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Lying eye

Kevin Baldeosingh •22 November 2001 • 834 words

"In a way, though, I find all this encouraging. The fact that an ignorance industry exists at all suggests that the intellectual culture is considered sufficiently pervasive to be rejected or co-opted (albeit in corrupted fashion)."

I went to church on Sunday. Not only that, but I went to a Pentecostal church. Oddly, my intellect was not dimmed nor was my natural atheism abated. Maybe the Holy Spirit was resting that evening.

Last Sunday the Curepe Pentecostal Church had a lecture by someone described as "a biologist and former evolutionist"; the lecture, according to the announcement, was on the Bible and science. Evolution is, of course, my pet subject, and I wanted to hear the kind of nonsense that is being promulgated in these churches. (I knew the lecture would be nonsensical, since the Bible has no science and Darwinian evolution is one of the firmest theories around. I was just curious as to whether the creationist's argument would be sophisticated or crude.)

As it turned out, Dr. David Menton's approach fell somewhere in between. Menton, a cell biologist and a retired lecturer on anatomy from the US, used a computer and a large screen to give a lecture titled "The Eye of the Creator". His argument, a favourite of creationists, was that the eye is too complex and wonderful an organ to have come about without a Supreme Being.

What I found rather appalling, though, is that Menton is educated enough to know he's talking rubbish. Far from not having the intellectual ability to grasp the concept of natural selection, Menton has, it seems, deliberately chosen to lie to church congregations in order to further God's Word.

His dishonesty was especially patent in his selective quotes from Darwin's Origin of Species. For instance, he quoted Darwin as writing, "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd to the highest degree."

According to Menton, this was proof that Darwin, and evolutionists in general, were willing to accept a theory which they knew to be absurd. He neglected to tell the audience what Darwin wrote next in the very same paragraph: "Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."

The reason Menton left this out is because it shows how hollow his whole argument is: and, of course, he wasn't there to enlighten the members of the Curepe Pentecostal Church, but to fool them.

The promotion of ignorance, however, is hardly confined to Christian fundamentalists.

At the Divali Nagar this year, there was an exhibition titled "Ancient Hindu Science". This consisted of nicely-lettered rectangles of bristol board which quoted, not ancient Hindu texts or scientists, but white, mostly British people praising ancient India.

Among the more fantastic claims in this exhibit was the assertion that Indians thousands of years ago had electricity, airships and nuclear power. Never mind that such advanced technology must have left some trace, even after four thousand years, or that the Hindu texts, if they contained such information, would contain more than just allegory and metaphor. Fact is, the only relatively advanced knowledge ancient Indians had were in the fields of astronomy, irrigation and architecture.

But at least the person who set up the exhibit had the excuse of illiteracy: the introductory message had words like subjet, reffering, exibition and critisism. (He said he would welcome the last, so I presume he appreciates my comments and will do better next year.)

Such promotion of ignorance seems to be a growing trade in Trinidad and Tobago. The Hindu columnists, having a public forum, have been most fervent in exalting bogus science, history and theology. The afrocentrists are their twins, regularly making similar claims about how advanced ancient Africans were in technology and social organisation. It is not coincidental that, in the TNT Mirror newspaper, which aims at a grassroots readership, the non-journalist columnists number among them an afrocentrist, a counselling psychologist, an environmentalist , and an (unqualified) Christian theologian: along with feminist and post-modernist theory, these are all the defining paradigms of pseudo-intellectualism.

In a way, though, I find all this encouraging. The fact that an ignorance industry exists at all suggests that the intellectual culture is considered sufficiently pervasive to be rejected or co-opted (albeit in corrupted fashion). So it is quite possible that a seed is being planted which may flower at some future time: but that fragile plant has to be watered by real intellectuals; and in this place there is a serious dearth of those.