TURNING FAITH INTO A SCIENCE WHY DID CREATIONISM SPROUT IN FARM COUNTRY?

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I had a bully named Eddy when I was a kid. He wasn't my personal bully. Eddy beat up a lot of kids. He was a very angry young man. He spent some time in Juvenile Hall for petty theft. At 16 he dropped out of school. And then at 17, Eddy joined a Pentecostal church. He became an ordained minister. He got married. The last I heard, he had two kids. His life still wasn't easy; Pentecostal ministers tend to be poor. But his life was saved.

Faith can do that.

I've seen a few miracles like Eddy, and I'm always impressed with the power of faith. What amazes me is that, for some people, it's not enough. They want their faith to also be a science. They call it Creationism and it is ironic that Creationism has its roots in farm country.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I make no claims to be a cow expert, but I can say from personal experience that cows are dumb. Herefords have been known to go hungry with tasty green grass two inches away, under a spring snow. But it's not their fault. Humans breed cows to be stupid. The last thing you want as you are leading the cow into the slaughterhouse is a moment of inspiration on the part of the cow.

The original God was smarter than a Hereford. It was called an Aurochs (R-rocks). Darwin didn't name it that. Farmers did. Farmers painted pictures of Aurochs on cave walls seven thousand years ago. It was Aurochs that pulled the plows of Babylon. And it was Aurochs that fed the armies of Alexander the Great. The last Aurochs was killed by a poacher in Poland in 1627. That was a long time ago, but it was well after the flood.

The Angus, the Ankole Watusi, the Belgian Blue, the British White, theCash, the Devon, the Normande, the Norwegian Red, the Red Angus, the Red Brangus, the Scotch Highlander, the Texas Longhorn, the White Parkand the Zebu, (to name but a few) were all bred from Aurochs by people who never read Mendel. They wouldn't have known Darwin if he had owed them money.

But they knew what every farmer knows: If you take a cow with lots of beef on her and breed her with a bull whose mother had lots ofbeef on her, their offspring will probably be even beefier. Humans havebeen tinkering with the mechanics of evolution for ten thousand years, with cows and wheat and dogs and roses. Natural selection works the same way, it just takes longer: from slime to Einstein in a short four billion years.

But it's not as impressive as faith. Evolution never saved a life. It never turned a bad kid around. The theory of evolution never comforted the parents of an injured child. It never guided a tortured soul to peace. And I can't figure out why so many people want something as noble as faith to be as common as science.