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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Lushington D. Brady
How Creationism Won in NZ
All it had to do was put on a grass skirt
Way back in the early 80s, in my Year 12 Biology class, something odd happened. We had just started learning about evolution, natural selection and Darwin. Then our teacher, a likeable old hippy, closed The Web of Life (if you’re of a certain age and studied high school biology, you’ll know it well) and started talking about God and the Biblical story of Genesis.
It was, he claimed, an alternative scientific explanation to explain life on Earth. It was all a bit weird and we all exchanged some sidewise glances and surreptitious giggles.
Little did I realise, at the time, that it was my first encounter with what became a full-blown culture war battle, through the ’80s and ’90s: Young Earth Creationism.
Young Earth Creatonism – let’s just call it Creationism, for short – appears to have first sprung up as an attempt to get around US Supreme Court decisions restricting religious teaching in public schools. The gambit was to re-package the Bible as a scientific document and demand that it be taught as science.
It was nonsense, of course: scientifically and theologically.
Scientifically, the Genesis story and Creationism in general fails comprehensively. Professor Ian Plimer, lately more famous for challenging the modern religion of Climate Change Alarmism, wrote an entire book, Telling Lies for God, on the un-scientific nonsense of Creationism. Suffice to say that, not only does it contradict nearly all the known facts, it fails several key tests necessary to be considered a scientific theory, such as: parsimony, falsifiability and fruitfulness.
Parsimony is also known as “Occam’s Razor”: the rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. With its reliance on a Creator, Creationism introduces unnecessary entities that the naturalistic explanation of evolution doesn’t.
Falsifiability is the idea that a theory can, at least in principle, be proved wrong. Creationism, like all religious and supernatural ideas, cannot ultimately be proved wrong, because they are based ultimately on faith (this is not to denigrate religious ideas, ipso facto: I have written elsewhere on how science and religion satisfy different domains of human experience).
Fruitfulness is the principle that a scientific theory should not just explain one set of facts, it should predict more that are as yet undiscovered. For instance, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity contained within its mathematics several startling predictions of phenomena which no one had hitherto even thought of. Gravitational lensing, for instance, and black holes. Creationism does not, on the other hand, similarly predict new phenomena.
So, Creationism is bad science. But, as Barry Price of the Catholic Education Office wrote, in his The Creation Science Controversy, it’s very poor theology.
Creationism – the Young Earth variety, specifically – relies on an absolutely literal reading of the Bible. But Biblical literalism has always been a fringe belief, except, mostly, in parts of the United States. Even early Church Fathers like Augustine, and Ambrose of Milan, cautioned that not everything in the Bible should be taken literally. “These passages had been death to me when I took them literally,” Augustine wrote. Centuries after Augustine, Galileo himself wrote that certain passages of the Bible must obviously be interpreted metaphorically, as they otherwise clearly contradicted the evidence of our sense and reason.
Such literalism, Augustine warned, was detrimental to Christianity itself:
“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”
Proving the wisdom of Augustine’s warning, the battle over Creationism-as-science through the 80s and 90s ultimately worked against Christianity far more than for it. Creationism provided endless ammunition for critics of religion like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I suspect that much of the decline of religion in the West is due to young people being offered a false choice between obvious scientific fact and dodgy, nonsensical Biblical literalism.
The Biblical Christian Creationist push more or less withered away by the end of the 90s. It seemed like it was all over and the battle had been won. (I suppose I can lay claim to playing my own, very minor, part: in those pre-social media days, I was a veteran skirmisher in the Letters To The Editor pages, and corresponded with people like Prof. Plimer.)
But, to paraphrase the Lord of the Rings movies, we were all of us deceived.
For, deep in the heart of Mt Woke, a new Creationism push was being forged. Not a Biblical Christian one, of course: in fact, most of the people behind the neo-Creationism are virulently anti-Christian.
But it’s the same essential idea: a pre-scientific, magical, mythology being re-packaged as “science”, and used to foist, not even Dark Age, but Stone Age, superstition on children.
What makes this Creationist attack on science even worse is that it’s being waged very often by people who claim to be scientists, white-anting the institution of science from within.
What I’m talking about is the nonsensical agenda of “indigenous science”. Which is an oxymoron. Science is science: it recognises no race or ethnicity. A Zulu or a Han Chinese can practise science every bit as much as an Englishman or German.
On the other hand, “indigenous knowledge” is not science. That is not to say that it is entirely false or useless. Indigenous people were and are just as assiduous observers of the natural world as anyone else. Their knowledge of their specific environments is often prodigious. But their knowledge systems are superstitious, not scientific.
Consider the difference between astrology and astronomy. Astrology is the elder sibling of astronomy: it uses many of the same bodies of knowledge (the catalogues of stars, maps of the sky, and so on). But, it interprets them through the lens of mythology and superstition.
Indigenous “astronomy”, be it Australian Aboriginal or Maori, is the same. The observations of the stars are prodigious and impressive, but the interpretation of them is mythology and magic.
Inductively concluding that the Pleiades are a cluster of more than 80 young, hot stars, some 410 light-years from Earth, is science. Teaching that the Pleiades are a group of young girls and their glowing firesticks is mythology.
Teaching that they are the eyes of the god Tawhirimatea is mythology. Believing that their rising in the antipodean mid-winter is a time to release the spirits of the dead and offer food to the stars is superstition.
Yet, it is just this kind of neolithic superstition that certain supposed “scientists” want to be held up as “equal” to “Western science”. This is as nonsensical as claiming that the Biblical story of Genesis is equal to the Darwinian explanation of evolution.
Worse still is the fact that these shrieking ninnies are even more viciously intolerant than the clerics who silenced Galileo. They whip up mobs and encourage witch-hunts of actual scientists who dare point out the idiocy of their claims.
Richard Dawkins, for one, recognised this garbage ideology for what it really is:
“Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.”
Sadly, it’s bollocks that’s winning the war against science — and it has the official imprimatur of the New Zealand government.
Maramataka is a Maori superstition that combines an admittedly impressive body of observations of the New Zealand environment with a body of Polynesian mythologies about the moon, sun, stars, planets and supernatural beings. It’s no more scientific than astrology or Reiki.
And the New Zealand Ministry of Health is subsidising it with New Zealand taxpayer’s money.
Consider, for instance, the MOH paying Christian groups to practise laying-on of hands, or intercessory prayer, as bona fide medical treatments. Imagine dispatching a Reiki practitioner and a homeopathist along with paramedics.
But that’s exactly the sort of superstitious stuff that the New Zealand government promotes, under the guise of maramataka and Rongoa Maori.
The Creationists won, after all.
All they had to do was take off their cassocks and put on a grass skirt.
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