The stirring on the mount

SILVERLAKE, Wash. - “Look! You can see the mountain!”

Lloyd Anderson springs ahead of the small group of visitors he has been leading through Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Reaching a small observational clearing, he sweeps his arm toward the horizon and bounces with excitement as he waits for the group — Forest Carnine, a cattle rancher from Angora, Neb.; his wife, Dorothy; their daughter-in-law, Ingrid Carnine of Boring, Ore.; and her two young sons — to catch up.

It is one of those rare days when the weather in southwest Washington clears so you can see Mount St. Helens, which rises behind Anderson and his joyous grin. The snow-capped volcano dazzles against a crystal blue sky, its peak obliterated 25 years ago in an eruption that left it looking like a dish of vanilla ice cream whose top has been scooped off by an eager child.

Lloyd Anderson still gets revved up by the mountain. He is 69 and hard of hearing, but when he gets rolling in the booming cadences of the nondenominational minister he was until 1999, the years fall away and the words tumble out with the message he has committed his retirement to bringing forth. Which is: The Earth is only a few thousand years old, and what happened here in 1980 proves it.

In the beginning ...
Anderson and his wife, Doris, are the founders of the Mount St. Helens Creation Information Center and curators of the 7 Wonders Creation Museum. They represent a third wave of modern biblical creationist thinking, one that says hard-core science proves the Genesis account of creation.

Mainstream scientists say that because it can sound plausible to non-specialists, it could be a particularly formidable threat to public acceptance of Darwinian evolution as it has been taught for more than a century, which Americans already reject by a ratio of almost 2-to-1, an NBC News poll found in March.

In the early part of the 20th century, believers in biblical creation rested their assurance purely on the Bible. It says God created the heavens and the Earth in six days, so it must be so. Nearly half of Americans, 44 percent, still believe that, the poll found.

After retreating from serious public engagement following the debacle of the prosecution of Tennessee science teacher John Scopes in 1925, some religious thinkers posited that the data did indeed support the standard reading of the geologic and biological record. Evolution could be correct, they said.

But that still didn’t explain where the Earth came from in the first place. The delicate balance of climatic, geologic and physical conditions that led to life on Earth couldn’t have happened by chance, they said. It all had to be set in motion by a greater intelligence.

Adherents of what is called intelligent design are careful not to speak of “creationism” as it is popularly understood, weary of the Bible-thumping stereotype the word calls up and aware that the Supreme Court has barred teaching the concept in the public schools. So religious legislators and school board members around the country have latched onto intelligent design as a palatable vehicle for undermining evolution in the curriculum.

Most attention has focused on votes to require the teaching of intelligent design in Dover, Pa., and in Cobb County, Ga. Both initiatives have been challenged in court, but similar campaigns are under way in at least 15 other states.

A biblical analysis of hard data
If biblical creationism and intelligent design are at opposite poles of the anti-evolution argument, then Lloyd Anderson and a small number of others like him, popularizing the hypotheses of geologist Steven A. Austin and physicist D. Russell Humphreys, are the vanguard of a modern-day campaign to split the difference.

They are not your father’s creationists.

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