NigeriansTalk

There is at least one sense in which Nige­ria and the US are very sim­i­lar: hav­ing a remark­ably high pro­por­tion of reli­gious peo­ple – or as the present fad expres­sion goes, peo­ple that “have a per­sonal rela­tion­ship with God” – and of course also hav­ing a high pro­por­tion of cre­ation­ists, which fol­lows, so it seems, quite easily.

This was the first thought that occurred to me last year when dur­ing the heated US pres­i­den­tial cam­paign I saw John McCain and Barack Obama on the TV, appar­ently appeal­ing to the Amer­i­can reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive right, both of them at the Sad­dle­back Church, engaged in what could hardly pass for a mild debate mod­er­ated by the pas­tor, Rick War­ren. I remem­ber think­ing to myself: the only other place where this could pos­si­bly hap­pen is right here in Nigeria.

It is in my expe­ri­ence quite safe to assume that by being a Niger­ian, you are sim­ply reli­gious by default, until con­fessed oth­er­wise, and that you believe your­self to be a cre­ation­ist even with­out hav­ing as much as a half-hearted look at the evi­dence for evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion. With this premise, I have dis­cov­ered what has become for me a most favoured pas­time, which is to bring up the the­ory of evo­lu­tion and Dar­win­ism and related sci­en­tific con­cepts eas­ily asso­ci­ated with athe­ism, agnos­ti­cism and all sorts of ungodly ten­den­cies to spark up dis­cus­sion amongst col­leagues in Nigeria.

I hope we could have one such exchange here on Niger­tansTalk. Painfully, com­pet­ing and admit­tedly often more press­ing issues gen­er­ally trump what­ever space we might have for sci­ence in our pol­i­tics and national life.

In the dis­cus­sions that have resulted, I have found that roughly half of the peo­ple I’ve encoun­tered fall within the cat­e­gory I refer to, for the pur­pose of this post, as “the fun­da­men­tal­ist,” and the low­est water­mark of such argu­ment will be: “I would cease to believe in the exis­tence of other plan­ets and solar sys­tems and galax­ies if I find a remark in Bible (or the Qur’an) that so much as sug­gests that the earth is all there is in the universe.”

The other half are about equally divided into three groups: “the open minded” (“Well, it seems there is some good evi­dence that I’ll have to spend some time to con­sider more care­fully.), the “I don’t give a damn” (“What­ever it is, I don’t think it mat­ters.”), and “the mal­leable,” those that get con­vinced after a lot of dis­cus­sion, only find that they have reverted to cre­ation­ism at the next encounter (“What you said the other day, I really don’t think it can be true.”).

There is an Amer­i­can stu­dent from Texas here, with whom I’ve had two long and inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions on evo­lu­tion and cre­ation­ism. She is an avowed cre­ation­ist and a Chris­t­ian, and like most of my Niger­ian friends, she pos­si­bly couldn’t accept that being a Chris­t­ian and an evo­lu­tion­ist at the same time are not fun­da­men­tally con­flict­ing posi­tions. For her, they are sim­ply mutu­ally exclu­sive: the exact same argu­ment that my Niger­ian friends would make.

It actu­ally got me won­der­ing how sim­i­lar Nige­ri­ans must indeed be to Amer­i­cans in this regard and why would that be? It is for me, as for most sci­en­tists a per­sis­tent puz­zle as to why Amer­i­cans are so reli­gious and how cre­ation­ism is so wide­spread and evo­lu­tion is taken with so much neg­a­tive seri­ous­ness in the US. I could eas­ily explain the sit­u­a­tion in Nige­ria. I was never taught the the­ory of evo­lu­tion in pri­mary or sec­ondary school, although of course more because there were no teach­ers to teach it than because there was a leg­is­la­tion against teach­ing it.

Look­ing back how­ever, I think not hav­ing been taught evo­lu­tion in sec­ondary school was indeed a bless­ing because then I was left to study it all be myself and so had the oppor­tu­nity to weight the evi­dence against my knowl­edge of the Bib­li­cal account of cre­ation which I was raised in, and was, as I still am, also very well versed in. I am almost cer­tain that even if there were teach­ers, it is unlikely that any will teach it well enough to present the evi­dence and allow the pupils make up their mind.

My com­par­a­tive anatomy lec­turer in med­ical school after dis­cussing all the inter­est­ing and beau­ti­ful evi­dence for evo­lu­tion, ended the lec­ture by say­ing it was all crap, and that we should take none of it any seri­ously beyond the point of recant­ing (sic) them dur­ing exams. Might that be the rea­son: the lack of unbi­ased expo­sure to the basic tenets of evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory? Might this be what some Amer­i­cans are pro­tect­ing against when they say they don’t want evo­lu­tion taught in their schools?

What do you think? Are you an evo­lu­tion­ist? Why, if yes, and why not if not? Were you intro­duced to the the­ory of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion in sec­ondary school? What do you think the effect of that might be if you were or might have been if you were not? Do you think an evo­lu­tion­ist could at the same time “have a per­sonal rela­tion­ship with God?”