Published: September 15, 2006 02:43 pm      

Origin of Man

By Kelly Young

countybeat@jacksonvilleprogress.com

Take any two people off the street and ask them what they believe about the origins of man, and you will probably get two very different answers. Asking those same questions of the two junior colleges in town reveals the same phenomenon.

Although both schools are church affiliated, Lon Morris through the United Methodist Church and Jacksonville College through the Baptist Missionary Association of Texas, one teaches its biology students evolution, and the other teaches its students creationism.

“I teach evolution. Science is looking for natural causes to natural phenomena, it isn’t in the business of looking for supernatural reasons for things occurring,” said Assistant Professor Linda Allen, chair of the Natural Science Department at Lon Morris College. “To me science is one of the great themes of modern culture and religion is another. I think the two are equally important, but they are different, and since I teach biology and not theology — I teach evolution as the cause of life.”

According to Allen, Lon Morris is a Methodist institution, and Methodist doctrine allows for the theory of evolution.

“You can certainly be a Christian and believe in evolution. The problem is people who take the Bible literally and who believe the Bible as a historical document rather than a moralistic viewpoint,” Allen said. “Over the years, more and more of the Bible has been explained by science — but that doesn’t take away from the glory or the majesty or the spirituality of it.”

According to Allen, enough evidence has been found through the years to prove the theory of evolution.

“I consider evolution a fact. Scientific theory isn’t somebody’s idea, it has years and years of research and evidence behind it,” Allen said. “It has been researched and researched and researched. There is evidence from fossils, and the biggest evidence nowadays is the DNA evidence, the genetics.”

At Lon Morris, students are taught evolution in the classroom and, once the unit is completed, are then allowed to debate amongst themselves what they believe.

“After I teach evolution and I get through with the scientific part, I let them discuss it, and we argue about it. Most of my kids don’t even know what evolution is, so I teach them what it is and what it isn’t, and then they can decide to fit it in with their religious beliefs or not,” Allen said.

Across the city, at Jacksonville College, the origin of man is taught a little differently.

“I teach that the universe was created in six literal days. We believe that the Genesis account refers to literal 24-hour periods. You wouldn’t have the words morning and evening if it was referring to an indefinite time period,” said Professor Billy Wilbanks, chair of the Science Department at Jacksonville College. “People accept either theory just by their beliefs and what they have been taught — we really can’t prove either one.”

According to Wilbanks, there are just too many holes in the theory of evolution for him to believe it is true.

“At the time of the Big Bang, evolutionists believe there was all this matter out there, where did that matter come from? At the time of the Big Bang, how did the Earth end up getting all of the water and the air and the life-forms? Everything from as simple as bacteria to as complicated as people — no life-forms have ever been found anywhere else,” Wilbanks said. “We hear that all life-forms are progressing from one life-form to another, but yet in the world we do not have any life-forms that are between forms. The fossil record has never shown anything to be in a transition state, going from this form to that form.”

Wilbanks thinks that scientists often get caught up in thinking that everything in the world has some type of explanation and that everything can be explained, but he believes that the world shows this assumption to be untrue.

“There’s a lot of questions right now that I can’t answer. What holds the clouds up? If we throw a whole bucket of water in the air, the whole bucket is going to come right back down, but when it rains, all these little raindrops fall,” Wilbanks said. “There are still many unanswered things out there. Cell differentiation in human reproduction is something we don’t understand. Back when we are just a small cluster of cells, how do some of our cells know to become blood, brains, muscles, bones or something else. We don’t have an answer for that.”

Wilbanks believes, and Jacksonville College teaches, that the universe is just too complicated to be a random result of chance.

“When you consider all of the ‘random’ events that have taken place for our benefit; the element we need more than anything else is oxygen — that’s what we’ve got the most of. The compound we need the most is water — that’s what we’ve got the most of. Trees give us oxygen, and we give them carbon dioxide. The odds of any of those taking place is incredibly low, and when you add them all on top of each other, it just makes it all the less likely still,” Wilbanks said.

According to both Allen and Wilbanks, most of their students come to their classes as believers in creationism.

“Some of my kids understand all of the theories of creationism and are truly creationists, but most of my kids believe in the Bible and have never had their beliefs challenged, so they don’t really know what they believe,” Allen said. “Many of my kids are dead-set against learning evolution. It bothers me that an 18-year-old can be so set in his thoughts and beliefs that he can’t take something new at least to examine it.”

Neither Lon Morris College nor Jacksonville College make their teachers sign a letter of confession stating that the employee’s believe as their institutions do, but both Allen and Wilbanks said that they personally agree with their school’s stance on the subject.

According to a 2006 Gallup poll, about 46 percent of Americans believe in Young Earth Creationism — the belief that God created the universe in six later days about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-six percent said they believed that God guided the process of evolution, a theory called theistic evolution. Only 13 percent believe that humans evolved over millions of years without any supernatural intervention. However, only 22 percent of people with post-graduate degrees believe in creationism.