The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution by Adam Laats

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution by Adam Laats Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Do they truly believe Jesus rode around on dinosaurs, as sometimes depicted? Creationism USA reveals how common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. Adam Laats argues that Americans do not have deep, fundamental disagreements about evolution - not about the actual science behind it and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Laats asserts that Americans do, however, have significant disagreements about creationism. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, Laats demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest. Creationism USA digs beyond those headlines to prove two fundamental facts about American creationism. First, almost all Americans can be classified as creationists of one type or another. Second, nearly all Americans (including self-identified creationists) want their children to learn mainstream evolutionary science. Taken together, these truths about American creationism point to a large and productive middle ground, a widely shared public vision of the proper relationship between schools, science, and religion. Creationism USA both explains the current state of America's battles over creationism and offers a nuanced yet straight-forward prescription to solve them.

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My author, we, we of course have the brilliantest authors on the chris fosh show uh just uh just people that will expand your mind make you think make you better and you know if you think better you're actually better looking and more sexy this will improve your tinder profile results and everything else. Today we have Adam Lotz. He is the Creationism USA author, Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution. It's from Oxford University Press. You know those folks over at Oxford, they're always brilliant. Adam is no creationist. He taught middle school and high school for 10 years in Milwaukee, and now he is a professor of education at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

He studies the history of culture wars in America's schools and has published books like Creationism USA, Fundamentalist U, and The Other School Reformers. Welcome to the show, Adam. How are you? Hey, great, Chris. Thanks for having me. So, Adam, give me your plugs. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Well, I tweet. My name is Adam Lotz, so I'm at Adam Lotz, L-A-A-T-S. And then the books are available, obviously, on Amazon or anywhere else, Creationism USA, the publisher Oxford University Press.

There you go. Lots of brilliant people we've had on from Oxford University Press. Good school. Good school. They clearly won't let me in, so that's why we have you on. All I've got is my Oxford shirt, and that's the closest I'm going to get. So you've written this book. Give us what motivated you want to write this book on creationism? Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm a historian and I had

written about and most of my stuff was about the history of schools, especially the way people fight about schools. So as I mentioned, generally at home, I'm only limited to 25 words or less, you know, about any of that stuff. And I think it's a good policy. I'm not allowed to talk about Star Trek either or the history of submarines. I mean, there's just a bunch of stuff I'm not allowed to talk about. Well, the history of submarines is very controversial. I mean, if you've ever seen Red October, that's some controversy right there.

All right, yeah. These are the things I'm not allowed to talk about at home. But, look, one night we were sitting around, and my sister-in-law, she's a secular person like me, and the question that she had on her mind was like, all right, all right, you're not going to talk about history and stuff. But I just want to know, like, what's the deal? How in I think it was 2011 back then. How in the 21st century can there be so many people run around who won't admit that science is true you know creationists how can there be one of our whole political parties i won't mention any names but i think we all know which one

one of our parties is in thrall to these ideas creationist ideas that, this was her question, that go against every single piece of science that is available. It doesn't take much scientific knowledge to know that our planet can't be only 6,000 years old. I mean, you don't have to be a scientist to know that. I mean, that's like inject bleach level science. Yeah. I mean mean everyone knows that anything this flat can never be a thousand years old so that was her question like just explain it to me like how is it possible so you know we talked and then i was like you know what

i'm gonna write a book to try to explain it how this is possible and it turned into this book there you go so uh let's lay a foundation for those of uh people like me who went to betsy devos public school uh what is creationism exactly what's the definition of that yeah i i was thinking it was something to do with me having more kids or something yeah well first of all betsy devos public school that's called a private school chris oh well she's over public school you know you're really breaking down my joke yeah yeah um okay so and one of the arguments that I make in the book for people like Liz and me you know secular people who just don't get it uh one

of the things is that you know creationism if you if you take a sort of uh general definition you know the idea that god or gods or some sort of divine something had to be part of how you know this all happened you know you and me sitting here the sun the moon the trees that's super common like you'd say almost every american has some version of that kind of creationism. And the kicker is that most people who are creationists, you know, who think, you know, gods were involved or God, they've got no problem with science. So it's not the creationism makes you doubt science. It's this specific kind of creationism that goes against mainstream science. In the book, I call them radical creationists. Noah's Ark, right next to the Florence Yall sign, there's this huge ark in Kentucky. But it's not really the huge number of Americans that you might think.

So give us an overview of the book and what it's about. Sure, absolutely. So to answer my sister-in-law's question, you know, what's the deal with creationism? I start with a sort of a field guide. You know, if you're if you're an outsider, if you're not religious or even if you are, there's lots of different kinds of creationism. You know, just as one, for example, I think a lot of us think of the sort of evangelical preacher creationist type, you know, the sort of, you know, TV preacher, that kind of creationist. And that's one kind for sure. But I mean, think of all the Catholics out there, the LDS, you know uh church of jesus christ the latter-day saints you know they aren't really known as creationist religions because generally well lds is a complicated story but generally if you're catholic um your church you know and catholics are the

biggest single religious group in the united states um your church is creationist, but it's not, you know, like creationist. You know, Catholics don't go and build Noah's arks in Kentucky. They build castles in Italy. So the first chapter looks at how you can be a different kinds of creationism in America. The second chapter looks at the history uh one thing i think that is surprising to some people who don't know is that the this kind of creationism this young earth creationism it's new it it wasn't a thing in the early part of the 20th century so you got all these fundamentalists running around the 1920s they were fighting against evolution. But they, embarrassingly, for today's young earth crowd, they went out of their way to say, a young earth doesn't make any sense. That it's, you know,

you don't have to read the Bible that way. And these are the folks, they read the Bible as their main sort of source of inspiration. But the young earth stuff is new. And it didn't come out of um any of the big traditions but rather came out of seventh day adventism really yeah so uh i don't know you remember uh william miller uh he was the creator of it yeah when i say remember uh i mean remember reading about him in the 1840s he predicted that uh jesus was coming back he had done it with math and the Bible. And in Vermont and upstate New York, there were a lot of believers, Adventists. They thought Jesus' Advent was nigh. So some of them famously, not as many as the stereotype, but some of them sold all their stuff. And they put on white gowns and they got on top of their barns. Because William Miller said,

all right, it's this day in october at this time you know like an eclipse uh and clearly the world didn't end that day um it didn't well but see for for miller's followers especially one uh ellen g white was uh she was young at the time, and she started having visions to explain what happened. And, of course, they explained it in ways that made sense to them. Jesus did come. It's just that you couldn't see him. He was on like a speed train tour. He was on a bus tour, and the bus just went through town.

There you go. He transformed heaven. So Ellen G. White founded this new religion, Seventh-day Adventists. And they're most famous, at least to, you know, heathens like me, for things like Lil Debbie's. Lil Debbie's, that's a Seventh-day Adventist snack food. Oh, is it? Yeah. There's no, it's, you know, the snack cake or what do you call them? Swiss cake rolls.

No lard. There's no lard. Damn. You just ruined my whole little Debbie's fetish. Yeah. The idea is Ellen G. White has all these visions. And one of them is you're not supposed to eat animals. So you need food that doesn't have animal stuff in it.

We get Swiss cake rolls from Little Debbie's. But you also, God took her on a tour of everything, the universe and creation. And so she saw God create the world in six days, like 6,000 years ago. So for her followers, it was a sort of article. Well, it was an article of faith that the earth had to be young and our species had to be, you know, Shazam, Adam and Eve, you know, in the garden, just like the book says. And most other like Baptists at the time in the in the in the up until the 18th 1920s they didn't believe any of that but the seventh day adventists did so uh they keep preaching and in the 60s um they convince uh enough people that uh this this young earth creationism is born. But it isn't born in the way we know it until the 1960s. So it's not like there's an ancient young earth belief that sort of lingers.

It's a very modern thing. And it was created only because science, sorry, mainstream science, was getting more and more confident about how old the earth had to be that some religious people had to come up with a response. And the response in the 1960s was like, all right, say whatever you want. We know you're lying. The earth is only 6,000 years old ish. Wow. See, I was raised LDS and, uh, and they, they taught us that I think there's was like 4,000 years old. There's like 2000 pre in 2000. I didn't keep good track of it because I didn't believe in anyone anyway. But yeah, I mean, basically it was that sort of premise. And then,

you know, as a kid or growing up and getting older, you'd read about, you know, scientists discover this thing and using technology, they've that you know fossil whatever is like 10 000 years old and you're like way you know millions of eons you know so what do you call someone like me who's an atheist and i don't i don't necessarily believe in something i i i know that we have space dust in our DNA, so there might be some Mars origination, Big Bang. I don't really know. I'm not an agnostic either. I'm more leaning toward that space dust theory. But I think, what's his face talks about a lot?

The scientist that you see, the African-American scientist guy, really brilliant. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson, really brilliant. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson, really brilliant. So I think I subscribe kind of his version, but I also take a science approach where it's like everything's a theory until it's just proven. What do you call people like me? I mean, what's the opposite, I guess, of creationism?

Well, if I would come up with the term my opinion my argument in the book is that most americans are creationists but i don't care like you know okay you know they believe whatever they believe but they don't try to like make schools teach science in a certain way yeah they want schools to teach science yeah for people who are atheists, I think the same number, the same labels might work. A small number of Americans are atheists. They don't believe, you know, that there was any spaghetti monster. There was nothing involved. It was just, it just happened. Accident isn't a word that the scientists like to use, and not random either, but it wasn't guided by anything externally intelligent. No divinity was involved, anything like that. politeness i'd say i just don't care about you the only time that matters is if you get someone who would be a radical atheist who'd say hey you the public schools have to teach children

to believe in my beliefs which is it's you know panspermia or stardust or whatever we want to call it that my belief has to influence uh what goes on in school not and there's a difference between saying the best science which is you know the same things that i think the best science should be influencing what goes on in public school if you agree with that that doesn't make you radical but if you say kids have to be disabused of their notions about jesus you know we have to tell kids you cannot believe in the garden of eden it's bogus that's child abuse for you to be taught that i think that's radical atheism it doesn't sound like that's what you're saying yeah the thing i'm okay with you know i i learned a long time ago and what i settled in with my atheism

is it's okay for me and i realized that i in studying a lot of people and why they believe things i realized that this the universe is chaos life is chaos it there it's it's a horror show for some people it's terrifying for some people it was when i was young i was like oh my god this sort of world and bad things happen. And there's a need in our humanity to try and create order from that chaos as much as we can, or to feel like we have some sort of influence or control or mastery of it. Although some of it, that's self-deluded. If you think you master the universe, wait till an earthquake or hurricane comes by and you'll find out, you know, mother nature has

their own plan um but i learned a long time ago that there's a lot of people that subscribe to these different sort of things and i kind of look at them as like magazine subscriptions of thought and is our catalog and and like if people need to pick certain things to get through this experience of life and whatever is on the other side well then that's cool man like if if somebody's got to be a catholic that's cool just don't hurt other people with it and just don't force other people to believe it and so i'm i'm completely fine with it you know uh i'm not knocking on doors like the mormons that on or the seven day of venice on saturday morning when you're hung over going, have you heard about the big nothing?

Like after you die, it's just all black. You want to hear more about that shit? Because there's like, well, there's nothing more. Yeah, and I think you and I, it sounds like we're on the same page. In terms of policy and science in schools, I want to make sure in this book that everyone ends up, you know, disliking me. So the thing that some advocates would say and that I'm disagreeing with, people like Lawrence Krauss, for example, astrophysicist, Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, biologist, they advocate that it's child abuse children to be taught these things that are patently untrue like the human race human species came out only 10 000 years ago

because they say look it can't possibly be true you can't teach children that um we have to save these children by by giving them the truth and that me that this is where i disagree i think if if families um if things are abusive like actually abusive and there are some religions that that hate hedge into that with you know exorcisms and things like that and that's abusive suicide cults yeah yeah conversion therapies i these things really are abusive, and they're religious. And the government has not just a right, but a duty to intervene. Yeah. But, well, let me ask it to you this way, Chris. Say you're a middle school science teacher, yeah?

Mm-hmm. And you teach evolution for two weeks, and the kids kind of do their project and this one kid does a good project and he he makes sort of like a um you know a phenotype chart of you know how horses evolved it demonstrates that he really gets it you know in a good way and then so you give him a grade at the science fair and you're like all right cool and he's like but mr voss i gotta tell you i know this is all bogus because well because i learned in church that uh these ideas came from the devil to fool us and get us away from god's word in the bible which is you know that we're only six that the planet's only 6 000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on the boat and the boat was real and there was a real flood my reply would be damn you found us out

you got us kid now don't breed um the uh no you know i'm i'm i'm you know life is a giant i guess one thing i have learned or settled on is life is a giant catalog i mean what you choose to do in life your career path your education path everything is it's a kaleidoscope of of adventures and stories and paths you can go on and what's good for me like i'm fine i don't call people up or be like you should be an atheist it's a it's really cool over here the tithing is really cheap um the um, and I try and be respectful of other people's religions as much as I can. In fact, I've had people on the show that are religious, and we've brought up the topic of, well, Chris, would you be okay if – one of the issues you have with religion is it's so multifaceted and it has so many different competing things i think i saw once uh maybe this reference from chris rich and we created like 3 000 gods of man and so i was

talking to a friend of mine who i believe is baptist or or one of the other main religions and he said you know would you have a problem if we you know we promote our religion or we put our you know 10 commandments on the courthouse steps i said look you know i honestly promote our religion, we put our, you know, Ten Commandments on the courthouse steps. I said, look, you know, I honestly wouldn't have that much of a problem, but you got to be fair. So if you got to put ISIS's, whatever their thing is, the occult people or whatever their thing is, you know, you got to have everybody. It's got to be inclusive, I think is the word I'm looking for. But the problem with some of the, you know, ultra right-wing radical Christians, the white Christians especially, is they're just like, our faith is the only one. And sadly, you hear that from ISIS, too.

So if, like, all the religions can kind of work it all out to where everybody gets represented, yeah, I'm cool with it, man. You can put a little, I don't know, Big Bang explosion. I don't even want a plaque. don't i just don't give a shit well i think that's part of what makes uh you know for outsiders trying to understand american creationism one of the um the the the it's not like hidden but it is it seems it seems surprising is that the the folks you're talking about, the sort of politically conservative, Baptist, you know, Protestant, not always Baptist, but, you know, Protestant, a lot of them from an evangelical tradition, although, you know, some Lutherans and other non-evangelical groups as well um often people assume that they are um absolutely opposed to um evolutionary theory and once you start getting into and reading the culture and going to the museums and reading the literature these days they're they're not um so for example if you go uh to answers in genesis they're the folks who built the big ark in um in kentucky the ark encounter their official policy is that they do

not want creationism taught in public schools and in fact they want evolutionary theory taught even in private schools that are you know on their team you know they're they the schools that teach their kind of creationism um they want their kids to learn evolution which seems like they're making all this money off that boat they're not uh so some of the the folks that, you know, the watchdogs, this is a little side business, like the answers in Genesis stuff are like a million people came. And then the watch it's kind of a question of who's gonna go and then you know there's people like me go and we don't believe it we just want to see the we want to see the spectacle sort of yeah and it includes some stuff you wouldn't even guess like diorama i still don't understand this one because i don't know the bible well enough a diorama of a guy like in a gladiator fight with like a giant

cyclops with a horn and stuff on the ark well yeah well it's kind of like the museum part of the ark oh so it's like is that supposed to be david or something david goliath no goliath i don't think had he wasn't like a monster he was was just a big guy. And it was definitely like a – anyway, there's a bunch of stuff that you just don't expect if you're going from the outside. And one of them is, if you ask them, they'll say, oh, no, no, no. We actually want our kids to learn evolution. So in the book, here's one that I did. I read that from their published stuff. And after doing this for years, I've been able to make some connections. So I asked some for a while, I had a blog running about this stuff. And she was a regular contributor. And she was a young Earth creationist. And she was a homeschooler.

And she first contacted me because she was trying to find ways to teach her kids. And she's a young Earth creationist homeschooling mom. She wanted to teach her kids evolution. And so, you know, this is the first I'd heard of this. I thought she would not want to teach her kids evolution. And so, you know, this is the first I'd heard of this. I thought she would not want to teach her kids evolution. This is before I, you know, knew what Answers in Genesis was saying. So I went and we have in our upstate New York where I live, there's some creation schools, like K-12 schools. And I went and I asked the principal of one of them. Do you guys, like two questions.

One, do you teach evolution? And do you brag about teaching evolution? Like to parents who are thinking about paying money to send their kids here because we know how to teach evolution. And I think this is the key term. We know how to teach evolution right. Like they don't want to teach evolution the way I would want to teach evolution in a public school. They want their kids to know it, which is what I would want to. But then they want their kids to know what's wrong with it and why they don't believe it. Oh, I was expecting you to say that they would teach evolution,

but like God's hand was in it. Like God turned Jesus from a tadpole to a frog. Well, there are those schools as well. That's what I go with. There's a larger group of of create i think you know you have to call them creationists i think that god guided creationism or evolution and that evolution is just god's tool and that's that's a very large group of christians but that's not the answers in genesis that's not the radical creationist type and i love how that arc that's

in kentucky we've been talking about has dinosaurs in the in the cages like like i want to know who on noah's team because i read the bible as a kid thinking maybe there's something in here i need to learn i read the bible and i don't remember hearing about a velociraptor wrangler running around like who's the poor bastard trying to get that shit done yeah yeah and and when i before they built the ark i went and visited the creation museum which is you know 40 miles away but same group same idea and i didn't know as much back then this is you know gosh 15 years ago maybe i don't know but i noticed they had dragons everywhere like like there was a dragon room there's a dragon theme and this is when i was just starting to read about it so yeah 15 20 years ago

and it turns out the dragons were a key thing because for this group answers in genesis dragons like the dragons in various mythologies and folklores, those were like real. And what they were was people seeing dinosaurs. Oh, right. It's like a whole Game of Thrones thing here. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And the reason it's so important for folks like Answers in Genesis, these young Earth creationists, to put the dinosaurs in the cages on the ark, and it makes sense. That's the thing about young Earth creationism. I think sometimes, like my sister-in-law, thought it was just a huge group of dumb, dumb, dumb people. And that's not fair. I don't think that's accurate. I'll leave that to you. In my opinion, it's a huge group of people who have a separate and alternative and largely coherent group of ideas that they can teach their kids. And the dinosaurs, they only make sense

in a coherent world. Because if it wasn't coherent, and tell me where I go off the rails here, Chris. If it wasn't coherent, the Answers in Genesis folks would get rid of the dinosaur part because they know that's the kookiest to you and me. I mean, that's like Flintstones-level science. science uh but they keep it and they emphasize it because it's a huge part of the coherence of the way they understand history so dig if god created eden all the animals um humans and it just happened like the way they said in the book there was an actual global flood two of every kind of animal had to get on the boat um if that's true if that's going to make any sense then it has to include all the animals that ever lived squeezed into that whatever 6,000-year history,

including dinosaurs. So it makes sense. Yeah. This is something I've studied all my life in leaving religion and being an atheist is why people believe the things they do, whether it's religion or whether it's like little green Martian men or the world Earth is flat, which we all know is true. Or, you know, whatever,

pick your belief, you know, pick, pick your stupid belief. We all have stupid beliefs and scotomas and stuff. And, and, and trying to get into reality is, is, is what seems to be a life goal, especially for some people, let's put it that way. Um, and so it's interesting to me what beliefs people choose to, and then that, that, uh, uh, I'm trying to me what beliefs people choose to. And then that, I'm trying to think what the right word is, but the attenuating system that they build around that belief to substantiate it, to give it validity, is quite extraordinary. Like, you know, the one thing about the Ark is we brought two of every creature. Well, insects, microbiology, you know, microbiology cells and different things. Did you make sure you got all that on there? Germs, you know, flu bugs, I don't know, nuclear cells. Did you make sure that was all getting on the Ark there with your little, you know, like I said,

whoever was the poor velociraptor Tyrannosaurus rex wrangler who had the stick and the rock and was trying to get in the arc, you stupid Velociraptors. And then I love the part with the seven days. Here's an omnipotent god, I guess. I don't know if that's the right word. He's all powerful. He's all seeing. He builds the whole fucking universe. But after six days of building the earth, this poor guy's got to rest because his back hurts or some shit

like what the fuck is that so yeah there's a lot of that stuff that's in there that i just don't really get so in the book you get into all this stuff right including um some of the stuff so one of my um one of my one of my past academic books was about the history of um evangelical colleges places in the news now like liberty university that book was called fundamentalist you i was sitting in the corner watching that with my wife and the pool boy too yeah yeah so the i think the thing that's important to understand, or one of the things that's important to understand, is that we non-creationists and even moderate creationists need to be careful about assuming that people who believe these ideas that are scientifically impossible, like you say, really two of every micro um the for for you know the last 50 years or so these young earth creationists have debated all these things now don't get me wrong i i bet there

are plenty of just dumb ignorant people of all beliefs including younger creationists but in the colleges you have these academics and they're wrestling with those questions and other questions. Like, for example, physics, how could you possibly have enough rain in the clouds to cover the entire Earth? That's impossible. Like that's just the scientists have said, have said well no they've worked out a different way of understanding uh reality so reality broken into dispensations makes different sense in the dispensation where there was uh eden you have a whole different layer in the firmament you know in the sky and the bible explains it apparently so i think one mistake that i made early is being um you you don't need to assume that everyone is smart and a genius who believes these things

seem ridiculous oh i stopped assuming that a long fucking time ago, man. Right, yeah. And there are systems to each of it. So in Chapter 5 of this book, I go into way too nerdy detail about what you learn when you go to a creationist college that makes you feel like you're learning science. You are learning a kind of science. And it's infinitely mysterious, and you can get the basics kind of early, easy, you know, like bio 101 at a school like mine, a public university. But then you know that you could get a PhD and get into more and more detail and in fact, spend your whole life studying a tiny little aspect of these sciences. So I do think that's an important part to understand creationism is to understand um it's more complicated than just people who don't care about science people do care about science

you know i and i i i there's no way to say this without being critical but i've often looked at some of the the things that people subscribe to the logs they hold on to get through this life, the, the belief system, let's call them that that they subscribe to. They like the simplicity of the nature of it. Sometimes we do that in politics. We do that in everything really. And there's a lot of people that would rather have the simple answer or the conveniently easier answer.

Like, well, why is all this shit here? Oh, Jesus made it. And it's here for me. And then there's some sort of, there's some great real estate afterwards that we get, which I don't know why the whole thing had to go down. But, you know, that's the creator's business. But it's interesting to me, like, like for me, even as an atheist, you know, I remember biology class and all the different things, you know,

cellular macro level, you know, all that kind of crap. That's clearly complex. I'm just going to stick with, I'm an atheist and I believe in science, but I don't really want to know the details. So even I'm guilty of doing the simple, give me the simple answer and let me run with that baby. But I feel a lot of people do that in religion where they're just like, give me the preformed construction manual and I'll just cite from it and we'll call it a day. Yep.

I agree entirely. I think you can even take it one step further, which is people want, they want to know that there's a bunch of expert opinion out there that proves what they already think is right. So, for example, in the book, I lay out the explanation that, yes, radical creationism you know the stuff about you know a six-day actual creation the flood a real flood 6 000 year history that kind of stuff yes that's about religion but mainly these days it's about things like lgbtq rights uh in the in the 20th century was about things like communism and anti-communism it's about things like abortion and climate change you know it's not yes it's theological and yes it's scientific but the real disagreement doesn't come about the science of evolution or honestly the theology of you know biblical interpretation real distinction comes

about same-sex marriage um rights for uh you know non-traditional uh couples uh abortion rights you know that all the rest of the culture war issues that you would think have nothing to do with creationism in fact they have everything to do with creationism so you wrote the title of the book creationism usa is this a problem in other countries or is this kind of our thing no uh one of the things you read in the newspaper every once in a while and even science guy bill nye uh you know who is a great uh you know i love him my kid loved him um he even said that this is an american thing and that that's a misunderstanding you can do it two different ways first of all you can look at the guy who built the ark in kentucky ken ham he's from australia so he's not even american

some of the some of the the sort of more uh punchy critics call him you know the ayatollah of kentucky which i think is funny but it kind of misunderstands american creationism because it makes it sound like he's you know sort of from the backwoods or whatever he's not he's an international superstar from you know from australia he's from a different country he's a cosmopolitan uh educated um you know uh he's a he's an immigrant plus money's money right you know if you can come up with a gimmick makes it i i don't like the tons of corporations businesses business at least that's how i don't know what i don't know what his angle is but um so uh um let's talk about the coronavirus and Donald Trump. I guess let's start with coronavirus.

How does the history of creationism help understand the politics of the coronavirus? Because we've seen a lot of this. A lot of people have a hard time with it because it's a molecular, biomolecular, you know, sort of structure. You know, they think that coronavirus shows up and goes, hi, can we hang out for a while? Yeah, well, I'm glad you asked. I think there, I know like when I am in my friends, circles of friends and acquaintances, you often hear this expression like people will say i understand maybe how people could support the president's policies and want to get more conservatives on the supreme court i i understand that stuff what i don't understand you'll hear people say is how someone can with a straight face

say that president trump has mastered the science of fighting a pandemic when he says things like injecting disinfectant could be a cure, which he said back in the day. Hang on, let me take a swig of this bleach here. What were you saying about disinfectant? You got to inject it. Oh, it's injection? I've been drinking it. Damn it.

That's just a social thing though his clorox is nasty but and i think i i think it's it's it's similar to creationism in that you have people like me saying how could anyone agree with president trump's science he's being anti-science and he's not if you. I mean, sometimes he is because he's everyone. But generally, what he says is, I've got better science. I have science on my side said don't listen to science they haven't said you know hunker down in your in your um bible uh lined room and don't join the modern world no they said actually those scientists are not real scientists the ones who say millions of years. Donald Trump, believe it or not, campaigns as if on the promise that he's got superior science.

And the reason, I don't know if you saw this from FiveThirtyEight, but this is just last week, over 80% of registered GOP voters, not just like Donald Trump in general general they approve of donald trump's handling of the covid pandemic which uh you know to people like me just seems astounding like yeah you know like say you might like the guy but don't say that injecting bleach is good science i mean that's just that's just and this is where i think it gets so close to

the whole key to understanding the world of creationism people like me are tempted to be like you and this is what richard dawkins said the you know the oxford biologist you got to be ignorant you got to be insane or you have to be wicked was his word for all three or all three and i think that's the wrong way to understand it the key is not science the key isn't even the bible the key are you ready are you ready for the key go all right the key is trust people who trust the donald believe that whatever people say about him is really fake news and if it's fake news who cares if someone comes running in and i know they're a liar and they tell me something i don't care how outrageous it is because i know they're lying now young creationists have the best trump card sorry the best um ace in the hole when it comes to trust because uh you remember the

story right um you got eve in the garden god had just said hey welcome to the garden and for some strange god reason do whatever you want but don't eat that tree the fruit from that tree i can't tell you why but don't trust. Trust me, don't. What the snake said, what the serpent said to Eve was alluring. The snake didn't say, I'm evil, come and join my team, and this apple from this tree is going to turn you evil. What the snake said was, I know better. Eat the apple from the tree, and then you'll know better. It's knowledge.

The tree of knowledge, right? Yeah. Creationists say, hey, this is the oldest trick in the book. When those scientists come to you and say, the earth has to be millions of years old. When those scientists come to you and say, there's no way Adam and Eve, something, something, something, that's the serpent's voice in your ear. And so don't only ignore it because you're dumb. Ignore it because you're smart.

So this is kind of interesting what you're talking about. One of the aspects of that feature is narcissism, which Trump has. He's a malignant narcissist. And you know what was interesting is we had a gentleman on the show named Chuck DeGroat, and he wrote this book called When Narcissism Comes to Church, Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. We had him on the show, and one thing he talked about was one of the problems in religion is there's a lot of narcissism going on, especially with preachers and reverend. And I wonder if that plays into what you were just talking about with people believing this narcissistic stuff. I think it does so not in the creationism usa book but in my academic research

about you know the history of of evangelical colleges i spent a lot of time studying these colleges that you know of course there's always been evangelical colleges like harvard was an evangelical college but this kind started in the 1920s and so i don't know how closely you've been following well i know you've been closely following because I heard you talk about sitting in the corner with the pool boy. Very closely following the pool boy in my life. The story at Liberty University, I think to people who don't know the world of creationism and conservative evangelicalism, they think, and there was a great piece that just came out in Politico about the Falwells and the pool boy and, you know, Becky and Jerry walking on campus and saying like, ooh, I'd do her. Ooh, I'd do him. You know, did you read this?

It's pretty. I didn't read that part yet. I've been missing that. You got to read it. It's Brandon Ambrosino is one of the authors. It's a great piece. Michael Stratford. And one more author.

I'm slipping. You know, I'm just at that point where like anytime the death protests too much, anytime you're a religious person, the harder you're banging that Bible about gays and marriage and whatever your thing is, the more I know that there's some closet with some giant ass skeletons on that topic in your in your house right and i'm just waiting for them to fall out yeah so you know you the the jim and tammy faye baker you might not remember them uh the um the saddleback rick warren you know it's just scandal after scandal and i think it's not i don't well in my opinion and you know from his the 20th century history it's nothing about like the actual religion it's about this question of outsiders from mainstream american culture who have built up this culture of trust and mistrust

you know if you're an insider you have to go with what we're saying because those outsiders are always talking stuff about us and they're going to lie to you. So one thing that can happen, and a lot of times it doesn't happen, but it comes to the headlines when it does happen, is that an authoritarian leader can abuse easily these circles of trust and mistrust. Because they can just say, oh, and this is how Jerry Falwell Jr. survived so long. He survived so long in spite of all these scandals, because he could just say, that's the kind of thing the enemies of Liberty University have been saying forever. Yeah, and he did, I remember him saying that over the... Yeah, they just want to bring down a Christian institution. And the people who trust, who have built up this culture of trust and ferocious mistrust.

It's not that they're dumb or even that they're gullible. Some of them might be, but that's a language that the institution has formalized and built into how it operates. So they got no leg to stand on to say well you know there's no external it's an authoritarian institution there's no external group there's a board of trustees only there's no external group to to call bs on that yeah what's interesting to me and i don't know if you talk about this in the book but it comes in the same play of this creationism and stuff is is the self-interest of all of this um where where it's like i must be exceptional like the the thing we wake up to as human beings and the thing that keeps up this night is why are we here and what happens after we die and what was the purpose of

me being here we and we have to come out with some sort of exceptionalism like i'm smarter than the snake i'm smarter than the dog which you know some people aren't uh clearly uh if you've ever watched fail videos or america's greatest uh whatever video show um hold my beer as the famous last words but but there's always this exceptionalism to it like today i was speaking with somebody uh with good intentions we were talking about the human body and they'd seen some different things about the human body and how great it was and you know and the implication was is because it was built by a divine being in their own image it's always interesting like everyone's always like we're built in you know some, some guy's image for all we know, you know, I don't know. God is some sort of space alien who's purple and he's got weird ears, you know, pick your science fiction movie. And, you know, we're just like an ant farm. He's like,, we're really messed up build.

I mean, the way that we give birth, the way that we, the way that our eyes are in her head compared to other creatures, I mean, just the whole evolutional build of us is a, is a fucking shit show. Like there's no divine intervention there for most of the biologists that I've seen read or write about this,

but it's always that exceptionalism they have to get into. Like I'm here for a purpose. Why? Some special vapor in the ether guy decided that I should be built and I'm here for that purpose. What's your purpose? I don't know, man. It's in the book or something. It's always interesting to me how that always has that sort of selfish sort of interest to it. Oh yeah. And I, I want to be careful with this point cause I, I,

it can be misinterpreted, but historically you get that sense of sort of intellectual hubris on the side of, of creationism and young earth creationism, but you also get it from these uh missionaries for science through history um and i don't think that's what you're saying but i do think that there's this tradition that uh the the phrase that people pick up on is one that darwin used there's a there's a grandeur in this view of life, meaning once you really understand sort of evolutionary processes and the way it works, it's not like you said, it's not that these bodies were created to be perfect.

It's that these bodies exist at all, you know, with the appendix that we that we don't need anymore, but we have it for evolutionary reasons, which with these hands, which, you know with the appendix that we that we don't need anymore but we have it for evolutionary reasons which with these hands which you know like when you study the different you know the bat's hands or the bat's wings and the dog's paw and the human's hand you can see evolutionarily this is not necessarily how they would be designed if you had every range of choices you know you were stuck evolutionarily with things but there are these missionaries for science who take this idea that you're talking about like this exceptional idea and they use it for the non-religious you know like the the the other side of evolution and one of the i think think the reasons why we fight so much about evolution unnecessarily is because we shouldn't care. And by we, I mean the American public square.

I should care. You should care. My mom should care. Your mom should care. Like people should care about themselves and their families and their churches or their clubs or whatever. But if we're making up laws and curricula for schools and for town meetings we should um painstakingly not care uh what people want to believe about this stuff so we need to get rid of the exceptionalism part and just let uh even if we don't like it, we should let the best science or history or literature, that should be what we teach in schools. You know, and we've seen the destructive element of ignoring science or disputing it or just being like, yeah, whatever.

You know, I've even had people say with the coronavirus, well, if it's God's will that I get coronavirus, then I'll get it, or God will protect me from the coronavirus. I think we've all seen the different preachers who've said that and died of coronavirus. You know, it's interesting to me how extraordinary we'll be at ignoring the obvious or science. You know, I feel for, I kind of feel for parents. I didn't have kids, but I've often thought, what would I have thought or done if my child looked up to me and said, hey, Daddy, you know, why are we here and what goes on thereafter?

And if Grandma dies or Puppy Dog dies, what happens what happens the puppy dog and it's so much easier to go with the well son there's like a heaven and a special place they go to you know for me as an atheist it's just like they just know they just end there's nothing i remember mormons used to say to me they'd like, what if you die and there's just blackness? I'll be like, well, I won't know because it will just be blackness. I mean, I'm not going to be laying around a blackness going, this blackness fucking sucks. I wish I could get a Coke. You know, it's just, it'll be over. Right.

So, you know, I often wonder about it. It certainly is convenient to have some of these pre-built construction things because then you can go you know even i gotta tell you honestly even after my my first dog died and i went through really painful time losing what i termed as a child um i really wanted to subscribe to some of those things like the rainbow bridge or that there's a heaven like i could just really feel my my brain just going we could believe that shit that sounds good let's do that because it it makes it hurt less but uh you know i mean but then i got a crossover into the fantasy land and that's like a whole spin cycle uh hole

that just you know never ends if i if i try to cross that line, at least in my opinion. So it's interesting to me, um, how we go through all these different things. Uh, what are some other aspects in the book that we haven't touched on? Um, well, uh, one of them is, is similar to what you're bringing up, um, which is that people tend to put their belief first and their science second. So, for example, there have been a couple of studies, and studies don't really show usually what people want them to show, what I'd like them to show, but it's suggestive here. So, for example, in one study that they did with Harvard undergrads, they taught a unit about evolution.

And before and after, they asked students to talk about what they kind of thought about evolution and they knew more about evolution um and it didn't change much what they believed about it uh but and here's one of the the points that that's a tough takeaway people in that study and they spoke focus specifically on the concepts of natural selection and other you know key terms in in um the sort of neo-Darwinian synthesis evolution. It didn't matter in that study how well they could explain natural selection compared to how much they said they believed it. So people would say they believed it and not know it, or people would say they don't believe it and they do know it and so the the the knowledge and belief uh ignorance and and um understanding it's all messed up and so others there's another one at louisiana state undergrads and they um the same thing uh so one the student that really sticks with me he's like i definitely

think evolution is true and they're like okay so how does it work and it sticks with me obviously so he um the student says all right so there's cheetahs right and cheetahs are like, ah, we're hungry. So they decided to run faster so they could get more food, or else they'd go extinct. That's evolution. And that's not, I mean, that's like maybe a family guy level explanation of evolutionary science. It's like, no, there wasn't a meeting of cheetahs. We should learn to run faster.

Yeah, they didn't. Come on down to the run faster cheetah workshop today yeah 7 a.m it's that's you know one of the concepts it's tough about things like natural selection is a lot of uh our our minds as you've been saying are sort of i don't want to say hardwired but they tend to look for cause they tend to look for explanation and if there isn't a cause or an explanation they'll make one up to fit and so this student studied um uh you know he studied evolution they're like all right come back and tell us what you think he's like well i still think evolution is true um and and then he went back to his cheetahs he's like okay so the cheetahs didn't decide to run faster it's just that over time they realized that they had to run faster over time and it's like you know and i'm a

teacher i've been a teacher for like i don't know 20 years now it's i love this kid you know it's like because either way i just picture him and this none of this is in the study i'm just picturing him both times being entirely confident and explaining these wacky schemes so like the second time he got closer you know he's like all right cheetahs over time learn to run faster it's like all right buddy i love you but that's not right either that's not what evolutionary theory says the point being uh the studies seem to suggest that um if we want to talk about ignorance and evolution it's not just a one-way street it's not just that the people who believe evolution are in the know and creationists are ignorant some are some aren't some people believe evolution and they don't know anything about it some disbelieve and they don't know anything about it some disbelieve and they

know a bunch about it some believe and they know a ton about it it's just a mess yeah so how do we resolve it all how do we uh i mean are we just have we just been living with the creationism usa for all those 200 plus whatever years of our republic or is there any resolve to this are we going to keep wandering around the dark like a gang of idiots i in my mind the solution will come uh in a way that gives me optimism that it might actually work with real live actual americans because the solution doesn't come from heroic striving the solution comes from people like me like you like science teachers like baptist ministers people agreeing at what point they're just going to relax and go back home and sit on the couch yeah so for example just educate yourselves i mean uh i think we need more leaders like you say that

they advocate for science see if i was like a creationist i get really good with it like my thing would be like yeah there was evolution, but Jesus made it happen. Jesus said, you're a cheetah and you're a snake. That's what I do. So back to the coronavirus. I'm going to charge for it. I know you've been following folks like the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, mapper of the human genome, like America's like hero science guy. He is a leading creationist.

Wow. He inspired a group who does exactly what you say. They call themselves bio logos. And their point is to tell Christians particularly because they're Christian. Look at God. The Francis Collins quote is, the God of the Bible is the God of the genome. God's all powerful. He doesn't have to give us a book that spells it out like in comic book form,

here's what happened with the flood and the garden and the snake. Those are important stories, and they're from God, but it doesn't mean it's like exactly what happened uh so the bio logos folks say exactly what you talk about all of that and then by the way so to catch him i was going to make some money off this sort of muslim sort of uh judaic uh organizations reform conservative orthodox there's this huge agreement among religious people that that's how to do this wow here i thought i had a new thing i could take out and make some money tax free on damn it can because the the the real puzzle is that this is this huge uh zone of agreement you got religious people you got atheists you got jewish people muslim people catholic people protestant people everyone agrees on this and yet where's the the where's the publicity where's the attention

i think i'm gonna pull like a joseph smith from the earliest church and just do like a spin the wheel collect them all sort of thing uh you know just whatever you want to be on sunday spin the wheel over there and you're jewish one week and you know whatever you want have fun so that's what gives me hope though is that pick it pick religion of the hat wrong with the baby there is there's this huge middle zone for religious people and non-religious people um if we can agree on what our public institutions want to do like schools yeah which we're all almost everyone is on board with then we can just stop talking about the stuff we don't agree on and that's not bad we can agree to disagree on whether you're dumb if you think there was an

actual global flood like my uncle he's not that. He's the uncle for science who would say, you know, like, wait, no, you have to realize that there couldn't be a global flood. It's like, nope. I mean, when it comes to public discussions, sorry, we don't have to agree on that. you want about how dumb that is fine but what you can't do is say that the people who believe that don't have a right to go to public schools and learn science without being made fun of for their belief in lots of rain and something something like boats and dinosaurs and we've had some really good authors who've talked about this on the show uh you have some very evil organizations like the betsy devos council that their whole idea is not only to teach this but to use as a recruitment tool to get people that aren't religious you know people like me you know obviously my when i was a child you know to get me recruited into buying into the whole jesus thing instead of going off on my evil satanic atheist march um and they want to force that curriculum onto the schools

right yep and that's that's something that i guess the principle is uh religious people especially um uh radical creationists and any religious minority because they are a minority and they just don't know it um they should be the ones who push for religion-neutral public schools the hardest. I'm not saying that they don't push for it, because obviously they do. Just go to a Friday night football game in County, Texas, and you'll see the cheerleaders with their Bible slogans and stuff like that. So I'm not saying it doesn't happen. In miniskirts. In miniskirts, you know, the biblically approved miniskirts.

Of course it happens. But the idea is, in my opinion, there's such a large group of people, including the same savvy conservatives who push for more religion in public schools, who will realize that it's a knife that cuts both ways if you push for religion in public schools and this happened at the supreme court with the espinosa decision if you want to push for tax funding for religious religion in public schools it's a very if you're religious it's a dangerous game to play because in a constitutional realm, you're opening the door to have religious ideas that you don't want crammed down the kids' throats in public schools. prayer decision angle v vitale supreme court decision and it was conservative um catholics conservative protestants the supreme court said you cannot the state of new york in this case

cannot have a prayer in public schools and so you'd think that religious people would be mad but back then conservative evangelicals conservative catholics they said thank you to the court we do not want the state of new y York government to make up a prayer for our kids because they saw the dangers of a government making up a prayer. Like for me, if I'm not religious, whatever, you know, go ahead and have them say whatever. They're not going to listen anyway. If you're actually religious and you care about how your kids pray, that's when that's a really terrifying idea. So I know what you're saying.

Conservative religious folks are pushing for more religious and tax-funded public schools, and it's bad, and it's worth opposing. But I think it's also self-defeating because pushing religion into public schools, only – I mean, the people who get hurt by it most are religious people there is at which is ironic because there is prayer and uh in public schools these days mostly it's a prayer that you won't die today of the of the shooter who comes by your school actually i actually saw on tiktok last night there are three girls that were talking about how great uh donald trump was and then one of the factors they said is that he's lowered school shootings this year and you're like wait there's a quarantine uh kids learning from laptops a little hard to get shot uh so anyway there's that well this has been interesting discussion uh the book is creationism usa

bridging the impasse on Teaching Evolution. Is there anything we missed? We want to leave some of this book, of course, to people to buy it and read it and get into the details. Yeah. No, thanks, Chris. It's been great talking with you. I do think that all these issues cut across groups of people. You know, it's not just a question for religious people.

It's not just a question for religious people. It's not just a question for atheists. It's anybody who is involved at all in American public life. Creationism is one way to understand all these debates about who to trust, who not to trust, who our side is, who their side is. It was creationism and evolution where all those debates got sort of market tested back in the 60s. So I think it's, you know, buy 20 copies for all your friends. There you go, guys. Check it out. And give us your plugs for people who find you on the interwebs and buy the book. Sure, yeah.

I tweet my name. It's A-D-A-M-L-A-A-T-S, at Adam Lotz. You can also check out the blog. The blog is I Love You, But You're Going to Hell. It's been on pause for the pandemic, but we used to have a little lively community where we discussed all these issues. So check that out. You can find more information about the book there as well. Yeah, that sounds like my favorite argument

to religious people because they're like, well, this is what's going to happen if you die chris and i always go what if you're wrong and they go and i go but what if you're wrong you have to assume the possibility that you could be wrong it's you know and they just never have an answer that's that's my that's my argument i just go, what if you're wrong? Yeah, I think so. So there's that. Thank you very much, Adam, for being on the show, telling us about your book and all the good stuff and sharing with us.

Brilliant thing. Thanks for being on with us today. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Chris. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com for just Chris Voss to see the video version of this and all the

wonderful, brilliant authors we've had on the show. You can go to thecvpn.com, subscribe to online podcasts. You can also go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, and also facebook.com, 4chess, the Chris Voss Show. Thanks to everyone for being here. Be safe, stay safe, wear your masks and today's vote day. So I don't have to say that anymore. Be safe out there, folks, and be good to your other human beings. We'll see you next time.