[Declaration of religious position from the outset: I am an atheist. I was raised in a not-very-strict, not-especially-spiritual Church of England environment. I was taught to love my fellow human beings and never to judge them. There was very little to disagree with. I liked the music, but as I got older, I decided that I could no longer go to church unhypocritically, not having the belief to justify my presence there. However, I'm pleased to say that questions about the age of the universe or the origins of life never entered into my mind as part of my scepticism, as reading the Bible as literal truth was never part of my religious upbringing. My objections were more of a metaphysical nature, though even the word 'objection' seems too strong. I believed that Christian morality had no need of a supernatural law-giver in order to be applicable, that personal redemption had more validity if it was accomplished through self-examination rather than through benign divine intercession. And I had serious misgivings about the purpose of eternal life.]
On the whole, the 'evolutionists' are more entertaining to watch. They have the job of marshalling logic and evidence against blind faith, which is by no means an easy task. For some of them, this job descends to angry anti-religious diatribe; some take much delight in subjecting the wackiest claims to extensive logical dissection. Once or twice, you will find a reasonably intelligent commentator who attempts to pick apart the different burdens of proof demanded by religious and non-religious approaches and to show how incompatible they are in a non-judgmental way. (I could at this stage mention Dawkins – whose evangelical mission is against religion of every kind, and who freely mixes scientific and moral arguments up in a slapdash way – but I choose not to, as he has made it a point of principal not to debate with creationists, even though he has made a living from scoring easy points off them.)
Among the 'creationists', most are shed-based lunatics, barely able to string a sentence together, let alone an argument. Their repeated appeals to Scripture are boring, and their scientific claims so absurd as to be more annoying than funny. Only a few are really worth watching – mostly professional preachers of one kind or another, and paradoxically because it is not clear whether they really do believe in creationism or if they're just in the business of scamming donations from gullible believers. Honorable mentions go to Ray Comfort (known as 'the banana man') and John Pendleton, who are both religious quacks of the highest order, but the king of them all is (Dr) Kent Hovind*, currently serving a ten-year sentence for tax evasion at the Federal Correctional Institution in Jesup, Georgia. He's a hero of mine. An anti-hero, let's say. Yes, he's a fraud, but he takes dishonesty to remarkable levels of sophistication. He's a pretty entertaining speaker, too, and he has mountains of evidence at his fingertips for the literal interpretation of the Bible. Here's just one of his many online seminars. I recommend watching it in full, late at night in a darkened room with the volume turned up loud.
The task of collecting evidence to support this nonsense is almost, if not more, impressive than the job of refuting it. If Hovind had spent the same amount of time researching a genuine field of science as he has clearly done fabricating proof of Noah's flood, he might have achieved a small amount of usefulness in his colourful but confused life.
There is a certain mindset, which is by no means restricted to American Christians or indeed to religious people anywhere, that will believe an absurd proposition in the face of insuperable odds. In fact, the more contrary evidence the believer is presented with, the greater their conviction that there is a conspiracy to silence them. In the majority of cases, the claims made about the extent of the conspiracy to suppress the so-called 'facts' – about the moon landings, UFOs, 9/11 etc. – are even more grotesque than the claims about the facts themselves.
One of the most remarkable people I ever met was crop circle expert Lucy Pringle. She deserves a blog post all to herself. Her resistance to the idea that the patterns that appear in fields are produced by men wielding planks – in spite of the plank-wielding men themselves claiming responsibility – is extraordinary. I became exasperated by her apparently willing blindness to the plank-wielding facts and her baseless speculation that gave gullible leverage to any account, no matter how bizarre, apart from the clear, rational one. We argued, but our arguments turned out to be just as futile as those between creationists and evolutionists. We both came away accusing the other of being narrow-minded and stubborn.
On the whole, the arrogance of such self-righteous fantasists is more depressing than inspiring. Yet in spite of this, I still cannot help but feel a mischievous admiration for those who, with the heroism of Don Quixote, defend their delusion in the face of every fact. The ones without an obvious religious or political motivation are all the more fascinating.
Another of my favourite fantasists is Iman Wilkens, the author of a magnificent book called Where Troy Once Stood (Rider/Century Hutchinson, London, 1990; 5th revised edition published by Gopherpublishers.com, Amsterdam 2009). Over more than 400 pages packed with bogus etymology and duff archaeology, it explains that the epic poems of Homer – the Odyssey and the Iliad – describe real historical events, and that these events took place in Cambridgeshire. Sadly, it's impossible to get hold of for less than £40. While I was at university at Cambridge, I recommended it to Classics Department Library. It represents a first-class illustration of how, if you fervently want to believe something, you will never be short of evidence to support your belief.
This brings me to Anatoly Fomenko. He believes that the entirety of world history is a fabrication, almost the nec plus ultra of conspiracy theories.
It's spectacular stuff, and I want to know more. Where do you begin refuting a theory like this? As in the creationism debate, the rebuttal is not easy, which is what makes it so interesting. The extent of the bullshit is almost too great to shovel. In the words of theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it's 'not even wrong'.
I really do wish I could 'believe', as the cranks do, and to have the sort of mind flexible enough to distort everything to fit my own worldview. How nice to be so certain of things. How incredibly comforting it must be to go through life with every fact supporting your thesis. It would be like being a baby, with everyone cooing over you and looking after you, having no responsibilities and enduring no challenges. But we must grow up and become independent, and come to terms with the chaotic confusion of signs and meanings that surround us. But with the evidence so up for grabs, as Fort teaches, it does make me wonder where proof ends and faith begins. One of the things that's so fascinating about Kent Hovind and other 'creation scientists' is their lack of awareness of that distinction. And what about people who hold 'unshakable' political convictions? How can I say for certain that the things I myself hold to be true aren't simply self-reinforced fictions of convenience? We should do our best to interrogate ourselves towards 'supposition', rather than 'belief'.
Amen. Now back to YouTube.
* Hovind's doctorate was awarded by the non-accredited Patriot University in Colorado Springs.
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