One of the things that has interested me over the many years since I?ve been out of the Watchtower is the mindset of the ?intelligent? Christian fundamentalist. Specifically, I mean the educated type, the sort who really ought to have enough educated reasoning skill and basic native brain-power to see the hopelessness of the fundie position on all that early-Genesis mythical stuff, but who doggedly sticks to it (or pretends to in public) as if it were a respectable, logical scientific point of view, as if it really were gospel.
What makes them do it? Do they imagine they?re doing God a favour? Do they think they?re helping him out of a difficult spot when they deliberately shut their eyes to compelling scientific evidence, and publicly proclaim that the fundie view on the Creation account, the Flood, and so on is all ?perfectly in line with scientific principles? ?
I guess it bothers me because I could never work out the motivations behind what looks like sheer intellectual fraudulence. And worse than that, what bothers me is the degree to which the truly clueless and credulous (and the WT has enough of those) place their faith in them. This type of WT-friendly-intellectual plays a large part in shoring up the worldview of the trusting faithful - in reassuring them that ? this world?s scientists? are all either villains or fools, all of them so lost in malice towards truth that they?re locked into a wicked and prideful opposition to Jehovah and his ?true science?. I think this caricature of ?scientists? just wouldn?t be possible to sustain over the long term unless there were a certain population of JW apologists reassuring the flock, constantly bolstering their faith in the Creation and the Flood.
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A month or two ago a really interesting science news story emerged which caught my eye. It concerned a population of tortoises living on the Galapagos islands. It turns out these creatures are descendents of a real-life ?Noah?s ark? situation. Something like 100,000 years ago the volcano (Mt Alcedo) on which these creatures live violently erupted wiping out almost all of them. How we know this is a really interesting story in itself.
A team of scientists ? molecular environmentalists - were studying the DNA of the various subspecies of tortoise found all over the Galapagos, and discovered to their surprise that one particular tortoise population, situated around Mt Alcedo, displayed only 20% of the genetic diversity of the other colonies of tortoises, elsewhere on the island. Low diversity in the genetic code is a strong pointer to what?s referred to as a ?genetic bottleneck? in that species history; some event that destroyed all but a very small number of breeding animals.
As background: The older a population of any species is, the greater the expected diversity in the DNA code. This is why it is now strongly believed among scientists that the cradle of the human race was in Africa ? the genetic diversity among people from Africa being so much greater than people elsewhere on the globe. This makes sense when you consider that the people/tribes/families who migrated out of Africa, eventually to populate the rest of the planet, represented only a small subset of the then total human gene-pool. Asia, Europe and eventually the Americas were settled with people having a lower gene diversity than the original, older population left back in Africa.
Anyway ? back to the tortoises. The degree of gene-diversity can be measured and the scientists on the Galapagos project made the calculations to try to establish when the suspected genetic bottleneck occurred. By their reckoning it was between 72,000 and 114,000 years ago.
An entirely separate line of scientific enquiry - potassium-argon dating on the layers of volcanic rock covering Mt Alcedo ? explained the story. Geologists using this technique were able to show that there was a massive eruption around 100,000 years ago which covered the entire mountain and surrounding region with ash and debris. This wiped out almost the entire population of tortoises from the mountain, leaving very few survivors. It might even have been as few as one pregnant female. From those few survivors the whole mountain region was re-populated with tortoises (there are now about 5,000 of them) but a tell-tale marker was left in their genetic code. It was a true ?Noah?s Ark? type event.
You can check this story yourself in recent science magazines - e.g National Geographic News, October 2 2003. (Scientific American also recently covered it, but I don?t have the reference.)
There?s a couple of things that I really like about this story. For one thing, it demonstrates the science behind genetic diversity in the DNA code, and completely blows out of the water the wholly idiotic notion that the entire earth?s breeding population of living creatures was reduced to a single pair of each species (or ?kind? or whatever) as recently as 5,000 years ago. Knowing the science and maths behind genetic diversity makes such an idea utterly untenable.
Secondly, I like the way that two, wholly unrelated scientific disciplines can corroborate the same event, and agree on timescales. Our knowledge of the way the world works is made deeper and richer by the efforts of these scientists ? the molecular environmentalists and the geologists - working together. Science often works like that ? when an idea or theory arising out of one line of research is confirmed from work being done in a wholly separate field of enquiry.
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Perhaps by now you?re wondering when I?ll get back to my rant about intelligent JW?s who ought really to know better than to support the idiotic ?creation-science? of the Watchtower. In fact, in writing this, I?m particularly thinking of one or two individuals back in my congregation thirty years ago when I was growing up ?in the truth?. I won?t dwell on them, but I am reminded of this one occasion:
I have titled this up as ?Sister Doreen? but I don?t know if she ever really qualified to be so described; she never was baptised. Doreen was an ?interested one? who studied for a year or two (for a while with my mum), and who gradually came along to the point of regular meeting attendance, field service and answering-up. She was all set to take the next step and get baptised, I guess.
She was typical in that she had a couple of small children and seemed to be all alone in the world, having been divorced. The ex was off the scene, we never saw him, and she never spoke of him. There were LOTS just like her down at our hall in late sixties. I didn?t have an awful lot to do with her, but knew her well enough to know that she seemed to be a fairly sensible, well educated woman, knowledgeable on a range of subjects. Looking back on it now, I would guess that the ?truth? was an emotional crutch and support system to someone like her, rather than a fully-thought-through scientific worldview.
At least that?s what I am guessing now, because, for some reason, she never did progress to that baptismal step. After her year-or-two long involvement, Doreen started to do the fade. I guess she started to see through it all, or the emotional need she felt was replaced with something else, or whatever. But, the upshot was she fell away. Poor Doreen.
Not long after this, the Circuit Servant?s visit rolled around. You know, the Saturday evening talk. One of the issues he was addressing was to do with the numbers of people who had fallen away, and he devoted a large part of his talk to this. In the course of this talk he felt it instructive to give us real-life examples of some visits to such lost ones that he?d personally been on recently. I happened to know that he?d seen Doreen that week. He didn?t put names to anyone, of course, but I knew who he was referring to.
He went on to relate what kind of conversation he?d had with ?this particular bible study who?d fallen away? and it seemed that it was precisely this issue over evolution/creation that appeared to be the stumbling block. He told us how he?d tried to reason with this individual from the scriptures, so as to turn her around, but all to no avail. The whole story was leading up to his big punchline:
??and do you know what she said to me? She said ? and doesn?t this show how Satan blinds the minds of people sometimes - she said : ?but these people are scientists, they?re clever men, they MUST know what they?re talking about!? ?
Well, I don?t need to tell you how the congregation simply howled with laughter. We fell about. I was laughing as much as anyone, but on a deep level inside, I knew that Doreen was being traduced here. The thing is, he HAD told the story very well. Doreen?s comment came across as utterly ridiculous. The message from the platform was simply so overwhelming:
How COULD someone be so blind as to put their faith in mere, fallible scientists?
So, I couldn?t help myself, I laughed along. But I?ve never forgotten that feeling of inner unease. And I?ve never forgotten that story.
And, of course, I wish now that I hadn?t laughed, because I can see clearly now that what Doreen said was nothing more or less than the plain, unvarnished truth. The scientists, professors, doctors, biologists, and all the other ?ologists who teach about dinosaurs, evolutionary theory, billions-of-years history, ice ages, DNA code diversity, potassium-argon dating and so on, mere ?fallible men? though they may be, have each actually spent years and years studying their fields of expertise. Their theories and conclusions are subject to ruthless peer review and modification. As a whole they have no particular axe to grind except to arrive at the Truth, real truth.
Doreen was entirely right - they actually DO know what they?re talking about. It turns out that ? as a group, regardless of any particular individual - they are NOT fools, after all.
And there are simply too many of them, in too many separate fields of research ? each wholly independent but mutually confirmatory - to make it possible that the whole scientific world-picture constructed over the last 150 years or so is a massive and wilful conspiracy designed to cover up the ?real truth? of Genesis.
Doreen instinctively knew that, and she got out.
Good luck to her, wherever she is.
Duncan.