To fund my second year in graduate school at UW-Madison, I applied for several different teaching assistantships. One was to teach introductory biology to freshmen. I was highly qualified for the position and the interview was going really well. It looked like getting the job would be a cinch—until we got to the part of the interview where the biology professors asked, “Do you have any questions for us?”
“Yeah, I do have one question,” I replied. “Is it okay if I don’t believe in evolution? I mean, I can teach it so that the students know the answers for the test, and I’ll tell them most biologists believe in it, but I’ll emphasize that it’s a theory, not proven fact.”
The zoologist who was interviewing me froze, the previously authentic smile on her face suddenly looking fake and forced. “I…don’t…know,” she finally stammered. The biologist was able to collect his thoughts faster. “We’ve never had a TA feel that way before,” he said. “Occasionally we’ll have a student—but never a TA.” He paused for a second. “And I don’t like the way you use the word ‘believe,’” he continued. “Evolution isn’t a belief—it’s a fact.”
It was easy to tell that the interview was over. “You’ll let me know one way or the other, right?” I asked. They said they would, but not surprisingly, I never heard from them again. No way, no how, were they going to risk having a teacher sow seeds of doubt about evolution in a class for impressionable freshmen. And I suspect that if I had asked a similar question, I might have had difficulty getting a biologist to take me on as a graduate student, either.
After this experience, I’ve looked quite differently at the claim that creationism is “unscientific” because all biologists consider evolution to be a proven fact. This consensus is not as free as they make it sound, nor are alternative viewpoints given any legitimate consideration. For at least a hundred years, creationist viewpoints have been blocked from the peer-reviewed literature. It’s actually quite similar to the way organic farming was treated by agronomists in the 1960s—every mention was negative and the possibility that it might be a viable viewpoint worthy of consideration was not open to discussion. Throughout both my undergraduate and graduate classes, I encountered subtle and not-so-subtle sneers at creationism. At UW they often were linked to outright attacks on Christianity. I learned the hard way that all the talk about diversity and inclusion only applied to physical characteristics, like race and gender. Ideological diversity—especially the belief that God created the world—was not allowed.
The reality is that any narrative about the origins of the world is a belief, despite the discomfort scientists feel with that term. One definition of “believe” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is “to consider to be true or honest.” The biologists who interviewed me considered evolution to be true. I considered creationism to be true. Those are both beliefs. And while they would argue that their beliefs are supported by evidence, in reality they are based on interpretations of that evidence. Evolutionists look at fossils in rock layers and say they are evidence of evolution; creationists look at the same fossils and say, with equally logical arguments, that they are evidence of Noah’s flood. Neither explanation can be proven because we can’t time travel or do experiments on the past. So the stories we tell about the origins of the world—even “scientific” ones—are ultimately belief-based. And the “consensus” that evolution is a “scientific fact” only exists because people with different beliefs are excluded.
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