Ed Kemmick
Ten years ago, before he opened his faith-based creationist dinosaur museum, I went over to Glendive to interview Otis Kline.
I had thought it might be fun to hear Kline present his notions regarding evolution, the age of the Earth and what we could learn from dinosaur fossils.
Kline did indeed assert that the Earth was 6,500 to 7,000 years old, that dinosaurs were among the creatures on Noah’s teeming ark, and that all the heavenly bodies were created at the same time the Earth was brought into being.
But it wasn’t much fun. Kline was soft-spoken, a bit doddering and terribly earnest. He went on and on, defending mounting absurdities with ever stranger fantasies. It wasn’t quite like listening to a man telling you he was Napoleon, but I had the same sense of being unable to say anything in response.
Once you start arguing with a man telling you he is Napoleon, you have already begun to lose the argument.
Kline has been in the news lately, indirectly, because Bozeman entrepreneur Greg Gianforte was one of the major financial contributors to his museum. Gianforte has been at the center of a culture-war controversy since it was announced that he would be delivering two commencement addresses next month, at Montana Tech in Butte and Rocky Mountain College in Billings.
Some critics have zeroed in on his support of organizations considered extremely homophobic. At Montana Tech, which turns out a steady stream of petroleum geologists — people unlikely to believe that God, during those first six busy days, salted the Earth with pockets of oil and gas — some professors were appalled by Gianforte’s seeming rejection of basic science.
I’m not appalled — maybe a little amazed and confused — but the science question does interest me most in the case.
I asked Gianforte, for a story I wrote last week, whether he agreed with the views advanced by Kline’s museum. He declined to answer. That is his right, but it’s also a shame. He made a fortune as a computer scientist before he was 50, so you’d have to be pretty foolish or arrogant to question his intelligence.
And that’s the point: With apologies to Kline, I would love to hear somebody as intelligent as Gianforte defend the idea of a young Earth.
Before I spoke with Kline, I realized that a lot of people rejected the theory of evolution by natural selection. It hadn’t occurred me that believing strictly in the biblical account of creation meant that you had to reject the basic findings of other sciences, too, including astronomy.
Kline told me that the stars and planets were created solely to mark the seasons and to serve as signs for people on Earth. “No matter whether it’s the study of animals, earth science, or astronomy,” he said, “the wonders of God’s creation are prostituted for evolutionism.”
So, while the proponents of creationism and its slightly better-dressed kin, Intelligent Design, are always denouncing Darwin as an agent of the devil, keep in mind that Albert Einstein would have to be considered just as wicked.
I came away from my conversation with Kline feeling deflated. It all seemed so limiting, even disrespectful. How could anyone look at the totality of human understanding of the cosmos and still believe in a pre-Copernican circus-tent universe in which pinpoints of light poke through the overhead canvas? The belief shrinks not only creation but the creator.
How much nobler — and more respectful? — to believe in a God capable of creating a universe of virtually limitless size and inconceivable complexity. That’s the part I don’t get, why believers use what they regard as the word of God to whittle God down to size.
And that, again, is what I would love to hear Gianforte explain.
But there is another consideration. Gianforte has assured officials at both colleges that he is not going to speak about religion, politics or gay rights. His plan was always to talk to graduating students about the value of education and the need to build a stronger economy.
There’s nothing wrong with opposing Gianforte’s appearances on the grounds that he has funded groups hostile to basic human rights for certain residents of Montana. But is it really any of our business whether he thinks the Earth is 6,000 or 6 billion years old?
I wouldn’t ask Otis Kline to speak to a gathering of students graduating with biology degrees, but I don’t think Gianforte’s apparent support of creationism undermines what he has to say about business success, or detracts from his own considerable achievements.
Just imagine if a Montana college invited a Native American elder to deliver a commencement address. Do you suppose anyone would object on the grounds that the speaker believed a creation myth that said his people were brought into being by Old Man Coyote?
Just asking the question shows how absurd the question is. But also note how easy it is to call other cultures’ foundational stories “creation myths.” That’s the way we are. We all consider ourselves God’s chosen people.
I suppose it’s fair to ask what my own beliefs are, however unlikely I am ever to be a commencement speaker. Well, I once described myself as a born-once Catholic, sometime-Congregationalist, quasi-heathenish skeptical believer in mysteries mostly beyond our ken. I’m not even a sometime-Congregationalist anymore, but the rest of it stands.
I do think evolution by natural selection is the only theory that remotely begins to explain the multiplicity of life as we know it. I also believe that our ideas, as much as our physical natures, are subject to evolution.
And though our ideas evolve much more rapidly than our biology, that change, too, can sometimes seem so very, very slow.
