diagram form.’
On the screen, a bar graph appears, consisting of biblical names and numbers.
‘Do you know that Adam lived until he was nine hundred and thirty years old? Noah lived until he was nine hundred and fifty? Abraham drops off at a hundred and seventy-five. Anyone here a hundred and seventy-five tonight? No? Big difference in the world. That’s change, but it’s not evolution. We live in a world where life-spans are influenced by stress in the environment. I’m old enough to remember when the Vietnamese first turned up in Australia. They were tiny. They’d come from a nasty place. All they’d had to eat for fifty years was bullets and Americans.’
I shift restlessly on the hard wooden seat, my eyes settling for a moment on a blank page in my reporter’s notepad. I see the lines there, ready to be filled with the descriptions and the strings of overheard dialogue and the thoughts that I’ll think about these Christians, these
crazy
Christians; the words that will make up the story that will eventually be read by people just like me. I see the lines, and I already know what they’re going to say.
Sighing, I glance down the row. I really am a very long way from home. It is as if I am in a rural town of the early 1950s, listening to the shibboleths of men from the 1400s. Strange to think that we are comfortably inside the twenty-first century, and John Mackay is neither a time traveller nor an idiot of the fringes. Rather, he is a famous Christian figurehead who has just flown in from a tour of America and Britain, where he has spoken to thousands of fellow believers and appeared on mainstream television shows. A veteran evangelist for the literal truth of Genesis – the book of the Bible that describes God building the earth in six days – he has come to north Australia to give a talk on the obsession that has run through his life like a burning wick: evolution and all the reasons it is wrong.
For Christians like Mackay, this is the Armageddon debate, the row to end all rows. Its logic is stark and indestructible: to accept evolution, they say, is to call the entire Bible a lie. Anyone who successfully proves that God didn’t create the earth in six days is setting off a chain of explosions that starts at the very base of all Christian thought; bursts up through the architecture of its parables, prophesies and gospels; and ultimately blows off its roof in a vast Satanic mushroom cloud. ‘How do you get rid of God?’ Mackay asks. ‘You can’t shoot him dead. So you attack his authority – and his authority is that he created the earth.’
Indeed, Mackay believes that if Lucifer himself didn’t come up with the theory of evolution, he is certainly behind its wild successes. ‘You have to look at the theory of evolution as the basis of all anti-God morality in the West,’ he says. Later, when I ask him whether he considers
The Origin of Species
to be ‘a kind of Satanic version of the book of Genesis,’ he brightens, pleased by the analogy, and says, ‘Yes, definitely. That’s exactly what it is.’
Mackay’s organisation, Creation Research – whose stated aim is ‘to seek evidence for the biblical account of creation’ – has
offices in the US, Canada, New Zealand and the UK
and his annual speaking tours have made his name notorious among those familiar with the debate. In the last few years, he has earned attacks
from august scientific bodies such as the Royal Society
and
the British Centre for Science Education
, which has even gone so far as to publish an MI5-style dossier on Mackay (‘Appearance: Mackay likes to play the larrikin. His dress style could best be described as “outback casual”’).
In 2006 the National Union of Teachers demanded new legislation
to outlaw Mackay-style school creationism lessons,
which the National Secular Society described as
‘verging on intellectual child abuse.’
When I sat myself down in the community hall, I was unaware of the full strangeness of the creationists’ theory. Luckily for me, Mackay proves to be an excellent teacher. I learn that around six thousand years ago, when God made the earth in six days, the environment was perfect and, as a result, Noah had metre-long forearms. There was no suffering, struggle, illness or sorrow; there were no carnivores; all living things grew enormous and the temperature was permanently pleasant. But ever since the day that Eve allowed a snake to talk her into eating the apple and then shared it with Adam, the world has become harsher, its inhabitants have got smaller and sicker and human society has been thrashing about in ever more desperate throes. God tried to teach us a lesson when he made it rain for forty nights. We didn’t learn. We are incapable: ever since Eve’s crime, we’ve been born this way – outlaw failures, fucking and sinning with callous abandon as the planet we’ve been given withers around us.