The Angst of Creativity: or, How Louisa May Alcott Solved the Creation/Evolution Problem

In Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Josephine March (Jo) wanted more than anything to be a fiction writer, no matter how hard she had to work at it or how little it paid. Jo is by far the most interesting of the four sisters in this book I find otherwise uninteresting. The only novel less interesting is Pilgrim’s Progress, which was the favorite novel of all four of the sisters. But Jo rocks!

When Jo was in her writing mood, everybody knew it. Here is the quote from chapter XXVII:

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a vortex" as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her "scribbling suit" consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally, to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did any one dare address Jo.”

I understand what Jo (probably based on Alcott’s own experiences) felt. When I am writing, the experience consumes me, and when I re-read what I wrote, the feelings come back. It feels even better than sex.

But it is also frustrating. Everyone assumes the writer is in complete control, but this is not true. Once the writer creates the character and his/her world, there are certain rules and patterns that must be followed; even the creator cannot violate them. The creator must follow the laws of nature, that is, the nature s/he created.

And this is also true of God the Creator, whatever this might mean. Once the Big Bang happened, and the physical constants (such as gravitation) were established, the Creator could not violate them. Once the solar system formed, whatever happened next was pretty much constrained to the operation of natural laws. That is, once S/He created the world, S/He had to let evolution take its course. From this viewpoint, creation and evolution are the same thing.

Historical contingencies, otherwise known as chance events, appear to come to the rescue. Things happen for no apparent reason, and change the whole course of evolution. One could not have predicted that cyanobacteria would move into larger cells, but once they did, the whole evolutionary history of plants opened up. It didn’t have to be that way. One some other Earth, something else might have happened. But one can, in fact, question whether chance events can actually occur.

So God the Creator, if there is one, is trapped within His story. It must be very frustrating. Just ask Jo March.

Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story four. Turn Ye to Me

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

            What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Roderick is a fundamentalist American exchange student in Scotland. He has many reasons for his faith, but the main one is that he believes Satan is real and can appear to us at any moment.

Roderick also disapproves of his own sexual attraction to Pamela. They go camping on a beach. He is certain that he can keep his hands off of Pamela. And he does, but not because of his will power. It is because, just as they started to sleep, they hear a loud satanic noise, which chase them back to their respective homes. For years afterward, Roderick tells people he almost lost his faith, until he heard the very voice of Satan on a beach in Scotland.

It was only many years later, when Pamela visits the home where Roderick and his wife raised little fundamentalist kids, that Roderick discovers, on educational television, the territorial call of the Manx shearwater, also called the devil-bird.

As science educators like Rice know, our beliefs are sometimes based on illusions.

Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story two. Fish Fry

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

            What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Dr. Fishbein is a creationist who runs a Creationist Evidences museum, to which homeschool fundamentalist moms bring their piles of children. The museum is not well-funded, but a rich Christian investor has come to visit his museum. Fishbein proposes a whole new, and lavish, museum which the investor funds. Fishbein has a particular problem with the evolutionary assertion that amphibians evolved from fishes, and that fossils intermediate between the two have been discovered.

The new museum site is a swamp that turns out to be a remnant from what most scientists (but not those who believe in the Flood of Noah) consider to be hundreds of millions of years old. While planning a big fish fry to dedicate the new building, he discovers something that lives in the swamp that discombobulates his whole belief system. What is it? Nobody ever finds out, because the people who come to the “fish” fry eat the evidence.

The New Reality of the Scientific Method: Donald Trump Is Always Right

I outlined the scientific method, which is something in which anyone, not just scientists, can participate, in my previous book Scientifically Thinking. But there is a new reality about science, at least in the United States, which has developed since I wrote the book, and which I will now explain.

For many years at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, I taught the Research Methods course for science graduate students, which was pretty much the precursor of my book. I recently found, in some old papers, that I taught a similar course at The King’s College, in my first faculty job. King’s was and is a fundamentalist Christian college. Soon after I left, it also became a fundamentalist Republican college and, today, is probably a fundamentalist Trump college. When I taught the scientific method, I taught it pretty much the standard way, although technology was different back then (no internet). But that was because my department chair, although he was a leading creationist, was open to free scientific inquiry. He believed that open inquiry would lead a person to accept creationism. He did not, unlike almost all other fundamentalists, impose his views on other people.

But here is what research is usually like at fundamentalist institutions. First, instead of reaching a conclusion, you impose one. For example, you will stipulate up front that there can be no evidence that is consistent with evolution. Next, you selectively gather information that agrees with your conclusion. Last, you draw your “conclusion” from the selectively-gathered information. This is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

The result was predictable. The scientific value of creationist research is nil, for two reasons other than the above. First, creationists used this method to defend not only the Bible but their sometimes highly imaginary interpretations of it. Second, their misuse of the scientific method made their work sloppy even when it had nothing to do with evolution. Their habit of mind was that, no matter what they did, they had to be right. I documented these two things in a pair of articles I wrote a long time ago: in 1988 and  in 1989.

Today we must add another dimension. Not just in creationist or fundamentalist camps, but in all publicly-funded research, the researchers must begin with the conclusion: they must begin with whatever belief the Republican party holds upon the question. For example, is global warming happening, and are humans contributing to it? The answer, fundamentalists think, must be no, even though the Bible does not mention it. The answer must be no because the fossil fuel industry says it is no. This, then, is the conclusion they reach. Are vaccines effective? Again, the required answer is no. Has gun violence reached epidemic proportions? The answer again must be no. Science, then, becomes just a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

It has been this way for a long time, to various degrees, starting mainly with the George W. Bush administration. But now, under Donald Trump, there is yet a new version of science. You begin with the conclusion that Donald Trump is always right. Science has now become a propaganda arm of Donald Trump, and of his chosen spokespeople, such as RFK Jr. who says that vaccination is not necessary. The conclusion is that vaccination is not effective, because Donald Trump, who used to champion vaccination, says so.

For example, even under Republican presidents in the past, the website climate.gov existed. As of 2025, that URL redirects to NOAA where global warming is hidden, although at this point they still admit that today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level (421 ppm) is comparable to the atmospheric level four million years ago, and much higher than any time during 6000 years of human civilization. But they are not allowed to draw the obvious conclusion that the Earth is getting hotter, only that it happens to be hot right now; certainly they do not blame our use of fossil fuels.

Modern Republicans place Trump in exactly the same position as medieval theologians placed God. Republicans worship Trump. I realize that this is blasphemy, but it is what they are doing, and we might as well say so.

I am glad that I taught and wrote about science before Donald Trump became the sole standard of truth. I am not sure, however, that I am safe. My most recent book, Forgotten Landscapes, provides evidence that Native Americans were civilized and had a significant effect on the North American landscape. This is not the picture of Native Americans that Republicans prefer. They want to claim that Natives were savages and did not deserve to keep the land that was taken from them. Republican opposition did not prevent the publication of my book. But what will happen next?

Why I Hate Fundamentalism and How I Emerged from It

I wish to tell my own personal story about why I hate Christian fundamentalism. My experiences are similar to those of thousands of other people’s, and I want to add mine to the online collection of accounts of religious oppression. Oppression of the mind.

There might be a gene for it. My paternal grandfather was a religious fanatic who spent his time and money on fundamentalist preaching, to the neglect of his family. He left on a preaching tour while his son, my father, lay dying in bed from an infection, from which he recovered. When my grandfather died, he left his biological family $1. His church parasites got the rest and spent it on luxuries.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a devotee of Garner Ted Armstrong, a slick radio preacher whose every word I considered to be direct from God. I was even ready to, as soon as legally possible or sooner, join his church. His religion was a strange mutation of Identity Christianity, that is, the British and Americans were direct descendants of the patriarch Joseph and, as such, deserved world rulership. Many white-supremacist churches today believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to maintain white oppression, but Armstrong just said the problems of the world are too big for humans to solve, and that Jesus would come back and set things right, with white people ruling the world. I never realized the racist content of his message, since he never said “white” but just “Joseph.”

Part of the power of Armstrong’s influence upon me came from the fact that I first learned about the perils of the world from his radio shows—for example, famine and overpopulation; pollution; the threat of nuclear war. He said he and he alone knew the answer to these problems: God would solve them, not gradually, but in one big apocalyptic event.

Because of my devotion, I was blind to Armstrong’s immorality. One day, when I started to listen to his program—on which I took extensive minuscule notes—his father (Herbert W. Armstrong) was on the radio, giving Bible-centered fundamentalist sermon reruns. I found out later it was because Garner Ted had run off with a woman. Later the world found out that he had been systematically sleeping with girls from one of his Ambassador colleges, as described in In Bed with Garner Ted. Those young women, and his thousands of little donors, paid a much higher price than I did.

 

The reason I left the Armstrongs’s church was that I fell into another fundamentalist cult, the Church of Christ. They actually convinced me that they alone had the correct interpretation of the Bible. They had whole books and sermons about how “The Lord’s Supper” (communion or eucharist) was to feature just one cup, not multiple cups, of grape juice, not wine. The only way I could consider such a trivial point to be important is that they had complete control over my mind. This continued through my undergraduate days. Because I thought that it would be wrong for me to marry any woman who was not a member of our little branch of the Church of Christ (even other Churches of Christ were off-limits to “fellowship”), my social life was truncated into a frustrated loneliness. I drove fifty miles each way each Sunday to attend the one and only correct Church of Christ in my part of the world, ignoring the one right down the highway from me. They controlled my life. I remember how awful I felt when, even when I was in high school, the local preacher had denounced me as a dangerously wrong person when I taught a different interpretation of scripture than he did. I was seriously depressed from it. Gee, thanks, Brother Bob Sanders. One of the congregations to which I was devoted eventually closed, but was taken over by another openly oppressive fundamentalist church, this time Baptist.

Eventually, when I went to graduate school, I found I could not maintain this link. It was an emotionally wrenching experience when I tore away from my roots in that church. But, of course, I promptly fell into a new fundamentalist spiderweb: the creationists. My link with creationism had begun in my undergraduate days. As a biology major, I developed the intricate skill of believing the science that I agreed with and rejecting the rest, not realizing I was being dishonest.

After I began to learn scientific and careful thinking in graduate school, I questioned the creationists. I taught a church class about creation and evolution, which was basically a theistic evolution approach. Two old men, fierce creationists both, arranged to have me put on trial by the church leadership. I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I found out later it was because the trial was just meant to let the old men blow off steam. But once again, it was an emotionally battering experience. Gee, thanks, Marlyn Clark.

Then I fell into the web of Christian colleges. My first two faculty jobs were at so-called Christian colleges. I was unspeakably inspired to be teaching students about science, not in opposition to but enriched by Christian views. This included environmental issues, about which I believed Christians should care. But, as I learned from these two jobs, a Christian college was just an excuse to pretend to have intellectual honesty. At the first college, The King’s College, factions of the faculty spent most of their time disputing with one another over college politics. Later, after I was gone, they chose a president (Dinesh D’Souza) whose only qualification for his job was that he hated Democrats and could write convincing lies against them. He would (and continues to) just make stuff up. The only thing that got him fired was when he had an extramarital affair. But even this King’s College experience did not disturb my idealism about Christian Higher Education.

The second college was Huntington College. Here, the pervasive assumption was that Christianity consisted of obedience to the Republican Party. This was at the time when Huntington native Dan Quayle was vice president. Since I taught environmental issues, which Dan Quayle considered to be leftist propaganda, I was in a precarious position. When I became the victim of secret political maneuvering, I was extremely upset and depressed for about two years. This time, I wanted to write a book about The Reality of a Christian College, an antidote to the widely read The Idea of a Christian College and to the hypocritical books written by Huntington president Eugene Habecker. I wanted to describe Christian Higher Education as corrupt while pretending to not be. It did not occur to me that nobody, including me, would want to read such a book.

The agony I experienced from these two jobs considerably lessened my ability to enjoy my beautiful daughter as she grew up from ages one to seven. I played the role of responsible father, but I could not experience the full delight of being her father, a delight I have thankfully recovered by enjoying my granddaughter at these ages. What joy I missed the first time around!

After these experiences, which lasted about 23 years, I settled into a calmer, more generalized Christianity. I could finally enjoy religion and life. All of the previous links, from Armstrong to Huntington, were dead to me.

But I eventually realized that even good religion was not worth the effort. For the last sixteen years, I have not been associated with a church. This, plus my rejection of popular entertainment such as cable TV and movies, has left me with an enormous amount of time to think about, write about, and enjoy the world of science. I had to wait until I was almost 50 years old before I could inhale the breath of freedom found in agnosticism. I now know that if there is a God, this God is a spirit of love, rather than a dictator of doctrines. My message to the world, in this blog and in many books, is not to hate religion but to hate its oppressive forms and seek inspiration directly from the natural and scientific world. I still read, and love, the sayings of Jesus, for example, without stressing out about the correct literal interpretation.