Religion and me (3)
My early religious education saw Jesuits arguing with highly qualified science teachers.
As I have described, in part two of my articles on religion, I spent my early teens in a Catholic school, trained and educated by Jesuit priests. I received a good education, but its main goal was to spread religion — and to sow the seeds for future priests. We had weekly discussions on religion, in which I was considered a smarty-pants, always looking for trouble. But at least one of the priests enjoyed debating science and religion with me. Although he in no way succeeded in his proselytising, he clearly enjoyed our discussions, and sought every opportunity to pursue them.
The school had a biology teacher named Dr Palmer. Although this was frowned upon, he taught us all about Darwin and evolution. It slowly became clear to us that all the marvelous creations of God, that religion told us about, could be better explained by natural selection. Dr Palmer gave me On the Origin of Species to read, and spent a fair amount of time in his classes telling us about Darwin’s trips to the Galapagos.
During this time I caught a praying mantis and started looking after it. This beautiful creature spent the day on the curtains of my room, waiting for me to bring it tidbits to eat: flies, grasshoppers, cockroaches. It always turned its head in anticipation when I entered, looking straight at me. And it devoured the goodies I brought it with obvious relish.
One day I took my friend with me to school, and the priests were delighted. “This insect is showing us how to pray to God,” they said. “See it folding its hands and looking upwards.” I tried to argue that they were two strong and sharp forelegs, armed with a double row of spines, powerful tools to grasp its prey. I had seen how effective these “claws” were, how it grabbed the insects I brought it with blinding speed. Here’s a video that show you how they work. I even thought the insect should more rightly be called preying mantis. But the priests were adamant: God had constructed the arms for prayer. That is exactly what they wanted me to believe.
It was the same priests that told us how wonderfully God had formed the banana, to perfectly fit our hands when we eat it.
Four decades later I saw the very same argument put forth by Ray Comfort — you can watch him describe it on the above one-minute video. But I am not sure he wanted us to take him seriously…
Dr Palmer told us that bananas had been bred, “domesticated”, from wild bananas, like the one shown above, which were full of inedible seeds.
Air and water
Another subject of debate was how God had provided the air to sustain human beings, in exactly the right mixture. The atmosphere contained just the right amount of oxygen, 21%. In addition God purified the water we needed, by evaporation, and delivered to us, as rain, for drinking and washing. This was supposed to fill us with gratitude and wonder.
Of course Dr Palmer’s biology-trained student, in consultation with him, knew better. Wasn’t it the case that humans evolved to thrive on exactly the air mixture that was found on the surface of Earth? Fish had evolved to live on the tiny amounts of oxygen dissolved in water, and couldn’t handle the 21% of the oxygen in the air. Dr Palmer told us about recently discovered “anaerobes,” microscopic creatures that lived in complete darkness near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where the oxygen level was practically zero. They had evolved to derive energy not from light or oxygen, but from the carbon that was abundant in their environment.
Incidentally, the oxygen in the atmosphere, we learnt, came mainly from oceanic plankton that produced it with the help of sunlight and photosynthesis. The question we also asked in bible studies was why God had “poisoned” most of the water on the surface of the earth with salt, making it undrinkable for us — and for most land animals.
Geology
Another problem that bible-thumping priests generally had was that they were competing with our highly competent geography teacher, someone who brought in a fair amount of geology into his classes. Actually, geology was his main area of expertise. He read copiously and was always excited about new discoveries. At one stage he told us about the Deccan Traps, one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. They consist of multiple layers of solidified flood basalt, covering an area of about 500,000 square kilometers, with a thickness of more than 2,000 meters.
Our geography teacher told us that the Deccan Traps had begun forming around 66 million years ago, with lava extruding through fissures in the Earth’s crust. The eruptions lasted for 30,000 years. Together with the Chicxulub impact they were probably responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.
At the same time, in bible studies, we were told that God created the universe and everything in it just 6,000 years ago. I asked the one priest that would listen if our geography teacher was wrong — yes, of course he said, the bible has the ultimate truth. So why did we find such compelling geological evidence of rocks that are millions of years old? Ahh, he said, God put them there for us to puzzle over. To test our faith.
That, I kid you not, was the kind of explanation we were given.
