14^th Community Dinner

Science Against Evolution participated in Ridgecrest's annual Community Dinner again this year. It is one of our few opportunities to meet with the public to try to gauge public sentiment about the theory of evolution. Granted, it is a relatively small sample of the population in a small desert city that is more technically oriented than most, so the conclusions might not be valid. We have, however, seen a trend over the past several years. Fewer and fewer people want to defend the theory of evolution.

In fact, this year, the only defender of evolution that I talked to was a retired Presbyterian minister. (The retired Methodist minister who believes in evolution was at the dinner, too, but he won't answer me when I greet him.) Like the Methodist minister, the Presbyterian minister couldn't defend the theory of evolution on a scientific basis, but assumed it must be true because scientists say it is true. The Presbyterian minister said that since evolution is a scientific fact, the Biblical days must not be 24 hour days, but rather long ages, and "death" in the Bible must not mean death, but rather "second death." Kindly, the minister assured me it was OK for me to believe whatever I wanted to believe, even if it was wrong.

Several people took the opportunity at the Community Dinner to thank us for showing Ben Stein's movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, at a special meeting we had a few days after the movie came out on DVD in October. We advertised the special meeting extensively in print and on the radio. As a result we had a huge crowd (we estimate about 280 people), many of whom I had never met before.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn at the Community Dinner that at least one of the local public schools had shown Expelled to its students.

Certainly there wasn't much support in Ridgecrest for the theory of evolution when we began in 1996. Each year at the Community Dinner, we find fewer and fewer people who believe in evolution. It is hard for us to tell if that is representative of America as a whole. The primary employer of people in Ridgecrest is the premier Naval weapons laboratory, so people in Ridgecrest tend to be more scientifically literate than most other places. No doubt the theory of evolution is still going strong in pockets of ignorance where scientific censorship has been successful. But the amount of hate mail we receive has decreased dramatically the last few years, despite increasing visits to our web site. Hopefully, the theory of evolution might not be fit enough to survive many more years.

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