Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (25 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Saturday morning found us once again peering through a sand-pitted windshield, rolling east with the Beast in tow. I mentally braced myself for the return trip, hopeful that we had passed the lesson on counting it all joy and were starting the unit on counting your blessings.

We were nearing Barstow, and I was getting bored. I skimmed over my resources: a Ray Bradbury book I had already read three times, a brochure on turquoise jewelry, and the book on the Grand Canyon. I chose the latter.

We were past Barstow when I was startled by a grinding screech with sickening implications. Dad pulled to the shoulder, got out, and walked to the passenger side. Slender tendrils of smoke snaked from the rear hubcap, right by my door.

“Yup,” he said. “This really is unbearable.”

I was amazed that after dozens of breakdowns on the westward trip, he was finally going to have a breakdown of his own. “What’s unbearable?”

He grinned faintly, closing in for the kill. “We lost a bearing.” His eyes sparkled. “Wheel bearing, to be precise.”

“Great,” Heidi sighed. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Dad said as he slid back behind the wheel, “that we’re pretty lucky. It could have frozen up instead of making that grinding noise. If the wheel had locked while we were going seventy miles an hour pulling a trailer, who knows what would have happened.”

“So what do we do now?” Heidi asked as I visualized a maroon car and a turquoise camper tumbling across the highway like some art-deco demolition derby. She always wanted to know the next step, while I was still wondering over the last one.

“We drive back to Barstow and see if we can get it replaced.” Dad checked the rearview mirror and made a U-turn back to the west.

I considered the implications. “But, what if it freezes up now? Won’t that cause a wreck?”

“Not if we’re driving slow enough that it will have little effect.”

Slow enough turned out to be ten miles per hour. By the time we arrived in Barstow and located a place to fix the car, it was well after noon. The decision was made to find a place to set up camp and start out fresh the next day. Before long we were in a trailer park, seated in metal patio furniture and eating sandwiches at a metal table shaded with an orange-and-yellow umbrella. Mom and the girls walked to a nearby shopping center and left Dad and me to take in the scenic beauty of Highway 57 and the laundromat across the street.

The Grand Canyon problem weighed on my mind. I looked over the chart again. I was sure that my analysis was fairly conclusive, and I wanted to see what Dad thought about it. However, what if he pronounced me as being too smart for my own good? He had seemed so sure about the six thousand years and the Flood. Was questioning it like doubting, or even sacrilege? Maybe it was more like a civil crime, like treason, dissent in the camp. I struggled over whether to mention it and risk court-martial or to sit safely in silence with my own private doubt.

Dad solved the problem for me. He pulled the book to him and peered over his glasses at the chart. “So, these fellows think the Grand Canyon is three million years old, eh? I guess you can believe just about anything if you want to escape God.”

I gulped. “But why would a scientist make this stuff up? Isn’t his job to find out facts and figure out how the universe works? It seems to me that if he just made stuff up, it would be like a fireman going to a fire and throwing gasoline on it.”

“Exactly. A fact is neutral, but the explanation of the fact is not. It is based on the prejudices of the explainer, and that is such a powerful motivator that it can make people do the opposite of what they should. Say a guy, let’s call him Larry, is at the office, and he decides to go to an Italian restaurant for lunch. He walks in and sees his wife, let’s call her Bertha, holding hands across the table with a guy he’s never seen before. There are the facts. What is the explanation?”

This seemed like a very long detour from our topic of conversation, but I knew from many long years of conversations with Dad that we would eventually get back to the Grand Canyon, even if we did have to go through Giovanni’s to get there. “Well, I guess Bertha is having an affair.”

“Which is probably what Larry thinks, also, if he doesn’t trust Bertha. But what if Larry completely trusts Bertha? He might be willing to hear an explanation before he jumps to a conclusion. He might find out that this is her cousin she hasn’t seen in years, and she has just been bragging about how generous Larry is by showing him her wedding ring.”

His speculation set my imagination into gear. “Or maybe he’s a palm reader and he’s telling her future, like she’s about to get a divorce because Larry isn’t going to buy her story about the long-lost cousin.”

Dad gave me an indulgent but unamused look over the top of his glasses. “Possibly.”

“Or maybe it’s a Treasury Department agent trying to talk her into testifying against Larry for tax evasion. He just told her that Larry is a crook, which naturally upset her, and now he’s trying to calm her down.”

Dad’s look became less indulgent. “Perhaps.”

“Or maybe he’s a medium trying to help her contact the spirit of her dearly departed mother to find out why she named her Bertha.” I figured, as long as we’re in Giovanni’s we might as well enjoy it.

Dad gave me a steely stare, but I was enjoying myself. “Or maybe Bertha really is having an affair, and the guy just told her he’s not going to leave his wife, as he has promised for the past three months, and he is holding her hands to keep her from slapping him!” My mind raced as I tried to think of another, more exciting, scenario.

Dad, on the other hand, was ready to leave Giovanni’s and get back to the Grand Canyon. “Yes, I see you get the picture. Well, as I was saying, many times the explanation offered is colored by the prejudices of the person doing the explaining. It used to be that scientists accepted the view that God made the world. And because an intelligent mind designed it, they expected it to fit together and make sense, and so they set out to discover the principles that govern how the world works. Since the ‘enlightenment’ of the Renaissance, however, science has gradually become dominated by men who view religion as superstition and find any reference to or dependence on God distasteful.”

I nodded, feeling like the kid who asked for a bedtime story and got the first three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica instead. I was still thinking about Bertha and Larry.

“In the modern view, the universe didn’t have a beginning because to admit to a beginning is to admit to a beginner. So, when something like the Grand Canyon comes along, scientists will naturally prefer an explanation that accommodates their prejudices, which is that it took billions of years to make the Grand Canyon.”

The mention of the Grand Canyon brought me back to the subject. Perhaps we were finally getting to the crux of the matter. “Well, actually, they say it took millions of years, two or three million.”

“Million, billion, what’s a few millennia among friends? Either way, it’s a lot longer than six thousand.”

“Yeah, well, I was sort of looking at this chart and thinking about what you said about the Flood and everything . . .”

“Sure, just look at it.” He flipped to a page with a wide-angle picture from the South Rim. “One explanation is that it took a long time for the normal rates of erosion to create. But it’s just as possible that a catastrophic event accelerated the pace of erosion and dug this thing in much less time. It makes sense if you just look at it and think.”

“But . . . uh . . . I was noticing the fossils they found at all these different levels.” I turned back to the chart. “See, they’re hundreds of feet apart and—”

Dad broke in. “You know, if all these animals were drowned in a monstrous flood, you would expect them to be at different levels as they were washed down the river.”

“Yeah, but it says here that they found fossilized footprints on four different layers. See this?” I pointed out the layers. “Trilobite tracks in the Cambrian layer; and then animal tracks on the Pennsylvanian layer, 1,100 feet up; and then tracks in the Permian layer, 300 feet up; and then reptile tracks in the Triassic layer, 500 feet up.”

“OK,” Dad said, waiting for my conclusion with evident interest.

“Well, for tracks to form and harden into rock, it has to dry out, which takes some time. If all these skeletons got dumped down at one time and buried, how could each of the layers dry out and harden before the next layer got dumped on it?” There, it was out. I looked at Dad from behind a barricade of hair. He looked at the chart in silence. “I mean . . . it just seems . . . well, it just makes you wonder, you know . . .” I faded off into silence myself. I was breathing fast and shallow, anxious about Dad’s reaction. I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths.

Finally Dad spoke. “That’s a good question.” He took off his glasses and looked closer at the chart.

I realized I had stopped breathing completely. I tossed my hair back, took another deep breath, and tried not to look so amazed.

Dad looked up at me. “Now, let me ask you a question. Remember when we were driving through the Painted Desert and it looked like there was water on the highway up ahead?” I nodded. “Did we ever reach it?” I shook my head. “Sometimes things look like one thing when they are another. It’s like a magic trick. It looks like the lady really is floating in the air, but once we hear the explanation, it seems very simple.”

I grew a little impatient. “I know, the explanation can be affected by our prejudices.”

“Yes, but I mean something even more than that. Sometimes we have to decide if we are going to believe our eyes and our logic, or if we are going to believe God. For example, if you saw a man walk out of a bar and stumble, what would you think?”

“I’d think he was drunk.”

“Right. Now what if that man was me?” He raised an eyebrow. “What would you think then?”

I knew Dad hated alcohol, almost as much as I hated country music. Then I remembered a time, back when we lived in Ohio, when he had gone into a bar to hand out tracts and to witness. “I would think you had been handing out tracts and that you tripped on something on the way out.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing else would fit.”

“Or, maybe, because you know me and you have faith that what I say is true?”

“Yeah, that’s the same thing.”

“Then if I know God and have faith that what He says is true, I won’t let a piece of circumstantial evidence make me think God’s Word isn’t true.” He leaned back in his chair as if resting his case.

I wasn’t satisfied to leave it at that. It annoyed me that the whole issue had been reduced to a loaded question of who was right, God or man. In our house, there was only one way you could answer. I countered with a question of my own. “But why can’t they both be right? Does the Bible say the Earth is only six thousand years old, or is it only Bishop Whats-His-Face who says it? Maybe the bishop was wrong. I mean, the Bible doesn’t say how long it was from when the world was created until Adam. Maybe it was millions of years.”

Dad replied with the air of someone pointing out the obvious. “Genesis says God created the Earth in six days, not millions of years. And,” he added, “his name was Bishop James Ussher.”

“OK, Bishop Ussher. But what about the verse that says a day to the Lord is like one thousand years? Couldn’t those six days be longer than just a day? Like a whole era or something?”

“Some people think that, but the Hebrew people were very practical people. They didn’t usually think in ethereal or abstract terms. And their language was, accordingly, very practical.” He put his glasses back on. “The word translated ‘day’ is yom and is defined in terms of evening and morning, a very practical and observable phenomenon. Every other place in the Bible where this word is used with a number in front, like ‘the first day,’ refers to a literal twenty-four-hour day. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the author of Genesis had in mind a vast, vague, and undetermined period of time when he wrote, ‘And it was evening and morning, day one.’”

I had to admit I was out of my depth there. Dad was the expert on dead languages, not me. “So, you’re saying that based on how the words are used in the rest of the Bible, it makes more sense to think it means a twenty-four-hour day in Genesis.”

“Yep. Obviously, not everybody thinks that. But this is America. They have the right to be wrong if they want to,” he said, smiling.

“Even Bishop Ussher?”

“He wasn’t American.” Dad’s smile grew.

“Even people who study ancient languages?”

The smile didn’t fade, but the twinkle in Dad’s eye did. “Meaning?”

I knew I was pushing it. Best to retreat and minimize the damage. The voice from one shoulder said, “Now you’ve got him! Just get it all out on the table and see what he does.” The voice from the other shoulder said, “It’s not too late to back off and smooth things out. Just say you were kidding. No harm, no foul.” The problem was, I didn’t know which voice had the halo and which had the pitchfork. They were just two voices, two choices—although I did seriously question a voice that would say, “No harm, no foul.” What kind of a voice was that?