Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Creationism

August 22, 2004
Palo Alto, CA
Richard Heydt

For a large number of Americans who came of age in the mid to late 20th century, if they've been aware of creationism at all, they've viewed it as a curious sideshow to the relentless march of science, progress, and social tolerance. Americans remember how creationism was pilloried in "Inherit the Wind," a very entertaining but clearly biased film version of the famous Scopes trial of 1925, in which a high school biology teacher offered to be the guinea pig in challenging Tennessee's law against teaching evolution in public schools. The moral message of the film was that reason ultimately triumphs over superstition and fear. Oh, and the other message was that religious people are nutty.

The growth of evangelical Christianity in recent decades has fueled the challenge of creationism to evolution, but the fight has been going strongly since the late 19th century. In a sense, creationism today is a stalking horse for a much broader set of issues that divide social conservatives and social liberals in the United States. Creationism is what happens when belief systems collide. If you believe there is a religion/science collision, then creationism is the issue at the forefront, and it keeps popping up here and there across America, like a tireless ground squirrel.

Darwin created quite a stir when he published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, the idea of evolution was debated fiercely. The host of that meeting was the anatomist Dr. Richard Owen who expressed the sentiment, "Let us ever apply ourselves seriously to the task of scientific inquiry, feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and improve our intellectual faculties, the more worthy we shall be, [and] the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God." Owen was one of Darwin's severest critics. I mention Owen's words because his attitude reflected the feeling of many people at the time that, not only was science a noble pursuit, but science was poised to reveal the glory of God's creation. Yes, the new and radical idea of evolution by natural selection offended many people, but for the most part science itself wasn't a threat. Science would illuminate God.

In America it wasn't until about the 20th century that science in general and evolution in particular was widely perceived as a threat to religious belief. It was around this time that corroborating evidence for the mechanisms of evolution, such as Mendelian genetics and cell biology, began to be understood. It was also in the early 20th century that Protestant fundamentalism became a more forceful movement in the United States, as it began to react to the secularization of society. I'm simplifying things greatly here, but one could say that it was the clash of these trends that led to events such as the Scopes trial, where teaching evolution was first challenged in court.

American Christianity has always had its believers in the creation story. A Gallup poll from 2002 reported that about 30% percent of Americans believe in "biblical inerrancy." In an ABC News poll of 1,000 adults taken in 2004, an amazing 61 percent said they believe that creation as told in the book of Genesis is literally true. It's very difficult to evaluate poll results like these because people mean different things when they talk about something being inerrant, or factual, or literally true. But the point is that Genesis carries weight with Americans.

In the first half of the 20th century, what is commonly called "old-earth" creationism (OEC) was widely accepted among Christians. OEC has many variants. A common one is the "day-age" interpretation, in which the days of Genesis are not actual 24-hour days but rather periods of indefinite length in which God created the universe. There are many other interpretations, but they all allow believers in the Genesis story to accept scientific claims that the Earth is billions of years old. In other words, OEC permits at least a limited accommodation of the Bible and science.

However, in the middle of the 20th century "young-earth" creationism (YEC) reasserted itself among Christians, and particularly among evangelical Protestants. Young-earth ideas have been around for a long time, but it was a book entitled "The Genesis Flood," by Henry Morris (an engineering professor) and John Whitcomb, published in 1961, that attempted to put belief in a recent creation and in a literal reading of Genesis on a scientific footing. I think it's no accident by the way that this book coincided with the major liberal-conservative social rifts that began to divide the United States in the 1960s. YECs believe that that the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that God created the world in six 24-hour days. To support their belief in a young earth, some believe that the earth's geology and fossil record can be explained by a catastrophic event, a worldwide flood (the flood of Noah). Mainstream scientists have always sneered at this idea, but YEC gained significant traction over the years between 1960 and 1990. It is supported still by several religious institutes and organizations, such as the Institute for Creation Research in southern California. Along with the belief in a recently created earth, YEC entails the belief that species did not develop from a single organism through natural selection, and that only limited changes are possible among the originally created kinds of plants and animals. And, needless to say, humans and apes are of separate origin.

Around 1990 a new movement began taking shape. The ideas of Intelligent Design were put forth by several scientists, and were quickly picked up and promoted by conservative religious groups and opponents of evolution. Intelligent design has a few serious proponents in academia, but is still in its infancy as a field of study, and its future is still uncertain. One of the most notable ID proponents is biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, who promotes the idea that many biological structures and systems are irreducibly complex, meaning that there is no plausible evolutionary pathway by which they could have been created. Examples are the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting system. Most of the irreducible complexity is at the cellular and biochemical level, rather than at the gross structural level. Another ID academic is mathematician and philosopher William Dembski of Baylor University, who has proposed a mathematical foundation for determining whether something in nature has been generated by design, rather than by chance or by natural law. Dembski claims that with his objective criteria one can infer design, independently of the identity or the intent of the designer. In other words it's a "scientific" tool that may lead to a conclusion that there is an unnamed something outside of science. Conservative Christians know this something is the God of Genesis and of Jesus Christ, but it need not be argued that way in front of a hostile audience.

Speaking of hostile audiences, debates about evolution have been part of the landscape since the beginning. There was a debate at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in1860 that I mentioned, which featured the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin's friend and supporter Thomas H. Huxley. This was the debate in which the bishop turned to Huxley and asked if apes were on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. In that same year in the U.S. there was a debate in Boston between Louis Agassiz, who was the head of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology as well as an ardent anti-evolutionist, and William Rogers, who founded MIT. In 1924, the year before the Scopes trial, there was a debate at Carnegie Hall that was broadcast on radio. This debate featured the Baptist minister John Straton and the Unitarian minister Charles Potter. It's no surprise that Potter argued the pro-evolution side, but it turned out that a three-judge panel from the New York State Supreme Court declared Straton as the victor. The more modern debates, such as the one Jon attended, often take place on college campuses and, while the debate locations vary, they often feature some the same protagonists. These debates can be interesting and entertaining as theatrical events. Do they change people's minds? Probably not.

Most Americans hear about creationism vs. evolution in the context of what gets taught in public schools. During the last half-century state and federal courts issued a number of decisions on what can and cannot be taught. In 1968 the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. In a response that typifies the tit-for-tat nature of the creation-evolution battles in America, the state of Arkansas later passed a statute that required schools to give balanced treatment to so-called "creation-science" and "evolution-science." But then in 1982, a federal court ruled that this statute violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. As part of the ruling, the court attempted to define what constitutes science, and it said that creation science did not meet this definition. Anyone who has studied the philosophy of science knows that defining science is difficult and controversial. In my opinion, "creation-science" is probably just bad science, rather than non-science. One reason why Intelligent Design has been embraced by conservative Christians - in some cases even by those who distrust science - is that the fight against evolution can be waged with a weapon that is different from YEC, and can't be dismissed as easily by either the courts or public opinion.

Back in 1999 the media picked up on the story of the Kansas State Board of Education voting to remove mention of the Big Bang, the age of the Earth, and evolution from its science education standards. For a short time this put Kansas in a very unfavorable media spotlight. However, despite the attention Kansas received, it would be incorrect to think that either Kansas or its Board of Education is somehow unique in America. There are a number of states - Missouri, Georgia, Minnesota, Louisiana, Ohio, to name a few - in which state boards of education have debated and voted within the last year on whether to include "alternatives to evolutionary theory" in their state science standards. As I said, the battleground is just about everywhere in America.

For example, in March of this year the Ohio state Board of Education passed a proposed model science curriculum that includes a Grade10 lesson plan entitled "Critical Analysis of Evolution." I've looked at this lesson plan and in my opinion it's fairly sophisticated for 10th graders. The lesson plan was opposed by groups of scientists and educators in Ohio, not because of its level of sophistication, but because they believed it was an effort to promote Christianity in the classroom.

The idea with the lesson plan is to have groups of students do research into aspects of evolutionary theory and to present evidence that supports or challenges the scientific viewpoint relating to that aspect. For example, one aspect might be the development of antibiotic resistance among bacteria. A position supporting evolution would be that when bacteria acquire a mutation-induced resistance to a particular antibiotic, it's evidence that environmental changes and natural selection are able to produce significant changes in populations over time. A challenging position would be that antibiotic resistance is just an example of "microevolution," which is limited to small changes in populations and species, and which doesn't demonstrate that evolution can produce new species or types of life. Sounds innocuous, doesn't it? Proponents claim it is.

This lesson plan corresponds to a provision in the Ohio state science standards adopted in 2002, which reads, "Describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Many scientists object strongly to that provision because they think that the body of evidence that supports evolution is overwhelming. They also don't like the fact that evolution is singled out. They believe the intent is not to develop thinking skills at all, but rather to cast doubt on evolution and to open the door to teaching alternatives, such as intelligent design. Whether that's true or not, they are certainly right that the creationist strategy has changed and that intelligent design is one of the new political tools in the creationist toolbox. The progression was to first outlaw instruction in evolution, and then to teach creation science side-by-side with evolution. But when the Supreme Court in 1987 effectively disallowed laws that required equal time for creation science, the strategy evolved again, this time into teaching critiques of evolution along with evolution itself. Intelligent design makes those critiques even more provocative.

Unfortunately, evolutionists risk intellectual sloppiness themselves when they casually dismiss ID by referring to it as intelligent design creationism. Whatever it's deficiencies, ID is quite a different thing than belief in a 10,000-year-old earth, and it has advocates who think that the idea of a young earth is silly. But even though scientists don't like ID, the fact is that it poses no threat at all to science. It will rise or fall - and in my opinion most likely fall - on its own merits in the intense scrutiny of scientific debate.

Whatever happens to Intelligent Design, however, the political and social movement against evolution is strong and won't die anytime soon. The public schools will be the forum where evolution and creation are pitted against one another, with the courts coming in a close second. Is evolution vs. creation a false dichotomy? In many respects I think it is, but the problem is that the realms of religion and science are much, much closer now than they have ever been, and they keep bumping elbows with each other. To Christians who distrust secularism and fear the huge number of ethical questions that science is ready to open, evolution is the symbolic head of the beast and simply cannot be ignored.

Religious conservatives often claim that evolution is inherently atheistic because it presupposes a philosophy of naturalism. In other words, evolution assumes that only materialist causes are responsible for what happens in the universe, and so it leaves no room for God. This is a charge heard often from Philip Johnson, who is a law professor at U.C. Berkeley and one of the most vocal opponents of teaching evolution as fact in public schools. Philip Johnson says, " Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself." He says that from the Darwinist point of view, "it is imperative that the public be taught to understand the world as scientific naturalists understand it. Citizens must learn to look to science as the only reliable source of knowledge, and the only power capable of bettering (or even preserving) the human condition." His claim, in other words, is that science actively displaces God.

It is because of the strong voices of people like Phillip Johnson against the monopoly of science and its naturalism assumption is that some public schools now have lesson guidelines like the ones from Ohio. It's fascinating to me that evolution disturbs so many people, like Phillip Johnson, but it's true.

What about the charge that belief in evolution is equivalent to atheism? Do you accept that? I don't. It arises from the fear that science and secular society are undermining faith. But equating evolution to atheism ignores the very complex - and often conflicting - sets of scientific, social, and religious beliefs that real people hold. I think that many American Christians believe that evolution as it's commonly understood does in fact occur, and at the same time they believe that God is involved in some unfathomable way. That may be fuzzy science or uncertain religion, but is it atheism? Hardly.

But if belief in evolution and in the methods of science is not equivalent to atheism, is it nevertheless true that science inevitably competes with religious belief for the attention of the human mind and imagination? Definitely yes. Supporters of science - including many UUs and me - are disingenuous if they claim that belief in evolution is no threat at all to religious belief. If I make a claim like that it makes a huge difference what kinds of religious belief I'm talking about. In fact, the considerable weight of evidence for evolution is a potential threat to textual literalism in religion, in the same way that archeological excavations in Israel will always be at least a potential threat to literal readings of the Old Testament. As a scientist I can't reject a theory that explains observations and is consistent with other established theories, simply because it disagrees with what is written in a sacred text. At least I can't do it without consequences to my credibility. This is one reason why creationism does not belong in the science classroom. It isn't that science doesn't have biases - it does - or that the prevailing scientific consensus has never been proved wrong. But science still has rules. If proponents of I.D. can fit it within that system of rules, by putting it on a more rigorous theoretical footing, and showing that I.D. has constructive and predictive capabilities, then mainstream science may have to take it more seriously. But if they can't, I.D. will eventually drop out of sight. When that happens the creationism movement will discard it and look in other directions to justify its cultural challenge.

It remains to be seen how well science teaching - and in particular teaching evolution - in public schools will fare against its adversaries. It won't be rescued by any modern movie equivalents of "Inherit the Wind" that attempt to frame teaching evolution as a simple matter of free speech, or that try to claim moral superiority by making fun of believing Christians. Those won't work in the current climate, nor should they. The American public will have to be convinced that, even if there is serious debate about the mechanisms by which evolution occurs, alternatives to evolution still do not belong in the science classroom. Americans have to be convinced that with regard to teaching children we are better off if the realms of science and religion continue to remain separate, even as conservative Christianity continues to gain strength in America, and even as science makes bolder and bolder claims about who we humans are, where we come from, and what we can do.

In the end, if we follow science where it leads it is because ideas like evolution become part of our intuition about how the world works. We make choices, either implicitly or explicitly, about which of our perceptions of the world we allow to be formed by science, by faith, and by other types of experience. Those choices reflect what we fear in life and what we hope for. Evolution has been called "Darwin's dangerous idea," and it is that, but it's also a source of tremendous creativity and great hope.

Robert Pennock in his book Tower of Babel draws the distinction between what he calls philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Philosophical naturalism is a cousin to atheism, but what science relies on methodological is naturalism. This means that only naturalistic explanations can be used to explain what is observed. Science doesn't allow someone to invoke the hand of an unseen agent to explain what he or she sees in a telescope or a microscope. New physics can be proposed when all other plausible explanations are exhausted (think "dark energy," for example), but new physics implies new laws, not arbitrarily acting, and independent agents. Why does science operate this way? One reason is that explanations relying on unseen agent are ultimately untestable: they can never be proved wrong, so they don't properly belong in the realm of science. But what do you think? Could science operate differently?