“What book d’ya get that out of?” came the reply one day. And thus it began, for this waterfall was not only located in ancient rock, it was also in the heart of the Bible-belt. I had heard there were people who believed the Earth was only 6,000 years old, but I never thought I would actually meet any. That summer, and every other summer I worked teaching science to the public, I met a lot of them. Though most objectors would just walk away from the program, some mothers would cover their children’s ears to protect them from the “blasphemous park ranger.” One man, after I patiently explained how we know the age of rocks, finally just threw up his hands, exclaimed, “The Devil made that rock look that old to turn you away from God,” and led his family back up the trail.

At the time, to a college kid with a summer job, these responses seemed bizarre but relatively harmless — they were local, “everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs”, “no skin off my back”, “whatever”... But now, 15 years later, I understand these taunts to be the threat they truly are: dangerous beliefs made more dangerous because more and more people believe them.

How does believing a 300 million year-old rock is only 6,000 years old become dangerous? It is a reflection of where and how we find answers. A 300 million year-old rock is the answer resulting from decades of observation, research, field study, laboratory testing, comparative studies and critical thinking. A 6,000 year old rock is the answer because God said so.

Is the accurate age of a rock really important? Interesting, yes, but important? Maybe not. But what if the question is about Polio? Should we seek an answer from decades of observation, research and field study, discover a vaccine and destroy a worldwide plague or does the answer lie in God’s plan?

What if the question is about food? Decades of observation, research and field study have shown us there is only so much arable land that can produce only so many calories of food energy. Currently, we burn 10 calories of oil energy to make 1 calorie of food energy. Our world population of 6 billion people is barely sustainable, let alone the 12 billion projected in another 40 years. Should we answer with conservation or with prayer?

What about your right to vote or just your rights in general? Eons of history, research, comparative studies and critical thinking have brought us to the advantages of a representative democracy based on individual rights and the checks and balances of limited governmental power. Is government of, by, and for the people the answer for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or would we prefer one nation, under God, defined by his will and authority?

Let’s think about this: If, as many people are demanding today, we want our government to be based on God’s authority, the first problem is to decide exactly which God we want to follow. There are many. God is a very ambiguous, schizophrenic deity. This is why, as Carl Sagan explained, “When you ask, ‘Do you believe in God’, if I say yes or if I say no, you have learned absolutely nothing.” So we have to be more specific. How do we get 300 million people to agree to a specific definition of God’s identity and will? We can’t, of course. A democratic populace with the freedom to think for itself never will. Okay, forget individual freedoms. The answer is a theocratic dictatorship that can force the people to live according to its particular interpretation of God’s will.

And that’s how a 6,000 year old rock becomes dangerous.

But it was just a little rock! Yes, but it is a big metaphor.

The man who claimed that the Devil had made the rock look that old to turn me away from God was trying to warn me that I shouldn’t believe everything I see. He believes the Devil works through deception so anything learned from observation can’t be trusted. The church tells him Satan sends demons to trick his senses and his mind. Consequently, according to him and the 30 million Americans who agree with him, we can be saved only through faith.

Of course, there’s no denying that our minds can be easily fooled. After all, it is the basic premise underlying all marketing, entertainment, and campaign policies. But the idea that we must turn to faith for our salvation is fundamentally flawed. Credulity is a disastrous reaction to deception. If we wish to succeed in life, we need a more skeptical way to react to the world around us. How can we possibly work through the deceits of the world and the whims of our minds and come to a true understanding of reality?

That answer is the Scientific Method. It is a process of constant questioning, testing, verifying and questioning again, until the smoke and mirrors are removed and reality is revealed. Then you do it all over again. It is an adaptive mechanism, a hybrid of contemplation and observation and the best technique we’ve invented to help us figure stuff out. Constant questions. Constant testing. If an idea doesn’t hold up, we throw it out. It’s ruthless, but it works. There is no “argument from authority” because authorities make mistakes. And, as Sagan reminds us, “Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.” Nothing is sacred and that is how lots of very diligent people figured out that a 6,000 year-old rock was really 300 million years old. Cherished ideas often must fall by the wayside, but at its best, the method keeps us honest.

Honesty is difficult. It requires heroic efforts of introspection and self-awareness. This honest portrayal of reality is at the heart of the conflict between science and religion. While science is a natural response to reality, religion demands that we distrust our senses and our intellect, instead relying on a supernatural explanation. In this way, faith robs us of the best tool we have for learning about our world and understanding our true position within it. Religions, especially fundamentalist religions, get stuck because they are based on an immovable, unchangeable, unquestionable authority. But without doubt and questioning, there is no way to acknowledge, much less correct for errors. That is how a 6,000 year-old rock becomes dangerous.

It also explains the hostility on the hike that day because the danger goes both ways. If we want to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, almost every scientific discovery of the past 400 years has been a real downer. First we find out that the universe, literally, does not revolve around us. Next, we discover that our Sun is really a quite average star and, not only that, we live out in the boon-docks of an average spiral galaxy that is just one of 20 other galaxies (given the appropriately non-superlative name The Local Group) zipping through space outward from the center of the cosmos which, did we mention, is very far away from us. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this planet that was supposedly created for us was hanging out for almost 5 billion years before we even showed up and, by the way, we didn’t look like this when we first got here.

If your sense of self-worth, your purpose in life, is based on the belief that you and the universe were created specially for one another, science is truly a harbinger of doom. You can shoot the messenger, but ignoring reality is no guarantee that it will go away. Like a talk-show celebrity, the significance you desire is, sadly, based on unmerited importance. Truth be told, though the performance was entertaining, your show is just a dot among 6 billion dots on a bigger dot flying around a brighter dot lost amid a billion, billion more dots separated by vacuous space.

But here’s the cool thing: at least you are a dot. I am a dot, too. This means that, though we are insignificant to the cosmos, we are incredibly significant to each other. We and our fellow dots. What should we do? Don’t be afraid. The lack of a deity is not an opening for chaos. It is a call for responsibility. Besides, there are some really smart dots over there that have figured out how to learn and they can teach us how to survive. It’s all really quite amazing. Did you know that this rock is over 300 million years old?

Our species has continuously found meaning, purpose and comfort in the idea of god or gods. Unfortunately, if we want to know what is actually going on, and our survival depends on understanding reality, religion is utterly bereft of explanatory power. A belief in god’s existence is a useful and powerful illumination of our own desires for life, but it is not a reflection of what life is.

The discovery that a rock is 300 million years old is the result of lots of questions by lots of people who devised lots of different ways to ask the Earth about itself. Much to our delight, she is talking. Science is how we listen and the scientific method is how we understand what she says.

To deny that a rock is 300 million years old is to deny the process that got us to that understanding. Since this process of inquiry is our best tool for succeeding in the world, its denial is a grave threat to our future prosperity. Far from making us stronger, faith cripples us because it takes away our greatest advantage: our ability to question, to learn, to adapt and, therefore, to live.

This essay originally appeared as a commentary on Point of Inquiry, the podcast of the the Center for Inquiry. www.pointofinquiry.org

Dr. Oliver Sacks is probably best known for his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of case histories exploring an amazing variety of neurological experiences. Each story describes patients struggling to live with conditions such as Tourette’s Syndrome, autism, musical hallucination, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In his writings, we discover remarkable people: a Tourettes patient who becomes a successful surgeon, an Autistic patient who flourishes as a doctor and engineer, a painter who sees more when he loses his color vision.

At a time when diagnosis was the end goal of clinical studies, Silberman explains that Dr. Sacks went beyond the naming of a disease to figure out how patients might survive it, how they might go on living despite the chaos in their minds. Faced with a new and challenging condition, how could they discover an identity in a world completely changed by their disorder? Each story is a triumph of understanding, acceptance, growth, and adaptation. By digging deep into the mind, reforming and retraining functions of the brain and by mastering new skills, Sacks showed how patients could redefine their existence and become whole again. In some ways patients became even more “well” than before they got sick. Along the way, he discovered that the act of recovering one’s own story was in itself a form of healing.

We all know that Darwin and his ideas of ‘descent with modification’ and ‘natural selection’ caused problems from the very beginning. The implications of his research seemed to say that man might be descended from monkeys. This was heresy against the well-established truth of the day: namely, that man was the child of God, created in His image, special and set apart from earthly life. Monkeys? Ridiculous! Who does he think he is? Who does he think we are?

Of course, Darwin was not the first scientist to challenge the status quo.

Johannes Kepler discovered mathematical consistency in the music of the spheres. He found patterns in what had been thought a formless void and gave us the first inkling that the mysteries of the universe might actually be knowable. So now there’s a pattern, but the heavenly ether was still separate from the four baser elements of nature: air, fire, earth, and water — until Isaac Newton demolished the artificial boundary between the ‘heavenly’ and the ‘earthly’. The apple and the moon are indeed made of the same stuff and therefore fall for the same reasons. With the heavens no longer an unknowable mystery and no longer set apart from earth, the stage was set for Darwin to show us we are no longer made of god, but, rather, of earthly matter.

So what’s the matter with matter?

The most recent attacks against Darwin and evolution have come from a group of Creationism/Intelligent Design advocates housed at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington; a group formally known as The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Like many faithful people before them, their identity is defined by God - bound up in his attention and love. Their relationship with God defines meaning for their lives and brings purpose to their existence. So each time scientific research pushes humanity another step further away from special creation, they attack science for diminishing man’s relationship with God. For faithful believers, science causes an identity crisis. It creates a disorder and becomes a source of mental chaos and worldly confusion.

Current publications reveal their anxiety and their coping mechanism: a wedge strategy to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies; to replace materialist explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

But here’s the thing: thanks to Darwin, we now understand that we are material beings, made of matter and part of the earth, an animal species among millions, part chance, part natural selection, and just the most recent iteration of bipeds to grace the planet.

With humanity now removed from the comfort of a special hallowed ground at the right hand of God, many blame Darwin for bringing about a sort of cultural depression and degradation, a nihilistic decline in morals and morale. Without a heavenly father and the meaning he brings to life, we must be just orphans, left alone, adrift, and without direction.

In fact, the opposite is true. Kepler gave us direction. Newton gave us force. And Darwin gave us company — 6 billion cousins! Every day should be a big family reunion.

Darwin has given us our diagnosis: Matter. We are of the earth. We are not special creations, but part of a vast continuum of life. No longer children of god, we are children of nature. This is our condition. But if this new understanding is a disorder, if it has caused an identity crisis, then science, too, offers relief.

How do we find a new identity in a world so utterly changed? How might we go on living despite Darwin’s diagnosis? Remember Dr. Sacks. We know we have an innate capacity for recovery and growth, creativity and adaptation, the very adaptation that has enabled us to come this far.

Darwin’s work was and is a shot across the bow because it challenges our cherished beliefs — our definitions both of god and of ourselves. As Adam Phillips explained in his book, Darwin’s Worm, because of Darwin, we must rebuild our identity and retool our hopes. But also because of Darwin, we know we can. He has given us our story, but it is not a nightmare of a meaningless existence. Darwin tells us stories about what keeps life going.

If the reality of evolution cuts too deep, Darwin has given us the freedom to discover our own story and thereby begin to heal. We might even become more well than before we became sick. Far from crisis and despair, the hope and promise of Darwin is that the world we live in is made more livable because of his description of it. By sharing his stories of human nature, we discover who we truly are, prepare for transformation, and come back to life.

Tampa Bay Skeptics Report (Tampa Bay Skeptics), Winter 2005—06, Gary Posner:

This past October, Gary Posner received a telephone call from Ron Pearce of Prattville, Alabama, asking to be tested for the Tampa Bay Skeptics “$1,000 Challenge.” The contest promises a $1,000 prize to anyone providing verifiable scientific proof of the reality of any paranormal phenomenon.

Pearce claimed that he could use psychic abilities to determine the medical ailments of ten volunteers simply over the phone or via e-mail without actually seeing them in person. Furthermore, he said, “I do not need photographs—just names and conditions or problems . . . for me to put together with the names . . . or you may even use numbers instead of names.”

Posner then used the TBS e-mail list to solicit volunteers, explaining the nature of the challenge and assuring them that medical information would be kept confidential. A list of ten ailments, ranging from high cholesterol to multiple sclerosis to mental retardation, was then e-mailed to Pearce along with, naturally, a numerical list, keyed to volunteers, 1—10. In order to win the challenge, Pearce would need to match each person’s number with its corresponding medical condition.

In the end, out of ten determinations, only one was correct. Pearce explained that he had never been tested in this way before, but that he would be able to demonstrate his “empath” abilities in person. He said he could relieve patients of their symptoms and diseases and added, “I’ve had people [whose] cancer has actually disappeared” [as a result of his presence]. When asked to provide medical record documentation of these cases, he declined to even make the attempt.

Posner explained that TBS and the scientific community cannot accept paranormal claims without solid, reproducible evidence and Pearce agreed that, at least in this test, he failed the challenge.

The Power of One

New Zealand Skeptic (New Zealand Skeptics), Spring 2005, Jay Mann:

Jay Mann entered his local pharmacy one day and was disturbed to find a sign announcing that a certain iridologist would be offering consultations there at a later date. [Iridology is the belief that you can diagnose illness, both past and present, by studying the pattern of lines in the iris of the eye.]

“I asked the pharmacist if he really felt this was helping the community or his image,” writes Mann. “I said that I had to rely on his professional expertise for assistance in choosing between competing products, and his promotion of iridology would make me (and others) dubious about his professional judgement.”

Mann went home, found the “Truth Kit on Iridology” by John Welch, and later left it with the chemist [pharmacist]. He had noticed an ad in the local “old-folks publication” promising that the pharmacy would host regular visits from the iridologist and so left the store with minimal expectations—clearly the pharmacy was already committed.

Writes Mann, “To my utter surprise, on a later visit to the shop, the Truth Kit was returned with a comment that the iridologist would not be returning again. . . . We agreed that a ‘discipline’ purporting to diagnose illness, that would misdiagnose nonexistent problems while missing actual disorders, was not acceptable.”

Mann explained that this was his first success in changing a misleading action by a pharmacy and acknowledged other “total failures.” For example, a pharmacist selling “oxygenated vitamin water” dismissed Mann’s skepticism saying, “many people think it’s very powerful.”

When trying to improve awareness at a local level, the difference between success and failure seems to depend on the claims made by the product or procedure. As Mann notes, “most health products are sold with no real claim to do anything. Cleverly worded but meaningless statements . . . are neither provable nor disprovable.” But, he writes, “iridology makes specific claims for efficacy and accuracy, and these claims had been demolished by the Truth Kit.” Success.

The Wisdom of Experts

NMSR Reports (New Mexicans for Science and Reason), January 2006, John Geohegan:

Skeptical of a recent book, The Wisdom of Crowds, members of New Mexicans for Science and Reason began their December meeting with a creative exercise designed to test the questionable claims made by the author, James Surowiecki.

In his book, Surowiecki proposes that collective intelligence is likely to be superior to the intelligence of experts. To test this theory, member Keith Gilbert designed two experiments:

At the opening of the meeting, the group would 1. Estimate the number of beans in a jar and 2. Estimate the number of cards, on average, which would be dealt from a deck before all four suits appeared. By then plotting a histogram of the estimates, Geohegan explained, “If crowds are much wiser than individuals in the manner implied in Surowiecki’s book, we might expect to see the standard bell-shaped normal probability curve.”

For the first test, however, what they saw was not a bell. Though there were 704 beans in the jar, the average guess was 563. Not only was this a 20 percent error rate, there were no guesses at all in the 700’s. Judging from the graph, the median guess was even less than 500, a higher percentage of error lost in the average number because of three members who guessed wildly wrong above 1,200.

For the second test, on average, the group guessed that 10.33 cards were needed in order for all four suits to appear. The graph showed a noticeable peak at 10 cards and the beginnings of a bell shape. The problem, though, is that the algebraically calculated answer is 7.665. So, though the group produced a more statistically uniform response than in the bean problem, their answer was wrong by a margin of 35 percent!

Though these games are a fun way to begin a meeting, they are relevant to a more important issue. At a time when many Americans want to write science education standards according to majority belief rather than scientific evidence, these tests provide easy and obvious examples of the inaccuracy of public opinion and alert us to the inherent danger of acting upon it.

Phactum (The Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking) Sept./Oct. 2005, William A. Wisdom:

Wisdom took the Evolution/ID battle into his own hands and addressed the Haverford Township School Board at their Spring Meeting.

He writes, “For years I had been distressed by the efforts of Fundamentalist Christians to dilute or remove instruction in the Theory of Evolution from the public schools. But, like so many people, I figured: It can’t happen here. Then the events in Dover, Pennsylvania, made me realize that the barbarians are at our gates—that the attack on science could happen anywhere.”

No doubt this is a sentiment many of us share today. Wisdom goes on to share the text of his speech: “If the bill passes [House Bill 1007] a new section entitled ‘Teaching Theories on the Origin of Man and the Earth’ would be added to the Public School Code of 1949. Wherever evolution is taught, the bill would encourage School Boards to include instruction in the so-called ‘theory of intelligent design.’” He continued by describing the historic debates of Huxley/Wilberforce, Darrow, and Jennings Bryan, adding, “The debates are going on today not because the evidence on each side is about-equally balanced. . . .The arguments continue, rather, because science is opposed by antagonists of various stripes for a number of different reasons.”

“The issue is no longer about whether or not God exists . . . the issue is rather about the nature of responsible reasoning about our world.” Wisdom carefully showed how a scientific theory explains a large body of facts from which the theory draws its support. “This power of the theory of evolution to explain facts in biology, geology, paleontology, and other fields is the evidence required by scientists; and such evidence is wholly absent from the so-called ‘theory’ of intelligent design.”

He finished his remarks to applause from the 50 members of the audience and strong supporting statements from the Superintendent and the President of the Board expressing their own determination never to allow creationism to be taught in any form in a science class.

We know education is the solution, not the problem, so we must take our message to the local decision-makers. A small local act within a large national debate, the initiative of Wisdom to stand before the Board is a perfect example of what we as individuals can do to protect the method of scientific inquiry within our schools.

NMSR Reports (New Mexicans for Science and Reason) October, 2005, Dave Thomas:

On August 22, the Rio Rancho (New Mexico) Public School Board voted 3—2 to approve Policy 401 which states, “. . . discussions about issues that are of interest to both science and individual religious and philosophical beliefs will acknowledge that reasonable people may disagree about the meaning and interpretation of data.”

As many have feared all along, such nebulous wording opens the classroom door to theological disputes that distract from the teaching of science.

For example, in an October 1, 2005, Albuquerque Journal op-ed piece, former state senator Pauline Eisenstadt and former state board of education member Marshall Berman wrote, “On the day after the policy was passed, a student brought a Bible into a chemistry class and wanted to discuss intelligent design. On the same day, in a different class on anatomy and physiology, a student questioned the teacher and said that brain-neuron-muscle connections were so complex that they had to be intelligently designed. Another student argued that this system evolved. The two students continued to take up class time on other topics that the teacher tried to present. Later in the week, another student brought the Book of Mormon to class and wanted to discuss it. . . . The use of the phrase ‘reasonable people’ opens the door to introducing nonscientific material, confusing our students and demoralizing our teachers. . . . This school board policy will have profoundly negative impacts on student learning in science and critical thinking. . . .”

At the board meeting the following month, five residents chose to address the policy again, despite its absence on the agenda. Dave Thomas, President-elect of the New Mexico Academy of Sciences, spoke to the Rio Rancho Public School Board of Education saying, “The science establishment of New Mexico [has] reacted to and responded to (Policy 401). Science classrooms are no place to debate the finer points of religion. . . . Please rescind this policy.”

It is worth emphasizing that Policy 401 and its consequences came from the opinions of just three people. Two of the three school board members supporting Policy 401 are pastors at Rio West Community Church whose Web site proclaims their goals of “gospel saturation and city transformation.”

Skeptics, scientists, and secularists are confident in the integrity of evolutionary theory, but in reality this is not a battle of ideas. It is a battle of attendance. The victory goes to those who show up. Education issues are decided at the local level. To win the debate over past origins, skeptics must be present.