Matters descended to the farcical when, denied the opportunity to introduce his own science witnesses, Darrow put on the stand the prosecutor Bryan. This conviction was overturned on a technicality on appeal, but there were no more prosecutions, even though the Tennessee law remained on the books for another forty years. In the s, the Scopes trial became the basis of a famous play and then movie, Inherit the Wind. In fact, Bryan in respects was an odd figure to be defending the Tennessee law.
He thought that the days of Creation are long periods of time, and he had little sympathy for eschatological speculations about Armageddon and so forth. It is quite possible that, humans apart, he accepted some form of evolution. His objections to Darwinism were more social than theological. The First World War, with many justifying violence in the name of evolutionary biology, confirmed his suspicions. It is generally agreed that Inherit the Wind is using history as a vehicle to explore and condemn McCarthy-like attacks on uncomfortably new or dissenting-type figures in American society.
After the Scopes Trial, general agreement is that the Creationism movement had peaked and declined quite dramatically and quickly. Yet, it and related anti-evolution activity did have its lasting effects. Text-book manufacturers increasingly took evolution — Darwinism especially — out of their books, so that schoolchildren got less and less exposure to the ideas anyway. Whatever battles the evolutionists may have thought they had won in the court of popular opinion, in the trenches of the classroom they were losing the war badly.
Things started to move again in the late s. It was then that, thanks to Sputnik, the Russians so effectively demonstrated their superiority in rocketry with its implications for the arms race of the Cold War , and America realized with a shudder how ineffective was its science training of its young. Characteristically, the country did something immediate and effective about this, namely pouring money into the production of new science texts.
In this way, with class adoption, the Federal Government could have a strong impact and yet get around the problem that education tends to be under the tight control of individual states.
The new biology texts gave full scope to evolution — to Darwinism — and with this the Creationism controversy again flared right up. Children were learning these dreadful doctrines in schools, and something had to be done Ruse ed. Fortunately for the literalist, help was at hand. A biblical scholar, John C. Whitcomb, and a hydraulic engineer, Henry M. Following in the tradition of earlier writers, especially those from Seventh-day Adventism, they argued that every bit of the Biblical story of creation given in the early chapters of Genesis is supported fully by the best of modern science.
Six days of twenty-four hours, organisms arriving miraculously, humans last, and sometime thereafter a massive world-wide flood that wiped most organisms off the face of the earth — or rather, dumped their carcasses in the mud as the waters receded. At the same time, Whitcomb and Morris argued that the case for evolution fails dismally. They introduced or revived a number of arguments that have become standard parts of the Creationist repertoire against evolution.
Let us look at a number of these arguments, together with the counter-arguments that evolutionists make in response. First, the Creationists argue that at best evolution is only a theory and not a fact, and that theories should never be taken as gospel if one might be permitted a metaphor. They claim that the very language of evolutionists themselves show that their ideas are on shaky grounds. There is nothing iffy about the Copernican heliocentric theory.
It is true. It is a fact. Evolutionists argue that the same is the case with evolution. When talking about the theory of evolution, one is talking about a body of laws.
In particular, if one is following the ideas of Charles Darwin, one is arguing that population pressures lead to a struggle for existence, this then entails a natural selection of favored forms, and evolution through shared descent is the end result. This is a body of general statements about life, since the s given in a formal version using mathematics with deductive inferences between steps.
In other words, we have a body of laws, and hence a theory in the first sense just given. There is no implication here that the theory is iffy, that is in the second sense just given.
We are not necessarily talking about something inherently unreliable. Of course, there are going to be additions and revisions, for instance the possibility of much greater hybridization than someone like Darwin realized, but that is another matter Quammen They reply: Those that survive! Hence, natural selection reduces to the tautology that those that survive are those that survive.
Not a real claim of science at all. To which evolutionists respond that this is a sleight of hand, showing ignorance of what is genuinely at stake. Some of our would-be ancestors lived and had babies and others did not. There was a differential reproduction. This is certainly not a mere truism.
It could be that everyone had the same number of children. It could also be that there is no difference overall between the successful and the unsuccessful. This too is denied by natural selection. To say that something is the fitter or fittest is to say that it has certain characteristics what biologists call adaptations that other organisms do not have, and that on average one expects the fitter to succeed. But there is no guarantee that this must be so or that it will always happen.
An earthquake could wipe out everyone, fit and unfit. Before discussing the third argument Creationists level against evolution, it is worth pausing over this second one. Most if not all professional evolutionists argue that sometimes natural selection is not a significant causal factor. In this sense, it is false that selection is something that by definition is and always is the reason for lasting change.
The fittest do not always win. It cannot be a tautology. Although, at first, this was embraced enthusiastically Dobzhansky , it soon became clear that at the gross physical phenotypic level it is at most minor Coyne, Barton, and Turelli However at the level of the gene genotype , it is still thought very important.
Indeed, it is a powerful tool in discovering the exact dates of key evolutionary events, especially those involving speciation Ayala Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, somewhat paradoxically, as Creationism has evolved!
Thus can one explain the diversity of life on earth — it evolved since leaving the Ark, which contained only generic kinds. For all its supposed faults, there is a better discussion of natural selection at the Creationist museum in Kentucky than in the Field Museum in Chicago, miles north.
The bar on macroevolution remains absolute. Third, Creationists point out that modern evolutionary theory asserts that the raw building blocks of evolution, the genetic mutations, are random. But this means that there are minimal chances of evolution producing something that works as well and efficiently as an organism, with all of the functioning parts in place.
A monkey typing letters does so randomly. It could never in a million years in a billion, billion, billion… years type the works of Shakespeare. The Creationists say that same is true of evolution and organisms, given the randomness of mutation. To which evolutionists reply that this may all be well and true of the monkey, but in the case of evolution things are rather different.
If a mutation works, then it is kept and then built upon, until the next good mutation comes along. This shrinks considerably the odds of evolution producing organisms, even though the appearance of mutation is random. Suppose you take just one phrase from Shakespeare. Twenty-six the number of letters, more if you include capitals and gaps and punctuation to the power of the number of spaces.
Dawkins has a good discussion of these issues. Rather is meant that mutations do not occur according to need. Suppose a new disease appears. Evolutionary theory does not guarantee that a new, life-protecting mutation will occur to order. Fourth in the litany of Creationist complaints, there is a perennial favourite based on paleontology.
Creationists agree that the fossil record is sequential, fish to primates moving upwards, but argue that this is the result of the sorting effect of the Flood. Primates are above dinosaurs, for example, because primates are more agile and moved further up the mountain before being caught and drowning. They also argue, however, that the fossil record ought to be continuous if evolution occurred, but in real life there are many gaps between different form — jumps from one kind of organism to another.
Apes to humans would be a case in point. This spells Creation not evolution. To which the response comes that on the one hand one expects such gaps. Fossilization is an uncommon occurrence — most dead bodies get eaten straight away or just rot — and the wonder is that we have what we do have.
On the other hand argue evolutionists, the record is not that gappy. There are lots of good sequences — lines of fossils with little difference between adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or in more detail the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to the modern horse on one toe.
Moreover, in refutation of Creationism, we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood. For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never found down with the dinosaurs. Those brutes of old expired long before we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this.
Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down — entropy increases, to use the technical language.
Energy gets used and converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service. But organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law. This would be impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind evolution meaning change without direct divine guidance of organisms from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like humans.
There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous intervention to produce functioning life. To which argument the response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy from elsewhere. And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while.
Eventually the sun will go out and life will become extinct. The second law will win eventually, but not just yet. Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law that is, unguided law , especially not by blind evolutionary laws. They must have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional. In fact, today the fossil record for humans is strong — we evolved over the past four million years from small creatures of half our height, who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we.
There is lots of fossil proof of these beings known as Australopithecus afarensis. Perhaps it is true that we humans are special, in that as Christians claim we uniquely have immortal souls, but this is a religious claim.
It is not a claim of science, and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls. There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution, but this is the nature of science. No branch of science has all of the answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true of their branch of science.
Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the cultural context. First, as a populist movement, driven as much by social factors — a sense of alienation from the modern world — one would expect to find that cultural changes in society would be reflected in Creationist beliefs.
This is indeed so. Take, above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was very popular because it was thought to justify slavery Noll Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends making people into the property of others — the Bible elsewhere seems to endorse slavery.
Remember, when the escaped slave came to Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey him. Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist circles well into the twentieth century.
Price, for instance, was quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites. By the time of Genesis Flood , however, the civil rights movement was in full flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully. They explained in detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as inferior.
The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy Scriptures. Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato or Aristotle.
Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons, Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright opposition to evolution of all kinds. We find in fact then that although Creationists were and are adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be called evolution! This said, Creationists were convinced that this change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists would allow.
Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during the days of Creation. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that Creationism is purely an epistemological matter — a matter of facts and their understanding. Moral claims have always been absolutely fundamental. Nearly all Creationists in the Christian camp are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last Judgement.
They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era. Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus — hence, we should engage in social action and the like.
Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others. For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family sanctity which today encompasses anti-abortion , sexual orthodoxy especially anti-homosexuality , biblically sanctioned punishments very pro-capital punishment , strong support for Israel because of claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End Times , and so forth.
It is absolutely vital to see how this moral agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods and Arks. Ruse discusses these matters in much detail.
Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful, and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris particularly and his coworkers and believers — notably Duane T. Particularly effective was their challenging of evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with bold statements provocatively made most often by Gish about the supposed nature of the universe Gilkey ; Ruse ed.
This all culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for state legislatures, that would allow — insist on — the teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools. In the biology classes of such schools, that is. By this time it was realized that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the Constitution that which prohibits the establishment of state religion , it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution from such schools.
The trick was to get Creationism — something that prima facie rides straight through the separation of church and state — into such schools. The idea of Creation Science is to do this. The claim is that, although the science parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as good science. In , these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was passed and signed into law — as it happens, by a legislature and governor that thought little of what they were doing until the consequences were drawn to their attention.
William Clinton was governor from to , and again from to his winning of the presidency, in The law was passed during the interregnum. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, the geneticist Francisco Ayala, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and as the philosophical representative Michael Ruse appeared as expert witnesses, arguing that Creationism has no place in state supported biology classes. Hardly surprisingly, evolution won.
The judge ruled firmly that Creation Science is not science, it is religion, and as such has no place in public classrooms. In this whole matter was decided decisively in the same way, by the Supreme Court, in a similar case involving Louisiana. See Ruse ed. Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial was less theological or scientific, but philosophical.
Paradoxically, the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand. The Creationists had started to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing philosopher Karl Popper As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable.
By this, Popper meant that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world. If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be rejected — or at least revised. The Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a science than Creationism.
To his credit, Popper revised his thinking on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was a genuine scientific theory; see Popper Part of the testimony in Arkansas was designed to refute this argument, and it was shown that in fact evolution does indeed make falsifiable claims. As we have already seen, natural selection is no tautology. If one could show that organisms did not exhibit differential reproduction — to take the example given above, that all proto-humans had the same number of offspring — then selection theory would certainly be false.
Likewise, if one could show that human and dinosaur remains truly did occur in the same time strata of the fossil record, one would have powerful proof against the thinking of modern evolutionists. This argument succeeded in court — the judge accepted that evolutionary thinking is falsifiable.
Conversely, he accepted that Creation Science is never truly open to check. On-the-spot, ad hoc hypotheses proliferate as soon as any of its claims are challenged. It is not falsifiable and hence not genuine science. They argued that in fact there is no hard and fast rule for distinguishing science from other forms of human activity, and that hence in this sense the Creationists might have a point Ruse ed. Not that people like Laudan were themselves Creationists. They thought Creationism false.
Their objection was rather to trying to find some way of making evolution and not Creationism into a genuine science. Defenders of the anti-Creationism strategy taken in Arkansas argued, with reason and law, that the United States Constitution does not bar the teaching of false science. It bars the teaching of non-science, especially non-science which is religion by another name. Hence, if the objections of people like Laudan were taken seriously, the Creationists might have a case to make for the balanced treatment of evolution and Creationism.
Popperian falsifiability may be a somewhat rough and ready way of separating science and religion, but it is good enough for the job at hand, and in law that is what counts. Evolutionists were successful in court. As we shall see, the task of leadership then got passed to younger people, especially the biochemist Michael Behe and the philosopher-mathematician William Dembski.
For better or for worse, one sees the heavy hand of Thomas Kuhn here, and his claim in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the change from one paradigm to another is akin to a political revolution, not ultimately fueled by logic but more by extra-scientific factors, like emotions and simple preferences.
In the Arkansas trial, Kuhn was as oft mentioned by the prosecutors as was Popper. The former is the scientific stance of trying to explain by laws and by refusing to introduce miracles. A methodological naturalist would insist on explaining all phenomena, however strange, in natural terms.
Elijah setting fire to the water-drenched sacrifice, for instance, would be explained in terms of lightning striking or some such thing. The latter is the philosophical stance that insists that there is nothing beyond the natural — no God, no supernatural, no nothing. According to naturalism, what is ultimately real is nature, which consists of the fundamental particles that make up what we call matter and energy, together with the natural laws that govern how those particles behave.
Johnson thinks of himself as a theistic realist, and hence as such in opposition to metaphysical realism. Hence, the evolutionist is the methodological realist, is the metaphysical realist, is the opponent of the theistic realist — and as far as Johnson is concerned, the genuine theistic realist is one who takes a pretty literalistic reading of the Bible.
So ultimately, it is all less a matter of science and more a matter of attitudes and philosophy. Evolution and Creationism are different world pictures, and it is conceptually, socially, pedagogically, and with good luck in the future legally wrong to treat them differently.
Theistic Realism is the only genuine form of Christianity. But does any of this really follow? The evolutionist would claim not. Metaphysical naturalism, having been defined as something which precludes theism, has been set up as a philosophy with a religion-like status. It necessarily perpetuates the conflict between religion and science. But as Johnson himself notes, many people think that they can be methodological naturalists and theists.
Methodological naturalism is not a religion equivalent. Is this possible, at least in a consistent way with intellectual integrity? To sort out this debate, let us agree to what is surely the case that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package deal. Take one, and you take the other.
Reject one, and you reject the other. You cannot accept Genesis literally and evolution. That is a fact. It does not take policy positions. The center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. Follow her on Twitter surveyfunk. Greg Smith is associate director of religion research at Pew Research Center.
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