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Evolution, Creationism, and other Modern Myths

Fulcrum Publishing

DO WE NEED A BEGINNING?

The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment. Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills. The Kansas donnybrook mirrored developments in New Mexico, Texas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and other states. Indeed, it suddenly seemed as if the mid continent was in rebellion against modern science. Advocates for both sides cleverly disguised their efforts to control the discussion in the most abstract and neutral terms, thereby elevating the issue of origins to a lofty status but also raising questions about the sincerity of their positions. If we take their statements at face value, the outlines of this fascinating struggle become much clearer and considerably more exciting. Since there is no reason to doubt either side in this heated debate, the arguments, dispassionately viewed, have much to tell us.

We begin with the Kansas development. On August 17, 1999, Tom E. Willis of the Creation Science Association for Mid-America in Cleveland, Missouri, helped the Kansas Board with its new curriculum and was quoted as saying that because evolution cannot be reproduced in a laboratory, it should not be taught "as though it is the only theory believed by sane individuals." Speaking for the scientific establishment was Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard paleontologist and one of the most outspoken evolutionists, who argued in Time magazine a week later that "evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the Earth's revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a 'fact.' (Science does not deal in certainty, so 'fact' can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)" But this view is not held by the entire scientific community. Gould does not see Sir Frederick Hoyle, British physicist, and Sir Francis Crick, English scientist and Nobel Prize winner, who have articulated nonevolutionary ideas, as acting in a perverse manner.

While most columnists promptly lined up in favor of science, Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Sun-Times, commenting on Willis's remark the next day, introduced a note of moderation with his admonitions: "The fear, of course, is that the schools will pick the 'wrong' thing to teach, such as the idea that the universe is eternal. That was the majority view of top scientists in the 1950s, but they were wrong. Now the majority believes that the universe was created in a Big Bang — a view not at odds with religious belief. What I'm saying is that scientists also can be, and often are, wrong — and incomplete." This middle position is much more responsible considering the history of science and how often the majority has not only been dead wrong but also has acted with a heavy hand to suppress minority views.

Some anecdotal evidence gathered randomly while this debate was occurring shows how both sides can and do sin against the idea of free inquiry in education. Ken Bigman, a Kansas biology teacher who helped draft the rejected curriculum, said: "Evolution is the unifying theory of biology, and now students will get such an incomplete picture." But does "unifying" mean that nothing else can be discussed seriously? Witness Rodney LeVake, a biology teacher in Faribault, Minnesota, who wanted to teach "intelligent design" — the theory that because the universe is intelligible, it cannot have occurred by chance — and was forbidden to do so: "They were afraid I'd turn my class into a Sunday school class, but that was never my intention. I just didn't want to teach evolution as a dogmatic fact when there's a lot of recent evidence that points to the opposite fact." Note also that a student at Central Oregon Community College filed a complaint against instructor Kevin Haley, saying that he presented evolution as "a fatally flawed theory." Haley and LeVake, in view of the many recent criticisms of evolution, had every right to teach that all was not well in Darwinian circles. And they would not be perverse in doing so.

Balanced against instances where teachers sought to bring a measure of impartiality were frightening episodes forecasting what we might possibly experience if the fundamentalists/creationists were to control public school education. In Belridge, California, a public school sought to adopt a Christian textbook, and the American Civil Liberties Union rushed to protest. Cited in newspaper accounts was the idea that although American Indians "attained a degree of civilization, they had no knowledge of the true God, and without this knowledge all other attainments are worthless." The question of origins seems to be caught between mindless religious propaganda and narrow, unrelenting scientific orthodoxy. Perhaps more frightening is the prospect for the future. A poll by People for the American Way found that four of five Americans support teaching creationism as well as evolution in the public schools. And Gallup reported that 44 percent of Americans advocated a biblical creationist view, 40 percent held a belief in "theistic evolution," and only 10 percent were strict, secular evolutionists. We can be certain, then, that the conflict will not vanish.

The controversy continued in 2000 when a committee of Kanawha County, West Virginia, science teachers rejected a previously approved textbook titled Of Pandas and People because it discussed "intelligent design," which some teachers on reappraisal believed was creationism in disguise. They thereby limited the teaching of origins to the Darwinian thesis, which has been under attack from many quarters. The next day the Oklahoma State House of Representatives passed a bill requiring science books used in Oklahoma schools to acknowledge that "human life was created by one God of the universe." In May 2000 Stephen Jay Gould, now acting as the high priest of scientific orthodoxy, told a conference at Brown University that the debate over creation was "a bizarrity," describing the movement as a local American affair. And Sarah Fogarty of the science department at Providence, Rhode Island's Lincoln School warned, "We can't dismiss creationism as being fanaticism, because it's not." But no evidence to exclude creationism from the ranks of the fanatical was offered.

On the offensive to crush this creationist uprising, the American Association for the Advancement of Science commissioned a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation to determine how well the states were doing in teaching evolution. Surely here was a survey to find politically correct curricula. Grades of D went to Arkansas, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Virginia, Alaska, and Illinois; F's went to Wyoming, Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Florida, North Dakota, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Tennessee. And of course, in a fit of adolescent pique, the report gave Kansas an F-. Illinois and Kentucky were said to have offered such minuscule mention of evolution as to almost avoid it altogether. In 2001, showing they had their own minds, the Alabama educators agreed to put a warning on their biology books stating that there were serious questions about the validity of evolution.

A change of membership on the Kansas State Board of Education in the 2000 election produced a proevolution majority, and in February 2001 the board approved new science standards that closely followed the evolutionary dogmas. By a seven to three vote, Kansas succumbed to the ridicule and attacks of the evolutionists and restored the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe and some of the evolutionary concepts that had been previously omitted. Dissenting board member Steve Abrams protested that he simply wanted to ensure that good science was taught in Kansas's schools. He might have cited as evidence a current controversial book, Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution, which demonstrates that in many textbooks the major concepts of evolution are deliberately misrepresented as fact. But would anyone have listened?

In February 2002 the Ohio Board of Education decided to give a full hearing to proponents of the intelligent design theory of organic origins. From newspaper reports it appeared that the board members were seriously considering the issue, although a number felt it was simply another form of creationism. It was also apparent that intelligent design has considerably more punch than the old biblical creationism. Dr. David Haury, an influential professor in science education at Ohio State University, was quoted as saying, "Intelligent Design is about how things got started. Evolution is about how they change across time." Clearly, proponents of Darwinian evolution have substantially reduced their claims of infallibility and are now reluctant to describe evolution as the predominant biological fact. They now attempt to escape the debate over origins by reducing the scope of evolution to the simple task of explaining purported body changes in organisms.

Some commentators have emphasized that this latest effort to delete the theory of evolution from school curricula and replace it with intelligent design is the new strategy of creationists who were turned away from their efforts to establish "creation science" as a valid subject for public classrooms. It is therefore a political rather than a philosophical or scientific problem. We can certainly trace the political attacks on evolution back to the Scopes trial in Tennessee, made famous by the movie Inherit the Wind. The issue at that time was whether evolution could be taught in public schools, with creationists holding the political trump cards. The tables have certainly turned.

Evolution is now the reigning paradigm, and it is the creationists who are seeking to have the court system break the monopoly. Substituting the Bible for evolutionary textbooks would certainly run afoul of the church/state constitutional barriers, so a much different strategy is in place. Seeking to broaden the meaning of science, creationists have first sought to create a "creation science" that offers partial explanations of Earth history insofar as they agree with the Old Testament. Alternatively, the effort is to allow all accounts of origins to be taught in the classrooms, knowing that Genesis would be emphasized. In the last forty years there has been a continuing examination by the federal courts of the possible ways that science could be changed or expanded to include what, for many Americans, is a true explanation of the origins of the physical world.

The recent cases worth discussing demonstrate a progression of thought from a strict adherence to the Old Testament to an increasingly complex agenda that more resembles secular catastrophism (the theory that much geological change occurs in planet-wide destructive events often caused by extraterrestrial bodies) than religious belief. Contemporary research that supports secular criticisms of orthodox Darwinian theory may lead to curricula in which a modified form of creationism could be taught. Then evolution would have to contend with the inconsistencies and anomalies of its own statements. Let us trace the emergence of this third framework of interpretation as it has surfaced in more recent cases such as Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982), and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). A brief discussion of these decisions will show that the issue should not be decided by public relations wars or litigation.

In Epperson the state attempted to exclude the subject of evolution from its schools, justifying its position by finding that it was injurious to the religious freedom of those who considered it antireligious. This approach was novel but did not succeed. Justice Black concurred with the Court's ruling, but warned that "unless this Court is prepared to simply write off as pure nonsense the views of those who consider evolution an antireligious doctrine, then this issue presents problems under the establishment Clause far more troublesome than are discussed in the Court's opinion." Sadly, he did not develop this argument to its fullest, which would have involved the questions of whether evolutionary doctrine was not itself a secular religion and whether the Court was thereby establishing it. The creationists have not exploited this argument and instead have relied on the tactic of proving that their religious doctrines were scientific.

McLean and Edwards provide a fascinating glimpse into the possible factual basis of a view of the universe that would emerge if religious writings had to be expressed in secular language. An analysis of the two cases will provide us with a better understanding of how the two sides, evolutionists and creationists, see each other and how they understand this intensely argued subject. Under contention in the McLean case in Arkansas was the Balanced Treatment for Creation Science and Evolution Science Act, passed by the Arkansas legislature in 1981. "Creation science," as defined by that body, "means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences." Creation science, then, would be based on the scientific evidences that could be used to support a theory of the origins of the universe that was more compatible with religious teachings. It would include the following points:

1. the sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing

2. the insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about the development of all living kinds of organisms from a single organism

3. changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals

4. a separate ancestry for man and apes

5. an explanation of the Earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood

6. a relatively recent inception of the Earth and living organisms

In contrast to these tenets of creation science, the legislature defined the beliefs that are deemed representative of evolution science and that, although not formally endorsed by scientists, are not an unfair rendering of the orthodox structure of scientific belief. "Evolution science" in the eyes of the legislature meant the scientific evidence for evolution and the inferences that could be drawn from that evidence. It would include these points:

1. the emergence by naturalistic process of the universe from disordered matter and of life from nonlife

2. the sufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about the development of all living kinds of organisms from simple earlier kinds

3. the emergence by mutation and natural selection of all present kinds of plants and animals from simple earlier kinds

4. the emergence of man from a common ancestor with apes

5. an explanation of the Earth's geology and the evolutionary sequence by uniformitarianism

6. an inception several billion years ago of the Earth and somewhat later of life

The court was asked to rule on whether the provisions of this statute gave unconstitutional support for "religion" — a thinly disguised way of saying "Christian fundamentalism." When the trial began, prominent scientists and theologians of both sides rushed to Little Rock to defend their beliefs and demonstrate their ignorance. One can only weep for the judge who had to choose between competing squads of experts, since his understanding of the nuances of either science or religion must be suspect. Thus errors of interpretation and emphasis abound in the decision.

The judge became confused about what had been argued by the expert witnesses. He wrote that "among the many creation epics in human history, the account of sudden creation from nothing, or creatio ex nihilo, and subsequent destruction of the flood is unique to Genesis," which is clearly overreaching. His statement is certainly not accurate in a comparative sense. Robert Cummings Neville, dean of the School of Theology at Boston University, in Behind the Masks of God, writes: "The conception of creation ex nihilo therefore is vague with respect to whether the creator God is to be specified in a theistic sense, or in a Buddhist or Hindu sense, or in a sense congenial to Chinese religions. Each one of those traditions can be a specification of creation ex nihilo, by comparing them as alternative specifications of the vague notion that we can determine whether they are contradictory, supplementary, overlapping, or incommensurable."

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Excerpted from Evolution, Creationism, and other Modern Myths by Vine Deloria Jr.. Copyright © 2002 Vine Deloria Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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