The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  It is a background state; a vague, non-specific kind of wrongness. It is like radiation – an instability that underscores everything; my entire life. It comes, I suppose, from my unconscious. And yet, in the overt world of my opinions, I am as outspoken as anyone. I experience my beliefs with a measure of certainty that, as I grow older, I find myself becoming increasingly suspicious of.

  I consider – as everyone surely does – that my opinions are the correct ones. And yet, I have never met anyone whose every single thought I agreed with. When you take these two positions together, they become a way of saying, ‘Nobody is as right about as many things as me.’ And that cannot be true. Because to accept that would be to confer upon myself a Godlike status. It would mean that I possess a superpower: a clarity of thought that is unique among humans. Okay, fine. So I accept that I am wrong about things – I must be wrong about them. A lot of them. But when I look back over my shoulder and I double-check what I think about religion and politics and science and all the rest of it … well, I know I am right about that … and that … and that and that and – it is usually at this point that I start to feel strange. I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

  It is as if I have caught a glimpse of some grotesque delusion that I am stuck inside. It is disorientating. It is frightening. And I think it is true to say that it is not just me – that is, we all secretly believe we are right about everything and, by extension, we are all wrong.

  All of my beliefs cannot be right, and yet the effects that they have had on my personal life have been costly. Hardly spoiled for friends, I recently dropped contact with a colleague whom I liked and admired after he told me that he believed the US should invade Iran. I overheard another friend, this one Jewish, proudly announce that she would never share a taxi with an Arab. That was six years ago. I haven’t spoken to her since.

  I don’t view these acts with any sense of pride. I know, logically, that there must be good arguments for these individuals’ strongly held points of view, but when I think about assessing them carefully and fairly, I feel incapable. I don’t fully understand this reaction. It is as if I am too angry, too weak to bear the challenge of it. And there is a fear there too, lying secretly among all the bluster: What if they’re right? What if the truth alters me; fractures something essential?

  So I am left with the lonely consolation of my righteousness. That is all that I have. And what does righteousness prove anyway? I hold my beliefs with absolute conviction – but no less conviction than John Mackay. These views have created ruptures in my life, painful states of estrangement.

  I have watched as these personal battles have manifested in the wider world. The decade of terrorism we have just lived through had its roots, of course, in mismatched beliefs that are both political and religious. Those same years saw what has the appearance of an increasing suspicion of science. The white-coated priests of the laboratory, to whom we have granted custody of the truth for so long, are seemingly being treated with growing levels of doubt. We don’t trust the MMR jab, we don’t trust climate data, we don’t trust genetically modified wheat or ‘conventional’ medicine or supermarket-bought beef. One response has been the cultural rise of the radicalised rationalists: celebrity atheists who have written bestselling books and sponsored anti-God advertising on the sides of London buses; groups of self-declared ‘Skeptics’ who toured sold-out concert venues like rock stars, defining themselves in opposition to the kind of anti-scientific thinking that they declared dangerous. Every one of these people, convinced they are right. None of them convincing the other.

  John Mackay got me reflecting on all this when he recounted his conversation with Dawkins. ‘This is your faith starting-point versus my faith starting-point.’ As I sit alone in my Gympie motel room, with its cracked plastic kettle and its stained sachets of sugar, I decide to go back to first principles: Why do I believe that Mackay is mistaken about the origin of our species in the first place? Well, I suppose I believe him to be wrong because people I admire, such as Richard Dawkins, tell me that this is so. But, honestly? All I really know about evolution, aside from the basics of natural selection, is that man is descended from the ape. Like so many people who hold strong opinions about it, I have never studied evolution. I have exercised no critical thinking on the topic whatsoever. I have simply put my trust in the people that culture has directed me towards. I have run to Richard Dawkins because I believe in his credentials as a scientist, and because his views coincide with mine – with my ‘faith starting-point’, in other words.

  I lie back and open the pamphlet that Mackay handed me earlier. It describes what the fossil record would look like if evolution were true. It says that what we should find, as we dig through the earth’s strata, is simple organisms gradually becoming ever more complex and diverse, sprouting wings and legs and hair and all the rest of it. Instead, what we apparently find are fully formed species suddenly appearing and then disappearing with no intermediate, semi-evolved beings at all. (If frogs turned into monkeys, goes a common argument, why aren’t we digging up ‘fronkeys’?) This, says the text, accurately reflects the creationist vision of God magicking creatures abruptly into existence. It also apparently echoes the concerns of Charles Darwin himself, who is quoted as pondering, ‘Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.’

  *

  The next morning, we meet up in the property of a Gympie mechanic. It is here that Mackay intends to prove that the biblical creation account represents the true history of the world. Currently, though, the land in which his evidence is buried is flooded. It will be another half an hour before the water is pumped away. As we wait in the mud, with the warm rain soaking our hair and the sound of the weather playing the gum trees like a ghostly instrument, Mackay begins to tell me something of his story.

  It begins in 1947, the year he was born in Australia to Scottish migrant parents. He was raised outside Brisbane in a family whose father he describes as ‘strongly pro-evolutionist and anti-Christian’ and, as a boy, he became a budding scientist with evolution as his central passion. At sixteen, he was reading yet another book on Darwin’s epochal idea when he came across a chapter on why there is no God. Its inclusion outraged the young science fan. It felt like crude propaganda, an article of burning faith shoved into a book that should consist solely of cold reason. ‘I was offended intellectually,’ he says. ‘So I deliberately picked up a Bible and began at the beginning.’

  Somewhere around this time, the quick conversion of John Mackay took place. Talking to him, it is impossible to isolate the precise moment that belief struck him. It seems as though the boy, for some reason, simply became bewitched by faith.

  Mackay tells me that God’s existence is scientifically testable, ‘because he promises to dwell within his people and that’s a testable thing.’

  ‘But how, exactly, can you test it?’ I ask.

  ‘He says, “I will make myself known to you,” and he did. I know Jesus Christ personally. It’s something in me.’

  ‘Is it something you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s not just a feeling, it’s intellectual too. It affects the way you think. It affects everything.’

  Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy’s view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay’s story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God. He sacrificed his life’s ambition to be a practising scientist when he felt ‘called’ to become a teacher. Having studied geology and genetics at university, he joined the staff at the prestigious Brisbane Grammar School, where, after deciding that ‘nine out of ten’ students abandon Christianity after deciding
that Adam and Eve never existed, he managed to inveigle creationism into his classroom.

  ‘Brisbane Grammar was private,’ he explains. ‘So you have a lot of freedom. You can innovate all sorts of education programmes that would take reams of paperwork to get approved elsewhere. I said to my colleagues, “I’ve found a way to teach creation.” They said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Yes I can.”’

  Mackay formulated a lesson that he called ‘How do we know what we know in the first place?’, the official purpose of which was to explore the methods we use to separate fact from fantasy. The example he used was creation versus evolution and he used it to help the children answer his favourite question ever: If creation is true, what would the evidence be?

  Word of Mackay’s unit spread, and he was invited to teach it at church groups. He was a hit. He circulated class notes to like-minded colleagues and impressed many, but most portentously an ambitious young teacher called Ken Ham.

  I am surprised to hear mention of Ham in all this. He is a Queensland-born scientist who is now a resident of the US, where he has become famous for his creationism museum and his daily radio show Answers … with Ken Ham, which is syndicated nationally to over a thousand stations. I am interested in Ken Ham because he and Mackay co-founded the Creation Science Foundation in 1979 only for Mackay to be kicked out after making some unusually bracing allegations about a senior member.

  ‘I wasn’t actually kicked out of the CSF,’ Mackay corrects me, when I mention it. ‘But it was getting to that stage.’

  ‘I heard you accused someone of witchcraft.’

  ‘I did accuse a lady of being a “divisive Jezebel,”’ he says, carefully. ‘Jezebel was a lady full of rebellion and the Bible says rebellion is the sin of witchcraft.’

  ‘And did you also accuse her of necrophilia?’

  ‘That wording comes from somebody else,’ he says.

  ‘But did you—’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, reluctantly. ‘I did communicate that as well.’

  ‘And was it true?’ I ask.

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ he says while wiping some drizzle out of his beard. ‘I mean, how could you know?’

  We pause to check upon the progress that has been made with the water pump. We are here to see a set of fossilised conifers which apparently contain crucial evidence for creationism. As we make our way through the sticky mud towards the gradually emerging treasure, John explains how the petrified remains of dinosaurs challenge the basic tenets of evolution.

  ‘The first dinosaurs look like dinosaurs,’ he says. ‘The last ones look like dinosaurs too. So within that timeframe – even if you did put it at millions of years – they produce their own kind, just as Genesis says.’

  ‘But hang on,’ I say. ‘If humans have been here since day one, that means we must have existed at the same time as dinosaurs.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘When you look at so-called mythical stories of dragons, they’re real. St George really did fight a dragon.’

  ‘But there are no dragons in the Bible.’

  ‘There are quite a few dragons in the Bible. Go to Job 41:14. It talks about a creature with huge teeth and a terrible mouth that breathed fire.’

  ‘Does that mean that Noah had dragons on the ark?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  By now, enough water has been sucked out of the pit that working geologist Liam Fromyhr can use the scene to tell me why he is convinced that the majority of his colleagues are mistaken in their belief that layers of earth or ‘strata’ are laid down over millions of years. For creationists, of course, these trees and the strata that they lie in will probably be around six thousand years old.

  Liam points to a fossilised tree, a beautiful coppery piece of rock in which it’s still possible to make out individual rings in the ancient wood.

  ‘This is a polystrate fossil,’ he says, ‘which means it sticks through several strata at once. This means the layers must’ve been laid quickly enough to cover the tree completely before it decomposed. We’ve got three metres of strata here. So conventional thinking would assume they were laid over three hundred thousand years. But as you can see, we’ve got a log sticking right through them.’ Liam gives me a long, steady look. ‘Now, logs don’t hang around for three hundred thousand years.’

  I turn to John.

  ‘So if these fossils are six thousand years old, this must mean they’re actual trees from the garden of Eden?’

  He considers for a moment.

  ‘Well, this is a tree which, due to some circumstances, has been catastrophically pulverised into sections. You can see another one over there that has gigantic cobbles up against it. The size of the cobbles tells you that the water has been going pretty fast.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘Are you telling me these trees were knocked over during Noah’s flood?’

  ‘Basically.’

  I bend down again to look at them. These old conifers, I can’t help but notice, are normal sized and not – as they should be, according John’s theory – gigantic trees, grown to an awesome monstrous splendour in a nutritionally, atmospherically and environmentally perfect Eden.

  ‘They’re not particularly massive, are they?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, these are just fragments,’ says John. ‘Is this a small tree trunk or a branch from a big tree? You just can’t tell.’

  ‘You do expect to find some gigantic trees, then?’ I ask, vaguely. ‘At some point?’

  His eyes scan happily over the trunks.

  ‘Eventually.’

  *

  ‘I’m going to say some things that might stretch your little brains today,’ John says from his lectern in front of the altar. It is Sunday morning and he has invited me to watch him preach at the Gympie Community Church. ‘I’m going to be talking about homosexuals. Open your Bibles at Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13. “If a man lies with the male as with a woman, both men have committed an abomination, they shall surely be put to …? Death.”’

  Behind either side of John’s head are large banners, painted in happy colours by the neighbourhood’s children. One says ‘Love’. The other, ‘Joy’.

  ‘Isn’t it true that today we have gay bishops?’ he says. ‘Isn’t it true that we have lesbian preachers? But in the Bible it says homosexual bishops, lesbian preachers, thieves, extortioners, adulterers, murderers and revilers will end up where?’

  On an adjacent wall are their companions, ‘Gentleness’ and ‘Kindness’.

  ‘Hell.’

  The woman in front of me highlights the relevant Bible chapter in pink ink.

  ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to our moral basis?’ he continues. ‘There will be a shift. If homosexuality used to be wrong and now it’s right, why not paedophilia? You watch. That’s what you’ll see.’

  I look around at the congregation of young families, elderly couples and children. I am expecting expressions of outrage; at the very least surprise. But everyone appears benignly accepting, as if they are watching clouds drifting over sunny meadows. Their Bibles have special weatherproof jackets with pockets and zips and pen holders.

  ‘You ask what gives God the right to determine what’s moral or immoral? He made the world. No argument applicable after that point. God is an absolute ruler and he’s not interested in your opinions. There might be a non-Christian here …’

  Mackay looks out over the congregation. His eyes seem to lock on to mine. My heart gives a single, powerful thud.

  ‘Do you realise the Bible is emphatic that you’re going to hell?’

  Today, he even looks different. The sun has reddened his skin and the two clumps of hair on the side of his balding head give a regrettable horn-like impression. As he finishes, his voice deepens and rings with fiery portent. ‘When a homosexual bishop meets up with a lesbian preacher in hell and they’re asking why they’re there, the demons will laugh and say, “We didn’t obey … and neither did you.”’

  The congregation murmurs their approval and J
ohn is replaced at the lectern by the pastor.

  ‘Just a reminder that Charlie and Beryl and celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary this week, they’d love you to join them for tea and cakes in the meeting hall.’

  *

  After the service I canvas the Gympie faithful for their opinion of John’s sermon, hoping that perhaps, after all, John Mackay will turn out to be on the fringes of an otherwise pleasant and accepting country community.

  ‘It was good,’ says a kindly-looking father. ‘I believe what he was saying, as controversial as that is in the world today.’

  ‘But I’m thinking most people around here wouldn’t agree with it?’

  He looks confused.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Yes they would.’

  ‘I expect you didn’t agree with what he was saying,’ I say, smilingly, to a nearby eighteen-year-old named Levi.

  ‘I agree very much with what he said,’ he replies. ‘It comes straight from the Bible.’

  ‘But you probably have lots of friends who wouldn’t agree?’

  His companion Charlotte interrupts primly, and with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Most of our friends would be just as against gay people.’

  I give up.

  Later, I find Mackay enjoying a cup of tea and some cake down at Charlie and Beryl’s do in the canteen. I decide to take the opportunity to get the entry conditions of hell straight, because he seemed to be saying that it is only unbelievers who end up in the abyss. So wouldn’t this mean that lesbian nuns go to heaven?