Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project Project, in May 2011 undergraduate student Conor Finnegan interviewed Alex Parkinson, a master's degree candidate at the University of Witswatersrand’s Berhard Institute for Palaeontological Research and lecturer at the university’s Origins Centre. In this interview, Parkinson discusses his experience with the Origins Centre, in particular his work with the Believing in Creation and Evolution program through which he discusses the synthesis of faith and science with young adults.

What has been your journey to your present position, and how are you inspired to do the work that you do?

At the moment, I’m a full-time student at Witts University. I’m busy with my master’s degree. I took a very, very long path to get here. I spent seven years working full-time in corporate institutions doing financial auditing and pursuing a part-time degree in archaeology, anthropology, and history. That then enabled me last year to become a full-time student because I had acquired enough funding to begin my honors degree in paleontology. From there, I started my master’s [program]. I’m 12 to 18 months away from beginning a Ph.D. in a subject that I’ve always been passionate about. I’ve been involved in the study of human development in South Africa for the last 10 years of my life, and I’ve recently become academically involved in the examination of human evolution and the general evolution of everything—including dinosaurs. I love my work, and I love waking up in the morning. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I feel like a forensic investigator sometimes, and that you can find a bit of a scrap here, bit of a scrap there, and you sort of start piecing together pieces of the puzzle to form a bigger picture.

And where do you go after the Ph.D.? Do you start teaching?

The chances of teaching are not very good; there are only a handful positions available in the country. Once you get your Ph.D., you can apply for what’s called a postdoctoral position, which means you get given a certain amount of time to answer specific questions, and basically you become a full-time researcher. Employment within the country is based on either working at a museum as a researcher or obviously getting a lecturer position. But past that, most people who qualify and continue in the field tend to stick to postdoctoral positions. So you’ll get a two- to three-year contract to answer specific research questions. Once you’ve answered those, you apply for more money to survive to be able to answer other questions. And so the process goes on.

And how do you think your personal religion influences, motivates, perhaps detracts from, or otherwise affects your work?

I don’t believe it does. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m an extremely religious person. I’ve always believed that religion divides people, where belief in anything can actually unite under a common goal. And although I believe there is God and there is an ultimate creator and I pray and ask for forgiveness, I was brought up in a very Christian school, and that in itself sort of turned me away when I went into high school because it almost became indoctrination. And it was probably the result of narrow-minded teachers that I sort of rebelled, but when you start getting older, you tend to revert back to that which you learned to be true. I don’t think my beliefs have any bearing on my studies. I work with bits of information, bits of bone, facts that I try to answer, and you can’t parallel the two, as far as I’m concerned. Science will always be science, and religion or belief is based on faith. You can’t expect to have tangible evidence to prove something that is based on something intangible. I don’t find conflict at all. Look, I am divorced. I got divorced 18 months ago. And my previous wife that I was together with for nine years studied theology. She was very, very Christian, and there was never any conflict. I think when you speak about human evolution, you need to take a step back from a literal interpretation of the Bible and look at it in terms of the knowledge that has occurred over the last couple of decades, with regards to geology, going back to Charles Lyell, and all types of things. So to me, no, there’s no conflict.

According to Dr. Merrill van der Walt and Fr. Anthony Egan, 64 percent of Christian South Africans believe in biblical literalism. What do you think are the major reasons that so many South Africans have that belief? What drives it?

I think it’s the fact that you need to look at our history. When the Dutch came, they were extremely religious people. The Afrikaans race as we stand today is extremely...I wouldn’t say narrow-minded in their approach, but they do take very literal translations of the Bible. And that is something that has been indoctrinated in the mass population for a very long time. And within some of the Afrikaans churches, the Bible is not something to be questioned. It is something that is there, that is fact, that is truth, and you don’t turn around and say, “But does this make sense?” It’s just the fact, and you need to accept it because that is the literal truth. And the origins of the problems are the fact that our entire schooling system prior to 1994 was a Christian schooling system, so you had religious teachings in schools. So for the current generation, the people that had been through the schooling system in the last 15 or 20 years and much more before that, it was all based on religious indoctrination and the complete dismantlement of traditional African cultural beliefs, because to them, the African cultural beliefs were basically almost animism, ancestor worship, and to them that was evil. So it was something that has been sort of adopted, and you get a lot of growing African faiths that are based on Christian fundamentals but involve various aspects of ancestor worship. I think it’s the—I can’t remember what the faith is called, but it’s the one where you believe you can be possessed by the Holy Spirit and do healing through that… 

Pentecostal?

Yes, yes, there’s a lot of Pentecostal traditions that are developing within Africa for the pure Africans that involve aspects of ancestor worship, and they’re trying to find the commonality or the amalgamation of those two beliefs. But where we stand today is literally based on the political-social history—schooling systems designed specifically to not accept anything else other than Christianity—and I think that is the phase that we’re in because those are the people that prior to 1994 are coming into their thirties, their early thirties, and even before those. The white schools, through my experience, as far as I know, are all still predominantly Christian. They have Christian policies that you sign when you enter into the school that say, “We will get your kid to sing hymns. We are a Christian-based school.” And there’s a lot of exposure. So yeah, I think mostly political costs resulted in where we are today.

So can we just wait for a generation for an idea like this to die out? Is it just a matter of time, or is there something else that needs to be done?

I think if you were to speak to the people that are going through higher institutions at the moment, I think there’s a lot of disassociation from literal translation. People in the past, Africans and our broader population, were forced to accept that which they had been told, and there was no argument. Now people are starting to question things based on their own intellect, their own decisions, their own interactions within their heads, and that is something that is definitely coming to the fore. People are starting to think bigger than what they just read, but it’s also based on higher institutions teaching people to be able to do that, to think critically about everything that you read. And yes, I think through time, a literal translation of the Bible, especially Genesis [chapters] one and two, needs to be questioned because you can’t take it literally. A day to God in the creation of the Earth could be 25 million years, could be a billion years, and every single day could be a different length of time. So I think within a few generations a literal translation is going to be different. There’s going to be a swing. But I think it all depends on the age group to which you’re targeting your questions. A lot of the time with ethnographic research within Africa, it’s been shown that Africans tend to answer the questions almost in the way that they expect you want them to answer, and that’s just something through the social conditioning of our past political system. Whereas today, you speak to an African who’s 18 or 19 years old, or anybody who’s 18 or 19 years old, they’re there to challenge the system; they want to ask the questions and think for themselves which is the most appropriate answer.

How do you see social injustices, like poverty or lack of access to education, maybe the legacy of apartheid, influencing a person’s belief in biblical literalism, if at all?

I think access to education is probably the most influential thing, because when you go through an educational system, an educational system teaches you to challenge things that are put in front of you, to ask questions and seek your own answers. If you don’t have access to education or access to people in your realm that have that similar thought pattern, you’re not actively going to follow that. So if, for example, your parents don’t challenge anything, your grandparents don’t challenge anything in a rural environment, then you’re not taught to challenge those things yourself that are put on your plate. So I think access to education is one thing. Does our past political history influence it? I’m sure it does in some way. I think it’s an indirect influence. I don’t think that it influences with intent. I think that poverty stops people from worrying about bigger questions. When you’re in a poverty mindset, you tend to focus on things such as survival—obtaining food, getting money, getting work. And to spend time to sit down for two seconds to think, “Well, should I be examining the Bible literally?” I don’t think that that ever crosses their mind. You hear the story, so you listen to the story and you believe it because you’re actually worried about getting food in your stomach, not the theoretical justice behind what you’re being told.

Is this belief in biblical literalism a disadvantage in the classroom or out in the workforce?

I suppose it really does depend. My ex-wife was extremely frustrating because she believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. As much as she knew and appreciated the fact of what I studied—and I could talk to her and show her fossils and things that made her think—she literally reverted back to whatever she believed. So it’s almost something that you brush off your shoulder. And I think the disadvantage of something like that, of a system that encourages literal interpretation of everything, stops a person from thinking independently based on what is put in front of them, and it almost creates an acceptance of everything without having to question it. So I don’t know…that’s a hard one to answer.

How did you get involved in the program?

I have known Merrill for a number of years. I have associations with Origins Centre, and I basically do contract work with them. And one of the things I have always done is be a trainer, but normally I’ve been training financial auditing in corporate environments. I was involved with one of the large financial institution's employment equity forums, which is based on trying to resolve diversity problems or disputes within corporate environments. So I’ve always been a good talker, and it was just by chance that I managed to get this lecture because the lecturer who was originally planned managed to develop the flu. And within a 24-hour period, I was the most likely suspect to be able to conduct the talk because on the side I also do teach. At the moment, I’m actually developing a business aimed at teaching a lot about biodiversity in the past to schools, so it’s something that’s very relevant in my mind. I often take tours of international visitors into the cradle of humankind, give them lectures on our past history, earth’s history, evolutionary history, and obviously, one of the aspects of that is human evolution.

When you go into a classroom, what for you is the goal of the program? What do you hope the students will get out of it?

I think my goal is not to go in as a hard-line scientist, but to go in and just present a body of information, and present it in such a way that they walk away thinking, “Well, that made a lot of sense.” Without speaking too much science, without flashing too many fossils, or saying, “We used to be monkeys,” I just talk about things that we know to be true, and parallel those situations with real-world examples that aren’t associated with humans. I hope that opens their eyes and brings them to the point where they accept that science and religion can work together, that they don’t have to be separate entities and you don’t have to believe in one or the other, that you can believe in both because faith is exactly that—it’s faith in the intangible, and that you need to recognize those things that are tangible and those things that are studied and known to be true.

When you are giving the lecture, you are dealing with teenagers who are impressionable, who will ask a lot of questions. And it is a delicate process—they’re at that phase where everything starts to be questioned. What tools do you use as a lecturer to get on their level, explain these broad ideas, and still maintain that delicacy?

I think to keep their attention, which for a teenager is relatively hard for more than 10 minutes, humor is vital and talking in terms of their values. You know, don’t stand up there and flash a whole bunch of fossils because that’s just going to bore them. But talk in terms of things that make sense—you know, simple things. And try to come down to things that come more relevant in terms of what they experience—interaction between individuals. I think humor is extremely vital. Even if they only remember one silly story I told them, then that’s fine. But one of the biggest difficulties I’ve experienced is that we lecture to a broad diversity of people. Going to St. Catherine’s was one of the top class schools, where they’re extremely educated individuals. There are a number of times where I’ve given lectures to previously disadvantaged schools where their level of understanding is very, very different. Sometimes I’ve given lectures where I’ve given the exact same talk [but] felt like I’ve over-pitched 300 degrees above it because some of the fundamental concepts are struggling. One experience I came across: I gave a lecture, and afterwards they asked me, “But what are genes, and what is genetics?” And that was quite an eye-opener, because you assume that all individuals had a concept of what those things are. So being able to use your audience in the beginning to gauge their level of understanding and their response to things that you say and the way that you say them and just looking at general facial expressions—I use that as a big tool to gauge what is going on in the room and whether people are understanding, listening, or actually just looking at the window.

So how do you account for those differences in education, and what can you do to pick up the slack when someone doesn’t even understand genes?

It is difficult, but you find that the school generally has a specific level of understanding. And you can’t really blame them because in a lot of disadvantaged schools, their parents are illiterate. So they then go to school, and their teachers tend to christen them with regards to knowledge. Also, they teach them the core syllabus, and I think when you have more educated parents and you live within a more educated realm, you tend to absorb a lot more information than what you just learn at school and what’s inside your schooling syllabus. And that in and of itself better prepares you for challenging things like evolution, because evolution is not a simple concept. It’s based on many, many complex ideas and complex theories and complex associations that have been studied through other means. How do you bridge the gap? It’s sometimes extremely difficult, and that’s why I’ve always tried to stay away from very scientific presentations, because a scientific presentation may work at a school like St. Catherine’s because they understand the principles behind it. But if you go into a previously disadvantaged school or a less economically empowered community, because of their position within the society, talking science to them is not going to go in. They’ll sit there and glare at you. You may need to take five steps back. So having very broad presentations is one of the best things, without being too specific. One of my presentations is 125 slides, and I then select 25 slides that I think will be the most appropriate to the conditions I’m going into and which level to pitch at. If I then feel that I was wrong with regards to guessing what conditions I’m going into, I can then adjust that manually within my presentation. But it’s hard because we have a lot of disparity with regards to education—level of education, quality of education, quality of teachers. I gave a lecture once where the two teachers came to me afterwards and said, “That was really confusing.” You know, and you think to yourself, “Well, I pitched that at the lowest level I possibly can, and if the teachers are struggling to understand it, my word, what are the students experiencing?” It’s sort of a difficult thing.

Well, as someone who has done the lecture, what do you think the program does best? What is its greatest success?

I think its greatest success is bringing science and religion into the same room and presenting both sides of the story and letting the individuals learning decide what makes sense to them. I also think that it’s not a situation of conflict; it’s a situation of embracing. You present that which is known to be relative fact—if I can put it like that—and then bring in a lecture with regards to the fact that this may be fact and we don’t need to argue it, but that has no influence on our belief because ultimately the Bible and beliefs are based on much broader concepts than just where we came from, and it’s more to me about where we’re going as a society, what do we need to do to live fulfilled lives. So I think the most successful thing in the program is bringing those two opinions together and letting them speak their piece.

On the flip side of that, what do you see as its weaknesses, and maybe what could it do better?

I think the weakness, to be honest, is the time limitations, because 45 minutes for a talk might be long enough, but 15 minutes for questions generally isn’t. And it’s one of those things where you need to almost have a feedback system. If 20 percent of the people are too scared to ask a question, they need to be able to get answers to the questions they have and not be limited to a 15-minute window, or you need to provide a platform on which they can have answers to the questions they want within the framework of a broader system. In other words, if you don’t want to ask a question because you’re scared of the perceptions that your friends are going to have of your understanding, there needs to be a system of addressing this. I think that it is a very pivotal thing that needs to happen, and there has to be this interaction between religion and science because it’s just vital with regards to the development of anything. But there needs to be a system in place where there’s feedback, where they can get answers to broader questions. Does that make sense?

Yes. In talking to students, I’ve actually found that their biggest issue is that they didn’t have enough time, and that they were left confused in some cases, left with questions. But what can be done to address that issue?

I think a website could be useful with information on there about what is out there, science and religion, and spending time trying to figure out what are the most dominant questions that arise. It’s almost like a frequently asked questions and answers. Something like that needs to be developed because a lot of that will answer the majority of what people’s questions really are if a little bit more time could be allocated. Once you provide a platform for questions to be asked, within a short span of time you’ll know what questions come through and which questions come through all the time, and then compiling that and having that available as a handout post-lecture would probably be quite useful.

One of the other ideas that has been put forth is to train teachers, instead of students, because teachers can reach more students then. What are your thoughts on that idea?

I think it could work. I think it depends on the teacher. I think that adults have a lot more perceptual limitations than children do. And I think you need to have experts come speak to the people who need to hear it. Because teachers will always have their own opinions about specific things, which means that you get people inferring their own beliefs, their own perceptions, their own realities into the subject. It’s not a math subject, that one and one is always equal to two, and when you then pass that onto the teachers, it becomes differential learning where you have some teachers teaching it without bias and you have other teachers that teach it from a biased perspective, and there will always be a clear-cut winner based on the teacher’s perceptions. So to me, yes, our schooling system teachers need to teach evolution, but it’s what they teach outside the syllabus that I’ve always wondered about, because they might teach the syllabus and say, “Well, this is what evolution is, guys, but here’s what I think. This is what I believe,” and there is always a level of influence based on your own worldview on how you teach. And I think that that is a problem: by giving it to somebody else, you don’t have the distinction between a presentation that says “This is my opinion. Formulate your own opinion.” You’re literally being indoctrinated.

Who or what do you see as constituting the greatest source of opposition to the ideas that this program puts forth?

Teachers and people that are scared of change, people that are scared of embracing things that they don’t know themselves, and people that don’t embrace knowledge because they don’t understand it, but also don’t seek any way to understand it. I think it would be very vital to actually sit down with teachers and get them to understand the broader concepts and to get teachers to challenge their own mindset with regards to it. Although it’s vital for students to understand, it’s also vital for the teachers because like I said, I think teachers have bigger biases than what those of any student.

What do you see as the biggest challenge the program faces going forward?

I think its broader impact. By that I mean that out of however many Catholic schools there are in Johannesburg, there’s a hell of a lot more than those that have received lectures. How do you bring it into a holistic view where it becomes standard in terms of the broader system? That is the biggest challenge. Because maybe you’ve only affected 20 percent of the schools within Johannesburg, for example, and how do you break down the barriers and understand why the other 80 percent of schools don’t actually want to talk? Is that driven by individuals? Is it financial limitations? The program should be a holistic program that challenges all schools, that gets incorporated into all schools. But how do you do that? And why do people not accept things that are there and available? I think through time, things will change. I think as the older generation gets out and new people come in and they have experience of this sort of system, where you have these types of talks, that in time, ultimately everyone will want the talks at all schools. But is that going to take 40 years to happen? So that’s the broader challenge: How do you get more people to accept for someone to come to talk to them about something they clearly don’t like or clearly fight against?

Would a change in curriculum work best?

It was an extremely big challenge to get evolution incorporated into our curriculum, and now that it’s there, I think it’s just going to take time for things to be integrated. I think the curriculum is sufficient, and the evolutionary theory is one of the questions asked on the final exam. That’s probably done because it’s the only way to ensure that it’s actually taught, because you have prejudices and biases coming into play. If it were a small subsection that doesn’t get on an exam, would it ever get taught, or would it be taught by some and not others? So the curriculum is in place. I think it’s just time for perceptions to change and for there not to be such a fear of acceptance—or not even acceptance, but mere acknowledgement that that body of knowledge exists.

Looking at this particular program, which seems to be the only one addressing this issue so far, what do you think educators around the world could learn from it and take away?

I think that if you bring two institutions together that are each known for their excellence—the Jesuit Institute is recognized religiously as being a fundamental institute of learning and the Origins Centre as a museum that is recognized as one of the groundbreaking museums in this country—and making these institutions not fight each other, but instead form partnerships and work together for a common cause and a common understanding, that is ultimately what the world can learn. It’s that institutions with very, very distinct objectives don’t necessarily have to fight each other but can form very groundbreaking partnerships to expand and enrich the lives of people, to enrich the knowledge of people, and ultimately to change perceptions.

Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?

When I gave my talk, one of the strangest questions I was asked was when two students asked me whether aboriginals were humans. And that was quite an eye-opener because I was dumbstruck. I was absolutely dumbstruck at the time. I almost had to take three breaths before I could formulate an answer. I mean, I knew the answer straight away, but the fact that even in a modern society, in a modern schooling system, in an advanced educational system, that such concepts still exist, that such perceptions still exist in the broader society, and not an economically impoverished society but in a top-class society… That, to me, was an eye-opener from the aspect that such programs need to happen, that things like this need to go out there because clearly our work isn’t done. People will see differences between different population groups and can develop a perception that they’re not human because they look so different. So if nothing else, to go into a school and get that single question answered and change the perception that we’re all humans—irrelevant of what our skin color is—is vital for any society.

Is that the influence of the legacy of apartheid, or just a kid picking up a perception and—

I don’t know. I think that at the age they were it’d be hard to say that it’s an apartheid legacy because it was dismantled when they were 3 or 4 years olds. It could be driven by the fact that their parents are largely prejudiced and it feeds off that, but I don’t think it’s necessarily apartheid legacy. I just think that—taking a step back and trying to be relatively unbiased in where it could be coming from, if you look at the aboriginal population, they are a very distinct population. There are very few of the population left; they are a dying population, and they are extremely distinct from any other population group out in the world. I’ve thought long and hard about where such a question could come from, and I’ve really struggled to find an answer to that. I’m 30 years old, and when I was younger, even when apartheid was there—I have no concept of apartheid. My parents were never racist. I’m from British heritage. I was never told that Africans are different from whites. When I was younger, I used to sit in the bush with Africans and talk to them. And when you start to get older, you look back and think to yourself, “Oh, but hang on a second. There was actually quite a divide between us. They were always there, and we were always here—small things like that.” But to think that a legacy of apartheid still exists in a 17- or 18-year-old—I think that is quite scary. I don’t think that it’s likely. You still do get extreme right-wing Afrikaans communities that still maintain those sorts of concepts and ideals. But given where we were, where we had given the talk that day, I don’t think it was the apartheid legacy.