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IS there a creation/evolution culture war?

IS there a creation/evolution culture war?

 

Is there really a culture war between evolutionists and creationists?  Have you experienced it in your lives?

Some folks have argued that culture war talk is more the figment of politicians’ and journalists’ ambition than actual fact.  Morris Fiorina and his colleagues, for instance, cite survey data that attests to large majorities of Americans identifying themselves as centrists and moderates on religious and cultural issues.  As they argued in their 2004 book Culture War, “The simple truth is that there is no culture war in the United States—no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.”

Their point is valid.  Lots of Americans feel themselves to be in the middle on divisive issues.  Nevertheless, I think Fiorina
and other culture-war-deniers miss the boat on the big picture.  I think we do suffer from a culture war on the creation/evolution issue, for two main reasons.  First, I see a stark divide between believers of the two camps.  Creationists have a hard time believing that evolutionists truly believe their scheme.  Evolutionists return the favor.  Also, the feelings on both sides of this divide seem ferocious and bitter.  These are the ingredients for a durable and damaging culture war.

I’ve seen these effects in my own work.  As I’ve mentioned in these posts, I am personally an evolutionist.  I believe human life came to its present form through a process of natural selection over millions of years.  As a historian of American conservatism and conservative religion, I’ve given talks to largely evolutionist audiences in which I’ve described the ideology and theology of generations of American anti-evolutionists.  The responses I’ve received from those audiences have convinced me that many evolutionists suffer from a real blind spot in their understanding of creationism and creationists.

For example, after one brief talk about 1920s anti-evolution activism, one evolutionist audience member asked me in all sincerity, “What’s wrong with these people?”  She was earnest and sincere; she could not believe that “these people”—creationists—could really oppose the findings of mainstream science for so long.  (See a related discussion over at the US Intellectual History blog.)  There is no way this woman—a distinguished American academic and specialist in multicultural education—would ever allow herself to refer to any other subcultural group as “these people.”  But in the case of creationists, she did not mind lumping them all together in this condescending and demeaning way.  In her opinion, creationists deserved to be demeaned.

Similarly, evolutionists have often asked me if I think creationists REALLY believe in creation, and if so, how they can be so
dense.  The evidence of evolution, to evolutionists, is so self-evident that any disagreement seems either ignorant or mysterious.

Evolutionists often find themselves stumped by the vast difference between their own understandings of life and those of
creationists.  As a result, many evolutionists assume creationists must be scheming and dishonest.  Even in the pages of this blog, I have been accused of being a “lying creationist” for framing arguments in favor of divine creation.  There is a great deal of bitterness with which some people on each side of this cultural divide regard the others.  So much so that any attempt
to understand the other side is seen as stark treason, a punishable offense.

Perhaps my sense of uncertainty developed from my long exposure to other intelligent people who were serious about their religious beliefs.  For a long time I worked in Catholic schools, with a faculty that included lay Catholic and Jesuit
teachers.  Many of the serious Catholics seriously believed in transubstantiation.  They believed that a wafer and a jug of wine could really transform into the body and blood of Christ.  They believed that such things happened commonly, every time there was a Mass, all over the world.

I cannot get my head around that kind of miraculous belief.  I firmly believe that a scientific diagnosis of the wine after it had been supposedly transformed would still show the same chemical makeup that it showed before.  Yet such conclusive proof would not convince my former colleagues.  They might even agree with me that chemical tests had proven that wafers were still chemically wafers and wine was still chemically wine.  And yet they would also believe that they were not.  The wafer and wine had actually become flesh and blood, no matter what the chemical tests may show.  How could my Catholic colleagues believe that?  They were well read and intelligent.  They were good people.  Many had dedicated their careers and lives to
helping others instead of getting themselves ahead.  Yet they believed in this unlikely miracle of transubstantiation.

How?  I don’t know.
But I do respect them as intelligent people and I guess that my inability to believe might be a weakness on my part rather than on theirs.  I can’t help but see their belief as an authentic understanding of the world that differs starkly from my own.  Perhaps the same could be true for those who believe in other ideas that seem outlandish to me?

Have my experiences been unusual?  Have other people interested in the creation/evolution debate had similar experiences?  Those of you who are creationists, have you experienced a wide divide from evolutionists?  Have you seen or felt bitterness and anger toward the other side?  How about evolutionists?  Have you had a difficult experience with a creationist?  One in which he or she would simply not listen to reason?  Or, even worse, one in which he or she lied or acted dishonestly in order to promote creationism?

 

FURTHER READING: Morris P. Fiorina, with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War?  The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004).

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on September 25, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on September 25, 2011

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Pro-Evolution IV: The Nature of Science

EVOLUTION IV: THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

Science is not a simple discovery of truth.  It is a human process, a cultural process.  There have been scientific “truths” that generations of scientists have ardently believed.  Ideas such as phlogiston (although this can cut both ways; see the anti-evolution spin on phlogiston in this post) have convinced scientists and elbowed other ideas out of the realm of science.  This notion that science is somehow a social construction as much as a deduction of objective truth has led some evolution opponents to hope that evolution might be only a fashion among scientists rather than a basic truth about life on earth.  But even this understanding of the nature of science points out the fundamental truth of evolution.

Real science means continual skepticism.  The most ardent searchers for holes in the theory of evolution are not creationists; they are evolutionary scientists.  Any scientist who could come up with a big new theory that displaced evolution would be made an instant celebrity.  His or her career would be made forever.  It leads again to the question of the most likely: Which is more likely, a conspiracy of thousands of scientists over generations to keep a false theory as established science in order to undermine Christian faith (one of the implicit arguments of many creationists) or thousands of ambitious, aggressive scientists who have hammered evolution theory with every test imaginable, looking for a hole that would make their careers?

Take just one example to illustrate.  Stephen Jay Gould was one of the leading evolutionary scientists of the late twentieth century.  His writings attracted large appreciative audiences among both scientists and lay readers.  Yet he was also one of the fiercest critics of mainstream thinking about the nature of evolution.  Along with fellow evolutionist Niles Eldredge, when Gould found a weakness in standard scientific thinking about evolution, he pounced.  In 1972, Eldredge and Gould published a paper critical of the notion that species gradually evolved.  Rather, the fossil record seemed to argue for long periods of equilibrium punctuated by periods of rapid species change.  Rapid, of course, must be understood relatively.  Gould and
Eldredge did not argue—in spite of claims by later anti-evolutionists—that such change happened in sudden catastrophes.
They did not argue that there were no transitional fossil forms.  Rather, they argued that the pace of evolution must be understood to vary substantially over time.  The periods of change, Gould suggested, likely came in windows of between 50,000 and 100,000 years.  Nevertheless, their notion of punctuated equilibriums was a major criticism of contemporary thinking about the nature of evolution.  And it was suggested not by anti-evolutionists, but by evolutionary scientists themselves.  Far from conducting a campaign to enforce an evolutionary orthodoxy, scientists such as Gould and Eldredge continually probe the weaknesses of evolution.

The nature of science also tells us something about the origins of modern evolutionary thinking.  The idea of evolution is bigger than Charles Darwin.  Darwin gets the credit for introducing the modern notion of evolution with his 1859 book Origin of Species.  And he deserves a lot of credit.  His book spelled out a notion of changing species that could actually work.  But Darwin was not by any means the first to suggest that species had evolved from one another.  That idea was as ancient as Western culture itself.  Nor could Darwin claim all the credit for the notion of natural selection as the mechanism by which species changed.  Darwin finally published his book in 1859 after decades of working on it.
He was pushed to finally get it out into the public sphere by similar work by a man named Alfred Russel Wallace.  The fact that the two scientists came up with the notion of natural selection independently shows that the idea did not come from the unique genius of just one man.  Rather, it was an idea whose time had come.  Darwin’s patience in waiting for twenty years to publish his book and his elegant prose went a long way toward making his ideas credible.
But even without Darwin’s clout among the scientific community and his impressive style, the truth of natural selection would have made an impression on both scientists and regular readers.

Science is a competitive process.  It does not fit well with ideas of conspiracies.  It does not even fit well with ideas of ideology.  Scientists hope to establish themselves by proving something new.  If they smell a problem with the theory of
evolution, they will rush in to poke holes in it.

EVOLUTION IV: FURTHER READING

The TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy; http://www.talkorigins.org/; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Anniversary Edition (New York: Signet, 2003); Stephen Jay Gould & Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology 3:2 (1977): 115-151; Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);  Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on September 22, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on September 22, 2011

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Anti-Evolution IIa: Closedmindedness (continued…)

ANTI-EVOLUTION II (a): CLOSEDMINDEDNESS (cont.)

Plus, even the commonly held notion that “all” scientists believe in evolution doesn’t hold up. Look closely the next time you hear that argument.  Notice that much of the evidence given is not about the science itself, but about the credentials of the scientist.  A scientist is supposedly closer to the truth the more accolades he or she has received.  Thus, you may see a letter supporting more evolution education in schools, signed by seventy-five Nobel Prize winners.  Signed by leading professors at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Michigan.  But notice the circularity of that measure.  Those accolades come from within the dominant scientific paradigm.  By definition, such prizes and honors represent not some objective truth, but rather the opinion of other scientists that someone has done something praiseworthy.

The next time you hear that all scientists believe evolution, try sampling from the list below:

  • Fred Hoyle: Hoyle has suggested that current thinking about materialistic evolution is a crock.  Most memorably, he has suggested that the
    chances of life on earth developing on its own was about as likely as the chances that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard would assemble a Boeing jetliner.  In other words, life on earth is entirely too complex to have simply happened.  It needs some source, some cause.  In Hoyle’s case, this is not an argument based on a previous intellectual commitment to the Bible.  In fact, Hoyle’s preferred explanation for the origins of life are not from divine intervention but rather through the seeding of this planet by interstellar viruses containing the basic forms of life.  And even by the standards of mainstream science, Hoyle’s credentials are hard to ignore.  He is often credited, for instance, with coining the term “Big Bang,” although he did not accept the notion himself.  He did not win a Nobel Prize
    himself, although many people think he was unfairly denied one in 1983 despite his contributions to the project that won.
  • Chandra Wickramasinghe: Wickramasinghe was a student of Hoyle, and collaborated with him.  Like Hoyle, Wickramasinghe’s  mainstream scientific credentials are hard to ignore.  He has published dozens of articles, for instance, in the journal Nature.  He holds a professorship at Cardiff University and was the youngest person ever to receive such a professorship.  Like Hoyle, Wickramasinghe is not a biblical Christian.  He does not try to disprove the notion of materialistic evolution out of a commitment to religious ideas.  He is
    simply an innovative scientist able to rest on his credentials enough to publicly doubt the orthodoxy of evolution.  His unorthodox ideas have occasionally cost him funding.  Nevertheless, he has continued to study the idea that life on earth developed from cosmic dust, rather than simply springing into existence on its own.
  • Michael Behe: Behe is a biochemist.  He has argued that some organic functions, such as the mechanism for blood clotting, demonstrate what Behe calls an “irreducible complexity.”  Such complexity cannot have been evolved by a random process, since the entire mechanism needs to have developed all at the same time in order to offer any evolutionary benefit.  In other words, the evolutionary idea that some mutations offer a selective advantage to some individuals of a species, and that those advantages can lead to new species, does not account for some of the complex organic mechanisms.  It would do a simple species no good, in other words, to mutate one part of the blood-clotting mechanism.  It would have to mutate all the parts of it at once in order to derive any evolutionary benefit.

Evolutionists will point to the shortness of this list as evidence that such ideas are the realm of the kook, the crank.  But a balloon only needs a tiny pinhole to explode.  If even a few scientists doubt the evolutionary orthodoxy, that is enough to explode the myth that all scientists agree on the idea.  It is enough to demonstrate that scientific experts, even one expert, can evaluate the scientific evidence and find compelling alternative explanations.  The fact that the great majority of working scientists agree with the idea that life evolved on its own does not prove that it is true.  Before Einstein, the vast majority of working scientists did not understand the theory of relativity.  That does not mean that relativity was not true.  It simply means that most scientists were not able to come up with that idea on their own.  They were trained in other ideas and they  conducted all their research based on the ideas in which they were trained.  The vast majority of scientists at one time worked with the  assumption that phlogiston explained combustibility.  The vast majority also assumed at one time that human races were linked in a hierarchical chain with sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom and Nordic Europeans at the top.  Such orthodoxies are not convincing simply because they can conjure up large majorities of scientists.  Such majorities are, rather, just result of such ideological dominance.  They demonstrate nothing about the fundamental truth of evolution or any other scientific idea.

Even Darwin, in a famous closing passage to his 1859 Origin of Species, invoked the notion of a Creator as the ultimate source of life.  “There is grandeur in this view of life . . . having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”  But wait, you might say, Darwin said that to soften the blow of his controversial book.  As he delved further into the idea, he largely discarded the notion that any Creator had been involved in any way, even to initially breathe life into the evolutionary process.  Such notions only got in the way of his understanding of life.  But look at it from a different angle.  When Darwin started, he was open to the idea of a creator.  As he explored the idea of organic evolution, it only made sense if he eliminated the creator part.  That is, once he decided there was no creator, he realized he didn’t need a creator.  Circular logic.  Not due to evidence, but due to preliminary assumptions about the evidence.  You can do the same thing in reverse.  Assume a young earth.  It will lead you to conclude that such a thing is not possible without a supernatural creator.  Also circular?  Yes.  But it is better, more scientific, to leave all the options on the table.  To examine evidence without first presuming that there are or are not supernatural causes.  Science should mean open minded inquiry, not materialistic inquiry.  If you include that possibility, nine times out of ten the best explanation for life on earth is not due to chance but to design.

When Galileo agreed to recant his support for a heliocentric earth, according to legend, he did so only with an ideological wink.  “E pur si muove,” he allegedly said, “It still moves.”  In other words, in the origins of the modern scientific project, Galileo asserted that whatever humans might say about the physical universe, that universe went on heedlessly.  It didn’t matter, to Galileo, whether or not he recanted his statement, the earth still rotated around the sun.  It seems that Galileo’s position is the one of ultimate faith: It doesn’t matter what I say or do, the truth of my position
is larger than my own being.

The fact that Galileo’s would-be successors in the modern scientific establishment can no longer muster his sense of calm confidence is revealing.  If scientists today really were as confident in their evolutionary ideology as they purport to be, they would not be as insistent that all scientists agree with their position.  In other words, if the notion that life evolved in all its forms without a guiding intelligence really had the same
intellectual weight as the notion of a heliocentric solar system, scientists should be able to muster Galileo’s calm notion that “It still moves.”  They ought to be able to allow other ideas to be considered, knowing that theirs was the truth.

But they can’t.
Mainstream scientists today enforce a rigid evolutionary ideology.  The ideological—as opposed to truly scientific—roots of this kind of closedmindedness become evident in those few cases when scholars have attempted to present alternative ideas in academic settings.  Creationist Jerry Bergman collected cases of such discrimination in his 1984 book The Criterion.  Bergman, who claimed to have been denied tenure at Bowling Green University in the early 1980s due to his creationist beliefs, describes the stories of academics such as Clifford Burdick.  Burdick was allegedly refused his PhD at the University of Arizona in 1960 for including a consideration of divine creation as an explanation for  discrepancies in the fossil record.  Bergman argued that such attitudes had no place in a university setting.  Firing a creationist for speaking to students about his or her beliefs, Bergman argued, would be like “if a black were fired on the suspicion that he had ‘talked to students about being black,’ or a woman being fired for having ‘talked to students about women’s issues.’” In a similar case, Dean Kenyon was reprimanded by his
institution for his work with the notion of intelligent design.  Kenyon had co-authored one of the most influential textbook supplements in the intelligent-design field, Of Pandas and People.  In 1992, his school, San Francisco State University, ordered him to cease teaching scientific creationism as part of his biology classes.  Kenyon had been teaching such ideas as part of his curriculum.  He had been teaching evolutionary ideas as well, but had included other notions about the origins of life.  Such open-mindedness was anathema to the administration of the purportedly open-minded university.  To be fair, the rest of the faculty voted to allow Kenyon to keep teaching such ideas, as part of their right to academic freedom.  But the sentiment in favor of muzzling such ideas was significant.

Similarly, intelligent-design advocate Michael Behe’s university department felt forced to publish a disclaimer of Behe’s work that strayed beyond mainstream orthodoxy.  In embarrassment, apparently, that one of its faculty members could question the reigning scientific ideology, his academic department felt obliged to post the following disclaimer on its website: “The department faculty . . . are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary
theory. . . . Behe’s . . . views . . . are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department.”  Why is this sort of statement necessary?  Because evolution’s dominance of mainstream science is maintained through social, not scientific, rigidity and control.

However, there is a heavy price to be paid for such control.  Such attitudes not only enforce
the evolutionary orthodoxy, they also demonstrate its fundamental intellectual weakness.  When scientists feel they must resort to such heavy-handed ideological enforcement, it is evidence that their emperor really has no clothes.

 

ANTI EVOLUTION IIa: FURTHER READING

Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 2nd edition (New York: Free Press, 2006); Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, 2nd edition (Haughton, 1993); Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on September 18, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on September 18, 2011

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Pro-Evolution III: Sects and Science

EVOLUTION III: SECTS AND SCIENCE

 

Perhaps most troubling of all is the shallowness of anti-evolutionists’ reasons for rejecting evolution.  It makes a great deal of sense to reject
evolution if it is a simple choice between religion and evolution.  Faith makes all sorts of demands, and spurning a scientific idea seems relatively easy.  Especially if that rejection is seen as a requirement of faith.  And for a lot of evolution skeptics, that is apparently part of their rationale.

But rejecting evolution as a litmus test of Christian orthodoxy is extremely problematic.  For one thing, many ardent and devout Christians do not agree that they must oppose evolution in order to be faithful Christians.  They believe in an all-powerful God who uses evolution as his method of
creation.  To insist that one cannot be a Christian if one accepts the fact of evolution means rejecting the faith of all those people.

Even more disturbing, the idea that evolution must be rejected by faithful Christians has shallow and erratic roots.  Not until about 100 years after Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species did Bible-believing Christians largely agree on the notion that the idea of an ancient earth with long periods of evolution was anathema.  Before that, many fundamentalist leaders theorized that the “days” described in Genesis could represent long geologic periods in which life forms developed.  Some subscribed to the notion of an enormous temporal gap between the events described in one part of Genesis, when God created light, and other parts, when he created humanity.  During that gap, these early fundamentalists believed, life could have developed in an evolutionary way.  The important point to these Bible-believing, fundamentalist Christians was that God  intervened directly in time to create forms of life, especially human life.  They did not see a conflict with their religious beliefs and the scientific observations that the planet had lived through long geologic ages.

The idea that true Christian faith only had room for a young earth began among small sects, not originally among the majority of Bible-believing Christians.  Most of the first generations of fundamentalists in the 1920s through the 1950s did not agree that the earth had been created in the last 10,000 years or so, in pretty much its present form.  They did not agree that the fact of a worldwide flood—Noah’s flood—constituted a test of
true belief.  The story of how those extreme ideas came to be considered central tenets of Biblical Christianity shows how tenuous and ultimately unnecessary they are.  It was not always the case that fundamentalist Christianity required belief in a young earth and a literal worldwide flood.  Once we can understand that such beliefs represent a triumph of a certain sect, we can see why evolution does not need to be rejected by devout Christians as a whole.

Ellen G. White: Vision of the End, Vision of Beginning

In the 1920s, when these questions of evolution and Christian belief erupted in the first of America’s twentieth-century culture wars, many leading evolution opponents believed that the earth could be ancient.  At least, they did not see a young earth as one of the bedrock notions of their Biblical faith.  William Bell Riley, for instance, allowed that God took ages to create the earth and its life.  Riley insisted that there was not “an intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth was made six thousand years ago; and the Bible never taught any such thing.”  We can’t doubt Riley’s opposition to evolution.  In 1919, he organized the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, the first fundamentalist umbrella
organization, to combat the teaching of theological modernism and evolution.  He led the fight for anti-evolution laws in the 1920s.  Evolution, for Riley, meant the teaching of atheism.  He dedicated his career to stopping it dead.  But that did not mean that Riley believed in a young earth.  He took a backseat to no one in his fundamentalism.  But he did not think that it was a requirement to insist that the earth could only be 6,000 years old or so.

Similarly with William Jennings Bryan.  Bryan may be remembered best for his role in the 1925 Scopes trial.  In that trial, Bryan led the prosecution of John Scopes for teaching evolution and breaking Tennessee’s new anti-evolution law.  The trial was remembered—badly—in the play and film Inherit the Wind.  In the movie, Bryan comes off as a bitter, malevolent, ignorant man.  Bryan was none of those things.  He had run for President three times as the candidate of the Democratic Party.  He had been Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.  He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a devout Bible-believing Presbyterian.  He lent his talents and prestige to the very
successful 1920s campaign to get evolution out of America’s public schools.  Like Riley, Bryan thought evolution was bad science.  He thought it
was a way to confuse young people and force them to doubt their Biblical faith.  Once students were told that life had evolved in a random process, Bryan believed, they would necessarily doubt the fact that God had created life in its present forms.  But Bryan also believed that God might have done His creating over long geologic ages.  Bryan believed that they “days” referred to in Genesis could refer to millions of years.  Over those millennia, Bryan believed, God could have created life in all its forms.  Any other belief would run up against the scientific evidence for the age of the earth.  Bryan fought for the Bible.  Bryan fought against evolution.  But Bryan did not believe that he had to believe in a young earth.

In the 1920s, only a minority of evolution opponents insisted on the belief in a young earth as an article of faith.  Fundamentalist geologist George McCready Price led the charge.  In the 1920s, Price wrote, lectured, and debated tirelessly against evolution supporters.  He built a reputation as the leading anti-evolution scientist.  And Price insisted that one of the central tenets of his faith was the notion of a literal six-day creation, without long gaps for the earth to develop.  Price demanded belief in a literal worldwide flood and a young earth.  As opposed to his Bible-believing allies, Price insisted that adherence to such ideas formed the foundation of true orthodoxy.

Price studied the earth’s crust to find evidence.  The striated levels in exposed cliffs showed most geologists that the earth had formed in long ages of sedimentation and crust upheavals.  Price saw something different.  Price explained the striation in rocks as proof that they had been formed in a huge flood.  The fossils embedded in those rocks came from plants and animals trapped by the rising waters.  It was the flood, in Price’s geology, that explained the complicated crust.

Price did not just stumble upon his beliefs.  He was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.  For members of that faith, the idea of a young earth and a literal worldwide flood really were requirements.  One could not be an orthodox believer and still doubt such notions.  But the rub for non-Seventh-day Adventists comes from understanding the roots of such orthodoxy.  It did not come from the Bible itself, but rather from the prophetic experience of the denomination’s founder, Ellen G. White.

White began her prophetic career as a follower of William Miller.  Miller had predicted the date of the coming apocalypse around 1843 or 1844.
His predictions proved so popular among his neighbors in Vermont and New York that he published them for wider circulation.  Soon, he took his lecture on the road, presenting his biblical case for 1843 as the end date predicted in the Book of Daniel.

Thousands were convinced.  The Millerite revival grew from a local curiosity to a national movement.  At first, Miller was hesitant to give an exact date for the Second Coming.  But he believed that the world must end by March 21, 1844.  Some believers sold their farms, wrapped up their earthly concerns, and donned white robes to await Jesus Christ.  Famously, some even sat on the roofs of their barns and watched the sun rise on March 22.  On that morning, things appeared much as before.  No Jesus.

Some gave up.  Others listened to a new date—a correction William Miller agreed to—that said the true date must be in April.  Those must have
been anxious weeks.  Not wishing to be caught out like the foolish virgins, but now maybe a little skeptical that these predictions had the true power of prophecy, Millerites still waited.  After April 18, Miller himself gave up.  He apologized for his mistake but did not refute the notion that the world would soon be coming to an end.  He merely admitted that his calculations of its date must have been in error.

Ellen White did not give up.  In 1844 she was a young woman, convinced by the power of prophecy.  She had been converted by William Miller when she was still a young girl of twelve.  His predictions of judgment and apocalypse had terrified her, and she had spent nights crying, sweating, and shaking in fear of her body and soul’s suffering and damnation.  She was convinced.  But when Miller’s date came and went, she wasn’t sure what to believe.  Like many Millerites, her answer was to pray.  Unlike most of the disappointed ones, though, White’s prayers brought her outside of herself.  She was entranced in visions of heaven and earth.  She began seeing divine histories of the future scrolled out for her with the universe as a canvas.  She described the experience as being surrounded by a bright light.  She would be swept out of her body and hear the commanding voice of Jesus as God, telling her the story of the universe’s past and future.  She was surrounded by clouds of angels celebrating her divine experience.  At first, she kept her experiences to herself.  But she knew that could not last.  Jesus himself had directed her to share what she had been told.  She had become a prophet, equal in power and vision to those whose inspiration had created the Bible itself.  It was not intended for her alone, but for all humanity, to make known the truth of life.

White listened, and spoke.  She spread the word of her visions with the help of her new husband.  She described what God had shown her, which included the creation of the earth in six literal days.

Seventh-day Adventists (SDA) will tell you that White’s prophecies aren’t the same as the Bible.  Although she was inspired by the same power that inspired the Biblical authors, and White’s writings are authoritative among SDA believers, they do not make up a new Bible.  But the visions
she described, along with the implications for life and faith, still had the power to dictate behavior and belief among her followers.

Among those followers were the founders of big food companies, like Kellogg’s and Little Debbie’s.  The dietary restrictions that resulted from White’s prophecies meant that SDA members could not eat lard, so a Little Debbie’s snack will not have the same lardy filling as a Hostess Twinkie.  They also led Mr. Kellogg to experiment with healthy new foods, including by accident the original corn flake.

More important here, one of White’s visions included the creation of the universe and life.  White described her vision of God’s direct creation in six literal days.  She placed the date either 6000 or 4000 years before her writing.

Just as SDA members needed lard-free food, they also needed to believe in a literal six-day creation.  Not six “ages,” in which the words of Genesis stood for long geologic ages.  Not one day, then a long geologic gap, then five more days.  For Seventh-day Adventists, White’s vision affirmed a literal six-day creation, not very far in the past.

One of those followers was George McCready Price.  In the 1920s, when other Bible-believing fundamentalists believed in the possibility that the earth had existed for long ages before God created humans, Price campaigned for a much more radical kind of opposition to evolution.  He had to.  Ellen G. White attested to it.  To do otherwise would have been unthinkable for any Seventh-day Adventist, even if it would not have been for other conservative Christians.

As so often happens, Price’s unshakeable commitment to the notion of a recent, literal six-day creation carried the day.  Other fundamentalists were open to the idea of a young earth, but they didn’t insist on it.  Price did.  In addition to debating every prominent evolutionist he could find, Price helped establish the Deluge Geology Society.  As the name implies, this group was committed to the notion of a literal worldwide flood
that was responsible for forming the apparent layering of the earth’s crust.  This flood could explain the fossil record of extinct species.

When new generations of Christians wanted to find out more about evolution, it was the Deluge Geology Society that seemed the most active
and ardent opponent to the idea.  Part of that opposition, the new generations learned, must mean a literal six-day creation.  It must include a real worldwide flood.  And it must mean that the earth was young, no older than ten thousand years.

One of this new generation of anti-evolutionists was Henry Morris.  Morris was not SDA, but as he explored the possibilities of opposition to evolution, he found the most congenial home in Price’s Deluge Geology Society.  As he developed his ideas about the age of the earth and the origins of life, he did so under the influence of Price’s ideas.

In 1961, Morris published his own anti-evolution bombshell.  Along with John Whitcomb, another non-SDA anti-evolutionist, Morris explained his ideas about creationism in The Genesis Flood.  This book became the inspiration for a new generation of evolution opponents.  Unlike the folks that started the fight in the 1920s, this generation agreed on some basic ideas: the earth was no older than 10,000 years; it had been created in six literal days as described in Genesis; and it had been destroyed in a literal worldwide flood.  Most important, The Genesis Flood
made a convincing and influential argument that all of these beliefs were central to Biblical Christian orthodoxy.  As had not been the case for earlier Biblical Christians, the new generation, readers of Morris and Whitcomb’s book, believed that these fairly radical notions had always been central to true faith.

They had not.  They developed in large part from the visions of Ellen White.  They were not part of the ancient orthodoxy of Christian belief, but rather of the influence of one energetic SDA scientist, George McCready Price.

That matters.

Understanding the sectarian roots of this kind of anti-evolutionism will show that such opposition is much newer and peripheral to Christian belief than its advocates will admit.  But here’s another twist.  Even for those anti-evolutionists who dispute this line of argument, the story of Ellen G. White’s prophecies tells us something about religious opposition to the idea of evolution.  That is, many earnest anti-evolutionists could say that this SDA history has nothing at all to do with their anti-evolution beliefs.  They could say that Ellen White’s visions may agree with their belief in a young earth, a six-day creation, and a worldwide flood, but that they were convinced by arguments that came directly from the Bible, not from White’s prophecies.  That wider biblical argument, after all, was the one laid out in Morris and Whitcomb’s Genesis Flood.  Fair enough.
Just because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that governments should impose a graduated income tax does not mean that every such tax is a communist law.

But here’s the kicker.
Non-SDA anti-evolutionists do not care much about Ellen White’s prophecies.  Her vision of God’s work does not compel them to fight against the teaching of evolution.  For those outside of the SDA tradition, White’s prophecies are irrelevant.  They may even be blasphemous, assuming the role of something near the Bible itself.  In any case, those who believe in the Bible are not generally motivated by anything White may have seen.  It makes no part of their anti-evolution activism.

For these non-SDA anti-evolutionists, I suggest the following mental experiment.  Imagine your feelings about the prophecies of Ellen White.  You do not find her visions compelling.  You do not think they should be guiding public policy.  That feeling is the feeling of many Americans, Christian and non-Christian, about all Bible-based opposition to evolution.  Most Americans do not agree that the Bible dictates a belief in a literal special creation.  Lots of people do not care what the Bible says at all, the same way many anti-evolutionists don’t care about Ellen G. White.  Is it fair to base our public education system on ideas that are only meaningful for one segment of the population?  No matter what proportion of the population hold that belief?  The answer is obvious.  No sectarian belief ought to dictate public policy.  It should be left to private individuals to promote their particular beliefs, whether that be the vegetarianism and flood geology of a Seventh-day Adventist or the transubstantiation beliefs of a Catholic.  None of those beliefs should guide the planning of public school education.  Keeping evolution out of schools, or even watering it down by teaching it side by side with the notion of special creation, takes those sectarian beliefs and elevates them to the notion of universal doctrine.  It is not fair to those who do not come from that tradition, whether they are a minority or a majority.

 

EVOLUTION III: FURTHER READING

John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1966); Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, expanded edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); William V. Trollinger Jr., God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

 

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by Adam Laats on September 14, 2011  •  Permalink
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Anti-Evolution II: The Argument against Closedmindedness

ANTI EVOLUTION II: CLOSEDMINDEDNESS

One of the most convincing intellectual weapons in the arsenal of evolution supporters is that evolution has won over scientific opinion.  This is the argument that convinces me, for instance.  I admit that I don’t really understand the deeper science behind evolution, but when I see that every mainstream scientist endorses the idea, I am willing to be convinced.  But if we step outside that consensus, it is easy to see that such a consensus can actually be an argument against the simple truth of evolution.  And for the purposes of this blog, remember that I am not trying to convince or convert committed evolutionists to the opposite point of view.  All I hope to do is to show that there are respectable reasons why people might hold that opposite point of view.  I would like each side only to acknowledge that those on the other side might not be wicked, ignorant, or crazy.  In the case of the scientific consensus about evolution, it is easy enough to see how such a consensus can be proof of the
untruth of evolution, as much as it can be proof of its truth.  Here’s what I mean:

For most regular people, science is still understood to be a matter of deducing the objective truth about the nature of life and humanity.  Something is more scientific, in this view, when it comes closer to that objective truth, and less scientific as it edges away.  Thus, if evolution is
science, then those who oppose evolution must oppose science.

But scientists and those interested in the nature of science offer a much more complex view, especially since works like Thomas Kuhn’s
influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Since that time, the nature of scientific truth has been understood to be more of a social construction.  To create scientific truth, scientists engage in a social process that constructs an orthodoxy.  The word Kuhn used has made it into everyday usage: scientists construct a paradigm that guides their explanations.  Those who fall outside that paradigm must be forbidden from calling their work “real” science.  However, due to the nature of this process, the next scientific revolution can only come from those at the
outer boundaries of the current dominant paradigm.  Only by challenging the existing paradigm can scientific revolutions take place.

To clarify this process, consider an example that Kuhn himself used.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European scientists agreed that combustibility resulted from an ineffable substance they called phlogiston.  When something burned, it was the phlogiston in that material being released.  This concept guided their research.  They argued about phlogiston’s nature; they disagreed about the implications of experiments in which different elements were burned in the air or under glass lids; they created a scientific consensus about the nature, meaning, and  implications of phlogiston.

By the end of the eighteenth century, a scientific revolution had rejected the idea of phlogiston.  Until that time, however, any notion that contradicted the dominant scientific paradigm would have been rejected.  Why did some materials gain weight, for example, when they rusted and supposedly emitted phlogiston?  During the reign of the scientific consensus about phlogiston, such disconfirming evidence was explained within the paradigm of phlogiston.  Scientists wondered if phlogiston might have negative weight, for example.  But they generally did not consider the idea that phlogiston itself was utterly imaginary.

The implications of this understanding of scientific truth are obvious.  In the case of evolution, the fact that mainstream scientists all agree on evolution does not prove the merit of evolution.  Rather, it only proves that such evolutionary scientists are trapped by the intellectual
constrictions of that dominant paradigm.  They do not need to be wicked, ignorant, or insane to do so.  In fact, most of them would love to come up with a powerful new idea that would revolutionize scientific knowledge.  Most of them would drool at the thought of having their name ranked up there with the other scientific revolutionaries, Lavoisier, Newton, Darwin, Einstein.  It is not that they are trying to enforce an orthodoxy.  Rather, they are fundamentally unable to think beyond the restrictions of their current paradigm.  They cannot think of ideas, in other words,
that build on ideas they do not think.  It will not be until a scientific revolution overhauls current understandings that scientists will be able to see the flaws in their evolutionary thinking.

Perhaps the example of phlogiston is too far removed from current thinking, however.  It might be easy to acknowledge that scientists back in the seventeenth century would fall prey to such unscientific notions, but to take solace in the idea that more recent science would not do so.  An
example from the twentieth century, then, might be more convincing.  For a few decades at the beginning of the twentieth century, one dominant idea was that of scientific racism.  Experts explored the differences between different types of humanity.  Races were graded on a scale from robust, vigorous, intelligent Anglo-Saxons at the top, to indolent, brutish Sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom.  The qualities of each race were
scientifically delineated.  Readers were told that such notions had been agreed upon by a consensus of leading scientists.  To doubt it would be to
express ignorance and reactionary stubbornness.  The policy implications of this kind of science were obvious.  If there were greater and
lesser races of humanity, it made sense to avoid cheapening the better races with the traits of the lesser.  Breeding between different races would lead to a deadly downward spiral of stupidity and weakness.  It made sense to promote racial eugenics, the discouragement of breeding of less advanced races and the utter prohibition of breeding between races.  The people who promoted these ideas were not cranks or outsiders.  They included scholars such as Madison Grant, who testified as an expert before US Congress as they debated passing newer, stricter immigration laws in 1924.

Before such ideas were kicked out of mainstream science by scholars such as Franz Boas, they dominated thinking about the nature of man
and society.  It took people with a previous commitment to an alternative understanding of humanity to challenge that view.  Among those challengers were evangelical Protestants.  James M. Gray, for example, in his career as president of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago
(1904-1934), challenged the notion of scientific racism, just as he challenged the notion of human evolution.  For Gray, both ideas conflicted with the truth of Biblical teachings.  The Bible, Gray believed, described a common origin for all of humanity in the Garden of Eden.  Thus notions that some races were higher or lower contradicted God’s teaching.  The fact that scientists with impeccable credentials scoffed at Gray’s supposed
intellectual naiveté didn’t deter him.  He was able to think outside the dominant paradigm because he was committed to his understanding of an inerrant Bible.  Indeed, he was forced to think that way.  He could not have accepted the ideas of scientific racism, just as he could not accept the idea of evolution.

It is easy enough for some to reject the logic of Bible-based anti-evolutionists, but such rejectionists should be humbler in their assertions of confidence in the scientific consensus.  Such consensuses have in the past bound mainstream scholars to reprehensible ideas such scientific racism, or incorrect ideas such as phlogiston.  Simply because there is a consensus doesn’t make something true.

Those who support evolution often make another criticism of their opponents.  They point out that creationists’ claims violate the most fundamental principles of modern science by requiring a supernatural cause.  Such arguments, evolution supporters insist, go against the nature of true science, in which supernatural causes are rejected in favor of digging out the true material causes of things.  Science, at its heart, must reject such explanations, or else risk falling into a muddle in which every event can be explained away as the result of divine activity.  Take a simple example.  Thunder can be explained as the noise made when angels are bowling.  Such an idea is comforting to young children frightened by the noise of a storm.  But if adults were to seriously contend that thunder might in fact be caused that way, it would require fundamental violence to the notion of science.  Scientists know that thunder is really caused by the rapid movement of air to fill the void left by electrical discharges of lightning.  What if the Bible declared that thunder were caused by angels bowling?  Then anti-thunderists might declare that scientists arrogantly assumed that every roll of thunder was caused that way, when in fact some of the thunder might be due to angels bowling.  There is no proof, they could say, that angels did not bowl some of the thunderbursts.  No scientist could ever prove the cause of every single thunderburst.

But those who oppose the idea of evolution are not talking about thunder.  Their case is much stronger.  Thunder is observable.  Thunder can be studied as it happens.  In the case of the origins of life, evolutionists will admit that they have no direct proof of what occurred.  They infer from a body of evidence what they think makes sense, but in doing so they privilege an enormous package of pre-existing ideas about the notion of causation.  In other words, when they look at evidence from fossils and embryos, such evidence confirms their evolutionary hypothesis.  But in order for it to do so, evolutionary scientists must assume that there is only a material cause.

So, for example, evolutionists note that the basic structure of human hands is very similar to the bone structure of a bat’s wing, or a whale’s flipper.  From that they conclude that each of these mammals must have evolved from a common ancestor.  Makes sense.  But that conclusion has already assumed a material, evolutionary cause.  Consider, for instance, what can happen when you open your mind to consider a divine cause.  The conclusion of divine creation makes just as much sense.  Take a look underneath the hood at the engines of a Ford, a Toyota, and a Hyundai.  You will see very similar structures.  Each of them uses very similar mechanisms for generating power and translating that power into movement.  Each of them also has some similar additional parts, such as a reservoir for windshield-washer fluid.  Does that mean that they were not designed?  Of course not.  It means that the designers worked with structures that worked well.  If we assume a designer for life on earth, then we might conclude that the designer found that the same basic structure worked well for whales, bats, and humans.  The point is that evolutionists put the cart before the horse.  They assume a material, evolutionary cause for life, then when they look at evidence, they find their assumption confirmed.  At the very least, if we assume a divine, intentional cause for life, we can find our assumptions similarly confirmed.

ANTI EVOLUTION II: FURTHER READING

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jerry Bergman, The Criterion: Religious Discrimination in America (Richfield, MN: Onesimus Press, 1984); Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner’s, 1916).

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by Adam Laats on September 11, 2011  •  Permalink
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Pro-Evolution II: What evolution DOES mean

EVOLUTION II: THE MODERN SYNTHESIS

Here are some of the things evolution DOES mean:

  • In its most advanced form, the modern evolutionary synthesis has been accepted by all mainstream scientists.  This modern evolutionary synthesis, briefly, contends that life on earth was not created all at once.  It developed by a series of minute changes
    over a long time.  For a long time, scientists, including Charles Darwin himself, couldn’t figure out how those changes could keep from being swamped by a larger population.  For instance, if one fish was born with fins that helped it climb up on land to eat plants that other fishes couldn’t reach, it would have an evolutionary advantage over those other fish.  It could eat more and get stronger.  It could have more offspring that would also be likely to have those leg-like fins.
    The problem for early evolution scientists was the idea that the tendency to have leg-like fins would be watered down by mating with fish that had fin-like fins.  Even if a fish had an evolutionary advantage with leg-like fins, its offspring would blend the
    characteristic of leg-like fins with the characteristic of fin-like fins.  Over time, the tendency to have advantageous leg-like fins would be swamped by the majority of fishes’ fin-like fins.  The solution to this dilemma came to scientists by the 1930s.  Scientists realized that life on earth doesn’t work that way.  Instead, the offspring of a fish with leg-like fins with a fish with fin-like fins would carry the genetic tendency to be born with leg-like fins, even if the fish itself had fin-like fins.  You may remember something like this from high-school biology. The idea was a little older, discovered in the 1800s by a monk named Gregor Mendel.  Mendel observed pea plants and noticed that there was a regularity to their characteristics.  About one in every four
    tall pea plants, for instance, was short.
    Mendel realized that the short characteristic was carried recessively even in the tall pea plants.  When two tall pea plants with that recessive characteristic produced new pea plants, every fourth offspring would end up short.  How would this work with our fish with leg-like fins?  The genetic tendency to have leg-like fins would be latent in fish even with fin-like fins.  That is, they would have the genes to grow leg-like fins, but most of their offspring would have fin-like fins.  Every once in a while, a fish with leg-like fins would be born.  When the circumstances changed and these leg-like fins became an advantage, fish with leg-like fins would have more offspring more often.  Their offspring would carry the genetic tendency to be born with leg-like fins.
    Over time, if there was more food accessible out of the water, and if food became scarcer and scarcer below water, those fish born with leg-like fins would prosper, and find more mates also with that characteristic.  Not soon, but over time, a new species of
    fish with leg-like fins would evolve.
  • Some of the most convincing biological arguments for evolution come from what scientists call ontogeny and homology.  Ontogeny means roughly the way animals develop.  Some steps of that development only make sense in an evolutionary framework.
    For instance, embryonic whales grow legs for a stage.  Why?  Especially vital for our argument here, why would whales go through a developmental stage with proto-legs if God had simply created them in their current form?  It makes no sense.  It would be an example of the kind of evidence that God would have had to have left behind in order to fool humans
    into thinking life evolved.  Because those embryonic legs make perfect sense in evolutionary perspective.  For a time, whales had been land-dwelling mammals.  They developed their ability to survive and thrive in water as an evolutionary niche developed for them.  Their embryonic history demonstrates that path.  Although early evolutionists such as Ernst Haeckel overstated their case for the importance of ontogeny as a path of evolutionary development in all animals, in some cases it still points to an
    evolutionary origin for different forms of life.
  • Scientists also note powerful homologies among very different kinds of animals.  By this they mean the underlying structure of many different forms reveals the same basic structure.  For instance, bats’ wings, human hands, and seals’ flippers share a basic bone structure.  Each of the organisms uses the form for very different purposes: flying, grabbing, and swimming.  But the similarity of the underlying bone structure makes sense if all the forms evolved from a common ancestor.  As each species developed and specialized over the millennia, the basic bone structure developed in markedly different ways to help the species take advantage of evolutionary niches.  Bats developed the ability to fly, humans to grab, and seals to swim.  But such underlying similarity is utterly confusing if we assume that each species was created as is.  Why would a designer use the same underlying bone structure for each instead of coming up with more efficient ones for each ultimate use?
    That is, if the bat was made to fly, why wouldn’t its bone structure be markedly different from the bone structure of a seal flipper?  Just as with the embryonic evidence, the only way it makes sense is if the designer deliberately set out to obscure its
    (His?  Her?) role in the design.  It only makes sense, in other words, if God not only designed the vast variety of life, but then made it look as if that variety had evolved from common ancestors.
    Which explanation makes more sense?
  • There are other specific examples that flesh out the argument.  One that Darwin used was that of the ichneumon wasp.  This is a
    type of wasp that lays its eggs directly into or on the body of a host, something like a caterpillar.  The mother wasp then paralyzes the prey.  When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae eat the living but powerless body of the host.  They first eat the non-vital organs such as fat cells.  That ensures that the host will stay alive as they feed.  Only after they have eaten the still living flesh do they finally eat the vital organs and kill the unhappy host.  Why, Darwin asked, would a benevolent God create such implacable suffering?  If the panoply of living things were created, why create such cruelty?  It makes no sense.  Of course, Darwin could have taken refuge in the traditional answer to such questions: God’s ways cannot be known to us.  He may have reasons beyond
    our knowing.  But for Darwin and evolutionists that followed him, there was a much more obvious answer.  The reason animal life could be so cruel was because it had not been designed in such detail.  God did not create the vampiric wasp as such.  Rather, the wasp evolved to take advantage of the flesh of its prey.  It evolved in its ability to feed its young in this peculiar and revolting
    way.  In other words, if God created the wasp this way, we are presented with a moral dilemma that we can only overcome
    with a series of difficult mental gymnastics.
    But if life forms evolved to take advantage of evolutionary niches, the process makes entire sense.
  • The idea of evolution is repeatedly confirmed by new evidence.  For instance, the basic idea of species changing by a long slow process of natural selection came from Darwin and Wallace in 1859.  They had no idea about a lot of how it might work.
    But as scientists today find out more and more about the nature of life, each new piece of information confirms the basic notion of evolution.  For instance, scientists have had great success in recent years in decoding the genomes of humans and other species.  They have charted the genes that make up the recipe of the human species.  And they have found that those genes are almost identical to genes from similar species.  They are even very similar to the genes of very different species.
    Sharing so much of the same genetic make up confirms the notion that life on earth descended from a single source.
    Darwin and Wallace had no notion that this evidence would ever exist.  But it fits perfectly with their predictions of how such genes should look.  It confirms their suggestions.  There was no way that Darwin could have understood the evidence from the human genome.  Yet it confirms the idea of evolution in vivid ways.  Even during Darwin’s lifetime, he doubted the feasibility of his evolutionary scheme.  Based on the best scientific understandings of his time, there was no way that the earth could be ancient enough for evolution to have occurred.  Later scientific discoveries established a far more ancient age of life on Earth than Darwin realized.  Thus, even when his own faith was shaken in the feasibility of his notion, he was still proven correct.
  • When evidence piles up this way, the only way around it is to imagine that God created a trail of evidence meant to fool humans.  He created a universe that pointed in a false direction, to test whether humanity could overcome the evidence of reason to cling to faith.  Why would He do that?  Why would He want to fool people?  And, if He wanted to give humans a test about whether they would hold fast to His revealed truth in the face of overwhelming rational evidence, why would He give the majority of humans a non-Christian tradition to cling to?  It would mean that God wanted people to cling to a lifeboat of revealed religion instead of walking on the land that was only a few feet below them, then provided them with a lifeboat that wouldn’t float.  That does not seem consistent with a God of infinite love.
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by Adam Laats on September 6, 2011  •  Permalink
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ANTI-EVOLUTION Ib: Poor Results II

For biblical Christians, however,the question is not so simple.  As evolutionary ideas became more influential, a large segment of Christians concludedthat such ideas were not compatible with their scriptural beliefs.  Some critics (including this author in an upcoming post) may argue that anti-evolutionreligious beliefs only developed recently, and that they therefore are not essential parts of traditional belief systems. But that argument doesn’t recognize that anti-evolution beliefs naturally only developed as the evolutionary threat became more culturally powerful.  Why would traditional Christians develop an anti-evolution theology before they had to?  Why would biblical Christians consider the importance of their special creation beliefs when such beliefs were unchallenged?

In short, biblical Christiansbelieve that the Bible is God’s instruction book for human living.  It is essential—not optional but
essential—that every part of it be respected and heeded.  God gave this book to humanity.  God wanted humans to use this book as their
path to salvation.  The Bible, in one way of explaining it, was God’s invitation to humanity to join him in blessed eternal life.

Any idea that contradicts thewords of that Scripture must be not only wrong, but pernicious.  The Bible clearly and concisely explains theorigins of life, including human life. Any merely human idea, such as evolution, that contradicts that biblical explanation does not even need to be considered.  It must simply be rejected.

Although it is not usually a goodidea for humans to try to deduce divine reasoning, this case almost shouts out for such an explanation.  We can see in the social results of widespread evolution education an example of what can happen when humans ignore God’s rules and try to substitute rules of their own.  God gave humans the Truth.  That truth was not only true, but healthy for humans to understand and believe.  When more people were taught biblically, society was less disgusting.  When more people were taught that humans were
created by a loving God, s ociety was less similar to a zoo with no cages.

Even for those who are not impressed with a scriptural argument, however, evolution education should still be understood as a deadly threat.  Even if one is not convinced that the Bible or other holy writ must be the starting place for our understanding of humanity and the universe, the notion that children today are educated in a way that is starkly different from the past should give one pause.  Because even if we are convinced of the basic truth of evolution, we can’t help but notice that it is a fundamentally different way of understanding humanity.  It has been taught to generations of American kids, now, without an adequate understanding of the moral revolution that it
implied.

It might be easier to understand the problem if we imagine a little more intellectual distance, a different perspective.  Consider how you felt when you read about the religious worldview of an isolated Amazon culture suddenly attacked by modern western culture.  The Yanomamo, for instance.  Just as with other cultures that have been overwhelmed by Western Euro-Americanism, the path of this
previously isolated group was depressingly predictable.  The people descend into alcoholism and depression.  Suicide and crime rates
shoot up.  Young people spend their days huffing glue and cutting their arms.  Their fundamental cultural norms were shattered; their traditional explanations of life and the universe no longer hold up.
There is no longer any compelling reason for young people to exert themselves.  They look, instead, for animal pleasures to fill the void.  And the obvious question becomes: Why is it bad when it happens to them, but acceptable when it happens to your own culture?

ANTI EVOLUTION I: FURTHER READING

William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1994; Richard Dawkins, “Put Your Money on Evolution,” The New York Times Review of Books, April 9, 1989, pp. 34–35; Arnold B. Grobman, The Changing Classroom: The Role of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (New York: Doubleday, 1969); Gerald Skoog, “The Coverage of Human Evolution in
High School Biology Textbooks in the 20th Century and in Current State Science Standards,” Science and Education 14 (2005): 395-422.

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Pro-Evolution Ia: What Evolution Does NOT Mean

EVOLUTION I: WHAT IT DOES NOT MEAN

What is evolution?  People use the term in a lot of different ways.  One of the things that will help explain why so many people believe in evolution will be clarify what people mean when they say it.  Here are a couple of things it DOESN’T mean:

  • Humans evolved from apes.  This idea has been curiously offensive and distracting to the real argument.  In the
    modern evolutionary synthesis, the consensus is that all living things on earth had a common ancestor.  Over millions of years, different forms of life developed from that common ancestor.  Humans and other primates all diverged from
    one another relatively late in this process. But humans didn’t evolve out of monkeys or apes.  Rather, humans and other hominids split off from the same “branch” of the “tree (or bush) of life” that monkeys and apes split off from.
  • “Darwinism.” A lot of confusion can come from using Darwinism as a synonym for evolution.  Those who are trying to
    obscure the truth about evolution—some of them merely to profit from the huge market for anti-evolution materials—often confuse the issue by telling audiences that “Darwinism” has been rejected by scientists.  That’s true enough, sort of.  Darwin’s original ideas about evolution have been tested and challenged vigorously since the publication of Origin of Species in 1859.  Some of them have been discarded.  Thus, it is easy to find examples of prominent scientists in various decades saying that “Darwinism” is dead.  What they mean is that Charles Darwin’s ideas about the mechanism of evolution have been challenged by scientists.  They do NOT mean that the fact of organic evolution has been rejected.
  • God is a lie.
    The fact of evolution doesn’t have a bearing on theology.  It does not disprove the Bible.  Some of the most famous theologians in history, such as St. Augustine, embraced an evolutionary worldview.  And many prominent evolutionists, including Dobzhansky, believe in God.  They simply believe that evolution is God’s method.  Nor
    does the theory of evolution shackle God in some way.  Just because there is a mechanism by which species can change and develop does not mean that God has been robbed of power.  A tree grows from a seed.  That does not imply that God has been locked out of the process.  It does not have any bearing on the possibility of miracles or God’s supernatural involvement.  It would be fair enough to say, in fact, that a tree developing from a seed is a miracle that requires God’s guiding hand.

EVOLUTION
I: FURTHER READING
Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution,”  The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Mar., 1973), pp. 125-129; Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (New York: The Modern Library, 2006).

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by Adam Laats on August 27, 2011  •  Permalink
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Pro-Evolution I: Introduction

EVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION

In 1972, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky told the annual meeting of the National Association of Biology Teachers that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  The line stuck.  Not just because of Dobzhansky’s credentials.  An émigré from the Soviet Union in 1927, in the 1930s Dobzhansky’s work in genetics helped explain the
way Darwin’s idea of natural selection really worked.As evidence, Dobzhansky pointed to the fantastic diversity
of life forms.  A fungus which forms only on a certain part of a certain beetle that only lives in certain limestone
caves in France.  A fly whose larvae can only survive in seepages of crude oil. Each of these incredible and incredibly diverse forms of life evolved to fit an evolutionary niche.  They represented only those that have survived the ages; many other exotic and specialized forms of life also developed, flourished, and died off as conditions changed.  Dobzhansky argued that none of that made any sense—indeed, he called it blasphemous to think of—if such life forms had been created in all their specificity by an all-knowing God.  It would suggest a whimsical and cruel Creator; one who deliberately set up evidence that life had evolved in order to fool curious humans.  Plus, it would suggest a Creator who only created in order to destroy.  But it made perfect sense if life had evolved.

This is why Dobzhansky’s 1972 speech title immediately became a lasting favorite among those who sought to prove the importance of evolutionary thinking.  Dobzhansky summed up some of the reasons why evolutionists could not live without evolution.  Nothing they did made any sense if it was not unified by the idea that life forms had evolved to fit the diverse conditions of the planet.  Nothing made sense without the notion that each form had come into being as it took advantage of
niches within the diverse sphere of earthly life.  But all came into focus when understood as elaborations of the evolutionary process. All became clear when seen as the ways the process of natural selection allowed life to adapt to changing and diverse conditions.

Dobzhansky relied on the fact that such arguments had convinced every careful and honest student who had studied the evidence.  In these posts, I will not rely on that preponderance of agreement by academic scientists.  This is not because that evidence is not strong.  One of the best known projects that demonstrate the overwhelming agreement among scientists is the National Council for Science Education’s “Project Steve.”  In response to the lists compiled by anti-evolutionists of scientists who doubt the notion of evolution, NCSE compiled a much, much longer list just of scientists named Steve who do support evolution.

However, just as arguments from the Bible would never convince these evolutionists that evolution can’t be true, so such compilations will never convince those who do not believe in evolution.  The number of scientists who believe in evolution will not impress someone who assumes that such people have fallen into a lamentable intellectual trap. Just like a list of the number of healthy people who smoke will not convince me that smoking is healthy.  Just because many people do something can’t prove that it is right.

The purpose of these posts, as with all of the efforts on this blog, is more modest.  I will only attempt to make the arguments in favor of evolution that can demonstrate to a committed anti-evolutionist that one does not have to be deluded or ignorant in order to believe in evolution.  There are good reasons why people believe it.  As Dobzhansky argued forty years ago, once we understand this vision of life, nothing makes sense without it.  It becomes the key to unlocking life’s secrets.

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by Adam Laats on August 27, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on August 27, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/08/27/pro-evolution-i-introduction/

Anti-Evolution Ia: Poor Results

ANTI EVOLUTION Ia: POOR RESULTS

It does not take much to see the negative effects of evolution.  Let me begin with a short history: After the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, the federal government got involved in science education.  Until then, local communities had been able to exert more effective control over their local schools.  They had been able to keep evolution out, if that was what they wanted.  One of the ways they were able to do so was through the insistence on textbooks that did not focus on the issue of evolution.  Publishers generally produced books that had some evolutionary content, but that could also be used in a way that did not put evolutionary ideas at the fore.

After Sputnik, the federal government poured ten million dollars into a new textbook series that made evolution one of its guiding themes.  This series, produced by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, did not just include evolutionary ideas.  It did not simply introduce students to the basic concept of evolution, which teachers, parents, and school administrators could use in whatever way they saw most fit for their community.  Instead, it made evolution one of the guiding principles of science, as most mainstream scientists had insisted textbooks should for generations.

Since these textbooks were funded by federal money, the publishers were somewhat immune to pressure from the market.  In 1960, when the editors test marketed the books, some districts insisted that objectionable parts be edited out.  The editors simply refused.  They did not need to worry that their sales might suffer.  They stood on their contract and forced districts to take the books as is.

This change did not just affect those states and school districts that adopted the BSCS textbooks. Other educational publishers felt pressure to update their textbooks to make them more insistently evolutionary. If they didn’t, they worried they would lose market share.

And why should we care about textbooks?  Because this shift from textbooks that usually downplayed evolutionary ideas to textbooks that made evolutionary thinking one of their guiding principles was the most obvious educational marker of the breakdown in moral values that plagued America in the late twentieth century.  It doesn’t take any conspiratorial thinking to notice the correlation between the increase in evolutionary education and the utter collapse of public morality.

To compound the effect, around the same time that more and more public schools crammed evolution down the throats of children, the US Supreme Court tried to remove any mitigating influences in public schools.  In 1962 and 1963, in two landmark cases, Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Schempp v. Abington Township School District (1963), the Supreme Court ruled that prayer and Bible reading in public schools were unconstitutional.  This reversed centuries of tradition in American education. From the beginning of British colonial efforts in the 1600s, part of education was always training in the basic ideas of religion.  Just as more evolution made its way into more classrooms, students got less Bible and less prayer.  Is it any surprise that cultural upheaval followed?

Consider the changes in American culture since the early 1960s.  Between 1960 and 1992, according to William Bennett’s Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, crime soared over three hundred percent.  The number of children born out of wedlock
increased by over four hundred percent during that same period.  The number of single-parent households tripled.  The divorce rate more than doubled.  The rates of births to unmarried teenagers rose from 15.3 per 1000 girls to 44.8.  Suicide rates among teenagers more than tripled.  SAT scores declined more than 70 points.

Take your pick of any of these grim indicators, the main point is the same: the moral foundation of our culture has been eroded.  Since the 1960s, the simplest ideas of right and wrong have been confounded.  And how can we express surprise that young people act in immoral ways?  Or, to be more exact, how can we be surprised when young people are utterly amoral?
They don’t seem bothered by the meaninglessness of their existence.  They fill the void with animalistic pleasure-seeking.

The connection is glaringly obvious.  Compare it to other effects: when they started fluoridating water, people had better teeth.  When people started eating more processed foods high in sugars and starches, Americans got fatter and fatter.  And when evolution is forced into schools, we see worse behavior.

Why?  What’s the connection?  It is simple.  Evolution theory tends to weaken faith in God, the way diets high in processed foods tend to lead to obesity.  It might not happen in every case, but the trend is clear when we step back and look at trends across the entire culture.  The central devastating concept of evolution—the theme that became one of the guiding principles of the BSCS textbooks—is that humans are not essentially different from animals.  If you teach people that, in essence, they
are creations of a loving God, a God who watches them throughout their lives, who has established a world for them to live in and who expects them to behave according to certain rules, they will behave better.  This is true even for those people who don’t attend church regularly, or who don’t spend their time praying or reading the Bible.  It is an idea that permeates
culture and affects every part of how people interact with one another.  It is most noticeable, as in the past fifty years, in its absence.  If you teach people, instead, that they are accidental results of a meaningless process, if you teach them that they are simply the cleverest apes on a rock in a vast but merely material universe, then people will behave in ways that make sense.  In short, if you teach people they are animals, they will behave like animals.  They will mate when then get a chance to.  They
will take from the weaker and pursue the quick physical pleasures of drugs, sex, and fattening foods.

We know that correlation can’t be mistaken for causation.  That is, just because things happen at the same time doesn’t mean that one caused the other.  Otherwise, the fact that I wore my lucky hat on a day when I did not get attacked by tigers can be used to prove that my hat has tiger-repellent qualities.  But in this case, we are interested in correlation.  We’re not trying to prove that the insistence on evolution education caused this breakdown in social morality.  All we need to show is that the two things are part of the same disheartening trend. Our culture had certain moral truths that it insisted on.  It had a certain set of myths that sustained it and reinforced one another.  One of these—and I don’t use “myth” in the sense that it is necessarily untrue, rather in the sense that it is a widely shared cultural belief—was that God had created life.  God was part of human
life.  Evolution education is one part of the process of shattering that sustaining belief.  It is not necessary to prove that evolution education caused higher divorce rates, or increased drug use and carnality.  It is enough to demonstrate that these things go together.  Getting evolution out of schools is as sensible as getting soda and candy machines out of school.  Those soda and candy machines don’t cause increased rates of obesity. There are as many causes of obesity as there are obese kids lolling around our schools.  But that does not mean that the candy and soda machines are not contributing to the problem.

Now, let me point out again that these are cultural trends, not descriptions of individual lives. Just as not every American is obese, not every person raised in this evolutionary environment descends into the morality of the beast.  But just as it makes sense to look at the causes of increased rates of obesity, so it is important to examine the causes of moral breakdown.  This is where Dostoyevsky’s story of Ivan Karamazov is so insightful.  In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is the thinker.
He comes to the logical conclusion that there is no God.  And he deduces that in the absence of God, all is permissible.  It makes sense.  Without God, there is no reason to behave morally, besides the strictures of punishment. In other words, it makes sense to do anything that you can get away with, no matter how morally repugnant, if it will profit you.  But Ivan himself continues to behave morally.  He takes his atheism as a moral position.  Like evolutionary ideas, the idea of atheism can be considered as an idea instead of as a guiding principle if it is learned as an adult.  If it is considered by a person who already has established moral habits and principles.  In the novel, the trouble comes when Ivan’s half-brother Smerdyakov gets a hold of Ivan’s ideas.  Smerdyakov is a bitter soul.  Raised as a servant in his own father’s house, treated as a lower class of being, bowing and scraping to the strong, vicious to the weak.  When he sits at Ivan’s feet and hears his ideas of right and wrong in the absence of God, he acts upon them.  Unlike Ivan, Smerdyakov takes Ivan’s ideas seriously.  He follows
them to their logical conclusions, and makes them more than abstract.   In the novel, he kills his father for money, and arranges to frame another half-brother for the crime.  Why would he do such a thing?  For Smerdyakov, the proper question is why would he NOT do such a thing, given the chance. According to Ivan’s atheistic philosophy, morality is a construct of
society.  God is a narrative created by ancient peoples, no longer relevant or necessary to a modern understanding of culture and morality.

It is a thoroughly evolutionist philosophy.  And like schoolchildren taught from their earliest days that evolution is the way humanity came to be, Smerdyakov is instilled with the truth of this philosophy as the truth of life.  We should not be shocked or outraged that he acted in monstrous ways.  We should recognize that our ideas of monstrosity are similarly only constructs of our outmoded philosophy.  And so with schoolchildren taught to think in evolutionary ways.  They are taught that they are animals.  Why should we be surprised when they act like animals?  To be fair, not all of them do.  Some of them are not intelligent or dedicated enough to pursue the logical results of their education.  Many of them continue—as did Ivan—to
constrict themselves with traditional moral positions, even in the absence of logical support for those positions.  But
the danger comes from the large numbers of them who become Smerdyakovs.  Those who act logically in the absence of any
transcendent morality.  Those who realize that without grounding in some higher power, morality is just a convenience of
the ruling class.  They will act in ways that make sense for animals, ways that make sense for merely material beings
scrabbling around on an accidental rock floating in space.

This brings us to the question of timing.  Dostoyevsky wrote his book in the nineteenth century, long before Sputnik or the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study.  And he wrote in a world in which humans behaved brutally, lived in slums or as former serfs on vast estates.  In America, life was also a scramble.  People without wealth or social status lived in city tenements or mired in stultifying rural poverty.  People may not have learned about evolution in schools, but that was only part of the fact that most people didn’t learn about anything in school.  It is a mistake, this argument goes, to fantasize about some pre-evolution golden age.  In historical fact, people acted in animalistic ways long before textbooks included the truths about science.

Even if we grant this point, however, the overall argument doesn’t hold water.  Even if we agree, that is, that there was no golden age, and that evolution education has been part of a process of cultural improvement that has included an slow and uneven improvement in the material conditions of regular people’s lives, it does not therefore follow that we should celebrate the fact that it has also accompanied a breakdown in moral values.  In other words, just because people acted amorally before widespread evolution education does not mean that evolution education has not also promoted amorality.  The fact that people have acted amorally in the past is no reason to promote ideas that lead to more amorality in the present.

For those who have a strong previous commitment to an alternative story about how humans came to be, this flowering of amorality has an obvious cause.  For biblical or fundamentalist Christians, just as for orthodox Jews or Muslims, the inroads of evolutionary thinking are more than just a lament about changing times.  In addition to crumbling social morality from
a general breakdown in traditional values, these orthodox folks worry that their specific religious tradition has been targeted by evolutionary ideas.  They have a commitment to a specific creation story that cannot, in their opinions, be brought into
alignment with the idea of an unplanned evolutionary origin of life.

This is the obvious reason why the most vocal opposition to evolutionary education in the United States comes from dedicated biblical Christians.  They are often concerned with the cultural fallout from evolutionary ideas, but they are
also worried about the more immediate threat to their specific beliefs about the origins of life on earth.  Evolution
supporters are often stumped by this insistence on the idea of God’s creation of life by fiat.  They note that many
Christians simply acknowledge that God must have created life by evolutionary process.  They don’t understand the big
deal.  Why not acknowledge the overwhelming physical evidence for evolution over millions of years, instead of
engaging in mental gymnastics to prove that such an obvious truth is not true?

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by Adam Laats on August 27, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on August 27, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/08/27/anti-evolution-ia-poor-results/

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