TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

By Bob Holmes, New Scientist
 

Tom Willis heads the Creation Science Association for Mid-America and masterminded the recent school science curriculum controversy in Kansas, where students will no longer be tested on evolution. Today, he believes the Bible to be God’s literal words. But as a young man Willis was an atheist and trained in the hard sciences. Here’s how he ended up on the road to Damascus.
 

How did you come to reject evolution?

I was not a Christian-I didn’t know Christianity from the sole of my foot. But I became a creationist-an anti-evolutionist Christian-by a series of, some would say, unusual events. One was a traumatic personal event that caused me to rethink the meaning of life and to seek other solutions from the lifestyle I was living.

But my conversion was probably more inspired by reading Darwin and other popularizers of evolution than by reading creationist writings. Because I had studied hard sciences, been a high-school debater, and taken courses in logic, I realized the absurd reasoning that lay behind evolutionists’ arguments and was very powerfully struck that a theory with so little sound reasoning behind it could be so widely accepted among a group of people that calls itself the scientific community.
 

Do I take it that no evidence on Earth will lead you to change your mind about evolution?

I have answered the question before at the local atheist club by holding up my pocket comb and saying, “Instead of telling me stories about a time in the past about which you have no knowledge, just show me one complex system ever formed by random processes.” All complex systems owe their existence to acts of creation involving planning and work by one or more intelligent beings. I have made this challenge hundreds of times: Show me one complex system. It’s obvious that complex systems from 747s to coffee cups are created.
 

Does it bother you that so few scientists agree with you?

It doesn’t disturb me at all. It is not surprising to me that most scientists don’t believe the obvious. Jesus told us that the world would hate us. The scientific method in our culture is a political venture. I believe that the political forces of history tend to dominate cultural thought and they tend to drive out nonbelievers.

If you ask most scientists, they wouldn’t say they believe in evolution for political reasons.

Oh, of course not. Whatever your religion is, you don’t believe that you arrived at it by a silly method. Generally you believe you have made a sound decision. But because a majority disagree with me doesn’t tell me anything about truth. The majority has throughout history believed silly things.
 

What harm do you think has resulted from the spread of evolutionary thought?

When I began studying evolution it was obvious that it had been a major rationale for a dominant worldview. [During the 20th century] two-thirds of the world’s people were living in evolutionist states-that is, where evolution is the historical myth that is recognized as official truth in the state. Having lived through that and known many people who lived in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland, I realized that evolution as a life philosophy had been empirically tested by our culture and found to be wanting.

Hasn’t Christianity also led to abuses?

You can argue that the Inquisition and the Crusades came from Christianity. But you cannot defend either from Scripture. But you can easily defend Nazi and Communist behavior from evolutionary theory. Hitler’s views were argued to be scientific by many men on every side of the [Atlantic], and they managed to carry the day in Eastern Europe. If you recall, Hitler walked into Austria without firing a shot. That’s how popular his views were. It is not just an idle notion that men will believe things that are silly and call them scientific.
 

Why do you think God created Darwin?

God specifically said those who refuse to love truth, He will give them a spirit of delusion and cause them to believe a lie. I think Darwin was designed to give the world something to believe. Any child who has read On the Origin of Species can see that he didn’t have a case. I read it when I was a virtual unbeliever and I just filled the margins with unutterable phrases at my shock that such silly reasoning and nonreasoning could be accepted and called science.

Why are so many other Christians-Catholics and Protestants-perfectly at ease with evolution?

You can sit in a garage all day and call yourself a car, but that doesn’t make you one, nor does it make your pronouncements about either cars or garages scientifically accurate.

It sounds like you’re saying that mainstream Christians are false Christians.

No, I didn’t say that. They can also be mistaken. Evolution has to stand on either the scientific evidence or the scriptural evidence. I’ve maintained in this conversation it cannot stand on the scientific evidence, and I don’t have to maintain that it can’t stand on the scriptural evidence.

You virtually never hear a Christian defend evolution from the Bible. This tends to make me a little bit suspicious. I find that most of them are not interested in the Bible. They’re interested in Christianity as a nice way to bring up kids or some other such idea. Christianity, like evolution, is a statement about the history and purpose of the universe.
 

You say you’re not anti-science, yet why do you reject the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth?

I have researched the methods by which we have determined or pretended to determine the age of the Earth. I haven’t found one that works. I find that they work only by selectively discarding the dates that we don’t believe or that don’t fit our belief system. I don’t believe that we have developed a method that we can even test. When you go into a grocery store and they claim that your meat weighs 5 pounds, there’s a guy that comes in there every month with a standard 5-pound weight. I’ve asked many a geologist, “Where’s your standard one-million-year-old rock?” They don’t have one and they can’t possibly have one.
 

Isn’t that a bit glib?

Everyone chuckles and says that’s just rhetoric. No, it’s not rhetoric-they have no way of testing whether or not this is true. Incidentally, the same is true in a court of law. Every courtroom is about an event in the past. We can’t agree on whether O. J. Simpson killed his ex-wife and yet we pretend we know what dinosaurs had for breakfast 100 million years ago.
 

How should science be taught in schools?

There is no such thing as education without religion. When you teach someone from ages 5 to 18, you’re going to make a religious impression, even if it is the false notion that you can make a significant contribution to their life needs without mentioning religion. That is in itself a religious position.

If I had any agenda that I would defend, it would be the idea that scientific theories ought not to be taught in such a way as to require the student to affirm them. Students shouldn’t be required to believe scientific theories. They’re something you learn about, but you don’t have to believe them. And you shouldn’t censor evidence that might put any theory in an unfortunate light. [Right now] you can talk about evidence for an old Earth, but it is a fact that our opponents scream in livid anger at the evidence that points the other way.

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