If you really want to throw a spanner in the works, or stop a discussion amongst a group of people, tell them you believe in creation. It has traditionally been religion and politics we weren’t supposed to mention, but now, people who have not taken the time to look at it, have delegated creation science to the realm of religion and it is therefore taboo. Yet when you try to point out to them that it is actually robust science, based on empirical evidence, using an alternative set of presuppositions to those of the dominant worldview you are talking about, people tend to turn off, turn away, turn against you, do anything but give you a chance to explain why you believe there is a valid alternative to their point of view. Such a shame really. It’s a fascinating subject and would make an excellent topic of discussion on TV and radio.

I guess I’m yearning for the old days on the communes I lived on in the 60s and 70s, when we tossed around ideas without any barriers. Religion – bring it on. Politics – why not? It was an ideas free-for-all. We enjoyed examining traditional ideas and pulling them apart, while seeking out new systems of belief to analyse and try to understand. Nothing was taboo; everything was an interesting set of ideas to be examined. Some we tried and tossed aside, others we revisited when new information came to hand, while others sat in the queue awaiting deeper analysis. We were detectives of a sort, examining each claim, counterclaim and cosmology, trying to discover if they actually fit with our own understandings and experiences of reality.

Metaphysics, existentialism, the paranormal, the supernatural, spiritualism, philosophy, eastern mysticism, atheism, humanism, materialism; they all sounded as though they deserved some consideration. But in our postmodern world the dominant cultural paradigm has moved towards philosophical naturalism, so don’t mention anything that relates to the supernatural, and certainly not creation, it’s a religious subject. This cultural censorship is mind-boggling. How did people become so closed to examining different ideas? The media certainly seems to be leading the charge. The only airing they give to creation science is to seek out untrained people, with no real qualifications and ask them questions they know will result in an embarrassing lack of scientific awareness. Well trained, highly qualified PhD creation scientists are barred from the airwaves.

During the cultural drift towards materialism, evolution has been decreed to be the unbiased “scientific truth” we must accept about our origins and reality. People are dissuaded from examining its underlying, unproven, assumptions that are based entirely on philosophical naturalism, while those who break this new cultural taboo are ridiculed. The irony is, philosophical naturalism is just a different religion, another belief set, which insists there can be no supernatural agency in the creation of the universe. How did we get here? And why does a society that claims to value a rational, logical approach, refuse to examine the alternative set of robust, scientific, empirical evidence that supports creation?

In my experience most people are not really interested in questioning or challenging the status quo, but the really surprising thing is they are not even interested in defending it. When pushed, they appear to have little real substance behind their beliefs. They just trust the experts to be the arbiters of truth; the high priests of modern western society are the naturalist scientists. We are even encouraged to doubt whether highly trained and qualified people, who happen to believe in creation, can actually be scientists.

Somehow, almost all my life I have managed to be out of step with the dominant cultural paradigm. When mid 20th century culture was predominantly Christian, I was a New Age hippie seeking enlightenment and reading books from the theosophical society and novels by Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse. With the end of the 20th century approaching, western culture moved into post-Christian, postmodern humanism and I became a Bible believing Christian. I wonder why I was born so contrary; my parents should have called me Mary.