The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (2 page)

As his talk progresses, two further facts become apparent about John Mackay. One, he likes to speak in questions. Two, he has a bit of a
thing
about David Attenborough. ‘I know a question David Attenborough wouldn’t ask,’ he says at one point. ‘If creation is true, what would the evidence be?’

Of all the questions ever, this is probably John’s favourite because he believes that the evidence is on the side of God. By education and by thinking, Mackay considers himself to be a scientist. And it is by these rigorous and testable methods that he has promised to prove the creation hypothesis to me.

When his talk is over, the Gympie Christians begin to bumble out of the double doors, with a few getting snagged on small talk and lingering in chatty knots here and there. It is obvious that nobody had a real problem with John’s presentation. He was, literally, preaching to the converted, and his audience reacted to what he had to say in exactly the manner you would expect of a people who were, in effect, sitting through a six-thousand-year-old news report. The only person I can find in the crowd who isn’t wholly convinced is a young woman named Catherine Stipe. She admits to doubts about some aspects of creationism before quickly adding, ‘But as long as God made everything I’m happy.’ When I ask if she believes in evolution, she looks baffled. ‘I wouldn’t quite go
that
far.’

As the hall empties, Mackay patrols his merchandise – books, DVDs and fossils and crystals which are, according to a sign, useful both for demonstrating ‘God’s engineering genius’ and ‘combating new age lies’. Several of the DVDs are of debates with evolutionist academics, which poses an interesting question: If evolution is so demonstrably true, what is he doing debating with academics and then selling the resulting showdowns in sumptuously produced DVD twin packs for $50 a go? What is he doing behaving like a man who is winning?

‘We frequently win public debates,’ Mackay tells me when we sit down later on. ‘In fact, for a long while it was impossible to get debates because the academics didn’t want to be shown up. But then word went around, “They’re making too much progress, we’ve got to debate them again.” So in the last few years we’ve had quite a lot and the reason they always fail to beat us is they presume they’re fighting against theologians with no science degrees.’

Mackay, a geologist and geneticist who seems to possess an eager and audacious intellect, has most recently crossed ideologies with iconic atheist
Professor Richard Dawkins
– who, not incidentally, once told the
Guardian
newspaper, ‘People like Mackay thrive by drip-feeding misinformation … we cannot afford to take creationism lightly. It’s not an amusing diversion, but a serious threat to scientific reason.’

John recalls the meeting with a contemptuous sigh. ‘He was trying to be David Attenborough,’ he says. ‘I think it’s because he’s been getting
so much flak. People are sick of him. Do you know, if Dawkins is speaking at a university before me, the evolutionists get so disgusted with him they’ll double my crowd? But I led him to a point where he said, “Evolution has been observed, it just hasn’t been observed while it’s been happening.” And that’s just a stupid statement. If it’s not been observed, it’s not science. And if it’s not science, what is it? So I said, “This is your faith starting-point versus my faith starting-point, let’s not pretend any different.” He didn’t like that.’

*

I saw the lines, and I knew what they were going to say. My role here in Gympie is the one that I have been playing for years. It is to be a counter of weirdnesses, a cataloguer of wrongs. I am to list them in a newspaper; to upload them to a website; to send these Christians’ errors soaring across the planet, so that the peoples of far continents can read them and … well, what?

A confession. Most of the time, I provide no real answers; no solution to the mystery of how these false beliefs have emerged. Every now and then, I might unbury an insight into how my subject has come to be the person they are. Mostly, though, the thing remains a mystery and I find myself gazing at my subject, as if through a window in a distant building, thinking:
I have no idea how you ended up there
. The only thing that I have really understood was that we are divided by an inscrutable void and that, in being unable to bridge it, I have failed.

And yet there I go, again and again, on stories just like this one – small adventures with men and women whose beliefs about the world I find strange. I have explored the company of Furries, cryonicists, cult members, swingers, mediums, bodybuilders, vampire-detectives, a suicide cult and a couple who believe they once met the yeti in some woods outside Ipswich. I like to write about these people – it is like being a tourist in another universe. There is something noble about their bald defiance of the ordinary, something heroic about the deep outsider-territories that they wilfully inhabit, something comforting – in a fundamental, primeval way – about their powers of cognitive transport. They are magic-makers. And, beneath all of that, a private undercurrent: I feel a kind of kinship with them. I am drawn to the wrong.

These are things that I am not supposed to admit. The journalist poses as a clean, smooth mirror, reflecting back undistorted truth. To serve the reader, I must be unbiased, sane. I am not permitted to take sides, or to confess that the reason that I enjoy interviewing people is that I find simple conversation so difficult. Journalism gives me the comfort of rules: permission to ask whatever I want, without concerning myself with making offence. I can stand up and leave whenever I like, without risking my wife’s frequent and bruising complaint that I cannot be trusted in social situations. I am also probably not supposed to tell you that the only other situation in which I have experienced this kind of relief is in therapy, of which I have had plenty. Or confess the suspicion that, if I am drawn to the wrong, it is because that is exactly how I feel most of the time, and that I have done so since I was a child.

It is a background state; a vague, non-specific kind of wrongness. It is like radiation – an instability that underscores everything; my entire life. It comes, I suppose, from my unconscious. And yet, in the overt world of my opinions, I am as outspoken as anyone. I experience my beliefs with a measure of certainty that, as I grow older, I find myself becoming increasingly suspicious of.

I consider – as everyone surely does – that my opinions are the correct ones. And yet, I have never met anyone whose
every single thought
I agreed with. When you take these two positions together, they become a way of saying, ‘Nobody is as right about as many things as me.’ And that cannot be true. Because to accept that would be to confer upon myself a Godlike status. It would mean that I possess a superpower: a clarity of thought that is unique among humans. Okay, fine. So I accept that I am wrong about things – I
must
be wrong about them. A lot of them. But when I look back over my shoulder and I double-check what I think about religion and politics and science and all the rest of it … well, I know I am right about that … and that … and that and that and – it is usually at this point that I start to feel strange. I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

It is as if I have caught a glimpse of some grotesque delusion that I
am stuck inside. It is disorientating. It is frightening. And I think it is true to say that it is not just me – that is, we all secretly believe we are right about everything and, by extension, we are all wrong.

All of my beliefs cannot be right, and yet the effects that they have had on my personal life have been costly. Hardly spoiled for friends, I recently dropped contact with a colleague whom I liked and admired after he told me that he believed the US should invade Iran. I overheard another friend, this one Jewish, proudly announce that she would never share a taxi with an Arab. That was six years ago. I haven’t spoken to her since.

I don’t view these acts with any sense of pride. I know, logically, that there must be good arguments for these individuals’ strongly held points of view, but when I think about assessing them carefully and fairly, I feel incapable. I don’t fully understand this reaction. It is as if I am too angry, too weak to bear the challenge of it. And there is a fear there too, lying secretly among all the bluster: What if they’re right? What if the truth alters me; fractures something essential?

So I am left with the lonely consolation of my righteousness. That is all that I have. And what does righteousness prove anyway? I hold my beliefs with absolute conviction – but no less conviction than John Mackay. These views have created ruptures in my life, painful states of estrangement.

I have watched as these personal battles have manifested in the wider world. The decade of terrorism we have just lived through had its roots, of course, in mismatched beliefs that are both political and religious. Those same years saw what has the appearance of an increasing suspicion of science. The white-coated priests of the laboratory, to whom we have granted custody of the truth for so long, are seemingly being treated with growing levels of doubt. We don’t trust the MMR jab, we don’t trust climate data, we don’t trust genetically modified wheat or ‘conventional’ medicine or supermarket-bought beef. One response has been the cultural rise of the radicalised rationalists: celebrity atheists who have written bestselling books and sponsored anti-God advertising on the sides of London buses; groups of self-declared ‘Skeptics’ who toured sold-out concert venues like rock stars, defining themselves in opposition to the kind of anti-scientific
thinking that they declared dangerous. Every one of these people, convinced they are right. None of them convincing the other.

John Mackay got me reflecting on all this when he recounted his conversation with Dawkins. ‘This is your faith starting-point versus my faith starting-point.’ As I sit alone in my Gympie motel room, with its cracked plastic kettle and its stained sachets of sugar, I decide to go back to first principles: Why do I believe that Mackay is mistaken about the origin of our species in the first place? Well, I suppose I believe him to be wrong because people I admire, such as Richard Dawkins, tell me that this is so. But, honestly? All I really know about evolution, aside from the basics of natural selection, is that man is descended from the ape. Like so many people who hold strong opinions about it, I have never studied evolution. I have exercised no critical thinking on the topic whatsoever. I have simply put my trust in the people that culture has directed me towards. I have run to Richard Dawkins because I believe in his credentials as a scientist, and because his views coincide with mine – with my ‘faith starting-point’, in other words.

I lie back and open the pamphlet that Mackay handed me earlier. It describes what the fossil record would look like if evolution were true. It says that what we should find, as we dig through the earth’s strata, is simple organisms gradually becoming ever more complex and diverse, sprouting wings and legs and hair and all the rest of it. Instead, what we apparently find are fully formed species suddenly appearing and then disappearing with no intermediate, semi-evolved beings at all. (If frogs turned into monkeys, goes a common argument, why aren’t we digging up ‘fronkeys’?) This, says the text, accurately reflects the creationist vision of God magicking creatures abruptly into existence. It also apparently echoes the concerns of Charles Darwin himself, who is quoted as pondering, ‘Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.’

*

The next morning, we meet up in the property of a Gympie mechanic. It is here that Mackay intends to prove that the biblical creation
account represents the true history of the world. Currently, though, the land in which his evidence is buried is flooded. It will be another half an hour before the water is pumped away. As we wait in the mud, with the warm rain soaking our hair and the sound of the weather playing the gum trees like a ghostly instrument, Mackay begins to tell me something of his story.

It begins in 1947, the year he was born in Australia to Scottish migrant parents. He was raised outside Brisbane in a family whose father he describes as ‘strongly pro-evolutionist and anti-Christian’ and, as a boy, he became a budding scientist with evolution as his central passion. At sixteen, he was reading yet another book on Darwin’s epochal idea when he came across a chapter on why there is no God. Its inclusion outraged the young science fan. It felt like crude propaganda, an article of burning faith shoved into a book that should consist solely of cold reason. ‘I was offended intellectually,’ he says. ‘So I deliberately picked up a Bible and began at the beginning.’

Somewhere around this time, the quick conversion of John Mackay took place. Talking to him, it is impossible to isolate the precise moment that belief struck him. It seems as though the boy, for some reason, simply became bewitched by faith.

Mackay tells me that God’s existence is scientifically testable, ‘because he promises to dwell within his people and that’s a testable thing.’

‘But how, exactly, can you test it?’ I ask.

‘He says, “I will make myself known to you,” and he did. I know Jesus Christ personally. It’s something in me.’

‘Is it something you feel?’ I ask.

‘It’s not just a feeling, it’s intellectual too. It affects the way you think. It affects everything.’

Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy’s view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay’s story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God. He sacrificed his life’s ambition to be a practising scientist when he felt ‘called’ to become a teacher. Having studied geology and genetics at university, he joined the staff at the prestigious Brisbane Grammar School, where, after deciding that ‘nine out of ten’ students
abandon Christianity after deciding that Adam and Eve never existed, he managed to inveigle creationism into his classroom.