A Newsweek poll reports this week that 48 percent of the American public rejects the scientific theory of evolution. That’s nearly half the voting public that can’t tell fact from fiction or reality from ideology. In order to save democracy, we’ve got to help these people to evolve.
We can begin by discrediting the pseudo-science known as creationism. This doctrine can be invalidated in the eyes of more people by exposing its emotional roots. It’s pointless to debate creationists on the specific tenets of their doctrine. Such an approach plays into their defensive strategy and overlooks the source in the psyche of their irrationality.
The Christian right is using pseudo-science and mass-marketing techniques as a Trojan horse against reason, journalist and author Chris Hedges argued last week. Obviously, he’s right to be alarmed. And we can go deeper into the issue by asking why the Christian right is so determined to undermine reason.
The danger of creationism, Hedges writes, “is that, like the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics, it allows facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology.” Nazi eugenics refers to the doctrine that racial engineering and sterilization can help to create a master race. The doctrine of eugenics was a self-defeating coping strategy that arose following the German people’s collapse into self-doubt, despair, and even self-hatred after their humbling defeat in World War I and their country’s subsequent hyper-inflation and economic depression.
Creationism, which identifies humanity as a master species in God’s image, is also a coping strategy for a poor sense of self. The doctrine contends that human beings are special creations of God who have miraculously bypassed the evolutionary process that shapes all life forms. People embrace this belief as truth because doing so is emotionally satisfying: This belief elevates them in their own eyes. It’s really not about God at all. In a process that is mostly unconscious, these individuals are desperate to feel recognized and validated by something bigger and better than them. God just happens to do the trick. This desperation for recognition arises out of their underdeveloped sense of self. Even their great hunger for salvation is a craving for rescue from such an impoverished experience of self.
Like eugenics, creationism is also self-defeating. Because it is used to cover up psychological issues, it’s a blockage in the path of its adherents’ self-development. If they refuse to believe in the possibility of evolution, they reject knowledge of who and what they are. This obviously limits their potential for growth. They sacrifice their well-being for an ideology: Their self-imposed stagnation becomes their evidence for the falsity of human evolution.
People with a poor sense of self often compensate by convincing themselves that they are superior. This is the mechanism of narcissists, who also have an exceedingly weak sense of self. The doctrine of eugenics, too, was a statement of superiority, induced by self-doubt and self-loathing. Creationists are also eager for some means by which to feel superior. They can feel superior by believing they’re specially chosen by God. They can also convince themselves they are morally superior by condemning the beliefs and actions of humanists, secularists, and liberals. Their “superiority” extends, of course, to all creatures as well as the laws of nature.
Creationists are not usually aware of their unconscious compulsion to doubt and belittle themselves and of the consequences of doing so. Many of them are rural people who experience much of life on the basis of who is superior and who is inferior (a basis for racism, patriarchy, the Rapture, and authoritarianism). They also experience life through judgment of what is good, bad, permissible, and forbidden (a feature of fundamentalism). They believe (resentfully so) that “elitist” liberals consider themselves to be superior. These liberals, so the thinking goes, regard them as inferior. In a tit-for-tat exchange, creationists retaliate by seeing liberals as morally inferior.
In a process known as transference, people are inclined to perceive an attitude or judgment coming from someone else that corresponds with what they’re prepared secretly to feel about themselves. Creationists make of liberals a mirror, and in that mirror they imagine that liberals are looking back at them with the scorn that, deep down, these creationists are secretly feeling about themselves. (On an inner level, the inner critic is very scornful of us when, through self-doubt, we believe we deserve self-criticism for allegedly not having measured up in our expectations, i.e. for success and happiness.)
Creationists writhe like Holly Rollers at the suggestion their belief system is formed by these inner issues. Yet they’re fighting not so much for a specific belief system but to avoid a kind of metaphysical meltdown. Without special standing in God’s eyes, it feels to them they’ll be nothing but pinpricks of consciousness lost in space—without a direction, or a home, or meaning, or substance.
At a level that is barely conscious, these evolutionary stragglers live in terror of losing their myths and doctrines. They have no idea who or what they will be without these support systems that provide focus and hope for their existence. Consequently, reason, the debunker of illusion, is like a terrorist on the prowl.
Developmentally, these stragglers in the march of progress are like children. They’re in terror of being abandoned by God, the way that children can imagine being abandoned by parents. As reason reveals humanity’s need to evolve on our own or to die, they experience a loss of identity. They can’t imagine how to separate from old forms or paradigms without being terrorized by the process.
As more people are enlisted into their belief system, the safer they feel. But the world is changing rapidly. Reality has no use for doctrine or ideology. Science and sophisticated knowledge, along with intelligent and articulate people, are pressing in from all sides. Creationists know at some instinctive level that time is running out. Hence, the more desperate they are—and the more irrational—as they cling to the old.
Making the transition from faith in dogma to belief in the enduring value of one’s own self need not cause more grief than parting with a baby blanket. Mainly, we have to be prepared to examine our beliefs and not become identified with them. It helps to be on the lookout for important knowledge and to believe in our own capacity to figure out the essential things of life as well as anyone else.
An underdeveloped self can be a problem for secularists too, of course. Problems with anger, passivity, addictions, and relationships are consequences of it. The self is the inner richness we accumulate and consolidate as we invest in personal development. To develop the self, we need to be friends with truth, reality, and reason. We need to question and challenge our perceptions and those of others. The self is our inner peacemaker and, by extension, our peacemaker to the world. Without this inner resource and the strength it inspires, options such as violence and military force are more appealing.
Meanwhile, the debate with creationists needs to be expanded on our terms. Their emotionally held positions, developed out of inner weakness, can’t be taken at face value. As we see the roots of their delusion, our insightful responses will hasten, mercifully, their abandonment of that losing cause.
www.QuestForSelf.com
Peter Michaelson is a psychotherapist and author in Plymouth, MI. He offers telephone sessions and specializes in marriage and partnership conflict resolution. PDF files of his books are available at www.QuestForSelf.com.
There was an element within Nazism that wanted to created a super race, with the word "super" purposefully misinterpreted by those in the PC cult to "master," for propaganda purposes.
And, as we know, the term Nazi is simply used as a synonym for "European" by those in the PC cult. All Europeans are Nazis and are only redeemed if they accept the end of their civilization and race via multiculturalism.
by
JillHenrie (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 7 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 7:44:28 AM
Your analogy of the universe to a complicated piece of machinery is familar and no doubt, to a person seeking a "common sense" explanation convincing.
However, discovering natural truth requires observation, not appeal to analogy.
The nature of the universe has to be discovered by observing the universe, not by thinking about it.
Without going out and making the observations, it is intellectually dishonest to contest the veracity of theories or the integrity of those who are basing their theories on observed data.
I have met many Christians who complain about feeling belittled and oppressed when they learn that science requires judgements based on observation and that creationism is not science because of its appeal to theology.
I feel a sense of compassion for their emotional distress.
But Bob, there are two sides to this.
What sort of distress do kids who want to base their intellectual constructs on observation feel when creationists tell them they are sinning against a beneficent God when they refuse to include inobservable phenomena in their calculations?
What damage are we doing to our ability to cure disease, to grow food, to live without the daily drudgery of non-technological when we inflict psychological damage on scientists and technologists in the name of creationism?
Robert Chapman
Lansing, NY
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 3:10:05 PM
You show your ignorance by lumping large amounts of different people
into groups such as Liberals and Christian Right, etc. It's like voting for a person just because they are Democratic or Republican, instead of what the person really stands for.What do you have
against Christians? It seems to me that you are actually the one with fear.
To use your own psycobabble you bad mouth Christians because of your
own insecurities.
by
Bob Gormley (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 890 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 8:35:40 AM
Talk about seeing one's self as "superior". I think those that think like you as many of the "Fundamentalist", see themselves as higher in their evolutionary state, able to look down on others as lesser beings. Evolution like creationism is still simply faith and not science. Genisis is totally misunderstood by the "right". As Galileo said," the Bible is not about how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven."
by
Bill Ehleben (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 30 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 9:22:34 AM
Bob, with all due respect, in this exchange how could someone reading your response not conclude that you consider yourself superior to the rest of us?
You claim that you believe in something that is vitally important for the rest of us to believe in and that until we correct that deficiency we are incomplete, misguided of foolish- you characterized the original article as babble- which in my dictionary is foolish talk.
Have you considered that what you label as fear is mere perplexity over how one can communicate with a man who is so unwilling to take intellectually consistent and honest positions in this debate?
Robert Chapman
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 3:17:51 PM
How do I see my self in a higher evolutionary state if I don't even believe in
evolution? Again You lump me in with a group of people called "fundamentalists". Let's talk specifics instead of loose generalities that could mean anything.
by
Bob Gormley (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 890 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 9:42:57 AM
Thanks for a great piece Peter. I agree with you that there is a great deal of insecurity involved in fanatic religious belief. I also believe that there is a substantial degree of under-education involved. If children were educated at very early ages in science and critical thinking (rather than immersion in religion), they would have higher self esteem and a deep appreciation of nature and biology.
Dear Gromley,
Please explain how a "creator" makes all animals grow from a single cell?
I don't see any sign of a creator, I see cellular growth and differentiation.
Best regards,
John M
by
John R Moffett (79 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 596 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 9:51:54 AM
I never said everything came from a single cell, isn't that what evolutionists
believe? I said we were created. As another non-believer in God I'm sure
this concept of "instant creation" is unfathomable to you. To you and others the Bible and the knowledge contained there-in is pure fairy tale. Used as a crutch for insecure, uninformed, ignorant, narrow-minded Bible thumpers.
Do I paint an untrue image? Because many people believe in creationism
are they all insecure? Even scientists believe in creationism.
The bottom line , the crux of the whole matter is that you can't believe
in God , a creator. The very thought is an anathema to you. The words of
the Bible upset you, because they present the truth to you.
Am I wrong in my conclusions?
by
Bob Gormley (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 890 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 10:12:12 AM
Animals, plants, man were created at the beginning as it says in Genesis.
This is what I mean by creation. Evolutionists believe that life originated from a single cell and mutated to all the different life forms we have to day.
God placed in these life forms (animals, plants,man, etc.) methods of reproduction where they could, well... reproduce. In essence God created
cell(s). I apologize for calling you hopeless, but your comment just doesn't
make any sense to me. Factories???
Bob
by
Bob Gormley (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 890 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 10:36:19 AM
Wow, you look at this messy untidy universe and you see order.
I was out looking for a good trout fishing spot, wading down the middle of the stream tripping over rocks, root and branches and looking at the banks for places the trout could hide and I have to say, I would not think that this universe was put together in a rational planned way.
Who would bring the trout into the streams and eddies that they are forced into to spawn?
What happens to them there?
Who would place the rocks and the sand and the roots in the banks in the way that they are?
It is an act of faith to believe in the Creator, it is not a deduction derived from the observation of nature red in tooth and fang.
Robert Chapman
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 3:29:33 PM
To scientists, I am making perfect sense. Let me try and explain.
Your analogy is that anything complicated must have been made by an inventor/creator. But all such things are made from parts, none of them grow. Why would God make things grow from single cells, rather than making them in a factory, like watches and cars?
If God made cells which grow into animals, then he/she must be a biologist, wouldn't you think?
Finally, if all things complicated must have a creator, then do you think that God makes each snowflake grow? If not, then complex things (like snowflakes) can form by themselves, correct?
John
by
John R Moffett (79 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 596 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 10:48:34 AM
because I believe several of the comments, and the article hold vital pieces of truth. I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of a education based in science and critical thought, but the idea you can leave out the greatest scientist - God, seems foreign to me.
"I don't see any sign of a creator, I see cellular growth and differentiation." John M
How did the cells come to be, why do electrons do what they do (ask any respectable physicist, they can't tell you), what caused the big bang - a singularity, what singularity...and why. These are questions some people fail to explore deeply, or with some creationists, dispell completely.
"Even this comment needs a creator." Bob
A good point. Where in nature do you see codes? Rocks and crystals form into patterns based on physical properties - but how can you explain complex codes such as DNA without thinking it through. Do I think humans sprang up out of the ground - NO. I believe in evolution. Where we differ is that I look at the universe as perfectly controlled chaos, a design set forth to bring life to fruition, and I wonder where life may evolve in the future. I just don't let my love of science, and the wonder of creation to take my sights off the fact that there is more to reality than what we can touch, or "see".
I have so much more to say, but this is far too big a subject to discuss over the internet. We all have to find our own way.
by
Ben (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 46 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 10:54:22 AM
I see where certain things can evolve on their own.
A river causing changes in landscape.... this is not creation, it's called erosion. Structures in rocks can change structure due to temperature changes,etc. This is not creation.
Look at the reproduction cycle in mammals or any other living things.
Isn't it amazing that many of the reproductive systems are similar?
Man, dogs, cats, bears, snakes, myriads of mammals have certain reproductive cycles in common. They need fertilization of an egg, there is a
gestation period, birth through the genital area takes place. Is this all from
some controlled chaos? How improbable. All from random cell mutations?
Why didn't one species have cells that mutated to form other ways of
reproduction? It's by design!
by
Bob Gormley (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 890 comments)
on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 11:08:25 AM
