Back in 1994, Andrew Lansdown, then the pastor of Collie Baptist Church, WA, wrote a creationist pamphlet called Evolution? Lansdown later joined Life Ministries and has been the subject of an earlier blog item (13 May 2005).

The first part of Lansdown’s pamphlet was reprinted with minor modifications in the evangelical weekly New Life of 6 Oct. 2005, together with a brief introduction to the notion of ‘Intelligent Design’:

I should note at the outset that, in my view, if there is an intelligent designer, the God of the Bible is the most plausible candidate.

Lansdown proceeded to ask, ‘Is evolution based on science?’ Even ignoring the loaded nature of the question, his attempt at an answer inspired little confidence:

To determine whether evolution is based on fact or faith we must examine its premises to see if they are proven or unproven. A premise is an assumption upon which an argument stands, and the evolutionary theory has two. The first is that life originated from inanimate matter, while the second is that the species originated from a common ancestor.

I don’t intend to spend much time on this mess as websites like the Talk Origins Archive and No Answers in Genesis have had such issues covered for years. Briefly, the theory of evolution deals with how life develops, rather than with the question of how it began, so Lansdown’s first point derives from ignorance or a misunderstanding. His argument against common ancestry simply consists of repeated assertions that there is ‘no verifiable evidence’ for such an ‘unproven and unprovable’ assumption. If you want to be swamped by this apparently non-existent evidence, go to ‘29+ Evidences for Macroevolution’. Mark Isaak’s ‘Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution’ is also very useful.

Why won’t Lansdown and other creationists give the evidence for evolution a fair examination? I don’t think it’s because they’re incapable of understanding it. While Australian Religious Right groups may not be overburdened with brainpower, most of them have enough to get by. Lansdown himself seems quite a well-educated ’son of the manse’, has worked as a teacher and journalist and has won awards for his poetry. If we’re looking at qualifications, Jonathan Sarfati and some other Answers in Genesis staffers have higher degrees, although they often undermine claims to scientific respectability when writing outside their fields. Several Festival of Light/Christian Democratic Party leaders have solid academic qualifications, as does Bill Muehlenberg of the Australian Family Association. Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby has organisational rather than strictly academic talents, but he’s far from being a dunce.

When the average person - let alone the typical scientist - studies the case for evolution, he or she is struck by the thoroughly convincing nature of the multi-layered evidence. And yet people like Lansdown keep insisting that there is ‘no verifiable evidence’, that acceptance of evolution is ‘an unsubstantiated conviction’, ‘a blind conjecture’, ‘hardly the stuff of science’, ‘unproven and unprovable’ etc., to quote directly from the article. What is going on here?

I think that Lansdown and similar writers refuse to accept the validity of evolution because they can’t afford to pay the emotional price. Biblical literalism precludes evolution, and therefore when creationists read the scientific evidence, something switches off. That this process occurs is occasionally made clear, as when a Jonathan Sarfati moans that a specific evolutionary proposition is ‘biblically impossible’; or when a Carl Wieland exclaims that God ’saw that everything was very good’ prior to Adam’s fall in Eden, and how can you call millions of years of death and extinction ‘good’? Creationists don’t really ‘read’ the evidence for evolution, in the sense of integrating it into a meaningful whole, because they can’t. For a whole range of personal reasons, they cannot cast away the lifeline of biblical inerrancy.

This helps explain why so many rank-and-file creationists don’t even like talking about evolution, let alone reading books about it. Evolution seems to contradict what the Bible teaches, therefore it’s Satan-inspired, and therefore it’s blasphemous and to be avoided. It’s relevant that Lansdown seems to have made little effort to update his views about evolution since the appearance of his original pamphlet over a decade ago. The same points are made using much the same words, easing the insecurity of having to deal with the subject. Many authors have commented on the imperviousness to reason of creationist writers and the tendency for often-debunked counter-evolution arguments to emerge again and again. When you’re on a good thing, stick to it.

Towards the end of his article, Lansdown complains that ‘pigeons have not been bred into parrots, let alone penguins or eagles.’ Andrew, if you think that this is a serious argument against common descent, you really have to hit the books again. But this time, pretend for a few minutes that the Bible doesn’t exist and that scientific evidence can be judged on its own merits.

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