Unauthenticated Response to Jack Waters

Or, How the Covid Pandemic Made Me a Six-Day Creationist

Doug Wilson had a great influence on my parents and the other families who started the classical, Christian academy I attended from kindergarten through graduation. When I started entertaining the notion of old-earth or evolutionary theory, it was more to be a nonconformist than anything else. This tells you a) what kind of high school punk I was and b) what my community must have believed for old-age to be “nonconformist.” When I got to college, I found out that old-earth perspectives were the academically acceptable ones, although for some reason most of the students who bought the perspectives had a superiority complex over “fundamentalist” Christians. What “fundamentalist” means changed a lot, and usually had to do with whatever these “open-minded” students (myself included) were reacting against. 

Despite the students who were old-earthers just because it wasn’t fundamentalist, there were the professors who actually did hold old-earth views, and from what I can tell, are either malicious liars or genuinely believe what they preach. Being around a university for long enough solidified me as an old-earther just because it seemed to be what the weight of evidence supported. I was in the philosophy department, so I didn’t see much of the evidence myself, but I took their word for it. In other words, it seemed like scientific consensus had agreed on an old earth. I didn’t want to go against scientific consensus. Additionally, I think there was a kind of democratic epistemology to which I subscribed: truth was most likely what the majority said was true. 

Thankfully, I met a few people who carried the anti-fundamentalist tendency all the way out of Christianity, which was enough to curb my reactionism for a while. The democratic epistemology started breaking down during the summer of BLM, as I saw any semblance of common ground in America (and the West by extension) begin to fall apart. By my senior year, I was an epistemological mess. Attracted by the existentialism of Kierkegaard, I wrote a thesis on the role of irony and faith in his epistemology. Little did I know (the Lord has a great sense of irony himself)––he brought me back into the classical world and put me in a place where I needed the faith I had written about. 

One of the blessings of being a young teacher is being forced to think about good books, more so than when I was on the receiving end of teaching. A second blessing is the responsibility which teaching brings; responsibilities which make lazy habits much less desirable. As I moved to a tighter community more deeply permeated by faith, I saw more and more clearly how the spirit of the age had infected me––heart, soul, mind and body. 

What does this all have to do with being a young-earther? Well, for one thing, the school I taught at was the kind of “fundamentalist” school that teaches “fundamentalist nonsense” like that. But I taught humanities, not science. 

One of the first books I taught was C. S. Lewis’ Discarded Image, in which he offers us this:

When I was a boy I believed ‘Darwin discovered evolution’ and that the far more general, radical, and even cosmic developmentalism which till lately dominated all popular thought was a superstructure raised on the biological theorem. This view has been sufficiently disproved…

The demand for a developing world––a demand obviously in harmony with both the revolutionary and the romantic temper––grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest.¹

Likewise, “The new Model [of the universe] will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her.”² Lewis suggested that philosophical presuppositions underlie scientific inquiry. I first read The Discarded Image a year or two after the Covid pandemic, an event which proved Lewis’ point. Mixed in with suspicions of “big pharma” and the Chinese government, many of the conservatives I knew spurned the pandemic restrictions on the grounds that people aren’t supposed to live in isolation. It wasn’t necessarily a denial of Covid’s threat to health; rather, it was a belief that spiritual needs transcended the risk. I suppose suspicion of government, domestic or foreign, might have contained a belief that their socio-political goals bred the “scientific” opinions anyway. In either case, proper conservative responses implicitly held true to what Lewis suggested: interpretation of data usually goes through philosophical, social, or theological convictions. 

Coming out of college, I was more likely to sit on the fence about whether Covid fears and Covid vaccines were legitimate. After I read Lewis, skepticism grew. The skepticism was furthered by an article by Matthew Crawford; “How Science Has Been Corrupted.” Crawford compares the Fauci regime to the Roman Catholic church in that both entities used “science” as a mediated authority to impose belief on others. He also cites “research cartels” which hold strict power over what kind of studies are and are not acceptable. In short, Crawford demonstrates that what we are told is “science” has a number of biases affecting it.

So what does Covid have to do with a young earth? My belief in an old-earth was largely based on the general assumption of its truth, as well as young rebellion. When the rebellion phased out, the former foundation remained. Between Lewis, Crawford, and the Covid pandemic, I began to see that what we call “science” is a fickle thing. For most of world history, “science” was just one of many ways of viewing the world, and it has always gone underneath philosophical, social, or theological presuppositions. If “science” could sell so many lies about Covid, it can sell lies about the earth’s age, evolutionary theory, and a number of things we probably won’t believe once we start operating under new philosophical presuppositions. 

1. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 220–221.

2. Ibid., 222–223.