The Believer, page 8
Another story, another. A young woman, brain dead, car accident. After she died, her father thanked Annie for her help. Annie responded by saying, “Tell me about your daughter.” Well. He started talking about things he had never known, how he couldn’t believe the stories her friends were calling to share with him. How his daughter had been the wise one in her friendship circle, the go-to, the fixer, the helper. How proud he was of her. How devastated to learn this, to know her truly, only now.
Annie will speak directly to the person even if they are unconscious. She was called in for such a man. Greeted him by name as he lay in his hospital bed. Introduced herself.
He can’t hear you, said his wife.
I understand, Annie said, sitting beside her and explaining that, according to Buddhist belief, hearing is the last sense to go.
“It’s really important,” she tells the group, “to keep speaking even though it looks like the lights are out and no one’s home, because we just don’t know.”
Annie told the man’s wife that she could keep talking with him. Share the stories of your family, Annie said, what you’ve done together. Let him know that these are the lessons that you’ve learnt, share some of the funny things, just keep talking. Then Annie said some prayers. Excused herself, saying she would be going.
“Martin, I’m leaving now,” she told the man from the foot of his bed. “And I’m going to pray for you.”
He opened his eyes, looked directly at her. Said very quietly, “Thank you.” A perfect example, she tells the group, of how we just don’t know.
“How are we going for time?” Annie asks Joe, who gives her a nod. One more. Elderly lady, in her eighties, surrounded by her family, her two strapping sons. Suddenly she says that she wants to get out of bed, needs to get out of bed. Stay there, stay there, urged her children and the nurses. Whatever it is, we’ll do it for you. She kept insisting she needed to get out of bed.
Why do you need to get out of bed? Annie asked.
I need to do something important, she replied.
“I may cry,” Annie says now, “because this was very powerful for me.”
Annie checked with the nurses, they approved as long as the woman was supported. So her sons lowered the bed rail and, in the reversal that is Time, lifted the bundle of their mother out of her cot. I’m going to kneel down now, she told them. This was what she had wanted to do. Touch the ground.
“I’m just thanking the earth,” she said. “Because the earth has been so good to me.”
Silence while we all breathe together. And then Joe asks where everyone would like to have lunch. “It was raining fifteen minutes ago,” he says. “But it’s blue sky now, though it’s a bit blowy.”
A decision is made to eat outside anyway.
14
In the Beginning
Andrew
Everyone who works or volunteers at the Creation Museum—from the cleaners to the cashiers at Uncle Leroy’s Fudge Stand to the “PhD scientists”—is required to sign the ministry’s Statement of Faith. That statement attests, among other things (such “other things” including that God finds homosexuality offensive) that: Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ.
Dr. Andrew Snelling is a geologist and the ministry’s Director of Research. Dr. Snelling completed his doctorate—a geochemical study of the Koongara Uranium Deposit—at the University of Sydney in 1980. According to the Answers in Genesis website, Snelling’s research has demonstrated that a global flood about 4,300 years ago explains many rock layers and most fossil deposits found around the world. His research also indicates, the ministry argues, that the radioactive methods for dating rocks at millions and billions of years old are not reliable, polonium radiohalos indicate granites and metamorphism of rocks occurred rapidly, and the rock evidence overall is consistent with a young earth.
I sit down with Snelling the week before he flies to Brisbane to speak at a conference with Ken Ham. Like Ham, he has an Aussie accent undiminished by his time in Kentucky. He presents as perfectly professorial in his lack of enthusiasm for eye contact, the precision of his phrasing and the trajectory of his pointer finger when he speaks. Unlike Georgia Purdom, he has an office with a large window through which I can see a line of trees, their leaves turned yellow and orange. Shelves of journals and books encircle him where he sits. He gestures me towards a chair in front of his expansive desk, on which rests a well-thumbed Holy Bible in a zip-up leather case.
“Do you have any church background at all?” he inquires.
“I’m Jewish,” I reply, settling into my chair.
“Okay.”
“You could probably put me in a secular humanist Jewish basket,” I offer.
“Oh, I don’t like necessarily putting people in baskets,” he replies somberly, with a touch of the Pooh Bear. “Course, the trouble is you put a person in a basket and there may be all these other things attached to that basket that they don’t really hold to. You shoehorn people into a particular slot and you really do them an injustice.”
He is, of course, correct both generally and specifically insofar as he demonstrates that it is possible simultaneously to consider Satan your personal spiritual adversary and to stay up to date with the Journal of Geology.
As a geologist, Snelling worked for various uranium mining companies, the Australian government agency responsible for scientific research and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization. “I started working with Ken Ham in Brisbane at the end of 1983 for the forerunner to the min—the Answers in Genesis organization,” he explains, correcting himself when he starts to say “ministry.” “I worked for nearly fifteen years for the min—for the organization in Australia.”
Snelling first came to the States in 1990 when he went to the Grand Canyon with a geologist from the California-based Institute for Creation Research. He explains that he accepted a role working for that institute from Brisbane, so he would not have to uproot his children, who were young and “finding their wings,” a phrase I find moving. Finally, in 2007, he stepped into the role he currently holds.
Boxes of rock samples in chalky plastic baggies populate the floor. Books and journals are heaped everywhere: The Adelaide Geosyncline; The Geology of New South Wales; Geology and Mineral Resources of Tasmania; The Geologic Time Scale, 2012; The Tectonics of the Appalachians.
The first impulse is to freeze; the second is to grapple for some way out. The continuing impulse is towards control despite knowing it’s impossible.
The first time I felt an earthquake I found myself, for too long, vaguely annoyed that our upstairs neighbors had decided to move furniture late at night. “The experience of an earthquake can be destabilising,” Geoff Manaugh writes, “not just physically but also philosophically.” The idea that the ground is solid—that we can build on it, trust it to support us, he continues, undergirds nearly all human terrestrial activity.
What we call “ground,” however, is just the solid crust on a slowly flowing river; a puzzle of tectonic plates drifting on the viscous mantle beneath. When Manaugh made the error of asking a seismologist he was interviewing a question about geology she replied, “I study waves, not rocks.”
“We do not, in fact, live on solid ground,” Manaugh realized. “We are mariners, rolling on the peaks and troughs of a planet we’re still learning to navigate.”
Andrew Snelling grew up in a strongly religious house and by the age of five was expected to sit quietly at attention in church. One of the books he read as a boy still looms large for him. “The Genesis Flood, published in 1961 by Whitcomb and Morris, was a book that was influential on Ken and it was influential for me,” he says. “I looked at that when I was a teenager and he was a young man as well.”
Though young Snelling and Ham lived in New South Wales and Brisbane, respectively, they were introduced through Snelling’s minister, who knew they were both interested in “this creation flood issue.”
The book he is referring to, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, was written by John Whitcomb, one of the founders of the modern creationism movement, and Henry Morris, a civil engineer. In it can be found the particular flavor of logic promoted at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, namely the conflicting assertions that “the evidences of full divine inspiration of Scripture are far weightier than the evidences for any fact of science” and that scientific facts support the veracity of Scripture. In 1972, Morris elaborated on his cosmology in The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, writing that a cosmic battle between Satan and the archangel Michael probably caused the craters of the moon. Ken Ham has called Morris one of his “heroes of the faith,” stating that “he is the man the Lord raised up as the father of the modern creationist movement.”
Though Snelling’s papers took out the first, second and third prizes for technical excellence at the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, he is not one to rest on his laurels. Unlike Purdom (now ensconced in other roles) and Ham (whose five doctorates are honorary), Snelling is an active researcher. Despite some time lost earlier this year resolving an unpleasantness with Grand Canyon National Park, in which his initial application for rock sampling was rejected due to what he calls “world-view discrimination,” he now has the requested rock samples and they are in a lab getting thin sections cut. “I’ll be studying them under the microscope, photographing features et cetera for publication et cetera . . .” he says.
While his articles are peer-reviewed in creationist journals, Snelling no longer has strong links with non-creationist academics in the earth sciences.
“I did earlier on but because of my focus and because of some of their reactions to what I do, the distance has grown,” he explains. “I’m still involved in professional societies but not so much in an active way, per se, in contributing to the life of the society. But I support their work and their journals et cetera. So, no, it’s a while since . . . I’ve had contact with a few people over the years but I haven’t maintained those strong links. Because of busy-ness more than anything else . . .”
I ask what initially attracted him to geology as a specialization.
“Ah! ” He is suddenly animated, explaining that he went to Tasmania on a family holiday when he was in fourth grade and there they visited a mining area. “So I got attracted to the sparkly, shiny minerals and I started picking up rocks!
“And you know what it’s like to have show-and-tell at school, I brought my rock collec—my rocks in to tell about them. And it’s not long before you know more about these things than anyone else in the class, which of course makes you feel important, so it spurs your interest. By the time I was going to high school, I was convinced that I was going to be a geologist, so it went from there. I was reading everything I could get my hands on.”
Later in our discussion, I ask Snelling whether selectively applying the scientific method is as problematic as selectively applying the Bible.
“One of the areas I look at is the Genesis flood,” he replies. “You read what the Bible says and you say to yourself, ‘If that really occurred, what would be the evidence?’ So at one level, yes, you’re saying, ‘Yes, this is a literal historical account.’ But then you’re saying, ‘Well, okay, if it is a literal historical account, let’s test what it claims.’ If it says that it covered all the high hills under the Heaven then that means that the ocean waters must’ve flooded over the continents. If they did that, would they not carry creatures that lived in the ocean and potentially bury them up on the continents? So you predict that there would be marine fossils buried on the continents. And you go out, and that’s what you find,” he concludes crisply.
“It doesn’t prove, per se, because we weren’t there to actually see it happen but it’s circumstantial evidence that confirms what you predicted. Yes, it is taking the Bible as an actual historical account, but it’s testing it. That’s what a forensic scientist does, say, with a crime scene. If suspect A did it, what will link up with what I found at the crime scene et cetera? It’s a similar process.”
That is the role of an advocate which is, I suppose, the whole point, since his ministry’s Statement of Faith holds that “by definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.” Also: “Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.”
It is impossible to directly experience the past, the future, alternatives to reality, remote locations or another person’s perspective. But we have memories and hopes, plans for the distant future; we speculate about what might have been and we are capable of deep empathy.
The various ways in which something or someone might be removed from us—in time, space, social distance or hypotheticality—are categorized as different types of distance. But social psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman found “a marked commonality” in the way people responded to those different categories. They proposed that this was because responding to anything or anyone that is increasingly distant from ourselves requires us to rely more on our capacity for abstract thought and association, and less on our direct experience. It is possible, in other words, to build a cognitive and emotional bridge across distance, but the integrity of that bridge will depend on knowing where we end and the Other begins.
This human ability to both affirm our self and transcend it has always been essential, and perhaps it is becoming increasingly important. “Human history is associated with expanding horizons,” Trope and Liberman write, “traversing greater spatial distances, forming larger social groups, planning and investing in a more distant future, and reaching farther back into the past.” Our superpower and our Achilles heel, a way of flying or falling.
Unlike Ham, Snelling sees himself returning, eventually, to Australia. “See, it’s different,” he says, explaining that unlike Ken, his grandchildren do not live in America. “So it makes sense for us to go back, though I would hope to still be able to be writing and things like that while I still have the health.”
In the sunlight that filters in through the large window and gets lost in the crevices just above the bridge of his glasses, I can almost see the boy with his rock collection hovering shyly at the edge of the space between us.
I imagine he would say something about the quarantining comforts derived from special knowledge; how it substitutes, poorly but adequately, for a different type of ease and belonging. And, at the same time, this boy contains a bursting to share what he has discovered; carries the love that burns at the heart of close attentiveness.
That boy, who is now grown and finally inhabiting the center of his particular universe, might not fully enjoy retreating from this enabling Eden, with its scholastic superhighways and its multitudes sufficiently large and willing to finance them. But what is distance anyway on a still-new earth where anything, really, might happen?
15
Paranormal
The Vigil
Where do I start with my night at the Masonic Hall? With the strange mix of boredom and terror? How I regret leaving too early? Maybe the moment when I was so spooked that I hurried from the bathroom, pants still open under my sweater, and scuttled on legs pumping with insectile rapidity back through a dark hallway towards the only inhabited room in the old building where moments before I had sat in inky blackness on “vigil” with members of the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research before acting on the delusional self-confidence that I might perhaps go to the toilet by myself. Or another moment, weeks later, sitting at my desk. On high alert listening to the audio of that night’s events, alive to the information that voices unheard at the time, voices unaccounted for, have sometimes—according to those AIPR members—clearly manifested on tape after the event.
It was a Saturday night, a Sunday morning actually, and I left the vigil at 12:45 am—which, like I said, I now regret given what happened twenty-six minutes later.
The Yarraville Masonic Hall was suggested as a candidate for paranormal investigation by Misha/Amber, who recently held a workshop here. She did not go into detail, but the possibility of something encysted inside the building’s 111-year-old walls was sufficiently intriguing for Vlad to come out tonight, along with three other AIPR members—Paul, a psychologist, Marina, a forensic scientist, and Evelyn, a grandmother in her seventies—as well as Jessica, one of the psychic attendees at the Abbotsford conference, who is in her twenties and currently completing “a diploma of regression,” working with those who wish to explore their past lives.
Aside from the Freemasons’ lodge meetings that are its raison d’etre, the Masonic Hall hosts a weekend craft market and occasional events like book launches and weddings. Nick the caretaker is giving Vlad the grand tour, snapping on the lights as he goes. I wander into the great hall for a moment with Jessica, our footsteps echoing in the vast space. “It’s like an old dance hall,” she laughs, looking around before her smile drops like a curtain. “I don’t like it.”
When I ask what it feels like to “not like” the space, Jessica explains that it’s a feeling of No, a heaviness in her chest. I’ll read later of the send-off that was held here over a hundred years ago for eight local boys going into the First World War. How a strong ladies committee had made elaborate arrangements—as only ladies can, giving each of the boys a waist-belt and clasp-knife. How there was dancing until a late hour. But for now there are just the two of us under six ceiling fans inexplicably whirling above the emptiness. To Jessica’s surprise, a decision is made to start the investigation in the lodge room rather than in here.
