Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

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The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.

For most of human history we knew very little, and what we did know was known by very few. Thomas Young (1773-1829), an English scientist, researcher, physician, and polymath is usually cited as “the last person to know everything,” by which is usually meant the then-contemporary academy of Western scholarship.¹ He was popularly known as “Phenomenon Young,” spoke a daunting number of languages, and made contributions to many fields of science, including translating the Rosetta stone and coining the term “energy.” Einstein praised him for his work on Newton and his physics in his 1931 foreword to an edition of Newton's Optics. For most of modern history, people took pride in being knowledgeable, and the deep drive of Western cultures, particularly in America, was to expand knowledge and make it more widely known.

Benjamin Franklin, who more than any other founder set in motion the processes that have become the American culture, had a very particular kind of culture in mind, and open-minded education was a major part of it. His America was solidly middle class. It encouraged upward mobility and did not permit hereditary privilege. It absolutely separated church and state, yet was tolerant of individual religious beliefs, or with equal equanimity, the complete absence thereof. It was urbanized, technologically oriented, sentimental about family, honest and good hearted, and proud of skills and prosperity attained through work done with integrity, but not solemnity. He saw the power of technical training to create prosperity in his own life and the advantage conferred by technical sophistication, even in immigrants who had arrived with little more than the tattered clothes they were wearing.

He would be appalled to learn that there has arisen an antipodal force, consciously working against those Franklinian values. Although no politician dare say so, the most important political and intellectual reality in America today can be seen in a poll conducted by CBS News in 2006. In it they found that “Americans do not believe that humans evolved, and the vast majority says that even if they evolved, God guided the process. Just 13% say that God was not involved.”²

The Gallup organizations addressed the same issue, but also included the age of the Earth, and conducted a series of polls of American adults in 1982, 1991, 1993, and 1997. In each survey the wording of the questions was kept the same, so that the polls would be equivalents and multiyear analyses could be carried out. The results turned out to be generally consistent across time, although the creationist position became more popular. The November 21-24, 1991, results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Belief Systems^⁎

In 2005, The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life carried out a poll involving 2,000 adults, which gives us another nuance of this perspective.³ They reported 42% of the public believed that “humans and other living things had existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” and that this rose to 70% amongst white evangelical Protestants and decreased to 32% in mainline Protestant churches, and—surprising to some, perhaps—to 31% amongst white Catholics.

By 2006, the creationist position was affirmed by 55% of Americans. Think for a moment about what this means: more than half of America has discarded much of the hard won knowledge of the past 500 years—essentially, the age of modern science and medicine. Astrophysics. Gone. Astronomy. Gone. Paleontology. Gone. Geology. Gone. Biology. Mostly gone. Genetics. Gone. The general laws of physics such as the speed of light found to be defective. It is impossible to believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old, that God manufactured it in six days, and that dinosaurs and humans once coinhabited the planet, and accept any of those disciplines. What many would think of as the crown jewels of the human intellect, part of what makes it possible to be optimistic about humanity, are of little or no interest. Because, from the creationist perspective, they are no more valid than phrenology seems to a modern physician.

That said, in the interest of full disclosure, let me state my personal perspective. I am a nearly lifelong meditator, and much of my adult life has been spent as an experimentalist doing peer-reviewed research on the nature of consciousness. Both subjectively and objectively, it has left me convinced that there is an aspect of consciousness outside the time-space domain. One that can be experienced, producing what would be traditionally described as spiritual states, and can also be studied under the most rigorous scientific protocols. My default position is to trust well-researched data, and it is absolutely clear: there is not a shred of evidence to support creationism. The six-day literalism I can understand, it is scripturally based. But nothing in the Bible says anything about 10,000 years. It is worth asking: where does this date come from?

As it happens, it traces back to James Ussher (1581-1656). Living at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and into Cromwell's government, he rose to become head of the Irish Anglican Communion in Roman Catholic Ireland, archbishop of Armagh, and vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Ireland's great university. He had begun as a brilliant scholar training at Trinity, and like many academics, was very competitive about advancing his scholarly prowess. Being a minority he was passionately committed to showing that Protestant scholarship was, in scholarship as in faith, superior to the Jesuit academy that dominated his world. Creationism had nothing to do with it. His was a 17th century version of an academic smackdown. It wasn't the date per se, it was widely believed the world was about 4,000 years old. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) placed the date at 3992 bc. What Ussher was trying for was less an exercise in theology than one in finer computation.

Working through the chapters of the Bible with great care, counting generations, and using whatever waypoints the Bible provided, “Adam lived 930 years and he died,” Ussher pursued his self-set problem for 20 years, finally arriving at a date he felt he had proved. In the summer of 1650, he published from London, The Annals of the Old Testament. It begins: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period.” In a marginalia in the right side of the opening page of his own copy of his work, he scribbled the date in “Christian” time—4004 bc.

Although Ussher gets the credit, he was actually preceded by six years, 1644, by his contemporary Sir John Lightfoot (1602-1675), vice chancellor of Cambridge (also a Protestant). In 1897, historian Andrew D. White wrote,

… an overwhelming majority of the most competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era; and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that “heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water,” and that “this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning [emphasis added].”⁴

Why, then, do we know Ussher, and not Lightfoot, with whom he agreed, and who advanced a chronology honed to the hour? We do so because when Clarence Darrow was doing research for the 1923 Scopes monkey trial, in which he would examine William Jennings Bryan, he decided to use the Ussher chronology as a rhetorical weapon. He would force the antievolutionist Bryan to affirm or deny it. In one of history's great ironies, it was the examination that made people aware of it, and thus, Ussher's bizarre date entered American evangelical consciousness.

How is it possible that 55% of Americans have chosen what should be an obscure academic story, recounted at history conferences, over the millions of hours of scientific inquiry that have gone on since the 17th century publications of Lightfoot and Ussher? How could something like 150 million people be so willfully ignorant?

Faith is the easy but inadequate answer because it provides no real insight. And let's be clear: for the most part, pollsters who do these surveys say it is not that creationists know better, but that creationists publicly say something they feel they must to be good members of their denominations. No. This is something they believe. It is an act of proactive denial. And it has nothing actually to do with the spiritual aspect of human consciousness. It is entirely cultural. Spiritual awareness is gnostic and subjective, and universally sees all life as interconnected and interdependent, whereas demanding no particular intellectual mindset about how physical reality is organized. It is as easy to be a spiritual Tibetan lama as a Hopi shaman, a Jewish rabbi, or a meditating physicist.

Creationism, although passionately defended and interwoven into modern American culture, is a cultural artifact, it is not a universal or even common view of Christianity. Very few other Christian nations indigenously have anything like this belief, and when it is introduced, it is very alarming. Like a public health concern over a virus. When German education minister Karin Wolff failed to make what German scientists considered a strong enough response condemning creationism, the vice president of the Association of German Biologists, Ulrich Kutschera, came out publicly saying, “On the one hand we have scientific fact, on the other, 2,000-year-old Christian myths. It is unacceptable to question the reality of evolution.”⁵

If this were a dispute about the nature of the Trinity, or if Allah was God's last messenger, or whether it was Joseph Smith, it might be of passionate concern to some, but would have little impact on public policy and the science and medicine that helps us improve our lives and may be necessary to help us save our planet and ourselves from the insults we have inflicted on the Earth. But creationism has direct political implications. As anyone who reads a newspaper or looks at a television knows, it has come to dominate the discussion of our science and our politics. In April, at the appositely named Messiah College in Pennsylvania, we actually required two of our presidential candidates to state publicly their profession of faith, and CNN anchorperson Campbell Brown thought nothing of asking Senator Barack Obama whether he believed the world was “created in six days.”⁶

It is the founder's miracle that they devised, and each generation of America has honored, the cyclical bloodless revolutions we call elections. We are about to get another chance. To choose whether it is science or the calculations of two academics from shortly after the time of Shakespeare, intent on academic one-upmanship, which will define how we conduct ourselves scientifically and medically. Are we open to what we do not know, or do we surrender to the dogma of willful ignorance? Our decision matters.

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References 

1. Biography of Thomas Young (1773-1829) (Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics). http://theor.jinr.ru/∼kuzemsky/tybio.html/Accessed April 4, 2008
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2. CBS News Poll 2006.
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3. Religion A Strength And Weakness for Both Parties (The Pew Research Center Web site). http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=254Accessed April 14, 2008
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4. White AD. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. In: New York, NY: D Appleton and Co; 1897;p. 9
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5. German Scientists Concerned About Rise in Creationist Belief (Deutsche Welle Web site). http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2222454,00.html2006;November 2, Accessed April 13, 2008
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6. CNN. The Compassion Forum. Messiah College; 2008;http://video.aol.com/video-detail/compassion-forum-5-april-13-2008/3742051607April 13, Accessed June 17, 2008
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