Answers in Genesis UK
This is a report from the Leicester Mercury newspaper which gives a broad outline of Answers in Genesis UK. The previous day there was a full-page article "Have We Lost Our Reason" which was about religious extremism and featured quotes from three members of the Leicester Secular Society. The BCSE believes that the report on AiG below was to maintain some sort of balance.
WOULD YOU ADAM AND EVE IT?
Answers in Genesis is spreading a fundamental Christian word all over Europe - and it is based in Leicester. Lee Marlow reports
In a warehouse in Knighton, a friendly man with Abraham Lincoln's beard and the look of an oversized teddy bear is settling into his heartfelt, if slightly unsettling, Old Testament stride. He's about to hit me with some Very Worrying News.
"If you don't accept God as your saviour," says Dr Monty White, "then you will go to hell."
"Unfortunately," he explains, "that is what will happen. I look around the world today and all the problems we are seeing now are the result of us taking our eye off God.
"When you die and you stand before God and you are not a believer and you have not accepted Christ as your saviour, then you will be condemned by God."
"And hell is waiting for you."
"Yes, that is where you are going," says Dr White.
"That is what it says in the Bible - and I'm sorry if I keep returning to the Bible - but it forms everything I believe to be true."
This is a moment I'm unlikely to forget in a hurry, sitting in the international headquarters of worldwide Creationist group Answers in Genesis - which also happens to be a boardroom in a large warehouse on an industrial estate in Knighton - and being told by a man I've just met that I'm on a highway to hell.
In a nation which is predominantly Church of England, occasionally churchgoing and broadly Christian, it's still a surprise to meet a man who believes it all so thoroughly and unashamedly passionately as Dr White.
He says the world is going to the dogs - but his group, AiG, can save us from ourselves.
He recommends non-believers take a long, hard look at what the Book of Genesis means. It might just sort us all out.
Answers in Genesis, so that we're clear, is the religious group that does exactly what it says on the tin - that is, it says you can unearth the meaning of life in the Old Testament book of Genesis.
"I was like you once," says Dr White. "I didn't believe. I used to read the Bible so I could bait my Christian friends."
Then, one day, he says - although it wasn't a sudden transformation, it was a slow about-turn that took four or five months - he realised everything he thought was right was wrong and the people he had enjoyed poking fun at had been correct all along.
It was a magical feeling, he remembers, wistfully, and it left him feeling warm and happy inside.
That day, he stopped blaspheming, tried to stop sinning - although we all sin, he says, even those trying their hardest not to - confessed his wrong doings and welcomed Jesus into his life.
Since that memorable day, he says, everything has been much better.
It seems churlish to disagree with Dr White. He is an affable gent who, you can see, is happy in his own skin and content that his theory on life is right and that others - even fellow Christians who don't quite travel that extra religious mile - are wrong.
Dr White is a very clever man who was once the registrar at Cardiff University. He believes the world would be a better place if we all thought like him.
Maybe he's right. His message, after all, is finding a growing and accepting audience across Europe and America.
While congregations have dwindled at churches across the country, Answers in Genesis continues to grow.
AiG has 10 full-time employees, three part-time staff and three volunteers. Two associate speakers are expected to join around Christmas.
Answers in Genesis works like this, says Dr White: There's the warehouse, where they dispatch between 30,000 and 50,000 videos, DVDs and books every year, and the ministry, where they travel the UK and Europe retelling the greatest story ever told.
It costs about £500,000 to keep the show on the road. One fifth of that comes from the sales of merchandise. The rest, says Dr White, they sit down and pray for. He's not joking.
"Every day," he says, "we will meet at 9am and pray and one of the things we will pray for is money."
Sometimes they pray for a new van. "We've needed a new vehicle three or four times in the past few years and we've prayed and we've received enough money to get one. The power of prayer works."
If it does, Dr White, why don't you pray to save dying children rather than praying for a new van?
No, no, says Dr White, shaking his head, it doesn't work like that. "Death happens. You can't escape that.
"Death happens because of Adam's sin. Nothing would have died if Adam had not sinned."
He hands me a magazine called Answers. The main article is titled: Do Leaves Die? They don't, it concludes.
A few pages later, there's a feature entitled Darwin's Legacy - An Assault Against God.
There's the religious rub. Followers of Creationism believe God created the Earth and everything else in six days and rested on the seventh day.
They believe that Adam ate the apple - although it wasn't actually an apple, it was a fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, explains Dr White - and subsequently ruined it for all of us by submitting to sin.
They visit churches to spread this message and some schools, though but Dr White says very little about this, admitting every time they venture into the classroom they get criticised.
"We prefer to keep that side of our work quiet," he says.
"I would like to see this [Creationism] taught in school," he says. He wouldn't like just anyone teaching it, though - he wants to teach it, or someone like him, so the children get the real thing, not some jaundiced run-through by a sceptical teacher.
What sets Creationists apart from other fundamental Christians is their belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that while Charles Darwin may have had a point about evolution, we didn't come from primates, we are descended from Adam and Eve.
Ironically, at the rear of the boardroom is a cupboard full of fossils. Dr White says every fossil you have ever seen is less than 6,000 years old.
Are you sure about that, Dr White?
"Yes. I studied geology at university. I know that methods of dating these rocks are flawed."
Three miles away at New Walk Museum, Leicester, they have one of the oldest fossils in the world. Unearthed somewhere in Charnwood and dating from something like 550 million years ago, it really is a sight to behold, says natural science curator Mark Evans.
Is there not any chance that these geological experts might be, somehow, 549,994,000 years awry?
Mr Evans thinks that is unlikely.
Dr White wafts away those 550 million years as if it's nothing more than a trifling difference of opinion.
The scientists are wrong, he says, because it says so in the Bible. It all comes back to the Good Book.
What if the Bible is wrong?
"Well, as John Wesley once said, if I'm wrong and the Bible is wrong and there's no hereafter," he says, "at least I've had a good life here on Earth."
