The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [5]
That seemed to convince them. The mood quickly shifted. In fact, some people started applauding. Instead of throwing us out, someone ushered us to seats in the front row of the bleachers. Charlie took out his cameras and began snapping pictures. I took out my notebook and pen.
“WE’LL WIN—ONE WAY OR THE OTHER”
The preacher took control of the meeting. He turned to the crowd and held aloft a book titled Facts about VD. “This is gonna turn your stomachs, but this is the kind of book your children are reading!” he shouted in his Mayberry accent.
There were gasps. “Get those books out of the schools!” someone shouted. “Get ’em out!” several others echoed as if they were saying “amen” at a revival meeting.
The preacher began to pace back and forth, perspiration rings expanding on his white shirt, as he waved the book. “Y’all have got to force yourselves to look at these books so you can really understand what the issue is all about!” he declared. “Your children may be reading these books. This is not the way to teach our kids about sex—divorced from morality, divorced from God. And that’s why we’ve got to continue keeping our kids out of school for another week to boycott these filthy, un-American, anti-religious books.”
That catapulted the crowd into a clapping frenzy. Money poured into the Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets being passed around for donations to fight the battle.
The rally continued in that vein for another half an hour or so. At one point, the preacher’s words were reminiscent of the businessman’s comments earlier in the week. “We’re not evolved from slime,” he declared defiantly. “We’re created in the image of God Almighty. And he’s given us the best textbook in the world to tell us how to live!” The folks roared their approval.
“The only victory we’ll accept is a total victory,” he declared. “We’ll win—one way or the other.”
When he raised the issue of whether the school boycott should be continued through the coming week, the resounding response was yes. The goal of the rally accomplished, he issued a quick “God bless y’all,” and the meeting was over.
Now I had all the color I needed for my story. I hustled back to my hotel and banged out a piece for Sunday’s paper, which appeared on the front page under the headline, “Textbook Battle Rages in Bible Belt County.” I followed that with an in-depth article that also ran on the front page the next day. 2
Settling back into my seat as I flew back to Chicago, I reflected on the experience and concluded that I had fulfilled my promise to the preacher: I had been fair to both sides. My articles were balanced and responsible. But, frankly, it had been difficult.
Inside that gymnasium Friday night, I felt like I had stared unadorned Christianity in the face—and saw it for the dinosaur it was. Why couldn’t these people get their heads out of the sand and admit the obvious: science had put their God out of a job! White-coated scientists of the modern world had trumped the black-robed priests of medieval times. Darwin’s theory of evolution—no, the absolute fact of evolution—meant that there is no universal morality decreed by a deity, only culturally conditioned values that vary from place to place and situation to situation.
I knew intuitively what prominent evolutionary biologist and historian William Provine of Cornell University would spell out explicitly in a debate years later. If Darwinism is true, he said, then there are five inescapable conclusions:
there’s no evidence for God
there’s no life after death
there’s no absolute foundation for right and wrong
there’s no ultimate meaning for life
people don’t really have free will 3
To me, the controversy in West Virginia was a symbolic last gasp of an archaic belief system hurtling toward oblivion. As more and more young people are taught the ironclad evidence for evolution, as they understand the impossibility of miracles, as they see how science is on the path to ultimately