A Discussion with Peter Knox, Jesuit Priest, Jesuit Institute of South Africa

May 17, 2011

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in May 2011, undergraduate student Conor Finegan interviewed Peter Knox, a Jesuit priest at the Jesuit Institute of South Africa and a lecturer with the Believing in Creation and Evolution Project. In this interview, Knox discusses the Believing in Creation and Evolution Project and the role of his faith and Jesuit values in his work with the Origins Centre.

So just to start—if you can tell me a bit about the journey, for yourself, your present position, and how were you inspired to do the work you do, just in very general terms?

As I mentioned during the presentation, initially I was a chemist, I trained as a chemist before I decided I should become a priest, and I became a priest in the Brookings Society of Jesus. I joined the Jesuits from University of Cape Town. I did my training in Britain and in South Africa, and then in Kenya. And then after finishing my Jesuit coronation—it takes several years—I was appointed to work at the Jesuit Institute here in Johannesburg, which only began four years ago. So I’ve been here since the offset—for four years—and we’ve been trying to bring the church—the good news—into other sections of society where it’s not normally heard and where people don’t normally have exposure to the Christian message. So that’s what we do in the Jesuit Institute. We obviously [do] service within the Church and a lot of our work is as a service organization within the Catholic Church. But we also want to put it out there so we have work with parliamentarians, we have work with people in business. We have work in schools, in general, not specifically Catholic schools. Some of us teach at universities; for example, Anthony teaches at the University of Johannesburg. So we try to bring our Christian faith—the Jesuits—inside, into the world, we try to take it beyond the confines of the average church.

And you talk about Jesuit identity. You know all those Jesuit ideals, like cura personalis and men and women for others. How do you think those factors into your work?

I think the "men and women for others," for example, you can’t really present something like that in one small encounter. You have to model this type of idea to people. You have to try to give it to children. For example, if you work at a school, you can have a longer content of interaction, get the sense of what you really mean by this. We can’t just pop into a school, give a 45-minute class and then pop out again and think that you’ve communicated some of these important things, such as cura personalis, care of human beings, Men and Women for Others. These are long-term investments that you put into people’s lives—important ideas that you have to continue watering.

Then, in that sense, how do you think your religion motivates, or influences, or maybe detracts from the work that you do?

Religion?

Right—your religion.

My own religion—well, I suppose my religion encompasses everything in my life. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t be doing if I didn’t have religious motivations. I could be quite happy to continue to be a chemist. Work somehow in chemistry and teach very, very secular subjects as you heard that other chap teaching on Friday afternoon. If I wasn’t religious in any way, that’s the way I would live my life. But because I’m areligious, that means belonging to a religious congregation, because I have a religious view of the entire world—that theological view—which informs everything I try to do.

I’m going to get to the creation and evolution project eventually, but before we get there I want to talk a little bit about some background information. Why do you think so many South Africans believe in this Biblical literalism and take the story of Adam and Eve as fact. Are there motivating factors? What do you think the reasons are?

You have to understand South Africa is a very religious society. The missionary work that was done here has been very effective. Many people call themselves Christian and they belong to a whole gambit, there are about 3,000 different Christian denominations in South Africa. And those who aren’t Christian are either Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu. And there is a small minority—it would be good for you to look at some of these statistics from the census, for example, the most recent census. And there’s another census going to be done this year. Look at the statistics and you’ll see how many people call themselves religious. And there are very, very few (I don’t have the numbers right now) who call themselves “no religion at all.” So South Africa is kind of a religiously informed society and those who are Christian turn to the scriptures for their inspiration. The Catholic Church has only rediscovered the scriptures since the Second Vatican Council. Before that Catholics didn’t really use the scriptures as their day-to-day handbook. And then those who do read the scriptures haven’t really studied them in depth and haven’t looked into the historical background of various books and haven’t done much home-religious study. They haven’t done Bible studies which takes them beyond the first glance reading of the scriptures. They look at them and take them at face value. That’s normal with every church. It’s only those who go more deeply into the scriptures who realize that you can’t really take it at face value. The Book of Revelation, for example, isn’t written about the year 2011. It was written about was happening in the first centuries of Christianity.

And when you talk about people not having the proper training, are there other influences, for example, if black South Africans versus white South Africans, one group was more likely to believe, or the lower class of people or poor versus the people who have had an education or who are good at it, or illiterate, or maybe Catholics versus members of the AIC, or things like that. Are there particular other groups who are more inclined to believe?

I don’t think it’s so much a belief as a methodology. A way of using the text and I think people of every class, every social background, wealthy, poor, Catholic, Protestant, everybody is open to education, or should be open to education. And as people learn more about the scriptures and what the scriptures mean, they are less inclined to use them in what we call the fundamental, fundamentalist way.

And I don’t think you can make some broad class distinctions or religious distinctions. Everybody uses the scriptures; until they learn more about them, it’s the way anyone approaches any text if you take it at face value. If you read the newspaper, you have to look behind the text, to see who wrote it, why they wrote it, what the message is that they’re to put across. And until you don’t you’re going to read things.

So to wrap it up, you wouldn’t think that people who live in poverty or who don’t have the same educational resources would be more likely to take the Bible at face value?

No, I don’t. Our experience during Apartheid and particularly in poorer communities is that poorer communities would [find] liberationist meeting in scriptures. They would take Exodus—an important text. Work was being done in Merrittsberg with people like Jim Cochran and Michael Wesley, I think. People in Biblical studies who would go to communities and let communities read the scriptures from their own perspective of oppression. And find that and so these might be proved very parochial, but they would find in the scriptures at lot more than wealthier and comfortable Christians.

That’s very interesting. So do you think having this belief—or having this methodology—disadvantages students at all in the classroom or outside that?

The methodology—just taken at face value…

More so than taking the Bible, just having that belief in the story of Adam and Eve as fact.

Yes, of course it disadvantages people. Because they may go through life thinking that any scientific research is somehow bogus. We’ve heard stories about, Merrill was talking about—they found a great big fossil of a fox skull which was about two foot long—50 to 60 centimeters across and he said oh you’re a great artist. He accused Merrill of having manufactured or fabricated that skull, that fossil.

And so obviously he’s at a disadvantage if he goes through life saying, “This cannot be—that cannot be, the next things can’t be because it doesn’t tie in with what I read in Genesis, Chapters 1 and 2.” They’re at a complete disadvantage. They don’t know anything about what’s happened in the history of the universe or the history of this planet or the history of life.

Do you think that just opening up educational resources like the Jesuit program—is that the solution then to this problem?

That’s not a complete solution. It’s only part of the solution. We are only to reach—last year we reached only about 600 to 700 [people].This year, We’re only going to reach 9,500 and that’s not going to solve any problem. People choose for themselves what they want to believe in [and] how much they want to be educated. No matter how much opportunity you give them, many people will remain closed and don’t want to know and they’ll find whatever reason not to learn.

School children, for example, those in the schools to which we go, they at least have to sit through our presentation. And we ask them to have an open mind. Hopefully, then they can make up their own minds, without having decided before, and what they’re going to believe and what they’re not going to believe.

So talking about changing a person’s belief, though—it’s pretty radical, it is something that is very personal, obviously. So what exactly do you think is the goal for your program? What are your hopes for these students who sit through your lecture and for the teachers who have to sit through it as well

Jesus says of himself “I’m the way to truth of life.” And I think part of our ministry is educators and Jesuits have a history of being educators. Part of our ministry is to try to present truth to people. Give them an exposure to the truth and offer them a choice. If people don’t have exposure to the truth, then it’s our fault. It’s a mission encumbered on us, those of us who have been educated, have an obligation to share this. What is our goal? Our goal is to introduce people to God. God has created the world. There’s no point in having people sitting with false beliefs. Ultimately, though, they have to make up their own minds—make a choice.

To go back to the project, if you could give me a bit of background. How did it first develop and when did you really first sense there was a need for a program like this.

I’d been teaching for some years at the National Seminary in Pretoria. The seminarians, in their first year of theology. One of the courses I teach is, or have taught, is God and creation. So we spend the first half of the semester looking at God and the doctrine of God—the attributes of God and here to infinity, etc., etc. In the second half of the course, we look at Genesis, Chapters and 1 and 2 and I’ve tried to let them have an idea about how big the universe is and where the universe came from, how it started and etc.

Obviously, then we touch on the notion of evolution. Many of the seminarians are very resistant to the evolution of humankind, or the human species. So this was some years ago—five years ago—that I encountered this resistance. And then out of the blue, Merrill who works at the Origin Center approached the Jesuit Institute. Merrill knows me from years back. I was a chaplain when she was at university and she was a student, graduate and then she was a doctorate student. She approached us and said she’s got an interesting proposal for us. She’s encountered this resistance from school kids and would we be able to work with her putting a religious a slant on the evolution story, which is her bread and butter—she goes on all the time educating people about paleontology and evolution. She approached and asked if we can come up with a religious slant and become co-presenters with her—on the kind of theological, biblical dimension of what she’s teaching. So she came, we put it to our team and the team had been largely enthusiastic. It ended up that Anthony, who is a Jesuit priest, and I, have done most of the presentations. Raymond Perry, the director of the Institute, has gotten involved, but it’s mostly Anthony and myself who go around to the schools working with Merrill.

While I was in Britain last year—I was away for four months—Anthony put together the presentation which you had seen. We share the presentation - we obviously don’t present it in exactly the same way. Anthony is a historian, I’m a theologian—we present it in different ways. Basically we try to do the same message, the two of us.

So how long now has the program been going on?

Fourteen, 15 months. It’s less than a year and a half.

In those 14, 15 months, how effective do you think it has been, and to tag along with that, in what ways can you measure its success?

Personally, we can’t measure the success. We’ve got students for two hours in a morning or afternoon. They see us, they listen to us, we hope, and then we go away. We’ve had some of the teachers asking us whether the same students who have been attending our sessions in May, might come back in the month of October, where hopefully their questions have developed and matured and they have deeper questions to ask us. That’s one way we would find quite helpful to measure our success. Follow-up. At the moment, we’ve had very little, or no follow-up. So that’s why we’re trying to take the project a step further and give education, not directly to students, but to teachers, because teachers are in long-term contact with their students. And we’d like to approach one of the universities in Johannesburg to try to bring something like this—faith and religion—into the teacher training curriculum. We haven’t hit a brick wall yet, but we haven’t got to speak to the right people yet. People who would be able to include this, if they thought it was the right one, into the teacher training curriculum. So the teacher training curriculum has a lot of good material in terms of science education which is another strand—is another the department that teachers R.E.—religious education teachers, but we haven’t come across anyone who brings the two together and says this is how faith and science speak to each other. But ideally we see our modification effect and that’s not what the Jesuits—we like to deal with the multi-layers rather than direct non-conflict. We haven’t seen our efforts mobilized yet.

There are two different—in Westin and in Johannesburg—national university and education faculties and we’d like to go to the second university in Johannesburg and see whether we can get to the educational department there.

So beyond that, what other major obstacles do you face with the program—maybe on a daily basis and, along the same lines, who or what people, organizations constitute the biggest challenge, or the biggest sorts of opposition, to the program?

We’ve had incredible cooperation. Merrill does the advertising. Merrill contacts the schools and we’ve had great response—a lot of positive response from many of the Catholic schools. We dealt with the free, formerly disadvantaged schools in Soweto last year. And we had hundreds, maybe several hundred children come into the Origin Center. Now that proved problematic because of logistics of getting 700 children from the township into the museum. That’s why this year, we’ve taken the program to the schools and it’s been well received. You were with us for two presentations on Friday and you saw us dealing with maybe 400 children in grades 10, 11, and 12. There are some who obviously made up their minds what they believe or what they don’t want to believe. Some of them have got the idea that maybe they can hold the two together—believe in creation and the theory of evolution. I suppose the obstacle is basically that people are challenged people who don’t like having this challenge. We’ve had no structural obstacles. We have already set aside ten slots in May and ten slots in October. Our obstacle is our own time limitation—we can’t be doing this forever. We have other things that we need to do. So we set aside a week in May and a week in October. Of the ten slots, nine were taken last week. So that’s not bad.

Having done the presentation the week before to the religious teachers at Heart and Collins, I immediately had teachers come up to me and say, “Please, would you bring this presentation to our schools?” for October. So in May they’re already asking for presentations in October.

So what do you think works best about the program and what do you see as it’s great successes?

What works best if that you have the attention of 200 young people—200 young minds—and interestingly, also their teachers, because their teachers sometimes come up with very important questions. And each time we have a different group of students, they are asking us different questions. And we sort of hone our presentation for the following time, which is something which is more sensitive to where they’re coming from and what their needs might be. I think that’s what we learn. Does that answer your questions? Do you need more extensive …

...more extensive in what you see as your greater successes. I know that’s hard to judge—you said there was a lot of feedback.

I think the great success is we actually have people, school teachers thinking that they’re not isolated—they’re not completely isolated. Teachers are hearing that they’re not the only ones in the world who are have difficulty teaching faith and science. We did research primary school—some research with 13 primary school teachers, teachers of religious education, and 18, I think, high school science teachers and we had them at two different conferences. And we just had them for just about 30 minutes filling in the questionnaire and we’ve able to see from their long answers, they’re able to express some of their concerns. Hopefully, we go back to these schools, where these teachers have expressed their concerns and they can say, “Ok, I’m not totally alone with my worries,” and for them to know there’s at least somebody within the Catholic schools’ organization is hearing them and trying to do something on their behalf. We wrote last year, Anthony and I wrote together with Eve a manual for sexuality education. And that has been an expressed need of Catholic teachers who hopefully now know how to teach sexuality within the Catholic context. Now we are hoping to produce in a year or two’s time something to do with the education of creation, evolution, Big Bang, Genesis. So we have to produce a resource which will give teachers greater confidence in what they are doing.

Now I want to get back to the Jesuit question. How do you think the Jesuit identity really affects the project and what Jesuit core values, like the ones we talked about earlier, do you think are present in this work?

Frankly, I haven’t seen any other religious congregations or a group of priests or a group of religious—male or female—stepping into this (a) identifying this need and (b) stepping into it. You generally don’t find many schools in South Africa, they’re not heavily invested in education, or keeping an education as the positive goal. And yet the Jesuits, the sons of Jesus, see this as an important project for the development of faith of ordinary Catholics. Many of the kids at our schools, in fact, are not even Catholic, so they’ll go back to their own Christian churches and hopefully spread the quiet humility of which, the second humility, “Actually, I believe in evolution and creation.”

I think identifying a need and actually doing something about it. Maybe people of other congregations are just, they do know the need, but they’re just too tied down with the day-to-day running of their schools. They’re working out where the money is going to come from for the next semester. We have a greater freedom and mobility. We can step in to make a resource available and then ask their thoughts.

I don’t see the Jesuits continuing this particular project for years and years and years. It’s almost like we’re consultants. We present what’s been requested of us and then we move onto another project. And I think that’s because we are fairly light and not tied down. St. Ignatius had the view that we don’t get ourselves tied down.

And, then, what do you think having the Jesuit name attached to the program—what does that mean to the students you talk to or the schools themselves?

I think that for the vast majority of people, it gives great confidence. They see both Anthony and I—we both have Ph.D.s in our respective fields. Merrill has a Ph.D. in her field. They can see that we know what we’re talking about. We’re not being irresponsible, we’re not just rushing into schools where angels fear to tread. We are respectful about the sensitivities there and I think that people have confidence that these people know what they’re doing.

At the same time, there are people who react against the Jesuit name, for whatever reason, they have decided that Jesuits are not a good thing, and therefore they would have a negative reaction to the whole venture. And that’s understandable, and people have their histories and have their reasons for believing what they believe. Hopefully, the way in which we present is sufficiently respectful of them, that they see a little bit more about the Society of Jesus. But we’re not there to sell the Society of Jesus. What we’re trying to do is to communicate to children and to their teachers that they can be Christians and dialogue with the modern world.

That their faith doesn’t have to be challenge everything that science is putting forward, is proposing as an authentic explanation. This is the Jesuits promoting the agenda of the Second Vatican Council. Don even speaks about the church in the modern world. We’re helping people to be faithful Christians in a world where the dominant discourse is the scientific discourse.

So then, where do you think the program goes from here? What is next? I know there were challenges in reaching out to schools that aren’t Catholic schools—could you talk about that as well?

Merrill has been in touch with the Anglican schools. We don’t have a direct entrée into the Anglican s schools, but they are appearing in different schools, in Methodist schools, faith based schools in the Johannesburg area and we try to go to them. Many of the government schools don’t have the funding to either bring people bring their children to the Origin Center or be willing to pay for us to come to see them They see it as “extra” curriculum and they have to find ways to do that. Last year Merrill got some funding from the DST—the Department of Science and Technology, and that’s how we were alerted to rent buses to bring the children to the Origin Center. You pay an entrance fee for that, so in time we hope to be able to do this with other, previously disadvantaged—which is our code name for black schools—the township schools. When we get funding, we’d like to do this with other denominations or non-denominational students.

Where do we see it going? We hope, in time, to be able to produce a resource which meets the needs of teaching a curriculum for grade 12 curriculum and the R.E. curriculum—to produce a resource and then give it a life of its own and not constantly servicing the project. You know, we’ve only just moved onto something different. It’s not like we applied to this for the next 100 years. And maybe in ten years’ time, whatever resource we produce will be updated as the educational curriculum is changed. We’ll revisit this in maybe 10 years’ time.

What can the government—and then what can others in the future—do to help you reach this goal of teaching children to believe in both. I know you talked about funding. What else can be done by other institutions?

As you know, others and I have put the product together. It would be good for other institutions to say, “Yes, we appreciate this—we can take it into our own school systems.” The government is a very secular government and they try not to dictate what’s on the religion education curriculum. Certainly Catholic schools are faith-based schools. They don’t impose on the R.E. teachers what is being taught. There is a life skills course which runs through the whole of secondary school. We see a way of incorporating this into life skills program. But we’re not trying to have other schools or organizations to help us, or other organizations to help us.

What we’re really trying to do is to be a service provider ourselves—to help them to do what they need to do. It’s not as if we have this fantastic product and they have to dance around to help us sell our product. It’s precisely the opposite. We’re trying to facilitate what they are trying to do themselves. We mustn’t become the center of attraction. We mustn’t become the organization that needs to be promoted.

To backtrack a little bit, but about the previously disadvantaged schools where you haven’t been able to reach out yet, because of lack of funding and other issues like that. Do you think those students are at a greater risk of a belief like this, or falling into a belief like this, and then being disadvantaged by that belief?

I think so. I think the whole educational backlog and the whole Apartheid educational situation, where blacks, whites, coloreds, and Indians were educated separately. And they had a lot less money to spend on the education of black students than on Indian and white students. That just hasn’t fallen away as of 1994 when Apartheid officially ended.

And there are ramifications that will carry on for generations in terms of educational funding, the preparedness of teachers to teach what they actually should know in terms of the availability of good teachers. And so previously-disadvantaged schools are, in fact, still disadvantaged. We may call them previously-disadvantaged because it’s correct to say they are now on a par with the other schools. But that’s not the case. Even if the government puts, and the churches, and the faith organizations, and NGOs put tons and tons of money and expertise into previously disadvantaged schools, it will take at least a generation of scholars and teachers to come through to sort of equalize the quality of education across South Africa. And there still will always be E-D schools. And I think the government recognizes that. There is a move to democratize education completely, where some people suggest the closure of schools for the elite—elite schools. I think the government, the country has moved beyond that. Many of these elite schools have outreaches, which is something we’re going to work on in the future. And that Sacred Heart, which is one of the important, avant-garde schools on the cutting-edge [of] education is dealing with poorer institutes in its immediate area. And so they have corporate, social responsibility and have a notion of taking care of the poor. Some of the elite schools we dealt with have a farm school attached to it so the children of the people working on the lands, are able to be educated and receive goods—a rounded education.

I’m actually headed toward the end. Just in general terms, what do you think other educators around the world could learn from the program?

I think they can take courage that something as pretty as this is being dealt with in South Africa. There’s a lot of sensitivity about evolution. Many black people have grown up being told they are closer to the apes. There’s a whole lot of racism inherit in the South African psyche. There is a lot of insecurity in the area of evolution. I think educators around the world can see that if South Africa can tackle it, they, too, can tackle it. South Africa also takes the faith dimension seriously. And this is an important area of people’s knowledge and people’s culture.

Africa is said to be notoriously religious and I think that’s a very important message to the rest of the world, which is getting increasingly secular. But we do take religion seriously. And there are also I.K.’s—indigenous knowledge systems so African traditional religions, which we should take seriously, is part of the entire human being, a whole rounded human being. That you don’t just deal with the scientific mind or the scientific imagination. We also have to deal with the religious dimension of people’s lives, the spiritual, the dimension where people are more in touch with their emotions and their feel of God or their knowledge of God. And I think that’s part of the Jesuit’s educational paradigm as well—that we try to deal with people as complete human beings and not just the intellectual dimension of your life—addressing the spiritual as well.

What kind of specific tools do you use with the way you go about it—having this lecture that is one hour with Merrill on origin and one hour with you, the Jesuit. What do you think we can learn from the logistics of your program, as well—the specific tools that you use?

I think we’ve learned from our own mistakes. We’ve learned from our own limitations. I think it’s obvious, that if you want to teach, you have to be flexible, you have to go with what’s available and actually operate within the constraints of society. Many of the schools don’t have electricity, for example—so how do you give a presentation with a PowerPoint, computers, if you don’t have electricity—the sort of basic, basic tools. Many schools don’t have screens or decent walls onto which you could be able to project. So there are logical things which have to be overcome and I think South African schools are relatively. If you go to other parts of the continent, the basic technology that we use is completely beyond them. So how teachers in most situations present their material—they’d have to be creative as well and try to use what’s available to them.

Is there anything else you would like to add, any comments, or stories from the program that you’d like to contribute?

At the end of the presentation, I say thank you to the children—learners—we don’t call them children anymore, we don’t call them pupils anymore—they’re all called learners. I say thank you to the learners for their questions and their attention because I really do believe every time I’m given a question which is unexpected or unthought-of, they help me to develop my understanding—my vision of what’s really encompassed, what’s included in their minds—that touches so many other dimensions of their lives. You can’t dismiss any questions as stupid questions because very often I haven’t anticipated where the questions might be coming from and what the sensitivities are that are involved. So I’m learning in this process—I’m sure that Merrill has as well. So knowledge is being produced in a way that is making a more rounded presentation for the next time we go out. What was your question? There was a second part.

Are there any stories you want to share?

I’m not a good story teller—I’ve been particularly pleased that teachers are hearing this as well. Some of the R.E. teachers I’ve encountered are fairly fundamentalist themselves and I think I’ve had pretty fundamentalist questions from teachers and I think it’s important for them to learn as well—that the Catholic faith does allow us to flirt with very scientific theories. The Catholic faith doesn’t condemn them outright and that’s what some think of as the Catholic tradition is, in fact, is greater than what it really is.

Just to talk about that for a second, too. What do you do when you have a fundamentalist teacher who is going to repudiate whatever you say after you leave. I don’t know if you’ve had a problem like that, but how do you handle one of those teachers?

It depends on the context in which you’re dealing with him. If you’re dealing with adults, then you can have an adult engagement. If he or she is one teacher, and there’s a whole group of students there, you can’t undermine the authority of their teacher. You can’t in any way try to paint him or her as a fool or to point out the obvious limitations of their worldview, because they are the people who are going to be dealing with the students for the rest of the year or the rest of the five years that the students are dealing with him. So you have to deal with them in all respects with some sensitivity and, at the same time say, be able to say “that’s not what I believe—and have you thought in this direction.” And so that’s teaching with a fair amount of diplomatic skills because that’s not the normal way I would deal with people.

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