the people evolution keeps leaving behind
In their commitment to rejecting science, creationists refuse to even update their arguments over the last two decades.
If you haven't heard of Milo Rossi and enjoy this newsletter, you'll like him too. He's a scientist and educator who specializes in very angrily debunking historical and archeological slop, conspiracy theories, and creationism, like ancient alien theories and Graham Hancock's reboot of the Noble Atlantean myth. So, it wasn't surprising when he recently came across a creationist website and spent an hour doing what he usually does and rip it to shreds for an audience of well over a million people.
Now, I'm not going to rehash his video because you can, and should, just watch it, and also because I've already done it before, many times in this blog's formative years. What struck me most about this video isn't that there are still creationists out there. Yeah, duh, obviously they're still around. No, what caught my attention is that over the past 20 years of trying to inject creationism back into science class, they have yet to update a single argument.
The same "coelacanths haven't changed, so they haven't evolved, so evolution never happened," the same "microevolution is real but macro is not," the same attempts to pass off Lamarckism as an accepted idea in biology, the same "irreducible complexity," and the same "oh, so how was the Earth fine tuned for humans, huh heathens?!" with a heap of "racism is only a thing because of Darwin" bullshit we've heard again and again and again. As much as I hate to go for the obvious joke, but... allow me a deep sigh here... creationists are just not evolving.
Back in the very late 00s and early 2010s, there was a huge push for "the theory of intelligent design," which was the creationist equivalent of the I'm-not-touching-you sibling game in which they decided that if they didn't say the word God in any of their appeals, then it wasn't Biblical creationism, and therefore valid. Except it was, and it was beyond obvious while they played a very stupid game of pretend.
Theists hated it for refusing to make a statement of faith. Scientists loathed it for corrupting discourse about science. Skeptics and pop sci/tech writers like me were sick of the same rehashed arguments. On top of that, it was based on a manifesto of fundamentalists who blamed all of our modern ills on Darwin and evolution, undermining the whole wet one ply tissue paper thin veneer. In the end, it quietly fell apart as a cohesive effort – led by a think tank with the unintentionally ironic name Discovery Institute – and was never heard from again.
This is why my reaction to Milo's video wasn't even frustration. I felt like an actor in a dark sitcom where a character fixes a leaky faucet again and again and again, but every time he walks away, the camera zooms in on the aerator screen to see a bubble of water build, straining against the surface tension, then drip with a loud splat against the metal of the sink as a metaphorical middle finger. Hell, Sisyphus offered to debate creationists instead of rolling his rock uphill would probably say "nah, I'm good." So, yeah. It's basically a lost cause to argue with them.
Now, for full disclosure, Milo is the same age I was when I first started skeptical, pro-science blogging, so he's fighting all these battles for the first time, whereas I've already been there and done that. So, maybe because I'm older, and at least pretending to be wiser, I find myself looking at the same rhetorical battlefield, the klaxon of deja vu blaring in my skull, not with a sense of anger, but with a deep pity for the kind of person who spends their days recycling now nearly century old apologetics and ignoring the beauty and weirdness of the universe around them.
Right now, creationists are missing the debate about the fundamental underpinnings of the universe as we know it, ignoring the efforts to make actual warp drives to explore the galaxy, the hunt for habitable worlds, and are refusing to pay attention to the twin looming crises of antibiotic resistance – which they admit is both possible and happening, by the way – and global warming fueling a potential fungal pandemic. We're trying to find the origins of mass. They're focused on keeping mass the same for the next thousand years.
For people who love to talk about the beauty of nature and how amazing of a gift life is, creationists seem to lack the slightest bit of curiosity about the reality we inhabit. They have little interest in asking questions they can't answer to their satisfaction in a Bible verse, and are offended that anyone would try anything else. But at the same time, when you consider their worldview and belief system, this makes sense in a sad and unnerving way.
To someone like myself or Milo, this open-endedness of the cosmos and biology is inspiring. There are so many secrets to discover, we'll never run of of things to do, learn, and explore in our lives. But for creationists, anything other than a black and white script to follow, with exactly prescribed rules that are not up for debate, is terrifying beyond all comprehension. Modern science may as well be an eldritch, cosmic horror set to devour their minds into nothingness because it doesn't give them the meaning and purpose they crave on a silver platter.
Seriously, just talk to a creationist about what drives them, and they will tell you with tears in their eyes how their "relationship with Christ" or "being a child of God" is the most important thing in their lives and they would never throw it away for the notion that we're, well, just animals lucky to be here thanks to nothing more than a few fluke mutations at the right time.
When they see modern science saying that the universe is really open to infinite possibilities, creationists are profoundly, deeply afraid to their very core and they insist on making it our problem so the world once again shrinks into their safe space. Coincidentally, this why neither their views, nor their argument, will ever, um... err... evolve, for lack of a better way to put it.
