Where is the intelligence behind new creationism?

Published on Saturday 4 February 2006 01:02

LAST Thursday, the BBC announced the latest in a series of battles for the hearts and minds of Britain. A poll commissioned by the BBC's Horizon reported that less than half of the population believed that evolution best explained the diversity of life we see today. Almost more shocking was the belief expressed by more than 40 per cent of those questioned that "creationism" and "intelligent design" should be taught in school science lessons.

Creationism is a strangely persistent conviction; it's the belief that Genesis can be read literally, so that God created the Earth just 6,000 years ago. Despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, it just won't go away. In many ways, it all sounds fairly harmless. Surely people can believe in what they want?

The big problem is that creationists want their ideas taught in school science lessons. Although its supporters describe creationism as a science, it is anything but. In 1987, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach creationism as science because it was an expression of religious belief and could not be tested. Now an offshoot has developed, perversely called "intelligent design", or ID for short, where the belief is that some forms of life are so complex that they must be the work of a grand designer. Again this idea was challenged in court and ruled to be unconstitutional for exactly the same reason: it is a religious belief and cannot be proved. In spite of all of these court decisions, countless surveys continue to show such beliefs are strongly supported. By 2004, proposals to teach creationism and intelligent design had been put forward in 37 American states. Unfortunately, it now seems the bad word is spreading.

Creationism can't be described as science, as no attempt is ever made to test it. Yet somehow the same beliefs are constantly recycled and stated as fact regardless of how many times they are shown to be total fiction. The important word here is belief. No matter how much science proves to the contrary, creationists chose to believe the world and everything on it was created just 6,000 years ago. I might believe in perpetual motion and that the Sun goes round the Earth; should I get a teaching slot alongside conductivity and photosynthesis? I hope not.

Creationists struggle to reconcile scientific observations with their own beliefs. They often fall back to the position of ignoring most of it or perform a bizarre range of intellectual acrobatics to square the circle. A wonderful example of this is to blithely suggest that the speed of light has dramatically slowed down since creation. By doing this, creationists can compress the latest age estimate for the Universe, 13.7 billion years, into 6,000 years. Easy. But what happens if we nonchalantly discount one of the foundations of modern science? The speed of light would have had to have been several orders of magnitude higher at the moment of creation. The most obvious effect is that it would have massively increased the rate of radioactive decay and the output from the Sun in the past, producing so much heat that our planet would have been incinerated. Perhaps not.

No-one should say that science has all the answers, but we enjoy much of our quality of life thanks to centuries of discoveries. Because of the way theories are proposed, put to the test and confirmed, science is self-correcting. With creationism and ID, however, there is no test. You have to take everything on faith.

Recent discoveries in human evolution are a case in point. I was extremely fortunate to be involved in the research team that announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, below left, - the "Hobbit" - to the world in 2004. The carbon dates we made during this work shows that 30,000 years ago (yesterday, geologically speaking) there were up to four species of human kicking about on our planet's surface. This gives an entirely different perspective on race to that implied by creationism. The fact that only one species now exists shows we're extremely fortunate to be here. Denying the fossil finds and their age ignores the diversity of humanity and our responsibility as a species to the planet we evolved on.

If students are to be taught to believe rather than question, to accept rather than enquire, we're putting ourselves in a worrying situation one generation from now. Our planet is now facing some of its greatest ever challenges. Recent estimates of the number of species becoming extinct are appallingly high. Somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 species are believed to be disappearing into oblivion each year; many without even being properly identified. When you then add the prospect of catastrophic future climate change, we have some pretty taxing times ahead.

Understanding the past gives us an opportunity to learn from yesteryear. By putting a framework of time onto past events, we can see if catastrophes hold any clues for how we should respond. By even countenancing an Earth as "young" as 6,000 years, as the creationist lobby would have us do, we risk ignoring the very lessons that may help us to successfully negotiate these future challenges. But if our planet is really only 6,000 years old, none of these catastrophes ever took place. We can't use them as scenarios to understand the future.

The past is the key to the future and we need all the time we can get to see it.

• Chris Turney is a research fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and his book Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened will be published by Macmillan Science on 13 June