In 1925, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged with violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution. Back then, many people believed the Scopes “Monkey Trial” would be the last gasp of the anti-evolution movement. But 85 years later, about the same percentage of Americans believe in creationism as believe in evolution.
On this episode of BackStory, the History Guys explore the ways Americans have attempted to grapple with the biggest question of them all: “Where did we come from?” Together, they trace the ups and downs in the relationship between science and religion. Are there times when the two have not been at odds? How did the Founders conceive of “creation,” and why did the idea of extinction pose such a challenge to their worldview? How were Darwin’s ideas received in the U.S., and why did it take six decades before public school systems started challenging the teaching of his theories? What lessons does history offer those interested in charting a peaceful relationship between science and religion in the future?
P. Onuf: Major production support for “BackStory” is provided by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Support also comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities. [music] This is “BackStory,” with us, the American History Guys. I’m Peter Onuf, 18th Century Guy.
E. Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, 19th Century Guy.
B. Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century History Guy.
Tape: Today, the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to intellectuals in the east. Today, intellectuals have bogeys much more frightening than fundamentalism in the schools—
B. Balogh: That’s a passage from Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by the great historian Richard Hofstadter and if sounds dated, well, that’s because it is. 1963 was when that book was published. Look around today and the evolution controversy that appeared to be on its last legs 50 years ago, well, it’s as alive as ever. In fact, in the past year, lawmakers in Florida, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Mexico, they’ve all considered legislation that would chip away in one way or another at the central place of evolution in public school biology classrooms and it’s not just lawmakers rejecting Darwin. Public opinion polls consistently find that about a half of Americans believe in the Bible’s account of creation and not in evolution.
P. Onuf: Some of you listeners will no doubt say that the battle of human origins is here to stay. That there’s an inherent tension between evolutionary theory and Christian religion and so it might surprise you to learn that for much of American history even after Darwin came along practitioners of science got along just fine with practitioners of religion.
E. Ayers: So, for the rest of the hour on today’s “BackStory,” we’re going to look at the way science and religion have interacted across all three of our centuries and since the topic of evolution is special when it comes to humans as what dramatizes the apparent conflict between science and religion the most, we’re going to focus on that today. How have our understandings about human origins evolved, so to speak, over time?
B. Balogh: Our story begins in the 18th century right here in “BackStory’s” hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. As you probably know, Charlottesville, was also home to Thomas Jefferson. I recently had the chance to visit Jefferson’s home, Monticello, with our 18th century guy Peter Onuf. So, Peter, it’s really nice of you to take me back to the 18th century.
P. Onuf: Yeah, well—
B. Balogh: Peter and I were at Monticello to look at Jefferson’s collection of bones. They’re one of the first things you see when you enter the front hall, alongside maps, portraits, animal hides and Native American artifacts. The bones are from animals that by Jefferson’s time were extinct, but back then, people hadn’t quite wrapped their heads around the whole concept of extinction. One other thing I should mention before we go any farther, Jefferson’s religion can best be described as deism. That’s the belief in a creator who set the world in motion the way a clockmaker makes a clock and then having created it, sits back to watch it tick away. Okay. Let’s go to the tape.
P. Onuf: Here we are on a level with these very interesting conversation pieces that people would then talk about. They say, Mr. Jefferson, what are we looking at here. They’d be a little shocked at these bones.
B. Balogh: These are not any bones, Peter. These are gigantic—
P. Onuf: They are very big, big bones.
B. Balogh: This is not from the family dog.
P. Onuf: No, no, no. We’re looking at the giant sloth. We’re looking at the mammoth is the big thing here.
B. Balogh: So, did Jefferson believe that there were current version of these mammoths—
P. Onuf: Yes, that’s…
B. Balogh: Wandering around or did he begin to believe this newfangled theory of extinction?
P. Onuf: No, that’s too newfangled. Jefferson believed if you had evidence of the existence of a mammoth, for instance, then that mammoth still might be out there roaming the west. Now, that’s one of the incentives for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Enlightenment philosophers like Jefferson, natural philosophers, think that our great challenge is to uncover and read the book of nature that is of God’s creation and what we don’t see now is because of the limitations on our sight that we have to overcome. For instance, we just don’t know what’s going on in the far western reaches of this continent because no civilized person has ever been there.
B. Balogh: So, Peter, looking at these gargantuan bones, would that lead to a conversation about the creation itself or was that too controversial?
P. Onuf: Absolutely. Look around this room. You are looking at God’s creation. These are symbols, examples, of God’s creation everywhere and what God has created has always been and will always be. It’s a perfect creation.
B. Balogh: Right.
P. Onuf: In other words, we’re not talking about this messy business of the succession of species across time because if God really were the kind of clockmaker that the deists talk about, then he makes a clock.
B. Balogh: And it runs forever.
P. Onuf: And it runs forever.
B. Balogh: And I suppose that folks who believe that were very threatened at the notion of extinction because if one part of that clock can disappear, what’s going to go next.
P. Onuf: Yes, exactly right.
B. Balogh: Peter, today the term scientist is almost synonymous with specialist.
P. Onuf: Right.
B. Balogh: Is it fair to call Jefferson a scientist when he had such a global outlook about his natural science?
P. Onuf: That’s a great point, Brian. In Jefferson’s day, you could not and should not draw distinctions between domains of knowledge, anthropology, archeology, botany, they’re all part and parcel of the same large project because they’re all part of a larger design. For Jefferson, the account of anything is an account of everything. To understand how a particular plant grows or an animal flourishes is to understand something about the larger design of God in nature.
B. Balogh: Peter, that’s terrific, but I gotta run to read the Journal of Sub-Saharan Econometrics.
[music]
P. Onuf: So, Ed, people like Jefferson didn’t make distinctions between science, religion. How did that change in the 19th century?
E. Ayers: Yeah, you have to remember that Thomas Jefferson also went in with scissors and edited the Bible.
P. Onuf: That’s right.
E. Ayers: So that it said what he wanted it to say.
P. Onuf: You’re exactly right.
E. Ayers: And that’s kind of a metaphor for the way that people of education handled things in the 18th century. They really didn’t feel that you had to take all or nothing and it’s amazing, really, how quickly things changed after Jefferson’s death in 1826. In fact, in that very period, was really the second great awakening where people were rediscovering the immediacy of the Bible and part of that was that you didn’t have to hold the Bible at arm’s length and see it as the product of an ancient time, but rather it was a living voice and God might speak to you at any time telling you that the end was near or that you needed to create a new religion.
B. Balogh: Well, you know, Ed, it wasn’t just religion that was evolving, so to speak. It was science as well and this was the subject of a recent conversation that I had with Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who’s written extensively about all of this.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): The word scientia, science, had been around since antiquity, but had been a synonym for knowledge. In the early 19th century, students of nature started using it more and more in the restricted sense of knowledge of nature and one of the requirements for participating in this enterprise was that regardless of one’s religious beliefs, if you were participating in science, doing science, you would not invoke the supernatural. Theologians had regarded themselves as part of the scientific discussion, if you will, and they found themselves on the margins at best and didn’t particularly like it. However, by and large, during the, say, 30, 40 years before the appearance of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, before the outbreak of the Civil War, there was a fair amount of harmony between science and religion.
B. Balogh: Ronald Numbers told me that this harmony remained in place even after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species hit American shores at the end of 1859. That was due in part to the efforts of Darwin’s biggest supporter in the U.S., a Harvard botanist named Asa Gray. Gray argued that not only could humans be exempted from Darwin’s law of natural selection, but that the twists and turns that evolution took could be attributed to God.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): I think that Asa Gray was really trying to defang Darwinism for Americans and other theists, but what isn’t as well known perhaps is that Darwin did the same thing. At the end of the Origin of Species, he says that the evidence that he’s presented indicates that all plants and all animals descended respectively from four or five originally created kinds and then in the second edition, Darwin adds, by the Creator.
B. Balogh: Ahhh—
Tape (Ronald Numbers): In correspondence a few years later, he expresses regret that he had introduced [penetucal] language but he never took it out. It went through six editions before he died and he left it in there, so he couldn’t have been that sorry.
B. Balogh: If Darwin was more Christian than a lot of us think, American Christians were at the same time becoming more scientific. By the end of the 19th century, many theologians had come to terms with evolution and then in the 1920s, something changed. Laws started popping up in a number of states banning the teaching of human evolution. I asked Ron Numbers what was behind the emergence of an anti-Darwinist movement six decades after Darwin.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Well, there’re several possibilities and one is the success of evolution in penetrating the churches and schools of America and one of the things we see after World War I is just an explosive growth in public secondary school education.
B. Balogh: Right.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Where they’re going to run across these ideas, so the success of evolution I think was important. Its linkage with the Germans became fairly common—
B. Balogh: Hmmmm—
Tape (Ronald Numbers): So in World War I you had the question—why did the most highly scientific culture on earth engage in such barbaric actions and the answer was that they had imbibed of Darwinian evolution, among other things and then people pointed out the decline in morality among American youth. If you taught young people that they had evolved from animals, then you had every reason to expect them to behave like animals and in the first half of the 1920s, you had a great example in Leopold and Loeb’s murdering of little Bobby Franks.
B. Balogh: That was the case of those two whiz kid law students who killed a teenager, right?
Tape (Ronald Numbers): They had learned evolution at the University of Chicago so life meant nothing to them.
B. Balogh: Got it.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): So, you have that sort of social concern that evolution was undermining the value of human life.
B. Balogh: That’s Ronald Numbers, historian of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We’ll hear more from Professor Numbers later in the show. [music] It’s time for a short break. When we get back, we’ll hear the story of the Reverend Irwin Moon, the preacher/scientist who flickered his way into classrooms across the nation.
P. Onuf: More “BackStory” coming up in a minute.
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P. Onuf: This is “BackStory,” the show that turns to history to understand the America of today. I’m Peter Onuf, your guide to the 18th century.
E. Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, guide to the 19th century.
B. Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, guide to the 20th century. We’re talking today about the conflict between science and religion—something that as we’ve been hearing, didn’t really take shape until well into my century. But by 1925, at least in the little town of Dayton Tennessee, it was all-out war.
Tape (Henry Drummond): Darwin took us forward to a hilltop from where we could look back and see the way from which we came, but for this insight and for this knowledge we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis.
Tape (Matthew Brady): We must not abandon faith.
E. Ayers: This is a clip from “Inherit the Wind,” the 1960 film inspired by the Scopes trial 35 years earlier. Here, defense lawyer Henry Drummond, based on the real-life Clarence Darrow, is squaring off against Matthew Brady, himself based on the trial’s celebrity prosecutor (and three-time presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan.
Tape (Matthew Brady): But your client is wrong. He is deluded. He has lost his way.
Tape (Henry Drummond): It’s sad that we don’t all have your positive knowledge of what is right and wrong, Mr. Brady.
E. Ayers: In the real-life version, high school teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution and he and Darrow never got the chance to appeal on constitutional grounds so the law remained in place for another 42 years. But what the trial did do was a strike a mortal wound to the image of fundamentalism in the United States and the anti-evolution movement kind of shriveled away. Or at least that’s what a lot of people thought.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): The truth is just the opposite.
E. Ayers: This is historian Ronald Numbers, in another excerpt from Brian’s conversation with him.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): William Jennings Bryant died four or five days after the trial. He became a martyr to the cause. There were far more anti-evolution bills introduced in state legislatures after the trial that had been before the trial. It wasn’t until 1928 roughly that the organized movement started petering out. All the states that were going to pass anti-evolution laws had done so. There was no sense in reintroducing a bill for the third time so it just died a more or less natural death and what happened then was that the fundamentalists who still in the ’20s had hoped to capture the mainstream churches and religious colleges threw in the towel and started building up their own empire and so they disappear, it seems like, but they’re really working hard behind the scenes. They’re starting the Bible school movement and Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Moody is thriving.
B. Balogh: That’s the Moody Bible Institute?
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Correct. And others like that—
B. Balogh: Right. You have fundamentalists on radio.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Exactly. They grab ahold of radio right away, so they reappear in the 1960s as though, you know, they’re like Lazarus, but actually they had been working really hard for decades.
[music]
B. Balogh: That’s Ronald Numbers, historian of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We’ll hear more from him later in the show.
[music]
P. Onuf: Ronald Numbers mentioned the Moody Bible Institute as an example of the fundamentalist institutions that thrived in the decades following Scopes. Well, in 1937, Moody became the home base for a California pastor named Irwin Moon. For years, Moon had been traveling the country, drawing huge crowds to lectures that were part religious sermon, part science demonstration. But Moon soon realized he could hit a lot more people with the help of modern technology, and started producing short film versions of his shows. They were a big hit, and actually did manage to cross-over into the mainstream. From 1947 to 1948, at least two and a half million people saw Moon’s films, and by the mid-50s, some 400 public school systems across the country were using them as teaching tools. “BackStory” producer Catherine Moore sat down to watch some of the films, and brought back this report.
Catherine Moore: That’s a million volts of electricity shooting from the fingers of an evangelist preacher. This demonstration of electrical resonance from the film “Facts of Faith” earned him the nickname “Million Volt Man.” Dr. Irwin Moon spent his life demonstrating another kind of resonance, too, that between faith and science.
Tape (Irwin Moon): For some reason, many people seemed to have two compartments of their brain. They keep their science on one side, their religion on the other with a wall between them. They’re afraid to remove the wall fearing that their faith will be swept away by fact and hard reality.
Catherine Moore: His film set in Chicago also had two compartments divided by a wall, but there was a door between them. In a preacherly three-piece suit, he sits in his study surrounded by leather-bound books and preaches sermons from science and sometimes he puts on a lab coat and opens the door.
Tape (Irwin Moon): We’re going to explore the mystery of time in the laboratory. Hello, Pete. How’re things going? Fine, Dr. Moon. Mr. Margosian is one of our skilled technicians here at Moody Institute of Science.
Catherine Moore: In 1925, religion and science battled it out at the Scopes trial, but for evangelism to remain relevant in a scientific age, Moon knew they had to make peace plus after World War II, he and all Americans were living in a world that could be destroyed by science.
Tape: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 [blast].
Catherine Moore: According to Moon, we had a choice. Atomic science could be used for good or for evil.
Tape (Irwin Moon): Who will decide which it shall be? Well, one thing is certain. Science alone can’t decide it and now as never before we see the importance of faith, of righteousness, of humility before God, principles upon which this country was founded and the only principles upon which it can continue to exist.
Catherine Moore: The U.S. military agreed. In 1947, it launched a mandatory religiously-oriented education program called Character Guidance. Chaplains used the Moody Institute films to teach morality, spirituality and citizenship to troops. Public school teachers used the films to teach science. After Sputnik’s launch in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act to close the brain gap with communist Russia. Among other things, it boosted funding for audiovisual equipment for teaching science. It just so happened that Moon was producing some of the most innovative instructional films out there just as AV equipment begin whirring and flickering in classrooms all over America.
Tape: Even the microscopic world has its comedians. These little fellows are just about as funny as they come.
Tape: One of the most intriguing discoveries in modern science is the fact that there’s nothing in this world that even approaches what might be called truly solid.
Tape: Say, what’s this? It looks like something out of a nightmare, doesn’t it? And it could be if you dream of bats. Have you ever wondered what goes on in the brain of a homing pigeon? Somewhere within its tiny head is locked a secret no man has ever— This is a wonderful world. [music] But perhaps the greatest wonder of all is man himself.
Catherine Moore: Moon’s explanations of nature, so full of wonder, simultaneously invoked reason and mystery.
Tape (Irvin Moore): Have you ever wondered about the peculiar shape of the red blood cell? Someone has described it as a cross between a donut and a pancake.
Catherine Moore: In the red river of life, Moon’s lab team creates a formula to describe the ideal red blood cell shape. Then they submit it to a room-sized IBM super computer to see what shape it spits out.
Tape (Irvin Moore): All that remains is to push the right button and the answer to our problem appears on the oscilloscope screen.
Catherine Moore: The image on the screen exactly matches the geometry of a red blood cell. Its perfect engineering demanded an explanation.
Tape (Irvin Moore): And to me the only adequate explanation is intelligent design. It would seem that if a man wants to believe in God, he has just within the red blood cells of his body at least 30 trillion very good reasons for doing so.
Catherine Moore: For Moon, empirical study of the universe amassed evidence of God and buried in scripture he found scientific truth.
Tape (Irvin Moore): The book of Leviticus, chapter 17, verse 11: for the life of the flesh is in the blood and again in the 14th verse, for it is the life of all flesh, the blood of it is for the life thereof. The Bible probably has more to say about the blood and its importance than any other book ever written outside of a textbook on hematology.
Catherine Moore: When Moon peered through a microscope at a red blood cell, he looked through two lenses. One was the physical lens revealing a nifty biconcave disc; the other was the invisible but equally powerful lens of faith. The second lens may have had little to do with science but like science, it had everything to do with truth and certainty in an unsettled world. [music] Reverend Moon’s film set had two compartments but between them was a door.
P. Onuf: That’s “”BackStory’s” producer Catherine Moore. We’ll post links to a few of Moody’s films at backstoryradio.org.
E. Ayers: Yeah, that was really interesting. I was surprised, though, to hear the phrase “intelligent design” being used way back in the 1940s because I don’t recall that until more recently.
B. Balogh: Yeah, I think that’s right, Ed. We associate Intelligent Design capital “I,” capital “D,” with the late 1980s and 1990s and I think there’s a very specific reason for why it starts in the late 1980s and that takes us back to the courts. The Supreme Court says 1987, if I recall, that in fact creation science was not a science so it had no place in public school classrooms. The intelligent design people turned around and said, hey, no problem, we’re fine with the idea of change over time, the heart of Darwinian evolution. It’s just that that change isn’t random. That change is the result of God’s work. Look at the complex organs like the eye, they said—those organs could never have evolved randomly. So basically, they’re saying if we can’t fight then, we’re going to join them. We’re going to take our religious beliefs and kind of push them through this vessel that we’re going to call science, taking us all the way back to your period, Peter, taking us back to that clockmaker who started things off and then we have the evolution things set in motion, etc., etc.
E. Ayers: And you know, there’s so many issues in America history, when this really gets into the schools is when it really hits the ground and this may be the leading example of how an intellectual debate really becomes concrete in our schools, so we wanted to figure out what this science versus religion debate really looked like in that context and so we called up a science teacher in my old stomping ground of East Tennessee.
Joe Wilkey: My name is Joe Wilkey and I am the science teacher at Rhea County High School. I have been here for 27 years.
E. Ayers: Now, there’s a lot of things I don’t know about, but I am an expert on east Tennessee geography and I can tell you that teaching at Rhea County High School means that Mr. Wiley is teaching in none other than Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial. We thought it would be interesting to hear from the person who teaches science to the great grandchildren of the kids in John Scopes’ classroom back in 1925. Mr. Wilkey actually runs the Rhea County science department, so we were a bit surprised to learn that he does not consider evolution to be a valid scientific theory because a theory is something you can actually test with evidence.
Joe Wilkey: If you’re going to use a scientific term, I would call it an evolution hypothesis and I’m kind— In my opinion, I’m kind of stretching it there [laughter] to call it a hypothesis. It’s a little bit more like science fiction to me. [laughter]
E. Ayers: Well, let’s go over your understanding of what happened then, okay? If one of your students comes to you and says Mr. Wilkey, okay, what did happen? What would you say?
Joe Wilkey: I would have to say no one knows, because science cannot prove that. Science cannot tell you how you got here, the origins, of man or any other thing that you want to make.
E. Ayers: So you would emphasize more what we can’t know rather than have another explanation, let’s say, creationism as we think about, or intelligent design.
Joe Wilkey: Well, I think intelligent design is as viable of an explanation about the way life is as anything that evolution has to over.
E. Ayers: I see.
Joe Wilkey: There is no way that you can prove that there was an intelligence that caused this cell to be here but can you look at the cell right now and see the intricate nature of it and start to appreciate how marvelous and complex, I mean truly complex, I mean, we still don’t understand all the complexity of the cell.
E. Ayers: So, it seems to me that you’re not really claiming then the undeniable supremacy of intelligent design over evolutionism, you just say that they’re sort of on an equal footing in their inability to prove their observations and so that they should be basically taught on an equal footing. Is that your position?
Joe Wilkey: Yes, sir. If you’re going to test them, I would say both of them have equal footing.
E. Ayers: Does the state of Tennessee agree with that?
Joe Wilkey: The state standard that we have been given by the legislature state that we are to teach about evolution and that’s what the teachers of Rhea County High School do. They teach about evolution.
E. Ayers: So, the Scopes trial began with in many ways testing the power of legislators to determine what was taught and not taught in the schools. Do you feel that we have it about right now in Tennessee, that the scope of what, so to speak, of what you can teach is appropriate or is the legislature still kind of too involved in the educational process?
Joe Wilkey: As far as science goes, teach where the evidence leads you. I don’t understand why the legislature or the courts should dictate what is being taught in science. You know, if a scientist is going to be searching for the truth about something, let it go where the evidence takes him and, of course, I guess I’m prejudiced there because I believe that the Bible is truth and that’s because I’m a Christian and that’s why— Let’s go where the evidence believes because I believe that the evidence will back up what is actually stated in some way in scripture. That’s what I believe.
E. Ayers: That’s Joseph Wilkey who’s a science teacher as Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee. [music]
P. Onuf: You know, guys, it occurs to me that the real issue here is not science, it’s history—where do things come from and that the whole issue of modern science should be framed in historical terms and that we should think about history as the central problem is really a tribute to Darwin’s influence because with Darwin, we had a new cosmology, a new way of thinking about the sequence of things through time, and I think you could say really that what they’re doing, the intelligent designers, is synthesizing enlightenment science with Darwinian science.
B. Balogh: Yeah.
P. Onuf: So you get the best of both.
B. Balogh: Peter, I think I’m following, but help me out with enlightenment science versus Darwinian science.
P. Onuf: Well, Brian, you and I think we’re enlightened today. Maybe we are. But the Enlightenment has a notion of the cosmos and its history which suggests that it’s a great clock, an elaborate mechanism and what we need to do is figure that mechanism out. It’s an empirical task. We have to understand how the gears mesh. Now, that’s a very static idea and Darwin introduces a dynamic idea, that is nothing ever is the same because of constant change through history.
E. Ayers: And it’s interesting, too, that Mr. Wilkey then says let science go wherever it may and let the legislature stay out of it which is exactly the opposite, of course, of what had happened at his own school 85 years earlier in which the legislature was intrusive and it was Clarence Darrow and the voices of modernity that said stay out of this. Now, it’s the voices of creationism and intelligent design are saying let science speak to us directly without the intrusion of the state, so, boy, all these different elements keep combining in different forms.
B. Balogh: It’s almost like recombinant DNA, Ed, and on that note, it’s time for another break. [music] When we get back, we’ll return to my discussion with historian Ronald Numbers and look at the creation of creationism.
P. Onuf: We want to know what you think about all this. The discussion is underway at backstoryradio.org. We’ll be back in a minute.
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P. Onuf: We’re back with “BackStory,” the show that takes a topic from the here and now and explores its historical context. I’m Peter Onuf, “Backstory’s” 18th century guy.
E. Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, that resident 19th century guy.
B. Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century history guy. Today’s topic—the history of the conflict between science and religion in America.
Tape (Matthew Brady): A fine biblical scholar, Bishop Usher, has determined for us the exact date and hour of the creation. It occurred in the year 4004 BC.
B. Balogh: This is another clip from “Inherit the Wind,” the movie about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. The prosecution attorney, based on the fundamentalist icon William Jennings Bryan, is in the witness box, being grilled by the lawyer inspired by the real-life Clarence Darrow.
Tape (Clarence Darrow): That first day, well, what do you think, was it 24 hours long?
Tape (Matthew Brady): The Bible says it was a day!…
Tape (Clarence Darrow): Well, there was no sun. Hmmm, you know, how do you know how long it was. Isn’t it possible that it could have been 25 hours? There’s no way to measure it. No way to tell. It’s possible. Then you interpret that the first day is recorded in the book of Genesis could have been a day of indeterminate length. I mean might to state it is not necessarily a 24-hour day. It could have been 30 hours. It could have been a week. It could have been a month, could have been a year, could have been a hundred years, or it could have been 10 million years!
Tape (Matthew Brady): I protest.
B. Balogh: In the movie, this moment is a kind of turning point—the William Jennings Bryan character is finally forced to admit a central flaw of biblical literalism. But in reality it wouldn’t have really been all that dramatic. The belief that the Earth is only six thousand years old—an idea now known as “young Earth creationism”–was a fringe view in the 1920s. Ron Numbers, that historian we heard from earlier—he told me that most fundamentalists, including William Jennings Bryan himself, read Genesis metaphorically, with the individual days standing in for vast geological eras.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): And then there was this small little group associated largely with the 7th Day Adventist Church that kept insisting no, it’s no more than 6000 years and they took care of the fossil record by assigning it to the one year of Noah’s flood.
B. Balogh: I see.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): That was a view endorsed by the prophists who founded the 7th Day Adventist Church, Ellen White, and one of her disciples, George McGready Price who wrote probably 30 books in the first half of the 20th century advocating disposition. Almost nobody outside his church accepted it and then in the 1960s, it was picked up by two non-Adventists fundamentalists, Henry Morse and John Whitcomb, and published as The Genesis Flood which became the Bible for the creation science movement and surprisingly this alternative became extremely popular among fundamentalists, Pentecostals and other conservative evangelicals.
B. Balogh: And is it fair to say that the alternative that won out is the least scientifically plausible.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Of course. It’s so counterintuitive. You would think that there would be a tendency to accommodate science as much as possible.
B. Balogh: Right.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): But the view that emerges more or less victorious in the ’60s and ’70s is the one that repudiates the most of modern science. Now, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, although the most vocal and visible group of anti-evolutionists had been now for a number of years the creation scientists, there were other anti-evolutionists and they were a little annoyed by the insistence of the creation scientists on a particular interpretation of Genesis, so these people with a few liberal young earth creationists, if there is such a thing—
B. Balogh: I’m sure there’s a group on Facebook.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): I bet there is— Started the intelligent design movement.
B. Balogh: I see.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): And the intelligent design movement was supposed to be a big tent movement that allowed all anti-evolutionists to participate, that did not talk about the Bible. That was too divisive. Set aside the Bible. Let’s just focus on arguments against evolution, but their biggest goal was to turn back 200 years. The consensus that in doing science one would only appeal to natural forces.
B. Balogh: Right.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): This had come fairly recently actually to be called methodological naturalism and it had been embraced by evangelicals and atheists alike and was a wonderful device for keeping peace while people with different religious views participated in this activity, but the intelligent designers claimed that if you couldn’t use God, then it was just as bad as denying God and so their primary goal has been to change what I would argue is the no. 1 ground rule for playing science—
B. Balogh: Which is to take God out of nature.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): Exactly. You could believe in God.
B. Balogh: Right.
Tape (Ronald Numbers): You can worship God. You can talk to your Sunday School class about God and nature, but you’re not going to get by attributing anything in a scientific work to God or Satan. [music]
B. Balogh: Ronald Numbers is a professor of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We’ll post an extended version of our conversation at backstoryradio dot org.
[music]
E. Ayers: If you’re just tuning in, this is “BackStory,” we’re the American History Guys, and we’re talking about the relationship between science and religion in days past. For the past few weeks, we’ve been inviting your feedback on today’s topic at backstoryradio.org, and our producers have invited a couple of the people who left comments there to join us on the phone.
P. Onuf: Hey, guys, rally round. We have a call from Bellingham, Washington. It’s Matthew. Matthew, welcome to “BackStory.”
Caller (Matthew): Oh, hi. So, not all religions in the United States, really not all even Christian traditions, have the same sort of track record with science and even using the same Bible, not all traditions have read Genesis the same way and I was wondering if you could comment then on how these different belief traditions, even the ones that still have the book of Genesis, how they have different approaches to science.
E. Ayers: I guess it strikes me that the two most powerful faith traditions that are not sort of evangelical Christianity are Catholicism and Judaism and it strikes me that both of those have had quite different angles of connection and dissent with science. I’d be curious to know, is science problematic with Judaism in the 19th or 20th century.
B. Balogh: Are you asking me based on my four years of Hebrew school, Ed? Or simply as an historian? As an historian, I would say that as an organized religion, Judaism has probably had the easiest relationship with science.
E. Ayers: Well, how about Catholicism, then? I mean, one way to think about it is that Catholicism is in a different kind of— a more corporeal conflict with certain varieties of modern science and one thinks of reproductive debates and so forth, but and obviously long before Protestant Christianity sort of became established in the United States, the Catholic church had been wrestling with science for centuries, so it’s interesting how we’ve narrowed the bandwidth so much to really to talk about in an American case of evangelical Christianity and we don’t really talk much about a conflict between Catholicism—
P. Onuf: I think that’s a great question, Ed, and I think it has something to do with authority and ecclesiastical authority in the organization of the Roman Catholic Church so these issues, of course, have been and continue to be profound and important but the kind of personal engagement that is characteristic of the Protestant tradition where it’s you and your God as mediated through the Bible, I think that makes, every man, so to speak has to be scientist or an anti-scientist, that is, you have to answer these fundamental questions for yourself and in a way, most believers and most faith traditions in the world don’t in an ongoing way have to balance or resolve these problems on an individual basis because their church hierarchies, their religious organizations are in a way deciding these things, usually in a way that enable a lot of play and a lot of slack so people don’t have to march to the same drum.
B. Balogh: I mean, the great irony here is on the flip side, science used to be what we associated with the individual natural philosopher or the inventor or the tinker and it is now science—
P. Onuf: That’s a great point.
B. Balogh: Organized in these gigantic organizational structures.
P. Onuf: That’s a wonderful point, Brian.
B. Balogh: That require panels that sign off on the validity of grant proposals.
P. Onuf: It could be that there’s a real antinomian appeal, that is, the appeal of the individual believer to stand up against the hierarchies of science, just as you once stood up against the hierarchies of the Roman Church.
B. Balogh: Right. Have we totally confused you, Matthew?
Caller (Matthew): No, no, no. I think there are issues of authority but there’s also sort of a theological direction to it as well. Part of it I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian and coming from an older Eastern tradition, in some ways older than Roman Catholicism, you know, coming out of the Middle East—we don’t have a pope or a magisterium. We also don’t have a lot of the same rationalisms that came into theology in the Middle Ages. It’s very mystical, but we’ve had a lot of freedom for scientists and really very notable scientists right up into the 20th century and the present day and we actually even have a lot of freedom on the question of evolution. My faith has been described lovingly as disorganized religion, so there really isn’t a definitive stance on a lot of these things.
B. Balogh: But, of course, Protestants are constantly engaging with these cosmic issues but they’re also monitoring each other, the individual believer is intensely concerned with other believers so there’s a real imperative to achieve some kind of, not consensus as if there were a compromise but to get to a shared truth—
E. Ayers: A solidarity.
B. Balogh: Yes, and Tocqueville talked about mass society in the 19th century. The genius of American democracy is that people seem to believe the same thing and that’s no accident because it comes out of Protestant religion which is both incredibly diverse but also has powerfully conformist tendencies and you don’t have that kind of pressure toward conformity within more highly structured institutions or even within a disorganized Greek Orthodox church.
Caller (Matthew): You guys are sharp. Thank you very much.
P. Onuf: Thanks for calling.
Caller (Matthew): Thank you very much. Bye. [music]
P. Onuf: We’ve got another call and it’s from Margaret in Lumberton, North Carolina. Margaret, welcome to “BackStory.”
Caller (Margaret): Hello and thank you. My husband and I moved here a little over 20 years ago and local lore held that a farmer that lived not far from where we lived at the time had beefalo on his farm which for those who don’t know what that is, it’s a cross between cows and buffalo and somebody took offense to this and felt that it was the intermingling of species was wrong and murdered the man.
P. Onuf: Whoa. This is getting better and better.
Caller (Margaret): And certainly breeding of livestock was considered a gentlemanly pursuit at one time. Early research into genetics was conducted by monks, so clearly there was not the same kind of moral or religious meaning attached to things like beefalo and so I’m wondering if as we unravel nature’s mysteries with cloning and embryonic stem cell and things like that are we attaching more religious meaning or moral value than we did in generations past?
P. Onuf: Well, listen, Margaret, that’s a great question. One thing that came immediately to mind when you asked about the beefalo are some of the things that Thomas Jefferson said about race mixing, that if you loved natural philosophy you wouldn’t want to mix the races because nature had created them different, in some way. This was an imprecise protoracial science argument but it suggests that nature had a design and that we should not inviolate it. At the same time, somebody like Jefferson and people in his generation were in love with the idea of improved domestic livestock and that breeding was crucial to the improvement of the separate races, so one of the issues that it raises is what is nature and what is nature’s purpose and is there a design in nature.
E. Ayers: Yeah, you know, one word is troubling me here on all this and that’s mule.
Caller (Margaret): Yes.
E. Ayers: You know, I mean, mules have been around for a long time and are very obviously a human creation because they cannot recreate, you know. It seems to me such an obvious challenge to the idea of the perfection and separability of species, but we know that people have been breeding livestock for centuries, right? I guess one way to think about this, in era before Darwin, selective breeding did not seem as much of a challenge because you did not have any concept that the actual species could evolve or change.
P. Onuf: Yes, that’s right.
E. Ayers: You’re just improving, just bringing to the surface what God’s already put there.
Caller (Margaret): Uh huh.
E. Ayers: Yeah, and I would just add that this can be seen in religious terms because of the requirement that man be productive and improve upon his conditions and, of course, in the 20thcentury, this really runs wild with all kinds of hybrid corn. A lot of this is funded by the government in order to improve the quality of corns and then by the time we reach the 21stcentury, genetic modifications. I don’t have an answer for your question of whether this makes it more religious, less religious, or violates religiosity.
P. Onuf: I think that’s just what Margaret’s getting at and that is the distinction between what Ed says about improving nature and that’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s fully compatible with a notion of God’s creation but then somehow you can also be violating nature and it’s the boundary between improvement and violation, between doing something that seems to be in tune with some kind of harmonious larger design or end, and then the rampant violation of something that we should hold sacred.
Caller (Margaret): Well, I think you see that with the embryonic stem cell questions, that if we’re using this to end cancer, then people have less problem with it than if we’re doing it to clone.
P. Onuf: Right.
E. Ayers: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting because if you think about what man has created for is to have dominion over nature, to quote the Bible, right?
P. Onuf: I think we’re also supposed to suffer.
Caller (Margaret): [laughter]
P. Onuf: However, and I think if we’re going to get theological about this and there’s suffering humanity, it’s not— It’s, of course, ever since the fall is what we’re doomed to, but it’s a knowledge of our finite qualities, of our limitations, suffering as part of creation and, of course, the creation design transcends us. It’s when we substitute ourselves for that creation as if giving ourselves eternal life.
E. Ayers: But speaking of finite, Margaret, I would just complicate further your very good question and not just think about modification, but elimination and think about all the species that have been eliminated in the efforts to protect them. This, too, strikes me as a deeply religious question as to whether man is entitled to eliminate entire species of vegetation and animals.
B. Balogh: Well, we’ve done it already. It’s too late.
P. Onuf: Sorry, Margaret, you were going to say something.
Caller (Margaret): No problem. I was just going to say I think that that is probably the question that then will keep us going as human beings.
P. Onuf: Yeah, and I think you’ve done a wonderful job of identifying one of the things we will be arguing about. In many ways, religion and science are part of our engagement with these fundamental questions, different approaches, you might say, but perhaps ultimately complementary and I think you’ve really drawn our attention to it.
E. Ayers: Well, we just hope we’ve not made you suffer too much even though it is our human fate.
P. Onuf: Right.
Caller (Margaret): No problem.
P. Onuf: Thanks, Margaret.
Caller (Margaret): Bye bye.
B. Balogh: Well, unfortunately, that’s where we’re going to have to leave things today. But as always—the conversation continues online. Drop by and let us know what you think—will science and religion ever truly make peace with one another? You can find us on Facebook, and at backstoryradio.org. Don’t be a stranger.
P. Onuf: Today’s episode of “BackStory” was produced by Tony Field, with help from Catherine Moore and Eric Verkerke, and [Allison Quance]. Jamal Milner mastered the show, and Gabby Alter wrote our theme. Special thanks today to listener Josh Grisetti, who suggested today’s topic on the “Pitch a Show” section of our website. “BackStory’s” executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.
E. Ayers: Major support for “BackStory” is provided by the University of Virginia. Support also comes from James Madison’s Montpelier, Weinstein Properties, Trish and David Crowe, Austin Ligon and an anonymous donor.
Voiceover: Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. “BackStory” was created by Andrew Wyndham for VHF Radio at the University Foundation for the Humanities.
Would any of you see this as a continuation of the tension between modernism and enlightenment thinking on one hand, and evangelical Christianity on the other, that would have separated Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin from Patrick Henry and George Whitfield?
All systems are attempts to negotiate the context in which those systems find themselves. The distinction between system and context dissolves and there is only an apparent conflict between the different parts or moments or solutions.
In America there are deep connections in the fabric of the culture that link the work done by religion and science in their particular areas. Since they have a common context their varied output puts them in conflict. This seems to be part of the major cultural challenge in a global context. Diversity, autonomy, security.
Opposition is one of the simplest and most recognizable forms of collaboration.
Thanks again for the opportunity to call in to your wonderful show—I only hope that I sound somewhat articulate when it finally airs! I tried to make the point that we can’t lump all religions together or even all Judeo-Christian faith traditions in relation to science or how they each interpret the Bible. I used the Eastern Orthodox Church as an example, which though only playing a very minor role in American History, is still a major expression of Christianity world-wide (the second-largest Christian communion after Rome) and represents a much older, more mystical and holistic tradition than mainline Protestantism or modern Roman Catholicism.
The Orthodox Church has never read the Book of Genesis as a science textbook or an eyewitness account, but rather emphasized its spiritual lessons about God and his relationship toward the created order and all human beings. The Church has always considered the act of creation to be a mystery and the description of it in Holy Scripture to be one of accommodation to the limits of human reason.
In general, I believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church has had a very positive track record with science and learning over its 2,000-year history. This is partially due to its mystical orientation and the high level of education among many of its greatest teachers, but also its more organic, less-centralized church structure, usually independent from the State, with a strong tradition of non-clergy leadership. You don’t usually see the same power struggles between Church, State, and the educated elite, but more often a relationship of cooperation between the three (though problems have arisen, usually after Orthodox nations have adopted trends from Western culture in an attempt to “modernize”).
While recognizing the limits of reason, especially in an imperfect world where spiritual problems often cloud our minds, the Eastern Church has also done much to contribute to science and learning. Even an illiterate desert mystic such as St. Anthony the Great of Egypt has encouraged people to examine the natural world to learn more about God’s Word. Another Father of the Church, St. Justin Martyr, taught that the Word of God in “seed-form” existed in all of the world’s greatest philosophies. A hymn written by the persecuted Church in Soviet-era Russia expounds that “the breath of the Holy Spirit inspires poets, artists, and scientists”.
Prominent Orthodox Christians of the 20th century with scientific backgrounds include Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (medicine), geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who received an honorary degree from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in up-state New York), Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovic, and philosopher Charles Habib Malik (physics) who helped draft the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All of these men drew from both their spiritual and scientific backgrounds for the greater good, and both Dobzhansky and Malik were naturalized American citizens. The most highly regarded bishop in the Church (the Orthodox do not have a Western-style pope) the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew gives talks around the world on issues of ecology as well as Church doctrine and the plight of Christians living in the Middle East.
However, there is currently no consensus among Eastern Orthodox Christians about the theories of human evolution. Some like Dobzhansky believe that evolution is simply the manner it which God chooses to create, but others are very critical of Darwinian ideas. There are many Traditionalists, especially in Eastern Europe, that believe that the Orthodox Church has been far too open to Western influence, and they are not without their points. “Modernity” in the West has lead to social disintegration, spiritual confusion, empty materialism, de-humanization, and ecological disaster. Orthodox Christians in Europe have also seen first hand the horrors caused by madmen like Stalin and Hitler who have used Darwinian ideas to justify their war on humanity. Consequently, human evolution is not an easy topic to discuss.
Also, here’s a helpful quote from a prominant 20th century personality of a different faith tradition—
“The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.” –Mohandas K. Gandhi
I work at the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, OH. Nearly every year, as we near the anniversary of this case, we get a phone call from someone in the media asking about local newspaper articles. We have to remind them that the Scopes Monkey Trial was in Dayton, TENNESSEE, not Dayton, Ohio.
Just discovered your podcast and am enjoying it immensely.
Several comments (if it’s not too late to chip in to the conversation):
First, the history of the Scopes trial has been colored radically by the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind,” in which William Jennings Bryan was portrayed as a narrow-minded Young Earth Creationist fanatic, while Clarence Darrow was portrayed as a reasonable, tolerant crusader for truth and honesty, with the teacher (Scopes) as the victim of persecution. The play was written in the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, and was really designed to tackle the battle between anti-Communist fervor and the voice of reason and tolerance. But the actual trial, which took place in 1924, had issues and undertones not mentioned in the play.
When Darwin’s ideas first came out, supported by the research of other scientists (many of whom were Christians), mainstream Christianity had no quarrel with evolution. Young Earth Creationism wasn’t yet a force of any strength, because for most of its history, believers in Christianity had interpreted the first chapters of Genesis much more symbolically or loosely, and the issue seemed like a minor point anyhow. Many Christians welcomed the idea of evolution as a unifying factor that could help explain the relationships among plants and animals.
Evolution wasn’t even the factor that shook Darwin’s own faith in God. It was two deaths in his family, including the death of his young daughter, that made him question.
But by the early 20C, Darwin’s ideas had become wedded to broader philosophical ideas, including the eugenics movement. Proponents took the notion of “survival of the fittest” and used it to argue their beliefs that the “unfit” should be sterilized. It was part of the bigger idea of “social Darwinism,” which was definitely not science, but got confused and conflated with science.
By the time of the Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan, a champion of populism, had become intensely concerned about evolution’s link (in the minds of many) to social Darwinism. It was this threat that made him accept the challenge of prosecuting the Scopes case. And he had some basis for it: the textbook that Scopes was using in the classroom included at least one chapter that promoted social Darwinist notions.
Bryan wasn’t a Young Earth Creationist. In fact, there was disagreement on the age of the earth, and the acceptance of evolution, even among the very conservative Christians who wrote “The Fundamentals,” a series of pamphlets upon which Christian Fundamentalism built itself. Belief in a young earth, and rejection of evolution, were not mandatory even among these people.
Evolution is no longer tied to eugenics in most people’s minds. But in the minds of many, it’s tied to materialism: the belief that there’s no reality beyond what’s testable by the natural sciences, and that spiritual life is a product of biochemistry. Naturally, people of faith take issue with that idea. Materialism is a philosophy, just like social Darwinism, but both philosophies have been confused with the science of evolution.
In my church, and in the Christian school where I teach, views on creation and origins run a wide spectrum. There are people who reject mainstream science altogether and follow the teachings of people like Ken Ham (Answers In Genesis). These folks believe in Young Earth Creationism–the idea that the world was created in six literal days, that each animal species (including humanity) was created specially and did not evolve except in tiny ways, and that the earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old. There are others who believe that evolution was a mechanism used by God to generate biodiversity, leading ultimately to creatures (humans) who would be capable of having a personal relationship with God. There are also many other positions that fall somewhere between these two.
Francis Collins, of course, is a good example of an evangelical Christian who fully accepts the theory of evolution. He was head of the Human Genome Project, and he’s now head of the NIH. His book, The Language of God, is well worth reading.
Finally, there’s an issue that all of us non-scientists face, whether we’re religious or not. Science is harder and harder to understand at a deep level. It takes years of specialized training–and even then, scientists in one field don’t necessarily understand other subspecialties deeply. Yet we’re asked to make personal and civic decisions all the time, based on our notions of science. Our decisions are ultimately based, not on our own investigations, but on trust. Whom do we trust?
I recently read a good book, Why Evolution Works, that deals with the subject science and religion by using the battles between evolution and creationism. It has a wonderful final section that discusses the emotions, ethics, and research involved over time with this subject. The authors are Paul Strode who is at the University of Colorado and Matt Young who is at the Colorado School of Mines. And , in the interest of full disclosure, Paul was a floormate of mine at Manchester College in Indiana, but the book is really a good volume on this subject. Thanks for the great show….the podcast gets me through miles of marathon training!
I have been listening to your podcasts as intellectual therapy. Thank you. Thank you.
Don’t you guys think we need to start a Church Backstory with the American Church History Gals? Skip and John at Yale trained a great team, and Grant’s students from Duke are fabulous. I will write the grant, if you all can imagine helping out. Think of it as Michael Denning meets Peggy Bendroth . . . Maybe?
Meanwhile, on topic, Marilynne Robinson has the best essay I know of on this, in her non-fiction book The End of Adam. I assign it to Duke undergrads, and it always scrambles their brains. They can’t quite sort out how a brilliant author like Robinson could be critical of Darwinism. I also still find Social Darwinism in America to be essential reading. Thank God for Hofstadter.
As a left-leaning, anti-death- penalty Christian, I also have students read Darrow’s argument against the death penalty in the Leopold and Loeb trial, alongside William Jennings Bryan on the dangers of social-Darwinism. At the very least, this conversation requires students to think in more nuanced ways about what is at stake when Darwinisms make their way into popular thought.
Finally, Stephen Jay Gould’s Ladders and Cones: Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons, is a helpful way to help students sort through the role of Harry Emerson’s little brother, Raymond, as he lead the Science of Man project. There is no short cut to the promised land, he intoned. (Lily Kay’s Molecular Vision of Life is great on this.)
I actually just incorporated a quotation from Draper’s book into a lesson plan for ninth graders. I hope there will some mention that since Draper’s time historians of science have more or less universally repudiated the Conflict Thesis, at least as White and Draper presented it. The scholarly consensus nowadays tends to emphasize the extent to which science and faith interacted amicably and cooperatively during the Scientific Revolution, and continued to do so until at least the second half of the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton wrote far more about biblical prophesy than he did about physics; and Galileo’s writings were actually widely praised by many Catholic prelates, including Pope Urban VIII, until a variety of political, personal, and other factors finally led to the notorious confrontation of 1633.
Great show! I’ll be assigning it in my Religion in the U.S. class next semester. Interestingly, I listened to this as I was finished reading _The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age_ by Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson. The authors recently wrote for the NYT: http://nyti.ms/tzjJCo. So many wonderful connections between this show and their work!
“As used in science, “theory” does not mean the same thing as it does in everyday life. A theory is not a guess, hunch, hypothesis, or speculation. It is much more full-blown.
A theory is built upon one or more hypotheses, and upon evidence. The word “built” is essential, for a theory contains reasoning and logical connections based on the hypotheses and evidence. Thus we have Newton’s theory of gravity and the motion of planets, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the germ theory of disease, the cell theory of organisms, plate tectonics (theory of the motion of land masses), the valence theory of chemical compounds, and theories of evolution in biology, geology, and astronomy. These theories are self-consistent and consistent with one another.”
Creationism and Intelligent Design are not based on science
I found it difficult to believe the science teacher from Dayton Tn is in reality a science teacher. Of course Darwinian Evolution can’t explain the origin of life, Darwinian Evolution is about the evolution of life. One can’t have evolution without life. The question of where did life come from was answered in the 1950s by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey when they did a chemistry experiment. The “science teacher” you interviewed should be informed of this fact. Contrary to the teacher’s comments the evidence for the origins of life is without doubt. It is amazing that this “science teacher” says “let science lead us” when he has rejected science. Evolution on small and large scales has been tested over and over and found to be validated by these experiments. The fact of the matter is that “Intelligent Design” is untestable. I defy any “Intelligent Design” proponent to come up with a way to test “God did it”. In fact I live for the day a researcher to publish a paper that proves once and for all that god did create the universe and empirical evidence shows that the Hindus are right. Then you’ll hear the “Intelligent Design” proponents claim that the experiment was flawed because it did not show that the Christian god was the creator. This “science teacher” is who to blame when we wonder why students in the United States are not able to do science.
This was the best coverage of the evolution vs creation debate that npr has put on but it still has some major drawbacks.
The arguments are not about science vs religion. It is an argument about two different views of science that have religious implications. Modern science believes in naturalism and creationists believe that there are supernatural forces in the world that can explain the origin of the world around us. Being a creationist does not stop individuals from being scientists. Many Bible believing scientists have used empirical scientific methods to successfully learn about and describe the world around us. I have a question for the naturalists. What if they are wrong?
One shouldn’t immediately dismiss the idea that the fossil record was triggered by a world wide flood that covered the whole earth. We certainly don’t see conditions today that would produce large world wide grave yards of extinct and current existing animals and plants. Also the methods that are used to give a billion or so years to the earth using radioactive dating are based on assumptions that are unknown to man. To date rock using radioactive methods the scientists have to know what the original rock contained regarding the parent and daughter compounds. Since no one was here to measure those quantities the scientists put into the equations numbers that will give you millions and billions of years so there will be enough time for evolution to occur. That is just playing unfairly.
Evolution is not real science. Oh just like creation scientists they use scientific jargon, scientific measurements, and write papers but unlike the empirical science that allows us to build and fly rockets and make computers evolution can’t study in real time what they claim has happened. No one has seen a land mammal go back in the water and become a whale. No one has seen a singular cellular organize and become a multi-cellular organism with different organ function. When genetic changes happen in organisms today through the sharing of genetic material or through genetic mutations the organisms are still microbacteria, dogs, corn, or birds. They don’t change into other organisms and they never will. Evolution is a belief system not a real empirical scientific endeavor.
No naturalist scientist has ever had an adequate explanation of the way we went from a mixture of molecules in the primordial soup to the exact code, language, decoding mechanism, repair mechanisms, and information that we have in a single living cell. Richard Dawkins when pressed with this issue said he believes life came from little green men from outer space. He can believe in little green men but not in God. This answer just begs the question since he would still have to explain how little green men evolved and he can’t. Another evolutionary scientist, I’m sorry I forgot his name, said that he admitted that science has not explained how we can go from molecules to man but he saw only two choice. One is evolution and the other is creation but an intelligent being. He also said that he didn’t want to believe in a God so he’s siding with evolution. Now there was an honest man.
It’s scary that Joseph Wilkie is the head of a high-school science department and has been teaching science for 27 years. Let science go where it may, he says, asserting that there has never been experimental confirmation of Darwinian evolution.
Natural selection (evolution) has been experimentally confirmed a thousand times over and is directly observable both in nature and in the laboratory be it with respect to the size of finch beaks or the color of London pigeons. Indeed, many of the miracles of modern medicine would be utterly impossible were the forces of evolution not at work.
How can Mr. Wilkie not know this? But he doesn’t. He is profoundly ignorant and presumably passing on his ignorance to a generation of students.
Andy, you have one of those wonderful minds that stays open just long enough to find something it can absorb, then closes down to make sure that original piece of knowledge isn’t affected.
the argument is definitely about science vs. pseudo-science. The criticism that no one has “seen” evolution is infantile – no one has seen an atom or many of the molecules that are used on a daily basis in the “empiricial” sciences that you applaud. What about inference? Or do you mean that inference is valid only when you agree with it. Given an incomplete dataset, such as the fossil record, what is one supposed to do – infer, ignore, or read a book that was written long before the dataset existed, and use the dataset to support the book?
I find it incredible that in your discussion of Jefferson’s stated position that mixing the races contravened God’s plan because he clearly created them separately, you chose not to mention that Jefferson fathered several children with a slave woman in his household, Sally Hemings, who was apparently his white wife’s own half-sister!
How can you possibly justify an omission of such enormity?
A few points to consider:
Christians who argue for the “evidence” of creationism are *not* exercising faith according to its definition in Hebrews 11:1 that emphasizes blind belief in that which cannot be seen. To argue for the proof of biblical claims is to demonstrate a lack of faith which would require no proof.
Secondly, religious books should *not* be given special treatment in an academically oriented program but should be interpreted with the same framework used on any text. Literalism becomes a *huge* problem in the Bible, not only with “creation” but also the story of Noah’s boat – check the description: 2 of every animal, multiple decks but ONE window??
It might be worthwhile to challenge Christians to justify their selective literalism whether it be in Genesis or Leviticus. Allowing any and all “faith” claims to pass unchallenged undermines the credibility of the show. It’s a tricky path to navigate but it is possible.
If Genesis is literal, then it means God approved of incest in the early years. And then there’s the whole issue of two accounts of creation that mention two distinct races of humans. Those created first did not have “original sin” only those in the second story. The story of the Garden is fraught with trouble as well since Eve is held responsible for moral choice before she is capable of making one. And what kind of deity prohibits knowledge anyway?
It may be that we can be no more certain about our ultimate origins as we can about our future or the existence of alien life – so what? It seems to me we’ve got MUCH more serious problems and questions to address.
Mr. Stryder is correct that Christian faith in the Bible is defined as being “certain of what we do not see”. It is true that we did not see God, an omniscient being, create the universe. But that does not mean that we cannot find evidence that suggests that he made it. Evidence does not deny faith but encourages it. Evolutionists must rely on faith in things they have never seen as well. They have never seen a soup of raw chemicals become a living creature. They have never seen a single cell organism organize into a complex organism like a mammal. They have never seen a land mammal go back into the sea to become a whale. That’s real faith to believe in those things.
As far as Noah and the animals, consider this. The Bible specifically says that God sent 2 of every kind of unclean animal to the ark. If chosen wisely be God there would only need to be two of the cat kind and two of the dog kind rather than every breed of cat and dog. With sufficient genetic diversity in the two animals all the types of cats and dogs could spread across the post-flood environments by benefit of natural selection and speciation. Creationists don’t deny natural selection. We just don’t believe there is any evidence that it results in upward “evolution” from one species to another or from molecules to man.
Yes, if the Biblical account is true there had to be marriage, intercourse and child raising between brothers and sisters in the generations after creation. In the generations following Adam and Eve there was no law given by God forbidding such relationships. On the other hand since Adam and Eve would have been created with perfect genes, i.e. no diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or other genetic diseases there would have been no health reasons why brothers and sisters could not marry and have children. It would have been only many generations after Adam and Eve were created that there would have been enough genetic errors in the human code to worry about health risks of near relatives having children. Yes the human race is devolving rather than evolving into a better species. Time and mistakes in the genetic code have accomplished this. A loving God later in history told mankind to stop having sexual relations with near family members to avoid having genetically inferior children.
There are not two contradictory stories of creation and two different races. The first chapter of Genesis deals in general with God’s hand in the entirety of creation, the earth moon, stars, and sun. The next chapter focuses on the unique creation of man and women who are the only creatures created in God’s image. It is a total misreading of Genesis to think that these stories are describing two different races of humans.
As to Eve’s role in original sin, Adam was more to fault than Eve. Adam was given more authority by God to his role as husband/leader. He was responsible for the decisions his wife made. He stood by and let her disobey God and then disobeyed himself. The rest of scripture points to Adam as the source of sin and death not Eve.
Mr. Stryder needs to spend a little more time in the Bible and read some of the apologetics in websites like AnswersinGenesis.org. I enjoy conversations like this. It’s so eye opening to see how people with a non Biblical world view think.
A biblical worldview does not require Christians to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of evolution. For more details, see my comments from June 2010, above.
I humbly disagree. There is only overwhelming evidence for natural selection within similar species. There is not overwhelming scientific evidence for molecules to complex life evolution.
Tom Richards
Would any of you see this as a continuation of the tension between modernism and enlightenment thinking on one hand, and evangelical Christianity on the other, that would have separated Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin from Patrick Henry and George Whitfield?
Benjamin Nelson
All systems are attempts to negotiate the context in which those systems find themselves. The distinction between system and context dissolves and there is only an apparent conflict between the different parts or moments or solutions.
In America there are deep connections in the fabric of the culture that link the work done by religion and science in their particular areas. Since they have a common context their varied output puts them in conflict. This seems to be part of the major cultural challenge in a global context. Diversity, autonomy, security.
Opposition is one of the simplest and most recognizable forms of collaboration.
Matthew Owen
Thanks again for the opportunity to call in to your wonderful show—I only hope that I sound somewhat articulate when it finally airs! I tried to make the point that we can’t lump all religions together or even all Judeo-Christian faith traditions in relation to science or how they each interpret the Bible. I used the Eastern Orthodox Church as an example, which though only playing a very minor role in American History, is still a major expression of Christianity world-wide (the second-largest Christian communion after Rome) and represents a much older, more mystical and holistic tradition than mainline Protestantism or modern Roman Catholicism.
The Orthodox Church has never read the Book of Genesis as a science textbook or an eyewitness account, but rather emphasized its spiritual lessons about God and his relationship toward the created order and all human beings. The Church has always considered the act of creation to be a mystery and the description of it in Holy Scripture to be one of accommodation to the limits of human reason.
In general, I believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church has had a very positive track record with science and learning over its 2,000-year history. This is partially due to its mystical orientation and the high level of education among many of its greatest teachers, but also its more organic, less-centralized church structure, usually independent from the State, with a strong tradition of non-clergy leadership. You don’t usually see the same power struggles between Church, State, and the educated elite, but more often a relationship of cooperation between the three (though problems have arisen, usually after Orthodox nations have adopted trends from Western culture in an attempt to “modernize”).
While recognizing the limits of reason, especially in an imperfect world where spiritual problems often cloud our minds, the Eastern Church has also done much to contribute to science and learning. Even an illiterate desert mystic such as St. Anthony the Great of Egypt has encouraged people to examine the natural world to learn more about God’s Word. Another Father of the Church, St. Justin Martyr, taught that the Word of God in “seed-form” existed in all of the world’s greatest philosophies. A hymn written by the persecuted Church in Soviet-era Russia expounds that “the breath of the Holy Spirit inspires poets, artists, and scientists”.
Prominent Orthodox Christians of the 20th century with scientific backgrounds include Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (medicine), geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who received an honorary degree from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in up-state New York), Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovic, and philosopher Charles Habib Malik (physics) who helped draft the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All of these men drew from both their spiritual and scientific backgrounds for the greater good, and both Dobzhansky and Malik were naturalized American citizens. The most highly regarded bishop in the Church (the Orthodox do not have a Western-style pope) the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew gives talks around the world on issues of ecology as well as Church doctrine and the plight of Christians living in the Middle East.
However, there is currently no consensus among Eastern Orthodox Christians about the theories of human evolution. Some like Dobzhansky believe that evolution is simply the manner it which God chooses to create, but others are very critical of Darwinian ideas. There are many Traditionalists, especially in Eastern Europe, that believe that the Orthodox Church has been far too open to Western influence, and they are not without their points. “Modernity” in the West has lead to social disintegration, spiritual confusion, empty materialism, de-humanization, and ecological disaster. Orthodox Christians in Europe have also seen first hand the horrors caused by madmen like Stalin and Hitler who have used Darwinian ideas to justify their war on humanity. Consequently, human evolution is not an easy topic to discuss.
Matt
Matthew Owen
Also, here’s a helpful quote from a prominant 20th century personality of a different faith tradition—
“The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.” –Mohandas K. Gandhi
Matt
Jamie McQuinn
I work at the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, OH. Nearly every year, as we near the anniversary of this case, we get a phone call from someone in the media asking about local newspaper articles. We have to remind them that the Scopes Monkey Trial was in Dayton, TENNESSEE, not Dayton, Ohio.
Just discovered your podcast and am enjoying it immensely.
Liz Shively
Several comments (if it’s not too late to chip in to the conversation):
First, the history of the Scopes trial has been colored radically by the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind,” in which William Jennings Bryan was portrayed as a narrow-minded Young Earth Creationist fanatic, while Clarence Darrow was portrayed as a reasonable, tolerant crusader for truth and honesty, with the teacher (Scopes) as the victim of persecution. The play was written in the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, and was really designed to tackle the battle between anti-Communist fervor and the voice of reason and tolerance. But the actual trial, which took place in 1924, had issues and undertones not mentioned in the play.
When Darwin’s ideas first came out, supported by the research of other scientists (many of whom were Christians), mainstream Christianity had no quarrel with evolution. Young Earth Creationism wasn’t yet a force of any strength, because for most of its history, believers in Christianity had interpreted the first chapters of Genesis much more symbolically or loosely, and the issue seemed like a minor point anyhow. Many Christians welcomed the idea of evolution as a unifying factor that could help explain the relationships among plants and animals.
Evolution wasn’t even the factor that shook Darwin’s own faith in God. It was two deaths in his family, including the death of his young daughter, that made him question.
But by the early 20C, Darwin’s ideas had become wedded to broader philosophical ideas, including the eugenics movement. Proponents took the notion of “survival of the fittest” and used it to argue their beliefs that the “unfit” should be sterilized. It was part of the bigger idea of “social Darwinism,” which was definitely not science, but got confused and conflated with science.
By the time of the Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan, a champion of populism, had become intensely concerned about evolution’s link (in the minds of many) to social Darwinism. It was this threat that made him accept the challenge of prosecuting the Scopes case. And he had some basis for it: the textbook that Scopes was using in the classroom included at least one chapter that promoted social Darwinist notions.
Bryan wasn’t a Young Earth Creationist. In fact, there was disagreement on the age of the earth, and the acceptance of evolution, even among the very conservative Christians who wrote “The Fundamentals,” a series of pamphlets upon which Christian Fundamentalism built itself. Belief in a young earth, and rejection of evolution, were not mandatory even among these people.
Evolution is no longer tied to eugenics in most people’s minds. But in the minds of many, it’s tied to materialism: the belief that there’s no reality beyond what’s testable by the natural sciences, and that spiritual life is a product of biochemistry. Naturally, people of faith take issue with that idea. Materialism is a philosophy, just like social Darwinism, but both philosophies have been confused with the science of evolution.
In my church, and in the Christian school where I teach, views on creation and origins run a wide spectrum. There are people who reject mainstream science altogether and follow the teachings of people like Ken Ham (Answers In Genesis). These folks believe in Young Earth Creationism–the idea that the world was created in six literal days, that each animal species (including humanity) was created specially and did not evolve except in tiny ways, and that the earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old. There are others who believe that evolution was a mechanism used by God to generate biodiversity, leading ultimately to creatures (humans) who would be capable of having a personal relationship with God. There are also many other positions that fall somewhere between these two.
Francis Collins, of course, is a good example of an evangelical Christian who fully accepts the theory of evolution. He was head of the Human Genome Project, and he’s now head of the NIH. His book, The Language of God, is well worth reading.
Finally, there’s an issue that all of us non-scientists face, whether we’re religious or not. Science is harder and harder to understand at a deep level. It takes years of specialized training–and even then, scientists in one field don’t necessarily understand other subspecialties deeply. Yet we’re asked to make personal and civic decisions all the time, based on our notions of science. Our decisions are ultimately based, not on our own investigations, but on trust. Whom do we trust?
Liz Shively
Mark Shafer
I recently read a good book, Why Evolution Works, that deals with the subject science and religion by using the battles between evolution and creationism. It has a wonderful final section that discusses the emotions, ethics, and research involved over time with this subject. The authors are Paul Strode who is at the University of Colorado and Matt Young who is at the Colorado School of Mines. And , in the interest of full disclosure, Paul was a floormate of mine at Manchester College in Indiana, but the book is really a good volume on this subject. Thanks for the great show….the podcast gets me through miles of marathon training!
Amy Laura Hall
I have been listening to your podcasts as intellectual therapy. Thank you. Thank you.
Don’t you guys think we need to start a Church Backstory with the American Church History Gals? Skip and John at Yale trained a great team, and Grant’s students from Duke are fabulous. I will write the grant, if you all can imagine helping out. Think of it as Michael Denning meets Peggy Bendroth . . . Maybe?
Meanwhile, on topic, Marilynne Robinson has the best essay I know of on this, in her non-fiction book The End of Adam. I assign it to Duke undergrads, and it always scrambles their brains. They can’t quite sort out how a brilliant author like Robinson could be critical of Darwinism. I also still find Social Darwinism in America to be essential reading. Thank God for Hofstadter.
As a left-leaning, anti-death- penalty Christian, I also have students read Darrow’s argument against the death penalty in the Leopold and Loeb trial, alongside William Jennings Bryan on the dangers of social-Darwinism. At the very least, this conversation requires students to think in more nuanced ways about what is at stake when Darwinisms make their way into popular thought.
Finally, Stephen Jay Gould’s Ladders and Cones: Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons, is a helpful way to help students sort through the role of Harry Emerson’s little brother, Raymond, as he lead the Science of Man project. There is no short cut to the promised land, he intoned. (Lily Kay’s Molecular Vision of Life is great on this.)
Thanks for the monthly dose of strong hope.
Andrew Roedell
I actually just incorporated a quotation from Draper’s book into a lesson plan for ninth graders. I hope there will some mention that since Draper’s time historians of science have more or less universally repudiated the Conflict Thesis, at least as White and Draper presented it. The scholarly consensus nowadays tends to emphasize the extent to which science and faith interacted amicably and cooperatively during the Scientific Revolution, and continued to do so until at least the second half of the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton wrote far more about biblical prophesy than he did about physics; and Galileo’s writings were actually widely praised by many Catholic prelates, including Pope Urban VIII, until a variety of political, personal, and other factors finally led to the notorious confrontation of 1633.
Art Remillard
Great show! I’ll be assigning it in my Religion in the U.S. class next semester. Interestingly, I listened to this as I was finished reading _The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age_ by Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson. The authors recently wrote for the NYT: http://nyti.ms/tzjJCo. So many wonderful connections between this show and their work!
Bill
“As used in science, “theory” does not mean the same thing as it does in everyday life. A theory is not a guess, hunch, hypothesis, or speculation. It is much more full-blown.
A theory is built upon one or more hypotheses, and upon evidence. The word “built” is essential, for a theory contains reasoning and logical connections based on the hypotheses and evidence. Thus we have Newton’s theory of gravity and the motion of planets, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the germ theory of disease, the cell theory of organisms, plate tectonics (theory of the motion of land masses), the valence theory of chemical compounds, and theories of evolution in biology, geology, and astronomy. These theories are self-consistent and consistent with one another.”
Creationism and Intelligent Design are not based on science
I’d like to recommend a wonderful documentary:
Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
http://documentarystorm.com/intelligent-design-on-trial/
http://www.nebscience.org/theory.html
Andy
I found it difficult to believe the science teacher from Dayton Tn is in reality a science teacher. Of course Darwinian Evolution can’t explain the origin of life, Darwinian Evolution is about the evolution of life. One can’t have evolution without life. The question of where did life come from was answered in the 1950s by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey when they did a chemistry experiment. The “science teacher” you interviewed should be informed of this fact. Contrary to the teacher’s comments the evidence for the origins of life is without doubt. It is amazing that this “science teacher” says “let science lead us” when he has rejected science. Evolution on small and large scales has been tested over and over and found to be validated by these experiments. The fact of the matter is that “Intelligent Design” is untestable. I defy any “Intelligent Design” proponent to come up with a way to test “God did it”. In fact I live for the day a researcher to publish a paper that proves once and for all that god did create the universe and empirical evidence shows that the Hindus are right. Then you’ll hear the “Intelligent Design” proponents claim that the experiment was flawed because it did not show that the Christian god was the creator. This “science teacher” is who to blame when we wonder why students in the United States are not able to do science.
Dean Effler
This was the best coverage of the evolution vs creation debate that npr has put on but it still has some major drawbacks.
The arguments are not about science vs religion. It is an argument about two different views of science that have religious implications. Modern science believes in naturalism and creationists believe that there are supernatural forces in the world that can explain the origin of the world around us. Being a creationist does not stop individuals from being scientists. Many Bible believing scientists have used empirical scientific methods to successfully learn about and describe the world around us. I have a question for the naturalists. What if they are wrong?
One shouldn’t immediately dismiss the idea that the fossil record was triggered by a world wide flood that covered the whole earth. We certainly don’t see conditions today that would produce large world wide grave yards of extinct and current existing animals and plants. Also the methods that are used to give a billion or so years to the earth using radioactive dating are based on assumptions that are unknown to man. To date rock using radioactive methods the scientists have to know what the original rock contained regarding the parent and daughter compounds. Since no one was here to measure those quantities the scientists put into the equations numbers that will give you millions and billions of years so there will be enough time for evolution to occur. That is just playing unfairly.
Evolution is not real science. Oh just like creation scientists they use scientific jargon, scientific measurements, and write papers but unlike the empirical science that allows us to build and fly rockets and make computers evolution can’t study in real time what they claim has happened. No one has seen a land mammal go back in the water and become a whale. No one has seen a singular cellular organize and become a multi-cellular organism with different organ function. When genetic changes happen in organisms today through the sharing of genetic material or through genetic mutations the organisms are still microbacteria, dogs, corn, or birds. They don’t change into other organisms and they never will. Evolution is a belief system not a real empirical scientific endeavor.
No naturalist scientist has ever had an adequate explanation of the way we went from a mixture of molecules in the primordial soup to the exact code, language, decoding mechanism, repair mechanisms, and information that we have in a single living cell. Richard Dawkins when pressed with this issue said he believes life came from little green men from outer space. He can believe in little green men but not in God. This answer just begs the question since he would still have to explain how little green men evolved and he can’t. Another evolutionary scientist, I’m sorry I forgot his name, said that he admitted that science has not explained how we can go from molecules to man but he saw only two choice. One is evolution and the other is creation but an intelligent being. He also said that he didn’t want to believe in a God so he’s siding with evolution. Now there was an honest man.
markie
I always floors me that a little knowledge of the nature of RNA/DNA and what it can do in a billion years is so easily denied by ignorance.
Steve MacIntyre
It’s scary that Joseph Wilkie is the head of a high-school science department and has been teaching science for 27 years. Let science go where it may, he says, asserting that there has never been experimental confirmation of Darwinian evolution.
Natural selection (evolution) has been experimentally confirmed a thousand times over and is directly observable both in nature and in the laboratory be it with respect to the size of finch beaks or the color of London pigeons. Indeed, many of the miracles of modern medicine would be utterly impossible were the forces of evolution not at work.
How can Mr. Wilkie not know this? But he doesn’t. He is profoundly ignorant and presumably passing on his ignorance to a generation of students.
Steve MacIntyre
Pardon my spelling. I meant Mr. Wilkey.
r
Andy, you have one of those wonderful minds that stays open just long enough to find something it can absorb, then closes down to make sure that original piece of knowledge isn’t affected.
the argument is definitely about science vs. pseudo-science. The criticism that no one has “seen” evolution is infantile – no one has seen an atom or many of the molecules that are used on a daily basis in the “empiricial” sciences that you applaud. What about inference? Or do you mean that inference is valid only when you agree with it. Given an incomplete dataset, such as the fossil record, what is one supposed to do – infer, ignore, or read a book that was written long before the dataset existed, and use the dataset to support the book?
JimM
I find it incredible that in your discussion of Jefferson’s stated position that mixing the races contravened God’s plan because he clearly created them separately, you chose not to mention that Jefferson fathered several children with a slave woman in his household, Sally Hemings, who was apparently his white wife’s own half-sister!
How can you possibly justify an omission of such enormity?
Stryder Lee
A few points to consider:
Christians who argue for the “evidence” of creationism are *not* exercising faith according to its definition in Hebrews 11:1 that emphasizes blind belief in that which cannot be seen. To argue for the proof of biblical claims is to demonstrate a lack of faith which would require no proof.
Secondly, religious books should *not* be given special treatment in an academically oriented program but should be interpreted with the same framework used on any text. Literalism becomes a *huge* problem in the Bible, not only with “creation” but also the story of Noah’s boat – check the description: 2 of every animal, multiple decks but ONE window??
It might be worthwhile to challenge Christians to justify their selective literalism whether it be in Genesis or Leviticus. Allowing any and all “faith” claims to pass unchallenged undermines the credibility of the show. It’s a tricky path to navigate but it is possible.
If Genesis is literal, then it means God approved of incest in the early years. And then there’s the whole issue of two accounts of creation that mention two distinct races of humans. Those created first did not have “original sin” only those in the second story. The story of the Garden is fraught with trouble as well since Eve is held responsible for moral choice before she is capable of making one. And what kind of deity prohibits knowledge anyway?
It may be that we can be no more certain about our ultimate origins as we can about our future or the existence of alien life – so what? It seems to me we’ve got MUCH more serious problems and questions to address.
Dean Effler
Mr. Stryder is correct that Christian faith in the Bible is defined as being “certain of what we do not see”. It is true that we did not see God, an omniscient being, create the universe. But that does not mean that we cannot find evidence that suggests that he made it. Evidence does not deny faith but encourages it. Evolutionists must rely on faith in things they have never seen as well. They have never seen a soup of raw chemicals become a living creature. They have never seen a single cell organism organize into a complex organism like a mammal. They have never seen a land mammal go back into the sea to become a whale. That’s real faith to believe in those things.
As far as Noah and the animals, consider this. The Bible specifically says that God sent 2 of every kind of unclean animal to the ark. If chosen wisely be God there would only need to be two of the cat kind and two of the dog kind rather than every breed of cat and dog. With sufficient genetic diversity in the two animals all the types of cats and dogs could spread across the post-flood environments by benefit of natural selection and speciation. Creationists don’t deny natural selection. We just don’t believe there is any evidence that it results in upward “evolution” from one species to another or from molecules to man.
Yes, if the Biblical account is true there had to be marriage, intercourse and child raising between brothers and sisters in the generations after creation. In the generations following Adam and Eve there was no law given by God forbidding such relationships. On the other hand since Adam and Eve would have been created with perfect genes, i.e. no diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or other genetic diseases there would have been no health reasons why brothers and sisters could not marry and have children. It would have been only many generations after Adam and Eve were created that there would have been enough genetic errors in the human code to worry about health risks of near relatives having children. Yes the human race is devolving rather than evolving into a better species. Time and mistakes in the genetic code have accomplished this. A loving God later in history told mankind to stop having sexual relations with near family members to avoid having genetically inferior children.
There are not two contradictory stories of creation and two different races. The first chapter of Genesis deals in general with God’s hand in the entirety of creation, the earth moon, stars, and sun. The next chapter focuses on the unique creation of man and women who are the only creatures created in God’s image. It is a total misreading of Genesis to think that these stories are describing two different races of humans.
As to Eve’s role in original sin, Adam was more to fault than Eve. Adam was given more authority by God to his role as husband/leader. He was responsible for the decisions his wife made. He stood by and let her disobey God and then disobeyed himself. The rest of scripture points to Adam as the source of sin and death not Eve.
Mr. Stryder needs to spend a little more time in the Bible and read some of the apologetics in websites like AnswersinGenesis.org. I enjoy conversations like this. It’s so eye opening to see how people with a non Biblical world view think.
Liz Shively
A biblical worldview does not require Christians to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of evolution. For more details, see my comments from June 2010, above.
Dean Effler
I humbly disagree. There is only overwhelming evidence for natural selection within similar species. There is not overwhelming scientific evidence for molecules to complex life evolution.