All posts tagged Henry Morris

Is This the Creationist Conspiracy?

Anti-creationists have warned about it for generations: Creationists are joining forces to sweep away reason and science. A growing conspiracy of dunces threatens to upend centuries of progress. But a recent tiff between leading American creationists demonstrates just how fractured and divided creationists really are.  And it demonstrates the ways hysterical anti-creationism may do more harm than good.

The threats of a creationist conspiracy go back to the roots of America’s evolution/creation culture wars. In his 1927 book, The War on Modern Science, Maynard Shipley warned that the fundamentalist “forces of obscurantism” threatened to overthrow real learning. As Shipley put it,

The armies of ignorance are being organized, literally by the millions, for a combined political assault on modern science.

Ever since, science writers have warned of this impending threat. Isaac Asimov, for instance, warned in 1981 of the “threat of creationism.” Such unified anti-scientists, Asimov believed, had made great strides toward setting up “the full groundwork . . . for legally enforced ignorance and totalitarian thought control.” Like Shipley, Asimov noted that not all religious people are creationists, but also like Shipley, Asimov failed to notice the differences between creationists. The only religious people one could trust, Asimov wrote, were those “who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true.”

What Asimov missed was the crucial fact that many creationists DO endorse real science; many folks who think of the Bible as more than just symbolic also accept the ideas of an ancient earth and human evolution.

This is more than just a quibble. When leading scientists and science pundits lump together all creationists as “armies of ignorance,” they needlessly abandon and heedlessly insult potential allies in creation/evolution debates. When science writers such as Jerry Coyne attack all religious discussion as “accommodationism,” they unnecessarily alienate creationists who want to teach more and better evolution.

A recent interchange between leading creationists demonstrates the way international creationism really works. Creationism in practice is not a horde of Bible-believing fanatics, relentlessly unified on the age of the earth and the origins of humanity. In practice, rather, creationism is a splintered and fractious impulse, fighting internal foes more viciously than external ones.

The “evolutionary creationist” Deborah Haarsma, leader of BioLogos, recently reached out to young-earth creationist leader Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis. Haarsma was “troubled” by Ham’s angry polemic about a third creationist, Hugh Ross of the old-earth Reasons to Believe.

We all have our differences, Dr. Haarsma said. But why can’t we come together over our shared Biblical faith? About our shared concern that young people are leaving the church? Why can’t we at least sit down together for a cordial dinner and talk over our differences?

Ken Ham publicly rebuffed Haarsma’s efforts. Ham agreed that his animus toward Ross was not at all personal. As Ham explained, “I don’t consider Dr. Ross a personal enemy . . . he is actually a pleasant person.” But Ross was also an “enemy of biblical authority.” And Haarsma was no better. “People like Dr. Haarsma,” Ham wrote,

make it sound like they have such a high view of the Bible, whereas in reality, she has a low view of Scripture and a high view of man’s fallible beliefs about origins!

There will be no dinner. There will be no grand alliance of creationists. Instead, we see the ways some creationists will tend to isolate themselves into smaller and smaller like-minded communities.

This story spreads beyond the borders of the United States. As historian Ronald Numbers described in The Creationists, in the mid-1980s the minister of education in Turkey wrote to the San-Diego based Institute for Creation Research. Turkey’s schools, the minister wrote, needed to “eliminate the secular-based, evolution-only teaching dominant in their schools and replace it with a curriculum teaching the two models, evolution and creation, fairly” (pg. 421). And Islamic creationism, much of it based in Turkey, has thrived. However, Numbers concluded, “the partnership between the equally uncompromising Christian and Muslim fundamentalists remained understandably unstable” (425). Numbers cited the rhetoric of American creationist leader Henry Morris: “Mohammed is dead and Jesus is alive!” As Numbers noted acerbically, such talk was “hardly calculated to win Muslim friends” (425).

There will be predictable tensions between different types of creationists. Though some conservative religious voices will work to spread evolutionary theory among evangelicals, others will focus on what Ken Ham called “rebuilding a wall” (Nehemiah 6:1-3).

Folks like me who want to see more and better evolution education will be wise to reach out to those conservative religious folks who also believe in evolution. Instead of copying the tactics of Ken Ham, as Jerry Coyne is prone to do, science promoters should embrace allies and make friends. Instead of shrieking about the “armies of ignorance,” science promoters will do well to look closer at the creationist population. There are plenty of friends there.

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by Adam Laats on October 17, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 17, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/10/17/is-this-the-creationist-conspiracy/

The Creation Debate We Need

Ken Ham, creationist debater extraordinaire, has again thrown down the gauntlet. This time, Ham has challenged conservative evangelist Pat Robertson. More than watching Ham battle Science Guy Bill Nye, America needs to hear this debate between conservative evangelical Protestant creationists.

Apparently, according to Mr. Ham and the folks at Right Wing Watch, Robertson has been taking pot-shots at young-earth creationism lately. On his television show The 700 Club, Robertson recently announced, “You have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this Earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence.”

As he has done recently with other conservative colleges such as Calvin and Bryan, Ham wondered pointedly if Robertson’s colleagues at Regent University really support Robertson’s old-earth position. Ham asked if the school followed Robertson in “compromis[ing] the Word of God with the pagan ideas of fallible men.”

Ham offered to debate these issues with Robertson. As Ham put it,

I wonder if Pat Robertson would be prepared to discuss these issues with me or one of our AiG scientists on the 700 Club? Or maybe in some sort of debate format at Regent University? We are certainly willing to do that…. I wonder if Pat Robertson, who is allowed to state these things so publicly through CBN will agree to have his statements publicly challenged and tested!

Both conservative religious folks and outsiders like me would benefit from such a debate. We outsiders would learn more about the issues that matter to creationists. None of us were particularly surprised by the arguments Bill Nye put forward. But many of us would be enlightened to hear the reasons for and against belief in a young earth, since both sides would be arguing from a relatively similar religious perspective. We outsiders could learn about the kaleidoscopic world of creationism. For some people, this might be the first time they heard that not every creationist embraces the idea of a young earth.

And evangelicals would benefit enormously. After all, belief in a young-earth as creationist orthodoxy is a very recent phenomenon. As historian Ron Numbers demonstrated so powerfully, until the second half of the twentieth century, belief in a young earth was restricted to a relatively small percentage of conservative evangelicals. At the time of the Scopes trial in 1925, for example, leading fundamentalists differed in their beliefs about the age of the earth. At that time, no one looked askance at anti-evolutionist leaders such as William Jennings Bryan who believed in an ancient earth. Only with the publication of Henry Morris’ and John Whitcomb’s creationist blockbuster The Genesis Flood did young-earth creationism become a dominant theme in conservative American evangelical thought.

Many young evangelicals these days don’t know this history. They often assume they must either accept the doctrine of a young earth or abandon their religion entirely. A debate between two conservative evangelical leaders would demonstrate the possibilities.

 

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 19, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 19, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/19/the-creation-debate-we-need/

Why Are Schools So Terrible?

Conservative intellectuals have long asked the question: What went wrong with America’s schools?

Of course, the question presumes that something HAS gone wrong.

We at ILYBYGTH don’t really care if America’s schools are terrible.  We’re more focused on dissecting conservative approaches to the question. How have different conservatives at different times offered different answers to this perennial question?

Now available free online is an argument I put together a few years back. The article appears in the pages of the storied Teachers College Record.

This article looks at the school-history visions of four very different conservative thinkers: Milton Friedman, Max Rafferty, Sam Blumenthal, and Henry Morris. Each of them agreed that public schools had become ineffective, even dangerous institutions. But the reasons they gave for that lamentable decline differed. Friedman, for example, blamed teachers’ unions and government control, beginning just after the American Civil War. Rafferty blasted the wrong-headed “progressive” takeover of the 1930s. Blumenfeld and Morris both looked further back, to a Unitarian coup at Harvard University variously timed either in 1805 (Blumenfeld) or in 1869 (Morris).

These conservative activists do not only differ in the timelines they gave for America’s educational decline, but also in their diagnoses and prescriptions. Friedman wanted a free-market solution. Rafferty hoped for clear-headed traditionalism. Blumenfeld wanted to scrap public education entirely. Morris hoped to heal schools with creationism.

In every case, these conservatives based their arguments about schooling on a historical vision. They are not alone. Activists of every political stripe use history to prove their points. In this essay, I outlined the ways a few prominent conservatives did so.

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by Adam Laats on November 11, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, Child Parent State, Evolution/Creation, Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 11, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/11/11/why-are-schools-so-terrible/

Decadence and the Fall of American Public Education

Things today ain’t as good as when I was young.

That’s the central notion, the vaguely articulated impulse, the often-unexamined presumption behind a good deal of conservative educational rhetoric.  Schooling these days has declined from glory days of the past.

In an essay in The American Interest, Charles Hill warns of the real consequence of decadence in American life.

As Hill notes, the idea of civilizational decline and fall is an old one.  Yet Hill insists that it retains explanatory power; Hill makes the case that twenty-first century America is sliding into a dizzying downward spiral.  Everything from technologically induced “screen culture” to awkward proletarianization of elites can be better understood as part of a lamentable decadence.

As Hill concludes,

Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, “decadence” arose as a romantically thrilling elitist fashion, providing a “sweet spot” in which a privileged, self-selected class could revel in dissolute practices while applauding their own cultural superiority. At the turn of the 20th to the 21st century something akin has emerged—call it a democratized form of decadence—among a far wider swath of the population, with the support of government and approbation of the cultural elite. Many observers have gazed upon such phenomena, then and now, and have seen mainly the sources of shifts in the art world. We move from the 1913 New York Armory Exhibition to mainstreaming of “street art” a century later rather effortlessly. But if what is at stake is world order, with national character and identity as its foundation stone, and democracy as the procedurally and practically most efficacious political form, then the fate of the art world may be the least of our concerns.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety.

Of particular interest here are its implications for American education.  Hill makes a few points about this himself.  For one thing, he notices the disturbing intellectual ramifications of “screen culture” especially among the young.  A generation accustomed to viewing people on computers, tablets, TVs, and phones, able to view without being viewed, Hill argues, adds a “new dimension” to old ideas about decadence.  Weaned on screen culture, Hill says, young people “can become oblivious to others.”

In a nuts-and-bolts way, Hill notes the way our current decadence has squeezed out learning in favor of training.

Of more consequence than the specific educational ramifications argued by Hill is the sense of decline Hill articulates.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is nearly impossible to understand the conservative impulse in American educational thought and activism without grasping the power of the idea of decadence.  Leading conservative intellectuals—even ones from very different backgrounds—have all grounded their educational philosophy on a notion that the educational system in the United States has ground down in a systematic pattern of decline.

In his landmark work Capitalism and Freedom, for example, free-market theorist Milton Friedman insisted that American public education entered a noticeable period of decline after the American Civil War when the government “gradually” (page 85) stumbled into the near-total “‘nationalization,’ as it were, of the bulk of the ‘education industry’”(page 89).

Conservative education leader Max Rafferty agreed about the decadence, but argued for a different time and cause.  The problem really began, Rafferty believed, in the 1930s, when “Dewey-eyed” reformers injected a deeply flawed notion of education into the American cultural bloodstream.  Instead of learning heroic truths and facing moral challenges, students in post-1930 “life-adjustment” classrooms only learned to revel in their own inability to determine right from wrong.  Such decadent teaching and learning, Rafferty argued in his 1963 book Suffer, Little Children, produced a weak generation, unable to combat the existential threat from “a race of faceless, godless peasants from the steppes of Asia [that] strives to reach across our bodies for the prize of world dominion.”

Though he viewed the goals of education very differently from Rafferty and Friedman, creationist leader Henry Morris agreed that public education had declined dramatically.  The root of the problem, Morris argued in his 1989 book The Long War Against God, lay in a one-two punch of Unitarianism and secularism.  The first blow had come in 1869, when Unitarians took over Harvard University.  Their example led American education away from its roots in what Morris considered to be authentic Christianity (pages 46-47).  The second decisive weakening came later, with John Dewey’s rising influence in public education.  That influence, Morris argued, led public schools away from religion into a markedly anti-religious humanism.

These examples could be multiplied nearly endlessly.  William J. Bennett, for instance, has argued with his Index of Leading Cultural Indicators that American culture as a whole—especially including its public schools—has declined terrifyingly since 1960.

It is taken as an article of faith among many conservative educational thinkers and activists that education today is worse than it has been.

This is more than the common griping about “kids these days.”  This is more than the old story about how when I was young I had to walk to school barefoot, through ten feet of snow, uphill both ways.

To understand conservative thinking about education, we have to understand this assumption of decadence.  Not many activists articulate this sentiment as clearly as the intellectuals described here.  Not many offer the careful examination of the meanings of decadence expressed by Charles Hill’s recent essay.

But behind many of the policies promoted by educational conservatives lurks this ubiquitous sentiment: things today are worse than they have been in the past.  Schools today are worse than they have been in the past.

 

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on September 1, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, Child Parent State, Evolution/Creation, Freedom & the Free Market, What is school?
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Posted by Adam Laats on September 1, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/09/01/decadence-and-the-fall-of-american-public-education/

Jerry Coyne Joins the Creationists

H/T: Sensuous Curmudgeon

Has Jerry Coyne really allied with creationists?

If you follow the creation/evolution wars, you’re likely familiar with the work of Coyne, a biologist and a leading voice in the long-running creation/evolution controversy.  Coyne famously argues that religion and science are incompatible.  In his book Why Evolution Is True, Coyne elegantly and concisely made the case for evolution and demolished the claims of creationists.

So how could this arch-atheist anti-creationist have joined with creationists?

In a recent interview with Haaretz, Coyne suggested that evolution went hand-in-hand with atheism, a strong central government and an expansive tax-funded social safety net.  In doing so, Coyne has added his voice to a long creationist intellectual tradition.

Science and religion, Coyne stated in this interview, “are polar opposites, both methodologically and philosophically. . . . Such contradictions [between differing religious truths], of course, render the term ‘religious truth’ ridiculous.”

In order to approach truth, Coyne believes, we must move away from religion and toward science.  To help the process along, Coyne told Haaretz, society must embrace a bigger government and a more egalitarian economy.

“The Scandinavian countries . . .” Coyne argued,

Have the most highly developed social-welfare systems in the world, and they are also the least religious countries ‏(for example, only 23 percent of Norwegians and 34 percent of Swedes describe themselves as religious‏). They are also the most receptive to evolution.

When citizens feel as if they have a government-provided safety net, Coyne told interviewer Smadar Reisfeld, they are less likely to cling to the false comfort of religion.

If scientists hoped to convince Americans of evolution’s obvious truth value, they must overthrow the false idol of religion.  Instead, Coyne said, “the government should intervene to a certain degree in order to give people a sense of security. . . . A more just, caring, egalitarian society must be created.”

So how does this sensible and pragmatic progressivism put Coyne in the creationist camp?

For generations, creationists have argued that evolution will and must lead to both atheism and socialism.  My hunch is that Coyne would not accept the “socialist” label, but Coyne’s vision of a government-led, Scandinavian-style social contract is precisely the sort of structure many creationists would call “socialist.”

At the dawn of the long creation/evolution struggle, for instance, William Jennings Bryan warned that evolution could only lead to atheism.  “Atheists, Agnostics, and Higher Critics begin with Evolution,” Bryan insisted in 1921, “They build on that.”  [Bryan, The Bible and Its Enemies: An Address Delivered at the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Bible Institute Colportage Association, 1921), 19.]

As historian Edward Larson has pointed out, lawyers in 1926 Tennessee defended the anti-evolution Butler Law as a way to protect young students from creeping communism, not just a way to save them from the ideas of evolution itself.    [Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 215.]

Throughout the twentieth century, anti-evolutionists have insisted that evolution must lead to—or come from—both atheism and socialism.

By the end of the twentieth century, for example, leading creation-science pundit Henry Morris equated evolution with every ideological terror of the century.  “Marxism, socialism, and communism, no less than Nazism, are squarely based on evolutionism.” [Morris, The Long War Against God (Master Books, 2000), 83).]

Perhaps Professor Coyne might not relish the company.  But by insisting that thinking people must choose between science and religion, Coyne encourages creationist dogma.  By tying evolution to large government and restricted capitalism, Coyne agrees with generations of the most fervent creationists.

 

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on April 2, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 2, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/04/02/jerry-coyne-joins-the-creationists/

Science at the Creation Museum

Thanks to the ever-watchful Sensuous Curmudgeon, we came across a recent article in Scientific American in which an evolution-believing science teacher journeyed to Answers in Genesis’ Creation Museum outside of Kentucky.

Image Source: Answers in Genesis Creation Museum

Image Source: Answers in Genesis Creation Museum

For folks like me and the author Jacob Tanenbaum, the scientific claims of the museum are impossible to accept.  A science teacher, Tanenbaum recoiled at the misleading scientific claims made by the museum.  “What disturbed me most,” Tanenbaum reported,

“was the theme . . . that the differences between biblical literalists and mainstream scientists are minor. They are not minor; they are poles apart. This is not to say that science and religion are incompatible; many scientists believe in some kind of higher power, and many religious people accept the idea of evolution. Still, a literal interpretation of Genesis cannot be reconciled with modern science.”

Fair enough.  During my trip to the Creation Museum, though, what struck me most powerfully was simply how plausible it all seemed.  For those who did not set out to debunk the information, the museum seemed just as authoritative as Chicago’s Field Museum or any other natural-history museum.

But what Tanenbaum wrote makes sense: the Creation Museum presents a misleading picture of the differences between creation science and mainstream science.

My beef with Tanenbaum is with his own misleading conclusion.  The problem with such creation science education, Tanenbaum argues, is “that 40 percent of the American electorate seems to have forgotten what science is. Considering that our nation put a man on the moon and invented the airplane and the Internet, this development is extraordinary.”

Tanenbaum may be a gifted teacher of mainstream science, but this conclusion suggests that he is not deeply versed in the culture of creation science that he condemns.  For those of us who want to understand creationism, we need to get beyond this naive assumption that creationists don’t know what science is, or that they are somehow hypocritical in their use of technology.

As I argued in a recent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, simple ignorance does not explain American creationism.  Many creationists have studied mainstream science.  In many cases, such as that of leading creation science author Henry Morris, they have earned advanced technical degrees.  And, beyond such stand-out leaders such as Morris, many rank-and-file creationists have extensive science educations.  As political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer discovered in their National-Science-Foundation-funded study of high-school biology teachers, of those teachers who espoused a belief in young-earth creationism (i.e., the Creation-Museum type of creationism), fully 55% had earned college degrees in science.   Furthermore, Berkman and Plutzer’s review of other such surveys led them to the following conclusion: “the overall evidence suggests that the high support for creationism in the classroom cannot be attributed primarily, or even substantially, to overall scientific illiteracy in the United States” (pg. 52).

Also, as creationists often remind themselves and their evolutionist foes, belief in evolution is not necessary for sophisticated engineering.  Dobzhansky’s claim that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution may be true, but that would not stop creationists from traveling to the moon, perfecting airplanes, or inventing the internet.

In the end, I think it makes a big difference whether Americans with creationist beliefs have “forgotten what science is” or if they have a distinctly different definition of science.  Building an anti-creationist argument on the foundation that creationism disables technical education, as does Tanenbaum and other prominent pro-science voices such as Bill Nye, is both a false claim and poor strategy.

Please don’t misunderstand me: this is not a brief for creationism.  However, if those of us, like me, Bill Nye, and Jacob Tanenbaum–who stand outside the borders of creationism looking in–if we really want to understand creationism, we must abandon our own naive assumptions about the meanings of that creationist belief.

46 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 11, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 11, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/01/11/science-at-the-creation-museum/

IN THE NEWS: Santorum on America’s Educational History

This just in from the Republican presidential campaign trail: Rick Santorum knows what conservatives want to hear.  Not much of a surprise there; Santorum’s knack for positioning himself as the true conservative has led him to a surprisingly strong showing lately.

Of interest to ILYBYGTH readers, Santorum recently described his views on the proper nature of American education.  In doing so, he zeroed in on issues that have long resonated deeply with conservatives.

According to stories in the New York Times  and Los Angeles Times (here and here), Santorum outlined his thinking about the nature of public education in a speech on Saturday to the Ohio Christian Alliance in Columbus.

Santorum has already attracted attention as a homeschooler and advocate of government vouchers.  As his official website articulates, Santorum believes parental choice is one way to “restor[e] America’s greatness through educational freedom and opportunity.”

In Saturday’s speech, Santorum blasted the current “factory model” of education.  Today’s public schools, Santorum insisted, represented an “anachronism,” a period in which “people came off the farms where they did home school or had a little neighborhood school, and into these big factories . . . called public schools.”

Proper schooling, Santorum declared, should begin—and often end—at home.  Santorum appealed to a historical vision that is near and dear to the hearts of many American conservatives.  For most of American history, Santorum argued, even the Presidents homeschooled in the White House itself.

Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?  Santorum asked.  Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

As I argue in an essay coming out this month in Teachers College Record,  this vision of the history of American education has been extremely influential among conservatives.  Since at least the 1950s, prominent conservative activists have based their prescriptions for healing American society on the notion that American education went wrong at a specific point in America’s past.  Of course, they also point out the corollary: conservative reforms can put it back on the right track.

Santorum appeals to a glorious educational past in which public schools had not yet tightened their stranglehold on educational opportunity.  This has been a common trope among conservative activists hoping to free traditionalists’ minds from the pernicious notion that education must look like today’s public education system.

Other common ideas that conservatives have insisted upon in their vision of American educational history:

  • schools started out as frankly religious institutions,
  • schools in the past did a better job of teaching more kids with less public money,
  • a set of notions known as “progressive education” ruined America’s strong tradition of real education, and
  • creeping state control led to ideological and theological totalitarianism in public schools.

On Saturday, Santorum indicated his agreement with these notions.  However, just as “progressive” educators have long fought over the proper meaning and function of schooling, so have conservatives.  In my TCR article I take a closer look at four leading activists since 1950:

  • Milton Friedman,
  • Max Rafferty,
  • Sam Blumenfeld, and
  • Henry Morris.

Each of these writers described a different vision of America’s educational past.  Like Santorum and generations of other conservatives, each agreed that the system had broken down.  However, also like Santorum’s unique insistence on the importance of Presidential homeschooling in the White House, each pundit laid out a unique educational past.

Anyone hoping to understand Fundamentalist America will be wise to listen to Rick Santorum this year.  He seems to have a knack for dishing out all the ideas Fundamentalists want to hear.

 

 

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by Adam Laats on February 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 19, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/02/19/in-the-news-santorum-on-americas-educational-history/

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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Posted by Adam Laats on September 14, 2011

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