As you say, scientists are fallible, all humans are fallible.
Nevertheless, the massive body of scientific evidence points one way.
Surely you owe it to the children to teach that massive body of evidence rather than
the writings of more fallible humans who were writing in the last couple of
thousand years.
I think the way that science has gone since Darwin has been very defensive on
the part of creationist people like myself.
I think it's only in the past, let's say 50 years, since Crick and
Watson, since the discovery of the incredible molecular complexity of life,
that new evidence is emerging.
Such as things that have been assumed to be very old are now being proved to be
much younger.
In this very town at the university, apparently a Neanderthal skull was found
to be only 250 years old.
They could still smell the tissue.
Apparently is a very worrying word, it's a very pernicious word.
I would question that apparently very, very strongly.
There is no Neanderthal skull that is that recent.
It is perfectly true that molecular evidence has shown that things are a lot
more recent than we thought.
For example, the evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees is now
known to be approximately between 5, 6, 7 million years, which is a lot more
recent, much older than you'd think, but it's a lot more recent than was
previously thought when all we had was fossils.
It's true that molecular evidence has changed some of the details of what we
know about evolution, but always in a productive, constructive direction.
And when you say that since Watson and Crick, new evidence has come to light,
of course it has.
And the new evidence is hugely and overwhelmingly confirming the tree of
life, with minor details changing here and there, the tree of life that we'd already
put together on comparative anatomy and fossil evidence.
As I said, I think the methodology behind radiometric dating is flawed, but new
evidence is coming to light.
The amount of helium trapped in zircon crystals, the amount of helium in our own
atmosphere, with all the alpha particle decay that's going on, the number of
sodium ions in the sea.
There are things that would cap the age of the Earth at thousands of years.
And again, on the principle of falsifiability, it only needs one of those
to be shown to be correct for all the others, the dating methods, to be proved
false.
Let me just confirm this.
You are a teacher of science in a major British school, and you think that the
Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
Yes, I do.
Thank you.
But let me go back to what I teach the children outside formal chemistry lessons.
In chemistry, all I will do when I come across something that would perhaps
challenge the preconceptions they have from biology is to just raise questions.
And I think that is what a liberal education is all about.
I'm not an American fundamentalist, right-wing, sense of this, sense of that.
I want evolution to be taught.
I want it to be set up.
But to be able to criticise it as well seems taboo these days.
I mean, I think it's right that we should teach controversial subjects and we should
encourage children to think for themselves.
There is, of course, plenty of controversy within evolution.
I mean, evolutionists disagree about all sorts of things, and that would be fine.
But when you say, people say things like, teach both sides of the controversy,
that rather supposes that there is a controversy and that there are two sides
to it.
I mean, why teach the biblical form?
Why not teach the Hindu version, the cosmic butter churn, or the Igbo
version of the world coming from the excrement of ants?
I mean, there's any number of creationist theories that you could pick on.
What's special about the Judeo-Christian one?
Well, I'm afraid I am an atheist regarding all gods other than the Judeo-Christian
one.
I have to confess that.
But that is my belief.
What I think children are taught, though, these days is very much a
one-sided picture.
My syllabus... things changed about three years ago.
The QCA and the government put out a syllabus saying children should be taught
how science works.
A lot of what has happened in the last few years in my own teaching has come from the
guidelines that children ought to now know, the principles of scientific
methodology.
Therefore, I have responded to things that are well-documented and I will pass them
over at the end, to show that from our syllabuses we have to be taught in
biology, for example.
Children should know at GCSE the conflicting theories, plural, other than
Darwinian evolution.
Now, what does that mean?
Lamarck was discredited 50 years before Darwin was in art.
I mean, what theories do they have in mind?
I could show you part of a chemistry syllabus that actually mentions the word
creationism and mentions Bishop Usher, whose name is spelt wrongly.
But I could show you that.
Now, what is the point of the exam boards putting in things like that if they are
then taboo in the classroom?
Well, I'm not going to defend the exam board.
I am going to defend the idea that scientific controversy should be taught
and that children should be encouraged to think for themselves and there are very
many important controversies within science, but this isn't one of them.
Now, let me just make a distinction between teaching in general studies,
which I understand you also do, as well as teaching in chemistry.
Do you think perhaps that the right place to teach this kind of thing is in,
what shall we say, history of ideas?
Okay, I mean, I think the argument most evolutionists would come up with is to say
these things belong in religion.
But on a practical level, that is unfair, because I've been at the same school for
35 years and I don't think I've come across any of the, well, it's at least in
double figures, RE teachers, who would have any science training at all,
who would feel competent to deal with the sort of questions children ask.
They would just say, go and ask the science teachers.
And so if you say, we cannot have this taught in science, you're effectively
condemning to the children to be indoctrinated with what I believe to be
atheism.
Because I think atheism and evolution go together, as your book says, and your book
is an apologetic for atheism.
And fair enough, that's fine, as long as you don't mind me in the classroom saying
there is another side of the story.
I'm somewhat unusual in taking that view.
The majority of my scientific colleagues, whether they're atheists themselves,
would probably believe that you could be both religious and an evolutionist at the
same time, as would essentially all educated churchmen.
They might say that, but I think things have changed in the last few years and
discoveries have been made, and the more we discover, the more staggering they
become.
That the Earth isn't very old, that evolution as a theory does fall at
certain stages, there's no easy path up mountain, probably, if I may borrow a
phrase from yourself.
I'm very amused by the titles of your books, because you seem to bring religious
titles into science, what are essentially science books, and you would deny me the
right to do that in my lessons to bring religion in.
But anyway, never mind.
Religious language is a part of our culture.
And so it should be in a science classroom too.
But I don't brainwash the children with religion in a chemistry lesson.
This year, since articles about myself appeared in the Guardian and the
Independent, I've been asked by the school to teach general studies, which again is
quite a difficult A-level with a syllabus, and my brief is to teach history and
philosophy of science.
And I was given on the first day back this school year, this is what you should
teach, Mr. Kahn.
And the first was the theory of evolution and other theories, plural, of origins,
plural.
Now, I again take that as a remit to offer the children the idea that is prevalent
and growing, whether we like it or not, that there is another...
You know this from biology.
Well, I'm going to show you these DVDs from the Truth in Science organisation,
which has reputable scientists at its head, and I will...
Did you say reputable scientists?
Oh, yes.
There's one with a doctorate at the University of Leeds, for example.
Oh, wonderful.
Yes, I think I know the one you mean.
I think we both know him too.
Well, all right, but this is a...
He, by the way, is a professor of thermodynamics, who thinks that evolution
violates the second law of thermodynamics.
Well, it doesn't because the sun is a source of energy.
Yes, exactly.
But I would say undirected energy is rather like putting a bull in a shiny
shop.
It does not create order.
It needs intelligence and energy.
Well, undirected energy won't create order, but what will create order is
non-random natural selection.
And that seems to be the one thing that you people don't get.
Natural selection is not random.
Repeat, natural selection is not random.
It's the very opposite of random.
But, OK, we're getting off the subject again, but it doesn't matter.
Going back to mutation, mutation seems to me to damage DNA rather than to create
anything new.
That's my problem.
The vast majority of mutations damage DNA.
The vast majority of mutations are changes in the wrong direction.
It's the minority that are in the right direction, which are favoured by natural
selection.
That's the non-random arrow that points evolution in a constructive direction.
All right.
I mean, I get children at school coming to me saying, Mr. Cowan, we've heard you
don't believe in evolution with incredulity.
And I say, well, yes, I do.
But it depends what you mean by evolution.
If you mean changes in time within a species, no problem at all.
If you call it, whether you call that variation or microevolution, I have no
problem with those things.
The problem I have is with speciation with macroevolution.
And I liken this to drawing a graph on a board with three points and extending the
graph ten miles without any further evidence.
Well, there's a lot of further evidence.
I mean, you're right, of course, that we believe that macroevolution is
microevolution produced over a long period.
And there's no reason why that shouldn't happen.
There are some cases where it seems to have happened remarkably quickly.
I mean, we know, for example, that Lake Victoria is only about 100,000 years old.
It's very, very, very, very young.
And during that time, about 450 species of cichlid fish have all evolved,
apparently from a common ancestor.
And that's very fast.
Again, it's not fast by your standards.
You think the world's only 6,000 years old.
But nevertheless, by evolution, by scientific standards, 100,000 years is
an eye blink.
But I would say they're all fish.
They're all cichlid fish.
I'm not a biologist, of course.
Well, of course they're all fish, but I mean, fish are enormously variable.
They're not reptiles.
They're not amphibians.
It just takes a bit longer, that's all.
Well, you see, that's where we would disagree.
And I think children need to know that even within the world of evolutionary
theory, there are problems.
There are problems with the Big Bang theory, as it's taught in a godless way by
scientists.
But back to general studies.
I feel, as children already know a lot about evolution from GCSE biology,
then by showing the truth in science material, I'm, in a sense, redressing the
balance.
And I'm basically a liberal.
I'm not a fundamentalist right-winger, as you might find in the USA.
I just think children deserve to know both sides of the story and make an informed
decision.
But the way I think things are going in education is that there is howls of
protest about what I should be teaching when it came out in the newspapers that Mr
Cowan is a creationist.
There's a storm of protest.
And I've been warned I mustn't bring the school into disrepute.
But I would say it's not fair on the children to censor, to withhold this
information from them.
And yes, probably, maybe it does belong in religious studies, but I don't know any RE
teacher, and I apologise to those listening to me who might feel qualified,
but the children won't get taught that unless a scientist does it.
As we were saying earlier, there are of course many Christians who believe in
creation in some sense, believe that God maybe started the universe off,
maybe God even started life off.
But they're evolutionists because the evidence is so strong.
Why do you put yourself in such an extraordinarily difficult situation?
I mean, you are seriously, as a chemistry teacher, arguing that the world is only
6,000 years old.
I mean, that's just dotty.
You cannot say that.
You can perfectly well be a creationist, be a Christian, and say, yes, I believe
the world is 4.5 billion years old, and that God created life or God created
the universe, but don't fly in the face of what are obviously true facts.
There are theologians through the ages, like, not my favourite theologian,
but St Augustine, who would say, why did God take as long as six days to do
it?
Why is it so short?
James Usher has a bad reputation.
I think his work is a work of scholarship.
I think it's good stuff.
I've got some material about Usher's origin of the earth.
James Usher was the bishop who calculated the age of the earth by adding up all
those begats and who lived, and then worked out that it was 4,004 BC.
On 23rd, I think.
9am, was it?
Well, it was evening and morning the first day.
We don't know what time.
I wouldn't go as far as Usher, but I would say he was about right.
And, you see, this is the point.
We start with a belief.
I believe in a transcendent God.
And once you do that, I'm afraid you can...
The evidence from Scripture draws me to that conclusion, and increasingly the
evidence from science draws me to that conclusion.
I haven't always thought this way, of course.
I became a Christian.
And what I like in your book, by the way, is I agree there's no such thing as a
Christian child or a Catholic child or a Muslim child.
I think that was excellent.
I became a Christian 21, 22 years ago.
And for many years, even as a Christian, I struggled to reconcile the stuff I was
taught, the way in the media one is bombarded with, evolution is a fact,
isn't it?
And it's taken me a long time to unlearn that.
And you may think that's going completely in the wrong direction.
But there was a time when I believed what you believed.
And I'm not sure there's a time when you believe...
I mean, one day I hope you'll believe what I believe in terms of the existence of a
personal God.
But on the other hand, mounting evidence that things are younger than they seem.
Well, I mean, maybe one of these days I'll have a deathbed conversion and believe in
some sort of personal God.
But I sure as hell won't believe the world's only 6,000 years old.
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
Well, I'm not sure it is.
I'd say if just one method...
Let's look at the genetary's work on radio halos.
I think it's polonium containing rocks.
Again, I'm not a professional geologist.
But there are studies on the internet that are available from websites that you
probably wouldn't like, like answersingenesis.org.
But they purport to show that the Earth cannot be more than, say, 10,000 years
old.
It sounds awfully like special pleading.
I mean, what it sounds to me is that you've decided for scriptural reasons that
this is what you believe.
And then you desperately go around looking for something to fit it.
And you find something on some odd website somewhere.
But you don't look at the whole corpus of the evidence.
But I've looked at that for years.
I think you're right, that is a criticism of the way I teach.
But should children have the right to decide on these things?
That's my point.
Everybody has the right to decide on everything.
I'm not anti the teaching of evolution.
I'm not going back to scopes.
I mean, this is wrong.
This is a common misconception.
I'd like these things taught.
But I'd like evolution as it's taught today to be critiqued in a scientific way.
In the end, as a person of faith, and I think we all have faith,
whether we have faith in the existence or non-existence or non-knowability of God,
I think there are only two positions.
We either believe or we don't.
I think you talk about probability in your book, which is very interesting.
In the end, there either is a God or there isn't.
And I've chosen to ally myself with the fact that there is.
But you're an atheist about all those other gods.
I mean, you're an atheist about Zeus and Jupiter and Thor.
So why choose that one?
I suppose this does come down to personal revelation.
I did have an experience of God.
I continue to have that experience when I share it with other people.
It seems to be a common experience.
Did he say, I'm the God of the Christians and the Jews, I'm not Zeus, I'm not
Jupiter?
No, he's the God of the whole world.
But he is what we might call Jehovah, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, the father of...
Yeah, but how do you know that?
Did he tell you?
Did he tell you, I'm not Zeus, I'm not Baal, I'm not the God of the
Australian Aborigines?
He didn't, but I went through a phase in my mid-30s where I suppose I was searching
and I read the Koran.
I've looked at some Hindu scriptures.
I found scientific errors in those, of course.
The earth on the back of an elephant.
You mean you didn't find any in the Bible?
Well, I thought I did at the time.
But since I've become a Christian, the more I look at the Bible, it talks
about God suspends the earth over nothing, which is gravity.
The earth is a sphere, certainly not flat.
There are things in the scriptures, actually, that would show that it had a
supernatural origin, not just the words of men.
There's something about the constellations of Pleiades and Orion, which you've
probably never looked at in the book of Job, that were only verified in the 1930s
when astronomers discovered the difference between a bounded and an unbounded star
system.
Now, there's a verse in the book of Job, and you might say this is coincidence,
that talks about the Pleiades being unbounded and rapidly rushing apart.
So, sorry, that's the wrong way round.
Pleiades is stationary.
So, Tito Brahe would have mapped this the same as we see it today.
But Orion is whizzing apart, and all we see are the three stars in a line,
the belt.
There's a verse that you think, how did they know that?
The water cycle is in the Bible.
In the end, there are things in scripture that, as a scientist, I had to come to
terms with and say, who wrote that?
And, yes, in the end, it was a personal revelation.
But only a revelation because I was inquiring, is there a God?
And I did that, as many people have done over the generations, did Jesus Christ
rise from the dead?
What is the evidence, historical evidence, for the resurrection of Christ?
And I came to this.
It wasn't logic in the end.
It was faith.
But once again, the bishops and vicars would agree about Christ.
They would not agree with you about the age of the earth.
I think we're not going to agree about that.
Let's just say thank you very much.
Thank you, Professor.