Science and Religion_A Very Short Introduction

by Thomas Dixon

  Does it not seem a little unfair not to distinguish between man and lower forms of life? What shall we say of the intelligence, not to say religion, of those who are so particular to distinguish between fishes and reptiles and birds, but put a man with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena and the skunk? What must be the impression made upon children by such a degradation of man?

  Bryan and the fundamentalists got what they wanted. In the decades after Scopes was convicted, evolution rarely featured on school science syllabuses, even in states where it was not illegal. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction not on the constitutional grounds sought by the ACLU but on a technicality. It should have been the jury and not the judge who had set the amount of the fine. It would be another 40 years before an anti-evolution law would finally be challenged in front of the United States Supreme Court.

  16. A fundamentalist cartoon from the 1920s depicting the theory of evolution as the tune played by a new ‘Pied Piper’ – ‘Science falsely so-called’ – leading the children of America down the ‘path of education’ towards the dark cavern of ‘disbelief in the God of the Bible’

  Varieties of creationism

  ‘Creationism’ is a term that can loosely be used to refer to any religious opposition to evolution. Such opposition has taken and continues to take many different forms. What all creationists share is a belief that the universe and life on earth were created immediately and supernaturally by God, and that human beings and all other species were each created separately and in their current form. In other words, creationists deny the common ancestry of all plants and animals. Creationists base their resistance to evolution at least partly on the authority of their sacred text, whether the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Bible, or the Quran. The Book of Genesis, for instance, relates that God, over a period of six days, created each kind of living creature separately, made man and woman in his own image, and set them above the rest of creation, before resting on the seventh day. As the King James translation put it:

  And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

  The Quran teaches that Allah is the Creator of everything, bringing the heavens, the earth, and everything in it immediately into existence, and making human beings out of clay and each species separately.

  Many creationists have based their stance on a literal interpretation of scripture. Those religious traditions that place a strong emphasis on textual authority, notably some varieties of Protestantism and Islam, are therefore more inclined towards strict creationism. As we have already seen in the case of arguments about Copernican astronomy, however, it is not easy to specify which parts of the scriptures are to be taken absolutely literally. As William Jennings Bryan pointed out during his cross-examination by Clarence Darrow at the Scopes trial, when the Bible said ‘Ye are the salt of the earth’, the text did not mean that ‘man was actually salt or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people’. That text, Bryan said, was to be ‘accepted as it is given’, namely ‘illustratively’ rather than literally. Darrow pressed Bryan further. He wanted to know whether Jonah really had been swallowed by a whale. Bryan corrected him – it was actually a ‘big fish’. But, yes, he believed in a God who could make a whale, or a big fish, and a man, and who could ‘make both what He pleases’. Darrow moved on to Adam, Eve, and their family. Did Bryan believe that Eve was ‘literally made out of Adam’s rib’? Bryan said he did. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. But, Darrow wondered, ‘Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?’ Bryan was unperturbed: ‘No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.’

  Then Darrow came to questions with obvious scientific relevance. When the Bible said that the sun had been stopped in the sky, did that mean that in those days the sun went round the earth? No, Bryan said, he believed that the earth went round the sun and what the passage meant was that the earth was stopped in its rotation. Then what about the age of the earth? Many bibles had the date 4004 BC printed in the margin to indicate the date of creation, as calculated from the text itself. Did Bryan believe the earth was about six thousand years old? ‘Oh, no; I think it is much older than that.’ ‘How much?’ He could not say. What about the six days of creation in Genesis? Were they twenty-four-hour days? Bryan was clear on that one: ‘I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.’ Rather, they were ‘periods’. God could have taken six days, six years, six million years, or six hundred million years to create the earth. ‘I do not think it is important whether we believe one or the other’, Bryan said. Soon afterwards, this famous exchange descended into acrimony. Bryan claimed that Darrow was trying to use the courtroom to attack the Bible. Darrow told Bryan he was merely examining ‘your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes’.

  This famous moment during the Scopes trial reveals two important things about creationism generally. First, even among Christian creationists there has been disagreement about how to interpret Genesis. In the early 20th century, many adopted the ‘day-age’ interpretation favoured by Bryan according to which each biblical ‘day’ was in fact a geological ‘age’ during which many different species were created. Others maintained belief in a very ancient earth by inferring a long ‘gap’ between the first moment of creation and the six-day creation. Within that gap there might have been multiple cataclysms and new creations, responsible for producing the fossil record. ‘Young Earth Creationism’ or ‘Creation Science’ is a more extreme version of creationism, according to which the biblical chronology is to be accepted and fossil evidence is to be explained not by successive creations and cataclysms but entirely as the result of Noah’s flood, approximately five thousand years ago. The Creation Science movement’s key texts, second only to the Bible in importance, were works by the Seventh-Day Adventist geologist George McCready Price. His Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory (1906) and New Geology (1923) both explained geological evidence by a recent universal deluge.

  Price’s books were the inspiration for the Creation Science revival of the 1960s and 1970s, led by a Texan Baptist teacher of civil engineering, Henry M. Morris. The Creation Research Society was founded by Morris in 1963, and the Institute for Creation Research in 1970. Both were designed to promote a more extreme and allegedly more scientific form of fundamentalist creationism than had ever existed before. As with Bryan’s anti-evolution campaign, the core motivation for the Creation Science movement was a desire to protect Christian communities from the corrosive and degenerate influences of the modern world. The range of evils thought to grow out of a belief in evolution in the 1970s were graphically illustrated in R. G. Elmendorf’s ‘Evolution Tree’, which bore fruit ranging widely from secularism, socialism, and relativism to alcohol, ‘dirty books’, ‘homosex’, and even terrorism. This brand of anti-evolutionary thought has spread from America around the world. In recent years an Islamic author from Turkey writing under the pen-name of Harun Yayha has produced many widely read books denouncing Darwinism as a ‘deceit’ and a ‘lie’ and drawing on the techniques and arguments of American proponents of Creation Science.

  17. A creationist image of the 1970s: the ‘Evolution Tree’ is nourished by sin and unbelief, and its fruits include a range of secular ideologies, immoral activities, and economic and social evils.

  The second general feature of creationism illustrated by Bryan’s testimony is its ambivalent relationship with science. The reason Bryan accepted that the earth orbited the sun and that it was much more than six thousand years old was because of the scientific evidence to that effect. Why, then, was he committed to the belief that Eve had literally been made from Adam’s rib, and that the Genesis account of creation was to be preferred to evolutionary science? At what point does the creationist stop believi
ng the scientific evidence and start taking the Bible literally? And why? The answer in practice is, as we have already seen, that it has been the question of human evolution that has caused greatest unease, and it is at the suggestion of animal ancestry for humans that most creationists have felt they must draw the line.

  Creationist ambivalence towards science is evident in other ways too. Many creationists, while resisting certain scientific results, specifically relating to evolution, still admire the success of science and seek to emulate or even appropriate that success. The recasting of fundamentalist anti-evolution as an alternative kind of science by Morris and the Creation Scientists was partly motivated by the desire to have creationism taught in the public schools as an alternative to evolutionary science. However, Price, whose geological works provided the scientific basis of their movement, wrote at a time before that had become the real issue. He genuinely wished to produce an understanding of nature that was both biblical and scientific.

  One of the most popular books about Islam and science in the 20th century was The Bible, The Quran and Science by the Muslim physician Maurice Bucaille. Published in 1976, the book claimed that the word of God as revealed in the Quran (but not the Bible) contained many statements that could only be understood in the light of modern science. Bucaille started a craze among Islamic commentators for finding verses in the Quran that seemed to foreshadow scientific discoveries as diverse as the expansion of the universe and the mechanisms of sexual reproduction. Other Islamic scholars, while rejecting both Bucaille’s anachronistic hunt for modern science in the Quran and also Yayha’s second-hand creationism, still seek a way to produce an ‘Islamic science’ which is truly scientific and yet which is divorced from purely materialistic interpretations incompatible with the Quran.

  The First Amendment

  Intelligent Design is not strictly speaking a form of creationism. Proponents of ID do not mention the Bible, let alone try to interpret it literally, and do not explain geological and fossil evidence in terms of a biblical flood. They accept the antiquity of the earth and of humanity, and in the case of some really liberal ID theorists, such as Michael Behe, do not even deny the common ancestry of humans and all other forms of life. Behe accepts more or less all of the standard evolutionary picture but identifies certain key phenomena, such as the biochemistry of the first cells, which he insists cannot be explained without the intervention of an intelligent designer. Other proponents of ID claim that the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of new complex forms of life about five hundred and thirty million years ago is inexplicable without intelligent intervention. The defenders of ID, to an even greater extent than the ‘Creation Scientists’ of previous decades, try to stay scrupulously within the bounds of scientific discourse and mention a ‘designer’ and ‘intelligence’, but never God, and certainly not the Bible. Some suspect that this reflects not the scientific nature of their enterprise but simply a canny awareness of the fact that they will need to look and sound as much like scientists as possible if their views are ever going to make it into the classrooms of America’s public schools.

  The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids the government from passing any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’. The original intention was not to exclude religion from public life altogether but to ensure that no particular form of Christianity become an established religion akin to the Church of England. There was also from the outset a broader hope that this Amendment would help to build, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘a wall of separation between Church and state’. The enactment of statutes forbidding state employees from contradicting the ‘story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible’ would seem on the face of it to put something of a hole in that wall.

  From the middle of the 20th century onwards, the US Supreme Court became increasingly active in policing the observation of the Establishment Clause in publicly funded schools. State laws allowing time for silent prayer in schools, or for the reading of denominationally neutral prayers, or requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted on classroom walls were all declared unconstitutional. In the 1960s, an anti-evolution law from the Scopes era was finally challenged on similar constitutional grounds. A young biology teacher from Arkansas, Susan Epperson, supported by the ACLU, challenged a 1928 state law making it unlawful to teach ‘the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals’. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the law was in violation of the First Amendment. The Court declared, in November 1968, that ‘fundamentalist sectarian conviction was and is the law’s reason for existence’. The Epperson case marked the beginning of the legal process which would give rise to the Intelligent Design movement about 20 years later.

  In the 1970s, the creationist camp adopted a new strategy, campaigning for legislation mandating ‘balanced treatment’ or ‘equal time’ in the classroom for two alternative scientific theories – ‘evolution science’ and versions of Morris’s ‘Creation Science’, which did not mention the Bible but asserted a separate ancestry for man and apes, a ‘relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds’, and an explanation of geology by ‘catastrophism, including a worldwide flood’. These measures did not stay long on the statute books. The Arkansas balanced treatment law was struck down at state level in 1982, on First Amendment grounds. In 1987, a similar law passed by the State of Louisiana came before the US Supreme Court. The Court ruled that the statute’s purported secular aim of promoting academic freedom was a sham and that its real purpose was to ‘advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind’. Because the primary aim of the Louisiana Act was to ‘endorse a particular religious doctrine’, it was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

  So, at the beginning of the 1990s, biblical anti-evolution laws had been declared unconstitutional; laws requiring ‘balanced treatment’ for evolution and ‘Creation Science’ had gone the same way; but opinion polls continued to find that between 45 and 50% of the population of the USA believed that human beings were created by God in their present form at some time in the last ten thousand years. (This figure remains the same today, with most of the rest of the population believing that humanity evolved through an evolutionary process somehow guided by God.) Legislators and members of school boards seeking to tap into the support of these voters now needed to develop a new strategy for getting God back into the classroom in scientific clothing. And that explains the birth of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement. School boards and state legislatures across the US have considered measures introducing ID into science education. Judge Jones’s ruling in 2005, which struck down the Dover School Board’s policy on First Amendment grounds, because of the clear religious intention behind it, strongly suggests that ID will have no more legal success than previous kinds of religiously motivated anti-Darwinism. The First Amendment will continue to do its job.

  In 1925, William Jennings Bryan saw that the central political question to be decided was ‘Who shall control our public schools?’ Debates about ID continue to bring out the social conflicts that arise in trying to answer that question. Bryan said that an evolutionist school teacher should not be allowed ‘to accept employment in a Christian community and teach that the Bible is untrue’ and to ‘force his opinion upon students against the wishes of the taxpayers and the parents’. Bryan predicted that ‘school board elections may become the most important elections held, for parents are much more interested in their children and in their children’s religion than they are in any political policies’. In many parts of the USA Bryan’s prediction came true. In some cases, the decisions of the courts to strike down creationist laws did indeed go against the wishes of parents and taxpayers. But, as Judge William Overton stated in ruling against the Arkansas ‘balanced treatment’ Act in 1982, ‘The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vo
te.’ No group, no matter how large or small, was allowed to ‘use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others’.

  Things have changed since Bryan’s day, however. In recent years, it has been the democratic process itself rather than the courts which has done most to keep ID off science syllabuses. In Dover and elsewhere, members of school boards who have changed science standards to de-emphasize evolution or to include references to ID have generally been voted out at the next election. Was Bryan right after all, that it is best to let parents and taxpayers have the final say through the ballot box?

  Explaining complexity

  But suppose that the courts and the people were not opposed to the teaching of ID, or that the question of whether ID might be taught in science classes were to arise in a country lacking the strict separation between state and religion enforced in the United States. What then? It would still be very unlikely that many people would consider ID a sensible subject for a science lesson. Good scientific, theological, and educational objections to such a proposal would be plentiful.