Tom Willis is one of American creation science’s movers and shakers. He heads the Creation Science Association for Mid-America and masterminded the recent school science curriculum controversy in Kansas, where students will no longer be tested on evolution. Today, he believes the Bible to be God’s literal words and says scientists believe in evolution for political reasons. But as a young man Willis was an atheist and trained in the hard sciences. Bob Holmes asked him how he ended up on the road to Damascus.
How did you come to reject evolution?
I was not a Christian-I didn’t know Christianity from the sole of my foot. But I became a creationist-an anti-evolutionist Christian-by a series of, some would say, unusual events. One was a traumatic personal event that caused me to rethink the meaning of life and to seek other solutions from the lifestyle I was living.
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But my conversion was probably more inspired by reading Darwin, and other popularisers of evolution than by reading creationist writings. Because I had studied hard sciences, been a high-school debater, and taken courses in logic, I realised the absurd reasoning that lay behind evolutionists’ arguments and was very powerfully struck that a theory with so little sound reasoning behind it could be so widely accepted among a group of people that calls itself the scientific community.
Do I take it that no evidence on Earth will lead you to change your mind about evolution?
I have answered the question before at the local atheist club by holding up my pocket comb and saying, “Instead of telling me stories about a time in the past about which you have no knowledge, just show me one complex system ever formed by random processes.” All complex systems owe their existence to acts of creation involving planning and work by one or more intelligent beings. I have made this challenge hundreds of times: show me one complex system. It’s obvious that complex systems from 747s to coffee cups are created.
Does it bother you that so few scientists agree with you?
It doesn’t disturb me at all. It is not surprising to me that most scientists don’t believe the obvious. Jesus told us that the world would hate us. This notion that Christianity was ever popular in the world is just myth. The scientific method in our culture is a political venture. I believe that the political forces of history tend to dominate cultural thought and they tend to drive out non-believers.
If you ask most scientists, they wouldn’t say they believe in evolution for political reasons
Oh, of course not. Whatever your religion is, you don’t believe that you arrived at it by a silly method. Generally you believe you have made a sound decision. But because a majority disagree with me doesn’t tell me anything about truth. The majority has throughout history believed silly things.
What harm do you think has resulted from the spread of evolutionary thought?
When I began studying evolution it was obvious that it had been a major rationale for a dominant world view. [During the 20th century] two-thirds of the world’s people were living in evolutionist states-that is, where evolution is the historical myth that is recognised as official truth in the state. Having lived through that and known many people who lived in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland, I realised that evolution as a life philosophy had been empirically tested by our culture and found to be wanting.
Hasn’t Christianity also led to abuses?
You can argue that the Inquisition and the Crusades came from Christianity. But you cannot defend either from Scripture. But you can easily defend Nazi and Communist behaviour from evolutionary theory. Certainly, before Hitler started shooting at Joe Stalin you would not have found many people defending an anti-Hitler view, even in the great bastion of freedom in the United States. That’s important. It’s important to realise that was a scientific view. Hitler’s views were argued to be scientific by many men on every side of the pond, and they managed to carry the day in Eastern Europe. If you recall, Hitler walked into Austria without firing a shot. That’s how popular his views were. It is not just an idle notion that men will believe things that are silly and call them scientific.
Why did you write recently: “Wherever evolutionists have taken over, `evolutionary Christians’ have joined Hitler and Stalin in killing Christians”?
Yes. Not all of them, but some have. Absolutely. You had to be an evolutionist to be a Nazi-that was the state doctrine-but many of them thought they were Christians.
Are you saying that belief in evolution leads humans to commit evil crimes?
I want to be precise about it. Evolution is not the cause of evil in man. There is no hint either in empirical science or in Christianity that evolution is the cause of evil in man, but it is an incredibly successful rationale for evil. It’s one of the best-crafted apologetic systems for evil that I’ve seen in history. It also produces a mindset that if you believe evolution you can’t possibly believe very strongly in a tremendous value associated with individual human life-or any other life, for that matter.
Why do you think God created Darwin?
God specifically said those who refuse to love truth, he will give them a spirit of delusion and cause them to believe a lie. I think Darwin was designed to give the world something to believe. Any child who has read On the Origin of Species can see that he didn’t have a case. I read it when I was a virtual unbeliever and I just filled the margins with unutterable phrases at my shock that such silly reasoning and non-reasoning could be accepted and called science.
Why are so many other Christians-Catholics and Protestants-perfectly at ease with evolution?
You can sit in a garage all day and call yourself a car, but that doesn’t make you one nor does it make your pronouncements about either cars or garages scientifically accurate.
It sounds like you’re saying that mainstream Christians are false Christians.
No, I didn’t say that. Many are false Christians. They can also be mistaken. You don’t believe everything that a Christian says. Why should I? Evolution has to stand on either the scientific evidence or the scriptural evidence. I’ve maintained in this conversation it cannot stand on the scientific evidence and I don’t have to maintain that it can’t stand on the scriptural evidence.
You virtually never hear a Christian defend evolutionism from the Bible. This tends to make me a little bit suspicious. I find that most of them are not interested in the Bible. They’re interested in Christianity as a nice way to bring up kids or some other such idea. Christianity, like evolution, is a truth statement about the history and purpose of the Universe.
Do you think Christians who believe in evolution are evil?
I didn’t say that.
I know you didn’t say that, I’m asking you do you believe that?
I believe that Christians or anybody who teaches evolution as science is likely to be causing harm. I’d have to say yes, some of them are evil. I would have no way of estimating what percentage are evil and what percentage are mistaken. I’m not God and I’m incapable of looking in the heart of man.
You say you’re not anti-science, yet why do you reject the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth?
I have researched the methods by which we have determined or pretended to determine the age of the Earth. I haven’t found one that works. I find that they work only by selectively discarding the dates that we don’t believe or that don’t fit our belief system. I don’t believe that we have developed a method that we can even test. When you go into a grocery store and they claim that your meat weighs 5 pounds, there’s a guy that comes in there every month with a standard 5-pound weight. I’ve asked many a geologist, “Where’s your standard one-million-year-old rock?” They don’t have one and they can’t possibly have one.
Isn’t that a bit glib?
Everyone chuckles and says that’s just rhetoric. No, it’s not rhetoric-they have no way of testing whether or not this is true. Incidentally, the same is true in a court of law. Every courtroom is about an event in the past. We can’t agree on whether O. J. Simpson killed his ex-wife and yet we pretend we know what dinosaurs had for breakfast 100 million years ago.
Where-apart from the Bible-do you get the idea that dinosaurs survived long after most scientists say they became extinct?
The word dinosaur is only 150 years old, but descriptions and pictures and sculpture and art of large reptiles is in every culture. The head of the Chinese museum of natural history stated in the last decade that dragons are not a part of Chinese mythology, they’re a part of Chinese history. What’s he talking about? He’s talking about large reptiles. If you just look at ancient cultures they all teach the same thing. The Bible teaches that large reptiles existed in the time of Job. Behemoth and Leviathan, large beasts from the book of Job, clearly are dinosaurs. When the people who produced the King James Bible translated it they had no idea what he was talking about, so they didn’t give them any English words. They translated them into other words. Since then we’ve dug up creatures that fit those models.
How should science be taught in schools?
There is no such thing as education without religion. When you teach someone from ages 5 to 18, you’re going to make a religious impression, even if it is the false notion that you can make a significant contribution to their life needs without mentioning religion. That is in itself a religious position.
If I had any agenda that I would defend, it would be the idea that scientific theories ought not to be taught in such a way as to require the student to affirm them. Students shouldn’t be required to believe scientific theories. They’re something you learn about, but you don’t have to believe them. And you shouldn’t censor evidence that might put any theory in an unfortunate light. [Right now] you can talk about evidence for an old Earth, but it is a fact that our opponents scream in livid anger at the evidence that points the other way.
Just for the record, do you believe the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun?
I’m sure your readers will love this, but I don’t know. Every physicist who’s looked at it seriously has realised that we don’t know for sure.
