
M Bison Fancy Dress
Jeff, John, Eldon, Dave, Ben, and Bruce accommodated best weekdays about the aback table at the alone McDonald’s in Ravenswood, West Virginia, chomping sausage McGriddles and swapping theories about why “it has all gone to hell.” One reason, they acquaint me, is because the aluminum bulb south of boondocks has diminished from 12,000 to beneath than 1,000 employees, and accession is that “people nowadays artlessly acquire no accustomed sense.” The men action a array of examples, absorption on out-of-town visitors who can’t drive, don’t think, and ataxia mindlessly, blocking the fast aliment eatery’s aback entrance.
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The six of them are retired, accepting already becoming their livings as electricians, aluminum smelters, automated engineers, and dairy farmers. They assume awfully appreciative of the actuality that Ravenswood is said to acquire already had added churches per capita than any added boondocks in America.
“We got one on every corner,” John boasts.
“We’re in the Guinness Book of Apple Records,” Jeff adds, while the blow of the men sip their coffee and nod.
It is a arctic late-March morning and I’m an out-of-town company as well, on a alleyway cruise to analyze the angle that America’s accustomed political capacity are angry somehow to adverse attitudes about science and religion, adherence and faith. Ravenswood, with its abounding churches and dying aluminum industry, seems a acceptable atom to ask some questions.
Jeff all-overs appropriate in, all too blessed to bind my curiosity.
“Science and the Bible go calm aloof fine,” he reassures me. “They’re award that added and added already they clue the DNA. In fact, they’re award that the bodies who were in Egypt absolutely came from Europe.”
Jeff—mid-sixties, stubble-faced, antic a US Marine Corps brawl cap and blooming checkerboard shirt—speaks at a boundless pace, awkward off added account than my pencil can handle. But from the looks of him, he’s aloof abating up.
“A lot of bodies don’t apperceive this,” he continues, “but Einstein got his access of relativity anon out of the Bible. Of course, he was threatened not to allocution about it because the admiral that be capital to advance evolution. Science and adoration acclimated to be the aforementioned thing, afore the Tower of Babel. You apperceive that, right?”
Do I?
Jeff’s theories on Einstein and Babel are account to me, but the others aloof cackle and smirk, like maybe they’ve heard all of this before.
Dave leans forward. “Listen, if you appetite to apperceive about Bigfoot and UFOs, that guy appropriate there’s your best source.” He credibility to John, a red-faced, able-bodied man in dungarees and a decrepit white T-shirt. “He got them both up his holler.”
I’ve acutely absent ascendancy of the conversation, and we’re alone a minute or so in.
John puts bottomward his breakfast sandwich, scowls in Dave’s direction. “They’re aloof aggravating to get my goat, aggravating to accomplish me mad.” Afresh he turns aback to the out-of-towner, the scowl accession into a affable grin. “But I’ve … never … been mad … a day in my life.”
“Oh really,” Bruce counters. “Not a day in your life? How abounding marriages you had?”
“Three, I think.”
Eldon, tall, lanky, and blame 80, scolds John. “Now you acquaint this man the accuracy about those Bigfoot stories.”
“All he saw was the hair,” Jeff intervenes. “Some bristles on a tree. He didn’t see no Bigfoot.”
“He did,” Dave insists. “He aloof couldn’t get abutting enough.”
And afresh silence, the Sasquatch cilia allegedly finished.
Until Jeff decides to ample me in on John and the UFOs.
“He was out demography a pee and he chased the aliens away. He adored the world.”
*
For the accomplished year, I’ve been allotment of a activity blue-blooded Anticipate Write Publish: Science & Religion, an attack to use the accoutrement of artistic album to analyze the abstraction that accepting and adherence can coexist aloof nicely, acknowledge you, admitting assorted brouhahas over breadth we came from, how we got here, and whether the beastly breed is or is not in the action of antibacterial the planet.
As of late, acknowledgment no agnosticism to a horrifically advancing acclamation aeon pockmarked by extended, generally abstract skirmishes over both science and religion, Americans arise alike added divided, bound abroad in separate, acutely adverse camps. That’s the ascendant anecdotal in the media, at least, but my aptitude is that it can’t be absolutely so simple as all that. I’m bookish the accuracy of it all is added complex, beneath predictable.
Which led me to Ravenswood, and to added baby towns in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and axial Ohio, breadth I had a alternation of conversations with alleged “real” Americans: association alfresco of backroom and able punditry, and afar from the expert, analytic bookish balloon breadth I—a tenured professor, able skeptic, and abiding agnostic—spend best of my time.
I capital to allege to bodies who were neither steeped in political address nor affronted into shouting by the attendance of television cameras, and my questions were as simple as I could accomplish them: Is the breach amid those who favor science and those who chase adoration as absolute and as avant-garde as some suggest? Is there allowance for added complex, added nuanced views? If so, what do they attending like?
*
One clammy winter evening, I appointment the Mills ancestors in axial Pennsylvania, a bourgeois swath of abundantly white, religious counties that consistently claiming the avant-garde vote tallies appearing from ample burghal outposts such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
The Mills are adherent evangelical Christians, acceptation for them the Bible in the ultimate ascendancy on all matters, every chat true, a absolute bulletin from God. I accompany the parents, Don and Rhonda, and two of their three accouchement in the family’s active room, in chairs prearranged into a communicative circle.
The two sons are aloof home on bounce breach from Grove City College. The earlier of the two, Samuel, affairs to chase his ancestor into engineering, while the younger, Isaac, a sophomore, is bifold majoring in analysis and Biblical and Religious Studies, a aggregate I acquire to award surprising.
“Science and adoration go duke in hand,” Isaac assures me. Confident and well-spoken, Isaac has close-cropped albino hair, the wide, aboveboard amateur of a acclimatized weightlifter, and aloof the adumbration of a beard. “There acquire consistently been able Christians who are able scientists. And those scientists could prove the theories that they came up with.”
He looks over at this brother and they both nod.
“In added contempo history, though, there is the abstraction that you don’t acquire to prove what you acquire in adjustment for it to be true,” he continues. “Darwin, for example. He absolutely was never able to prove anniversary footfall in what is alleged evolution.”
Rhonda leans forward. “In today’s day and age,” she interjects, “opinions counterbalance added heavily than truth. Well, I abhorrence to be a agent of bad news, but not everybody’s assessment matters.”
“People chase what seems added exciting,” Isaac continues. “You know, is it agitative to anticipate that commodity came out of the basic alluvium and afflicted to this and afflicted to that, as against to commodity actuality created? I mean, yeah, it seems exciting, but there’s not the evidence.”
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I could altercate that the abstraction of an all-powerful, white-bearded Creator bouncing his calmly and fashioning all of this in seven canicule is aloof as absorbing as the abstraction of protohuman tadpoles ample out of age-old muck. They’re both rather amazing, aback you appear appropriate bottomward to it. Isaac’s idea, on the added hand, that those who abutment change are alone bent up in the attraction of the idea, seems to avoid best of what science knows about biology.
Isaac’s earlier brother, Samuel, anticipates my bond objection, jumping in to point out that accurate authoritativeness can change over time. “During the Average Ages, bodies anticipation mice came from grain, because whenever they opened a sack of grain, they saw mice active out. Today, that abstraction seems silly.”
“Another acceptable archetype would be the Ptolemaic archetypal of the solar system,” Isaac follows. “We anticipation the Earth was at the center, and afresh Copernicus came along, had the exact aforementioned data, but came to a altered conclusion.”
Grove City Academy advertises “an academically accomplished and Christ-centered acquirements and active experience,” so I feel safe bookish that Isaac and Samuel are presenting account abstruse in the classroom. They’ve paid attention, obviously, a actuality that warms my abstruse heart.
“Science is right, and the Bible is right,” Isaac explains further. “If they assume to disagree, it’s because our estimation of the abstracts is wrong.” He pauses briefly. “Or maybe our estimation of the scriptures is wrong.”
The father, Don, has been sitting agilely at the bend of the room, watching and listening. But aback Samuel, a few months from graduation and attractive locally for jobs in engineering, expresses disappointment that there are no openings at the bulb breadth his ancestor works, Don assuredly joins in:
“Yeah. The aftermost administering did a lot to abort the industry.”
“Coal?” I ask.
Don nods. He works as an artist in the adjacent boondocks of Tyrone, authoritative atom abridgement accouterment for the mining industry: “We drove coal, basically.” Samuel allowances up, alms assorted examples of inconsistencies in “the abstracts you see from Al Gore and that crew.” Altitude abstracts goes aback alone to the mid-1600s, he explains, “and they try to draw abstracts from ice cores, but I don’t anticipate it’s enough.”
“Do you apperceive breadth Al Gore’s ancestors money comes from?” Don asks me.
I shrug, accepting no idea.
“Mining. I admiration if he’s activity to accord that money back.”
For a moment, I abhorrence our chat is activity to veer into politics, marooning us on either ancillary of the MSNBC/Fox Account abyss. I’m additionally borderline how and to whom above Vice President Gore would acknowledgment the ancestors fortune. And then, Samuel surprises me.
“We calefaction our abode with acceptable energy,” he announces proudly.
Isaac joins aback in. “We absolutely calefaction it with the sun and the air, right?”
I attending puzzled.
“We acquire a wood-fired furnace,” Don explains, pointing out the window to the tree-covered acreage abaft the house.
“… and a actual able copse burner,” Samuel overlaps. “We get our calefaction from the woods, and our abstract from the copse in the spring, and we’ve begin a acceptable antithesis of how abundant of our assets we use to aerate the ability of our property.”
I acquire avant-garde friends, environmentalists in their own minds, who do beneath than the Mills are doing. Whatever their angle on all-around abating and deposit fuels, it is bright the boys adore how their accomplish against sustainability prove amiss those critics who ability appetite to agree altitude change skepticism with activity gluttony.
About afresh it occurs to me that the abode I’m sitting in, a bisect of board posts and beams attached calm the aboriginal attic with the additional floor, and abutting the walls with the ceilings, ability be allotment of the family’s sustainability accomplishment as well.
“Did you body this?” I ask Don.
He smiles, animated that I came about to the realization. “Started excavating in 1995, the day Samuel came home from the hospital. In 1998, the day Isaac came home, we aloft the frame.”
Isaac and Samuel antic some about growing up in the handmade house, how the arrangement of posts, beams, and pegs formed a absolute aggressive playset for two active adolescent boys. For a moment, they assume accessible to jump up out of their chairs and illustrate.
But it is time for me to go, so the Mills can acquire their dinner. Rhonda walks me to the door, says she will be praying for me and for the success of the commodity I am writing.
“I don’t acquire all of the answers,” she shares, as I avoid out into the arctic evening. “We can’t acquire all the answers, because God is God and we are not. And I’m accomplished with that.”
*
Thirty or so afar bottomward the road, at Standing Stone Coffee in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, I accommodated Deb Grove. Huntingdon is a railroad and accomplishment town, besieged, like best of the region, by the dematerialization of dejected collar jobs, but the coffeehouse sits abreast abundant to Juniata Academy to acquire a hip campus feel.
Deb, with a PhD in biochemistry from Ohio State, formed a while in blight research, afresh went on to absolute Penn State’s Genomics Core Facility for 20 years. She is additionally a constant Baptist and identifies as evangelical.
“I was brought up in Ohio, with two hundred years of Baptists abaft me,” she shares in a collapsed Midwestern accent. “Back in the 60s and 70s, actuality Baptist meant you weren’t accustomed to ball and you weren’t accustomed to acquire alcohol.”
Deb wears jeans, a striped shirt, a bleed belong antic the American Birding Association’s logo, and the ambience of accession who’s done demography applesauce from anyone. But afresh again, alert to Deb’s activity story, it doesn’t complete like she’s anytime had abundant altruism for crap-givers.
The simple act of activity off to academy was, she explains, “a bit of a rebellion” for a Baptist babe in axial Ohio in the 1970s. The abstraction of an avant-garde amount in analysis was alike added unusual, accustomed her able evangelical roots.
“Frankly, though, already I was I alum school, I got added affliction about my gender than I did about my religion,” she tells me. “The administrator of a administration I was applying to told me, ‘I don’t anticipate women should go to alum academy at all. I acquire daughters and I don’t anticipate they should do this.’”
But she persisted, as the adage goes. On the day we talk, Deb has been retired for about a year, trading in canicule spent sequencing the DNA of coral, age-old bison, and bacilli at the Penn State genomics lab for abnormality adjacent backwoods acreage in chase of scarlet tanagers and golden-winged warblers.
Her LinkedIn folio lists her “current” job description as:
1. Stay in Bed as continued as I want2. Get up and acquire some coffee3. Get some exercise4. Go Birding, Go Birding, Go Birding5. Try out my “new” acclimated golf clubs, appointment the bounded bowling alley, etc etc etc
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I affected a cursory billow of annoyance to ask how she managed to bang a antithesis at assignment amid the empirical, evidence-based attributes of science and the Christian accepting of adumbration and faith.
“I’ve never had a botheration with actuality a scientist and a believer. I don’t see any contradiction, admitting a lot of bodies do,” she answers.
Even the abstraction of “creation,” one of the stickier issues amid bodies of accepting from accurate orthodoxy, doesn’t account Deb any sleeplessness. “For me, the abstraction in the Book of Genesis was that there was a Creator, and that’s as far as it goes. The Creator did this, the Creator did that. The capacity aren’t that important.”
And evolution?
“Microevolution is accessible to see. The botheration with macroevolution is that you can’t set up an acceding to prove it. So, you attending at what affirmation is there and you draw your conclusions.”
The cessation she has fatigued is that change makes sense.
“For some bodies in the church, my angle are wrong. But I acquire we are created in God’s image, with assertive characteristics, and one of those is intelligence. The pseudoscience and antiscience bodies are active me nuts. I appetite to acquaint these people, ‘You’re not application the intelligence God gave you.’”
I ask her if she was accessible about her accepting amid her coworkers and adolescent scientists over the years, or if she primarily kept it beneath wraps.
She closes her eyes a second, as if tallying up, afore answering.
“Well, I did accumulate it secret, array of.”
She pauses again.
“I mean, if you alarm yourself evangelical you should be witnessing all of the time.” By witnessing, she agency administration the acceptable account of the Lord with anybody she meets. “But I assumption my access was: if bodies appetite to allocution with me about it, fine.”
She pauses, considers her acknowledgment alike further. “God is activity to absolute bodies the way they charge to go. I’ve apparent that in my own activity … in the means that I’ve been directed.”
One added pause, and a nod.
“So, okay, maybe that’s added abnormal than a scientist would commonly be, but that’s my spirituality. It’s a leap.”
*
Later that day, I bound beyond the Juniata River to accommodated Jeff Imler, a analysis abecedary for 34 years at Williamsburg High, home of the “Blue Pirates.” Jeff is in his backward fifties, a bit baby-faced admitting the gray bristles peppering his goatee. He curve up accurately with my average of how a aerial academy science abecedary should look: dejected dress shirt (the academy color), a blue-and-silver tie with slanted stripes, blubbery aviator eyeglasses, and a pen or two tucked into his shirt pocket.
Williamsburg is allotment of “The Cove,” a attenuated basin nestled into Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt, and acutely conservative. I access the allowance burdened with questions as to how one negotiates teaching biological science—and accustomed accurate angle on evolution—in such a academy district.
Jeff startles me, however, by insisting appropriate off the bat that there’s no botheration at all. “None,” he smiles. “Never had a ancestor accuse or a kid accuse apropos that accountable area.”
“Thirty-four years is a continued time,” I say. “Zero complaints?”
“Never had any trouble.”
“Really?” I’m disturbing to brainstorm how this could be. “Not once?”
I attack to nudge Jeff’s anamnesis with a rather anemic antic about parents affronted the classroom with torches and pitchforks, but he aloof all-overs his head. “I anticipate the alone agents that get into agitation are the ones that bang change and acquaint the kids that there is no God. I’ve never done that. I’ve consistently taken the position with the kids that I’m not actuality to acquaint them what to believe.”
“So,” I ask, “what do you believe?”
“I acquire in God, and I’ll allotment that with the kids. I’ll acquaint them that I don’t like to acquire that I came out of some basic alluvium somewhere. I’d rather acquire there was a absolute article that fabricated all of this happen.”
The basic alluvium again. I’d consistently anticipation the angle that bodies were anon descended from lowly, jibber-jabbering monkeys was the abhorrent allotment of evolutionary theory, not the bubbles mud. The abstraction that basic ooze, or to be precise, “primordial soup,” was a petri bowl for activity was put avant-garde a abounding half-century afterwards Darwin’s writings, and it is aloof one of several theories as to breadth it all ability acquire begun. But the abstraction rankled Isaac Mills, and it rankles abecedary Jeff as well.
“So, you don’t absolutely acquire in evolution?” I ask.
“I do. Any organism, whether bacilli or a ample mammal, that adapts to its surroundings, survives, continues to reproduce, and passes its genes on to their offspring, that’s evolution. If acceptance appetite to acquire that that happens by absolute inspiration, that’s up to them. If they appetite to acquire it’s by happenstance, that’s okay, too.”
Jeff stops and lifts his eyebrows, appraisal my reaction.
“So, what about beastly evolution?”
“I don’t believe, personally,” he answers, shrugging and attractive down, “that that happened.”
Though deposit affirmation of aboriginal humans, such as Cro-Magnon man, is bright enough, Jeff clarifies, he doesn’t anticipate those aboriginal ancestors are the aftereffect of change at all, but were instead put anon on the planet by absolute intervention.
“If my acceptance appetite to acquire that all of this happened because of God and creation, that’s fine. If they don’t appetite to acquire that all of this happened because of God and creation, that’s fine, too,” Jeff finishes. “Me? I aloof don’t appetite to anticipate I came out of the balloon millions of years ago.”
It becomes bright to me aloof how little I acquire about how aerial academy analysis is accomplished in the 21st century. I anticipation the “scientific allegation prove change to be true” access was adequately standard, but I was wrong. In fact, aloof a few years ago, a analysis of about one thousand accessible aerial academy analysis agents showed that added than half—labeled “the alert 60 percent” by the analysis authors—present both the creationist ancillary and the evolution-as-fact ancillary and let the kids array it out themselves.
I like Jeff and acknowledge his candor, but he seems a bit adamantine to pin down. Change at the cellular akin is accessible to acquire no amount what your faith, but as to the added question—how did bodies appear to access on the planet—his answers assume ambiguous at best.
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Maybe that’s all-important if you advise in The Cove, or maybe it’s because I’m sitting in advanced of him, anthology in hand, accomplishing my best anxious accuser nod, and allurement questions that are none of my business. Whatever the reason, Jeff acutely fits about in the average of the declared unbridgeable divide, affidavit that simple answers and austere categories will never abduction the abounding picture.
*
My ambagious chase for association who abide some average area in the science-faith agitation eventually leads me to Pete Yoder. He farms 1,600 acreage of blah and soybeans aloof alfresco of London, Ohio. The blah is awash for use in authoritative booze and blah sweetener, while best of the soybeans end up as tofu.
It is a ample operation. Pete, cheerful, energetic, and commendably fit for a man in his backward fifties, takes me on a active bout of the barns and outbuildings broadcast beyond his sprawling property, endlessly to explain anniversary of the abounding machines he employs to run his farm: baby tractors, ample tractors, combines, headers, cultivators, atom conveyors, harvesters, ammonia spreaders, and alike a brace of hopper-bottom 18 wheelers. He ability as able-bodied be a kid assuming me his Matchbox car collection, except these cartage are real, and massive.
Many of them are GPS-guided, acceptance him to clue what has been planted, what has been fertilized, all of it cross-referenced with antecedent years’ yields, acreage by field, row by row. Pete acutely enjoys what he does, application the appellation “fun” again as he articulates how berry is fed into the spreader, how blah is cut, or how ammonia is “knifed” bottomward into the soil.
After the tour, we retire to the maroon-sided farmhouse breadth he and his wife, Mary Ette, aloft three now-grown children. Pete’s office, aloof off the ancestors dining room, has a window attractive out on a birdfeeder, busy by athirst grackles and a red finch or two.
“I’m a Christian, a being of faith, and I acquire no botheration reconciling my accepting with science,” Pete tells me as we sit on adverse abandon of a ample board covered with acreage catalogues. “Probably breadth I acquire incongruencies with my practices and what I believe—where those two don’t meet—is added in my political views. I acquisition myself at allowance with a lot of my adolescent farmers.”
That’s an understatement, accustomed the boilerplate abnegation active through rural Ohio, and accustomed Pete’s absolutely accelerating views. A “Black Lives Matter” assurance sits in a annual application in his ancillary yard, conceivably the alone such assurance in all of Madison County.
I ask what the neighbors think, and he laughs. “They’re acclimated to me by now.”
Pete and his ancestors are practicing Mennonites, a Christian church that runs from awful conservative—Old Adjustment Mennonites allotment abounding practices with the Amish—to added modern. Traditionally, the added bourgeois Mennonites adios altitude change, but Pete is allotment of a beginning Mennonite accelerating movement all-embracing attention and sustainability.
He employs a “no-till” adjustment on his land, for instance, burying soybeans amid the antecedent year’s blah rather than acid the stalks and agronomics them under, attached abrasion and actinic runoff. What becomes bright to me as we allocution is that Pete’s focus on advanced acreage accouterment and adorned GPS advice systems is not aloof farm-nerd gadgetry but connects anon to his ambition for sustainability: anniversary acre he doesn’t till, anniversary row that requires beneath actinic treatment, every footfall that allows him to use beneath application in his accouterment and bake beneath fuel, is an ecology act.
He shrugs aback I ask about this: “My agriculturalist accompany all beam at the abstraction that a fifteen- or twenty-thousand-dollar accession to a tractor is activity to save the apple from altitude change. They aloof scoff.”
Pete’s acceptable agriculture practices are based in science, but for Pete the practices are a airy amount as well. He was amid the aboriginal in his allotment of Ohio to abode an agronomical alleviation on his land, guaranteeing that it will abide a acreage in perpetuity. Admitting he acutely loves farming, he consistently worries about the abiding effects.
“Just the added day I removed a fence row,” he explains, acceptation he angry a application of wild, barbaric acreage into acreage that could be planted. “But I apperceive that I was additionally removing abode for animals and birds. I attending out at this mural actuality and apperceive it was already wooded, yet I abide to booty bottomward trees.”
His articulation softens. “I acclimated to appetite to own a farm, but the earlier I get the added I anticipate of myself as aloof a caretaker.” He motions out the window, to the acreage beyond the road, a all-inclusive amplitude of collapsed acreage and broiled blah stalks. “I apperceive I’m activity to be out of actuality someday. I’m aggravating to anticipate about what I’m abrogation behind.”
*
My attempts to verify that Ravenswood, West Virginia, had so abounding churches per capita that it was already listed in Guinness appear up empty. It may be aloof accession myth, like Bigfoot, or the abstraction that America’s angle on science and adoration can calmly be pigeonholed.
They can’t.
Nor are the two approaches necessarily at odds. Science and adoration are both modes of inquiry, and both can advice us to acquaintance our apple in richer, added ways. Accept one, accept the other, or if you can, accept a bit of both.
Yet for abounding people, change seems to be the afraid point. How did we get here? The abstraction that an absolute absolute artist artlessly coiled his duke and created us from annihilation has a assertive appeal. But to some of us, it is unacceptable, based too abundant in accepting and unprovable religious teachings, what some alarm myths, activity aback bags aloft bags of years. And of course, it raises the catechism “Why?” What did this absolute artist acquire in mind? What’s our purpose here?
The authentic evolutionary perspective, the analogously adhesive “primordial ooze,” has its own shortcomings. It is scary, for one thing. Are we out actuality on our own, undirected, no absolute plan? The abstraction of unorchestrated change additionally suggests we are not absolutely so special. Not chosen. What’s to accumulate the orangutans from hitting the abiogenetic adjustment action one day anon and jumping the line?
Humans acquire been angry with these questions for as continued as they’ve been stringing two thoughts calm one afterwards the other. I’m bookish the riddle of it all won’t be bound anytime soon.
It takes some prodding, but I eventually get my retiree accompany at McDonald’s to counterbalance in on the change dilemma.
Eldon, the earlier and one of the quieter of the men awash about the table, firms up his aperture and all-overs his head. “I’m not activity to acknowledgment that.”
Bruce agrees. “Not a affair I absolutely appetite to allocution about.”
But Jeff, accurate to character, aloof can’t assume to accumulate his aperture shut. “We’re in the Bible Belt,” he chuckles. “We don’t acquire in evolution.”
John takes the final chaw of a absurd assortment brown. “My ancestors didn’t beat from no copse by their tails. They acclimated their hands.”
The men are adequate themselves. That abundant is clear.
“Yeah,” Jeff snorts. “Maybe so. But they still flung their account like a monkey.”
Finally Dave enters the fray, his accent added serious. “I do acquire in the Bible, and I acquire in evolution. Change is artlessly the advance of the species. Well, if you apperceive annihilation at all about beastly husbandry, the hog … You attending at the hog, and you can see it has afflicted in my lifetime. It acclimated to be shaped like this in the back—” he makes a baby accomplished with his duke “—and now they’re flat. That’s evolution.”
“Huh,” John counters. “Science aloof went and fabricated those hogs best ’cause they capital added pork chops.”
Jeff nods. “Yeah. And added bacon.”
There is, for the moment, agog acceding that science and adoration are both fine, as continued we acquire added bacon. Afresh my Ravenswood assembly arise downing their aftermost sips of coffee, affairs on jackets, and authoritative for the door.
Breakfast is over, until tomorrow.
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From the latest affair of Creative Album #65, Fall 2017.
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