The Varieties of Scientific Experience

CHAPTER EIGHT

Questioner: How serious do you think the problem is with the creationists that are in the States?

CS: Well, different people will have a different answer. Some fundamentalist Christians believe that it is without any doubt that the world will end shortly, that the signs, especially the formation in 1948 of the state of Israel, are clear; that is, there are many fundamentalist Christians, at least in the United States-I don't know about elsewhere in the world-who deeply believe that this is true. And there will be a tribulation and a rapture, and there's an entire mythology about the events that will happen. We are even told by the Reverend Mr. Falwell that believing Christians, when the trumpet is sounded, will be taken bodily to heaven. And if they are driving a car or flying an airplane at that moment, then the car and airplane containing its nonbelieving passengers are in some difficulty. The conclusion of which would seem to be that there has to be a test of faith before issuing a license.

Questioner: You seem to think that in the event of a nuclear war, all human beings may become extinct. I put the question on the grounds of two things that you didn't bring up at all in your talk: One, nuclear power stations will be damaged in a nuclear war, and that will leak radiation that will be dangerous for thousands of years, and two, we don't know the effects of ultraviolet light that may come through to Earth after a nuclear war.

CS: Right. So the questioner says, is it clear that other forms of life would survive bearing in mind the enhanced ultraviolet flux from the destruction of the ozone layer and the radioactive fallout, especially if nuclear power plants are targeted. I chose grasses and cockroaches because of their high radiation resistance. And if you check it out, you find that they are several orders of magnitude more resistant than humans are. A typical dose of radiation to kill a human being is a few hundred rads. There are organisms that are not killed until a few million rads. Also, the sulfur-eating marine worms that I mentioned, they were not selected randomly either. They live entirely at the ocean bottom where no ultraviolet light can get and where they are quite well insulated against radioactivity in the environment. So for those reasons I still say that many forms of life would survive, and its clear from past mass extinctions like the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that many forms of life have survived in the past what were probably more serious events than a nuclear war, although it's quite true that the radioactivity was not a component of such events in the past.

Questioner: As a scientist, would you deny the possibility of water having been changed into wine in the Bible?

CS: Deny the possibility? Certainly not. I would not deny any such possibility. But I would, of course, not spend a moment on it unless there was some evidence for it.