Scandalizing My Young Earth Creationist Self

the joys of educating yourself all over again as an adult

What a week! What a debate! What different feelings after this debate than the last one! And yet. It is bonkers how close the presidential race will likely be. Sometimes I cannot believe the levels of idiocy and danger that are permissible so long as it comes from a supposed “strong” white man.

On the days when I can neither fathom how we got here nor how to get out, it helps to clear my mind for a moment with the big picture. As in, the big, big, big, big, big picture.

Photo by Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash

One of the highlights of our D.C. trip last week was touring the Smithsonian museums, because I am an insatiably curious and nerdy person. I am particularly interested in natural history (centering on ancient, prehistoric eras) and anything about metaphysics / the universe, as long as it’s broken down into simple enough concepts that I can understand. I have not taken a poll, but I am guessing most people in their 30s do not spend free Saturday evenings watching PBS Nova documentaries about dark matter and how life might have evolved on earth (correct me if I’m wrong…).

Perusing through some old journals still living in my mom’s garage, I was reminded how this fascination is in many ways an act of resistance to my indoctrination I experienced growing up.

In 7th grade, I was utterly scandalized by my introduction to biology in my science class, and came to see my science teacher as one of “them” who clearly had it out for faithful Christians like myself. I had steeled myself for this day, thanks to the teachings of Ken Ham and Kent Hovind, who told me that public school education would like nothing more than for me to become a secularist and lose my faith. I was determined to be steadfast in my belief system.

I apparently made it through unscathed, because I was challenged all over again in my AP Biology class in high school. Over this past weekend, I scanned an excerpt from a journal. I was recounting a conversation with my high school boyfriend (who was not a Christian; gasp! Missionary dating?!) explaining to him how learning evolution was really hard on me. It was hard to have to learn something that was such an assault on my faith, and plus, evolution didn’t even make sense as a concept! How could beings as complex and perfectly created as ourselves ever have come about by sheer chance?

His [patient, generous] response toward me was to try and have an open mind about it. However, “Don’t let your mind be so open your brains fall out!” was a common phrase in my fundamentalist circles, so I was pretty skeptical about that notion. But feeling sufficiently righteous in my evangelizing toward my boyfriend, I let the topic drop for that moment, praying that god would enlighten his mind about the nature of reality.

Oh honey.

So yeah, I’m really into learning about evolution and dinosaurs and the big bang and dark matter and the expansion of the universe, nowadays. I’ve got a lot of learning to catch up on.

I feel sorry for my younger self, much as it is also tempting to shake her. She was such a pill! She thought she knew so much! But she also had been so brainwashed from the time she could start to think for herself. Her religion thought that “thinking for one’s self” was a horrible idea because it inevitably would lead to lack of control over individuals. So, every thought she had had to be pre-approved by her religion; a strategy secured by her internalized gatekeeper that would cause waves of shame and fear to wash over every time a stray or doubtful thought popped in her mind.

What a tiny, restrictive, narrow life.

Let me tell you what it was like to explore the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s complex exhibit about human evolution.

Mind-blowing!! It is impossible to comprehend the vastness of time required to enable life forms like our own to evolve. The exhibit showed different species in the genus homo (I do remember some parts of AP Bio!). Did you know that the species homo erectus, which is now extinct, actually existed for longer than our own homo sapiens species? Is that not wild?!?! There were five early human species, but the four others aside from homo sapiens went extinct. Most likely because of homo sapiens… I guess you could say causing other species’ extinction is in our DNA?!?

For your nerdy delight. Sorry 'bout the camera glare.

It almost makes you wonder…when homo sapiens will go extinct…and unlike the other species, we will have done it to ourselves. While bringing countless other species down with us.

To zoom out even more, let’s fly over to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We had the chance to watch a spectacular planetarium movie about the vastness of space. Earth is a tiny speck in our solar system, which is a tiny tiny speck in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a teeny tiny fraction of the universe. We have no idea how big the universe is! We know it is expanding at an increasingly fast rate. We know that something we currently call dark matter and dark energy seems to be the bond that holds much of the physical matter together. But we don’t really understand what it is or how it works. It’s all enormous though, and mind-boggling.

When I get this perspective, it seems downright laughable — like literally laugh-in-their-face laughable — that conservative evangelical Christians think they have the final answer on things. That their god is somehow so concerned solely, specifically, with our tiny floating blue dot — and not just that, but specifically about who is having sex with who and when and how they do it. And also for some reason it’s very important that individuals have the right to own whatever killing machines they deem necessary to protect themselves from both the government, and people who live on the other side of arbitrary, symbolic lines drawn on earth’s surface that determine how you think about yourself and what you own.

Make it make sense. It makes no sense. It’s a pity their world is so small. But when I am tempted to get caught up in the smallness of that world, I hope a part of me remembers the utter vastness and beauty of a world much bigger than the part I see.