SARAH Palin, the new poster girl of the American Right, is a creationist. One of the most Googled photographs of recent weeks depicts the shapely Mrs Palin posing in a Stars-and-Stripes bikini, brandishing a rifle. The picture would have been more complete if she also displayed a copy of the Book of Genesis.
This is a woman who loves guns and glorifies war. She believes enthusiastically in the Second Amendment of the American Constitution, the one which talks about the right to “keep and bear arms”.
She also - like a lot of Christian fundamentalists - takes the Bible literally. So she accepts the story of creation contained in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It states that God created the world in seven days. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”
Today there is solid scientific proof for Darwin’s theory of evolution. It establishes that human beings emerged over a very long period of time from lesser (sub-human) forms of life.
That’s why the famous Scopes trial of 1925 (the subject of the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy) came to be commonly referred to as “the Monkey Trial”.
It was this trial that tested a law passed in Tennessee in 1924 making it illegal for teachers to instruct students that “man has descended from a lower order of animals”. With the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), John Thomas Scopes created the test case by instructing schoolchildren on Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Mrs Palin and those who believe in creationism actually believe that dinosaurs and humans actually walked the earth at the same time. For them, there was no slow process of evolution - man, just suddenly and instantly, appeared on the earth. Woman, I should add, appeared almost immediately afterwards.
It should be said that evolutionary theory is itself controversial, especially in its neo-Darwinian form - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.
And of course evolutionary theory is in large part not experimentally verifiable, because we cannot bring 10,000 generations into a laboratory. This means there are gaps in experimental verification, not least because of the incredible time-frame which the theory addresses.
The other thing, of course, and this is crucial, God need not necessarily be excluded from all of this. I once listened to an eminent physicist being inter-viewed on BBC Radio 4 about the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
Having listened to all of this, the interviewer, Melvyn Bragg, then asked the key question: “That’s fine, Professor, but where did the spark that ignited the Big Bang come from?” There was a momentary pause, and then came the reply: “At this stage you don’t need me. You need a theologian”.
So just as Christians can be happy with the Big Bang theory, so also they can buy into the theory of evolution in the belief that God started the whole process in motion.
But for Christian fundamentalists like Sarah Palin, the very name of Darwin is anathema. And so she wants creationism taught in schools to the exclusion of evolutionary theory.
Mind you, it may well be, as Peggy Noonan, former speech-writer to Ronald Reagan, has emphasised, that Sarah Palin is now untouchable. “The media could get videotape of Palin saying, ’We should invade Mars and it will be easy because Mars is hidden inside my hair!’.”
It wouldn’t make any difference, says Noonan, because by now Mrs Palin is “bulletproof”. We’ll see.
