Trump-endorsed Georgia Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Herschel Walker, revealed on Sunday that he is a science-denying religious extremist. Walker wrongly insisted the existence of apes dispels the scientific theory of evolution, and there was no Big Bang Theory. He attributes all of creation to God.
“I tell you something else I heard – now think about this,” Walker, very proudly, told the pastor of Georgia’s Sugar Hill Church, “at one time, science said, man came from apes.”
“Did it not?” Walker, a former college and pro-football star asked, pointing at the audience. “Well, what is interesting though, if that is true, why are there still apes?”
“Think about it,” Walker pressed.
HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel, who first reported Walker’s false anti-science beliefs, explains he “gets some basic facts wrong”:
Humans did not evolve from the apes that you see at the zoo. Rather, humans and apes have a common (and now extinct) ancestor that lived roughly 10 million years ago. Technically, all humans are apes, but that doesn’t mean that chimpanzees are one step away from becoming people. Walker’s summary of evolution is incorrect, and there’s nothing incompatible about humans coexisting with other apes.
Walker then explained that, according to him, God is necessary for “the conception of a baby.”
“Let me tell you, science can’t do that. They are trying to do it come but they can’t because there had to be a God.”
“So when God came and said, ‘Now let me create this.’ And God created the earth. And he put Adam and Eve there, and stuff.”
After some rambling remarks likening the United States to the biblical Garden of Eden, because of “freedom,” Walker declared, “I tell people this I’m not trying to teach you to love Jesus. I love him. You can like who you want to like, but I’m going to tell you there’s only one of them. There’s only one god, there’s only one Jesus. So if you’d go in with the wrong horse, I’m sorry for you. I’ll tell you I love Jesus.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also backs Walker.
Watch (clip begins at the 59:01 mark):