Rob Blackhurst

A shorter version of this piece FT Magazine:

October 14, 2006

Creationists believe the world was created only 6,000 years ago. Rob Blackhurst meets the man who believes he can out-argue science - and change the face of education

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A man in his late fifties wearing battered jeans and a bush jacket with pockets stuffed full of fossils stands at a lectern. "How can hydrogen gas become a fish, develop flippers, jump out of the water and become Tony Blair?"

He has beat-perfect comic timing, and there are gales of laughter from the audience. He flashes a picture of a T-rex on his overhead projector. "Some evolutionists say that frogs developed legs to outrun dinosaurs. You may ponder how quickly you'd need to evolve legs if you were chased by one of these."

This is John Mackay, a former science teacher from the outskirts of Brisbane, who early this summer brought his homespun variant of "creation science" to Britain, in a two-month tour of non- conformist chapels, evangelical Anglican churches and university Christian clubs. Tonight, we are in the down-at-heel Merseyside town of Birkenhead, at the evangelical King's Church, a low 1970s concrete bunker surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. The crowd - full of couples in loose patterned shirts and sharply creased trousers - looks as though it has stepped off the set of Family Fortunes. They are giving Mackay an ecstatic reception as, using PowerPoint slides, he systematically rubbishes everything that is commonly taught in school science lessons.

For Mackay, evolution is a myth promoted by "scoffers" and every word in Genesis is a literal truth. The world was created in six 24-hour periods and all living creatures, including those that have since become extinct, were made on days four, five and six of creation. The Tree of Knowledge was a real tree, Eve was created from Adam's spare rib and Shem really did live to be 600. As a "Young Earth creationist", Mackay believes the planet is a mere 6,000 to 8,000 years old, rather than the commonly accepted figure of 4.55 billion years. In this herbivorous "Good World", there was no death until Adam bit the apple. The first fossils were created 1,650 years after creation, when God inundated the earth with 40 days and 40 nights of rain in retribution for the sin of man.

Mackay displays a quote from National Geographic magazine to the Birkenhead congregation and reads it out: "The fossil record is like a film of evolution where 999 out of 1,000 frames are missing." There are murmurs of laughter from the audience. "Hang on - that means 99.9 per cent of the evidence for evolution isn't there!" says Mackay in excitable mock outrage.

He compares a photo of a fossilised jellyfish with one that he caught off the coast of Australia last year: "We know it's a dead jellyfish - because it looks the same as a jellyfish that died yesterday! Even if you thought that rock billions of years old - jellyfish have turned into jellyfish! And if you haven't changed for two billion years, I'm sorry but you're stuck in a rut!" Mackay tells the audience they are being duped by the scientific establishment and the BBC - "the biggest evolutionary creature on the face of the planet", thanks to David Attenborough's mellifluous gravitas, and the enchanting animatronics of programmes such as Walking with Dinosaurs.

"I'll give a prize to anyone who tells me what Charles Darwin graduated in," he says, fishing a fossil out of his breast pocket. "That's right. Come and collect your prize," he says to a middle- aged woman on the front row, "Charles Darwin actually graduated in theology. He knew exactly what he was trying to disprove."

Mackay has been visiting Britain almost every year for two decades, speaking in schools around the country without a scrap of press coverage or controversy. But this year his 40-stop tour - from Edinburgh to the Isle of Wight - hit a very contemporary nerve. Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, describes the teaching of creationism as "intellectual child abuse". He was enraged by Mackay's planned visit to a Lancashire comprehensive. "Why is a man whose background has not been checked being given three-day access to a secondary school?" he asked. Eventually, media pressure prevailed and the visit was cancelled. ("The school panicked," Mackay tells me later.)

Creationism can no longer be dismissed as a fringe belief with a handful of followers. It is hard to establish exact numbers, but according to church statisticians Christian Research, 2.7 per cent of the British population are evangelical Christians. The Evangelical Alliance, an umbrella group representing a million evangelicals in Britain, found in the last comprehensive survey of its member congregations, from 1998, that creationism had gained a strong foothold. Thirty-seven per cent of congregations believed that "Adam and Eve were created within six days at the start of the universe." Twenty-nine per cent thought that the world was created in six days but each corresponded to a geological period; and just 27 per cent thought the Biblical account was intended to be symbolic.

Simon Barrow from Ekklesia, the UK Christian think-tank, says this is a massive change over the past few decades: "Creationism is now a substantially growing movement within the evangelical sector. I was from a solidly evangelical household in the 1960s and it never would have occurred to me to be a creationist - I went to conservative theological college in the late 1970s and encountered hardly anyone who believed in the supposed literal truth of Genesis."

An Opinionpanel Research survey this year of more than 1,000 British students found that a third of those who identified themselves as Muslims, and a quarter of those who identified themselves as Christians, support creationism. Perhaps more surprisingly, a MORI poll found that 44 per cent of the public - religious or secular - believe that creationism should be taught in UK school science lessons.

Why is creationism on the rise when the march of science should have left it with as many adherents as the Flat Earth Society? And how did we reach a situation where, a century after the publication of The Origin of Species and 60 years since Darwinism was introduced in all school science lessons, evolution is again under scrutiny?

The most obvious reason is that it has been bolstered by "intelligent design" - the movement initiated by scientists in the US and described by its critics as "creationism in a labcoat". It argues that some natural structures are so complex that they cannot be accounted for through evolutionary theory, and must have required an "intelligent designer" - which may or may not be a God.

But perhaps, like the middle-class thirst for "holistic" eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Kabala, the rise of creationism is based on a desire to believe that the world is inherently good: a backlash against the sobering Darwinist thought that we are all blind products of violence, chance and death. Perhaps too, the movement has been inadvertently bolstered by aggressively atheistic figureheads of evolution such as Richard Dawkins, who dismiss religious faith as the refuge of the feeble-minded. Dawkins has even taken to calling himself a "Bright" - his new term for atheists, agnostics and materialists, to be contrasted with the dim followers of religion.

Reading the newspaper cuttings on creationism in Britain, it is tempting to think that both creationists and the media have a vested interest in talking up the phenomenon. The notion of a sinister cabal that wants to brainwash the nation's children makes an irresistible news story. But it doesn't answer the important question: are creationists a band of harmless eccentrics on the fringes of the evangelical movement, or are they a well-organised, expanding group, with a realistic chance of increasing their political influence in secular Britain?

Mackay flew in to the UK just as the row over increased freedoms for schools in the government's Education Bill reached its height. For secular liberals, he became a diabolical symbol of what would happen if evangelical Christian groups were allowed to run city academies, the new, business-backed independent state schools created under Labour's school reforms. Of nearly 50 academies already open, 16 are sponsored by religious organisations. By 2010, the government wants 200 academies to be established or in development. Plans by faith groups for an additional 19 academies are in the pipeline. And, among Christians, it is Britain's 1.6 million evangelicals who - although they don't make up a large proportion of the population - are being wooed by the government because they are motivated, able to raise funds and interested in taking over failing schools in deprived areas.

The Emmanuel Foundation - a Christian organisation funded by Sir Peter Vardy, a car dealership owner and creationist - runs three schools in the north-east. The foundation states on its website that creationism is taught in science lessons alongside evolution, claiming that the national curriculum allows doubts about the conventional interpretation of the big bang and fossil record to be taught as "issues of scientific controversy". But in April, after much equivocation and pressure from humanist groups, the Department for Education and Skills finally issued a statement contradicting this, warning that "creationism is not a scientific theory" and "cannot be used as an example of scientific controversy, as it has no empirical evidence to support it and no underpinning scientific principles or explanations". Science teachers are allowed to discuss "why opponents of Darwinism thought the way they did", but only if they show that the fossil record is evidence for evolution. Despite the obvious contradiction between the position of the Emmanuel Foundation and these government guidelines, the DfES steadfastly maintains that there is no problem with any academy teaching creationism ("All academies are fully meeting the requirements of the national curriculum," it claims). But this confusion and inertia is emboldening creationists. Last month a new fundamentalist Christian organisation, Truth in Science, sent a pack of creationist teaching material to every secondary school head of science in the country. The group has set up a website repeating the Emmanuel Foundation's claim that teaching anti- Darwinist ideas is permitted by Ofsted.

The evening after Mackay's Birkenhead performance, I travel across the north-west to Warrington to see him debate a fellow evangelical Christian, Paul Marston, a lecturer in the philosophy of science who accepts evolution. The school gym hired for the occasion is full. "I feel like Daniel going into the den with the lions," a tremulous Marston says - which doesn't get a laugh from the audience. For him, Genesis is "not supposed to be a biology lesson" but a "prose poem". He sounds exasperated when he deals with Mackay's literalism. "Are we really supposed to believe that God grew tired after the sixth day and had to rest? … And why was animal suffering linked to human sin? Human sin wasn't the fishes' fault." He tries pointing out that a Belgian Catholic developed the big bang theory. "There were far fewer literalists in scholastic medieval Europe than in modern Texas."

The ageing, mainly working class audience listens politely to Marston. But when Mackay gets to his feet and begins to flesh out their Sunday school verities, there is a palpable sense of elation. A man in his sixties, who works as an attendant at Preston University's car park, tells me: "Mackay was really good. I don't understand about dinosaurs and the age of the earth. Put it to one side. It's too complicated. But if preachers don't believe in creation or the six days they have nothing to base their lives on. Once or twice they've asked me to work on a Sunday and I've had no choice. But I don't like it."

After my trip to the north-west, I call Randall Hardy, an affable Mancunian who runs Creation Research UK, Mackay's British organisation. After some persuasion, I get myself invited to a conference on "Home Education for Christian families". Home education is a fast-growing movement among British Christians, although it has yet to match the influence it exerts in the US, where there is a two-million strong "Joshua's generation" growing up away from the "harmful" liberal influences of contemporary American schools.

The conference has been trailed in the press as a shadowy "week- long training camp" in the mid-Wales hills "for children as young as five" hosted by "bearded" Mackay. In fact, Cefn Lea Park, a Christian vacation and conference centre in Powys, resembles more a Scandinavian holiday complex than a brainwashing camp, situated amid steep, sheep-dotted hills so beautiful they look like one of Mackay's slides of prelapsarian paradise.

The carpark swarms with Mondeo estates and people-carriers. Compared with the northern congregations, the 45 families who have signed up for Mackay's course are a solidly white, middle England group. The only hint that it is a religious gathering is in the names, with squadrons of Isaacs, Joshuas and Sauls bombing around on the grass in their Gap juniors. I overhear two mothers discussing how they withdrew their children from the local primary school after seeing them become aggressive. Another complains about the difficulties of teaching A-level Chaucer from home. But no one seems to be quoting scripture. The women have given up their jobs to home-educate their children, while the men tend to work in white-collar "knowledge economy" jobs: one had trained as an RAF helicopter pilot, another developed graphic design software for Apple.

The creationists here are all too aware that they are parodied as bible-belt idiots in the media (one father pushing a buggy greets me with "come to see the terrorist training camp, have you?") and they cringe at any mention of American televangelists or the Christian right. There are no uplifted arms or hallelujahs, and I count only a single muttered "Praise the Lord" during the entire week. The home-educated teenagers, too, seem no different from their school-going peers - lolloping around in fashionable clothes and groaning when Tony Blair appears on television. I talk to a group hanging around the ping-pong table and ask them whether they have any doubts about the creationism they are taught. "No - I don't know how anyone can believe in evolution," says one 16-year- old, distractedly bouncing a football. "There are no facts to back it up."

In the auditorium Dr Diane Eager, a former medical biology lecturer at the University of Canberra, begins the programme of education. With her square glasses and hair pulled back into a 1950s bun, there is something of the bluestocking about her - yet like Mackay, she is a compelling speaker. "We blew it," she says in her soothing Australian accent. "Things have gone downhill - from good to bad to worse." With the help of a photograph of a rainforest, she describes the paradise we have lost. "There was no disease, violence or death - every animal was vegetarian. There were no weeds or dangerous plants. Water was provided by a gentle mist. There was a constant warm and comfortable climate. There was no need for camouflage because there was no fear. What a good world that would have been."

I feel myself lulled to sleep. An image of a T-rex flashes on the screen. "If there were no predators, what did T-rex eat in the Good World?" she asks "Why did it have edged, serrated teeth and powerful claws?" No one seems to know. "Because then tyrannosaurus rex could polish off a watermelon, a coconut or any other fruit even if they have tough skins." There is a collective "Aaaahhh."

Eager gets a warm round of applause, and after Mackay has taken a few questions, Hardy appears to advertise the extensive range of products in the Mackay brand. "We're selling off the videos. They'll cost you just Pounds 5. When they're gone, they're gone." Creation Research receives an average donation of several hundred pounds from the churches in which Mackay preaches. But as suggested by the regularity of commercial breaks throughout the conference, the organisation (which has offices in Britain, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Hungary) is largely kept afloat by the sale of DVDs and CDs of Mackay's sermonising.

After lunch, we go in search of fossil evidence of Noah's Flood, though not before the Bad World has intruded in the form of compensation culture. We all have to sign an indemnity form absolving Mackay and Creation Research of responsibility in case we fall off a rock face. "If you get killed on this trip, take it up with God," says Mackay, consistently enough.

After a short drive we stop at a recent cutting by a busy A-road. Mackay, wearing jeans and Chelsea boots, marshals us with a bullhorn megaphone and a sports whistle as articulated lorries thunder feet away from us. In the shingle, we are looking for fossils with scour marks which, according to Mackay, would suggest they had been moved by turbidity currents during the Great Flood.

"With Noah's flood you had lots of water and dead things covered up really quickly… if the fossils are lined up something has pushed them there," he says in a throaty whisper.

"The lack of worm marks means they fossilised quickly - which means lots of mud."

"Come on Pastor John, move it boy!" he orders as an ageing priest trails behind. I have trouble seeing anything at all apart from industrially cut pieces of rock, but the children are diligently finding what they're looking for. Before leaving, Mackay rasps an elliptical aphorism: "Remember: lots of people look. Very few people see."

The next morning in a classroom at Cefn Lea, a horse-shoe of cherubic, spookily well-behaved children are sitting cross-legged on the carpet, learning about Noah's ark. The session is led by Vance and Korelei Nelson, a Canadian couple wearing cowboy hats and clean-cut denim. Vance, a biology graduate, styles himself as "Dr Fossil", while Korelei manipulates a felt dinosaur puppet called Rex. At the start of the session everyone shouts the mantra "Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Christ" over and over again until they accelerate towards a racehorse canter. Later there will be a craft session to build a scale model of the ark, but first we're learning about the livestock transportation problems faced by Noah and his sons.

"How did Noah transport the whales? How did he have space for all living things?" asks Dr Fossil. Rows of desperate arms stretch for the sky. "That's right. Well done. He took the babies. There's no reason he had to take the big ones."

"Did all the animals fit into an ark like this?" asks Dr Fossil while showing a slide of a cartoon ark with a giraffe and elephant poking out of the roof. "No, they didn't. Remember the smallest version of the ark would have been the size of a world war two aircraft carrier. It was equivalent to 522 railway box cars - each able to carry 240 sheep. You see there's always another side when people criticise the Bible." He warms to his theme. "Were those people who say the ark wasn't real there?" "No," say the children in unison.

"How do we know the T-rex ate meat? Has anyone seen the T-rex eat meat?"

"NOOOO," say the children, even more loudly. "That's right," says Dr Fossil, "the only person who saw a T-rex was God. Science has to do with observing things. Has any scientist observed this?" "NOOOOOOOOOO," the children yell. "This isn't scientific observation," concludes Dr Fossil, "this is belief. And how long do fossils take to form? That's right. They can take two years." We then sing a country song accompanied by taped banjos and steel guitar:

"I don't believe in evolution (I know creation's true) I believe that God above Created me and you".

On my final stop on tour with Mackay, in the ancient Scottish university town of St Andrews, I'm intrigued to see how he will handle a student audience. He has been invited to speak to the Religious and Theological Studies Fellowship, a hub for evangelical Christian undergraduates. The room, overlooking a narrow medieval street, is half-filled with paid-up creationists, half with curious astrophysicists. Predictably, Mackay gets a harder time here about his belief in a young earth. What about the chemical dating techniques that show the world is billions of years old? He has dealt with this one before: "The minute you extrapolate backwards you will have the same problems as if you extrapolate forward - you are unhindered by data. If you want to believe in carbon-14 dating you'll be logical, you'll get a consistent answer. But what will 40 days and 40 nights of rain do to your carbon-14 method? It will ruin your carbon dioxide cycle. And if you can't assume the carbon dioxide cycle is the same, you're stuffed."

An astrophysicist has his next question prepared. "So what about all the evidence from measuring the speed of light that stars are billions of years old?" Mackay has an answer even quicker: "You, as students, should know we're on the edge of a new paradigm shift in physics. There are quite a few papers on the fringe of acceptability saying that light must have been faster in the past. The minute you concede that, the age of the universe becomes less than you ever considered possible. Now it's a whole different ball game."

The student valiantly has one more try: "If the world is 6,000 years old why are the oldest civilisations on earth in Mesopotamia supposed to be 10,000 years old? And if man and dinosaurs lived at the same time why don't we see humans buried with dinosaurs?". Mackay ignores the first point but concludes triumphantly: "We do have photos of a fossilised human just above a dinosaur bed in Montana. Remember - it's not the facts that are changing at all. It's the glasses we're prepared to take on when we look at the facts." In a neat reversal, he compares creationists with Galileo, with scientific fact on his side, "persecuted by short-sighted and dogmatic bishops".

Afterwards, one of the geologists is concerned: "You think he's a nice old buffer, but maybe it's more worrying - he's much more fundamental than I expected: he doesn't really leave any time for questions at all and spins his answers out to 12 minutes so nobody else can speak. Is he on the same side as these creationists in America who are throwing science teachers out of school?"

Creationists, on the evidence of my tour, are far from frothing-at- the mouth idiots. Those I met were intelligent, hospitable and probably had more science qualifications between them than the national average. Perhaps creationism is a collective madness (and it's not hard to find moments of bathos, with melon-devouring T- rexes) but, in its ambitions as a total explanation of everything, it has a kind of internal logic that has a seductive power. Every query seemed to have an answer to hand - from why spiders needed webs in the "Good World" (to collect water) to why God invented cholera (to recycle nutrients).

Compared with the faded reasonableness of Anglican doctrine, Mackay's fundamental brand of Christianity is self-confident and attractive. As Simon Barrow of the Ekklesia Christian think-tank says: "A mistake many people make is to think that all creationists are somehow stupid. But the problem is that creationism seems plausible within certain narrow boundaries of rationality."

Is creationism really likely to flourish in Britain - perhaps the most secular society in Europe? Direct parallels with the US are clearly ridiculous. Surveys show that 42 per cent of Americans identify themselves as evangelicals, compared with less than 3 per cent in the UK. The US National Center for Science Education estimates that up to 20 per cent of high school biology teachers in the US are teaching some variant of creationism, while in Britain the teaching of creationism in science lessons still has a will-o- the-wisp quality. Rumours abound, but, without Ofsted inspecting every lesson, confirmed sightings are hard to verify. Mackay and his colleagues, with their one cancelled school visit, are a long way from having a grand strategy to infiltrate the nation's education system. Nevertheless, all political parties now believe that faith groups should be given a bigger role in running schools, and it is not clear that the government's half-hearted safeguards on the teaching of creationism will survive long in an era of increased parental choice.

If creationists did have a greater say in political life, they wouldn't just be interested in tax-breaks for mothers who stay at home. Their reading of Genesis has some intriguing policy implications too. Andrew Forbes, a personal financial adviser who doubles as the Creation Research Trust treasurer, tells me that he has written to MPs complaining about the planned increase in retirement age. Alongside conventional arguments about the government breaking a contract of trust with citizens over retirement at 65, he adds: "People in the book of Genesis used to live for 600 or 700 years so the trend is downwards not upwards." His pessimism is based on the creationist teaching that since the flood man's genes have been slowly degenerating - a process that will continue until the second coming of Christ.

This theory also makes some creationists sceptical about environmentalism. In the car with Mackay on the way to dig for evidence of Noah's flood, I asked what creationists think about global warming. It seems that they believe there is some evidence for a hotter planet, but, for them, the planet has a "built-in obsolescence", since the book of Revelation predicts that there will be a "new heaven and earth that will be better than the original". Jesus will then come back "when things get really bad for a thousand years". For creationists, the "sin of rejecting God's ways" is responsible for environmental destruction rather than, say, increased carbon emissions. I was left wondering whether global catastrophe was therefore something they were happy to encourage as a harbinger of Christ's return. Either way, there seemed to be a fair number of SUVs in the Cefn Lea carpark.

The last time I see Mackay is in a cafe by Dundee harbour, where he is joined by Randall Hardy to discuss their spell in the media spotlight. In person, the quick-witted bush-tucker persona disappears: Mackay is attentive and softly spoken. "The fact is, evolutionists are becoming less central in this country - you only need to look at the rise of faith schools." He ruminates with amusement on his new-found celebrity: "I've become a real pop star here. A lot of the interest has been generated by humanist groups that don't like me being here and stir up stories in the press. Now every humanist website links to our site and our website hits have increased from 2,000 a day to 11,000."

Much of the current backlash against creationism can be attributed, he thinks, to its southern-fried connotations. "The American label is unhelpful - beyond a shadow of a doubt. Froth, bubble, high- pressure, high-salesmanship preaching does not go down well here. It's bad enough being an Australian." He is bemused by the sudden controversy of his Lancashire school visit. "The school panicked. If you're threatened with pickets outside the school gates what are you going to do? But feel free to quote this - other comprehensive schools are asking us to speak to them." However, he won't say which. Mackay hasn't been invited to Emmanuel College in Gateshead, though he says that some of the staff have privately "bought our course on the search for the origins of life" and "have made use of our books and DVDs". "But the school hasn't made any official approach," interrupts Hardy emphatically, trying to fend off another media storm in the making.

As he gets up to leave, I ask Mackay a question that I had not heard answered at creationist camp. What was the purpose of wasp stings in the Good World if there were no predators? Within half a second it is clear that he has already thought of an answer: "If you live in a perfect world, where man has absolute authority, the wasp would not be brave enough to sting you. They would use their sting to lay eggs or make a hole in the bark." With that, Mackay proffers a valedictory "Good on you, mate," before heading off for an afternoon searching for evidence of the Great Flood in the Firth of Forth.