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Dan Vergano, Cathy Lynn Grossman, "The whole world, from whose hands?" (2005)
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Dan Vergano, Cathy Lynn Grossman, "The whole world, from whose hands?" (2005)
"The USA Today" Posted 10/10/2005 10:49 PM Updated 10/11/2005 12:06 PM; http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2005-10-10-evolution-debate-centerpiece_x.htm
The whole world, from whose hands?
Scientists: Naturally, they believe in evolutionary biology
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In the fracas over evolution and intelligent design, only one thing stands out as a point of agreement.
Intelligent design really ticks off evolution's supporters.
This movement — as defined by Bruce Chapman, head of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent-design theory — maintains that "some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause."
But scientists view the movement as a Frankenstein-like return of creationists trying to get their views taught in schools, says Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland.
And creationism and evolution are the Godzilla and Mothra of this debate.
"In one sense, intelligent design is really only a minor issue in this debate, which has been loudly going on for a long time," says University of Wisconsin historian Ron Numbers. "Throughout the 20th century, you have seen a great deal of resistance from Americans towards evolution."
Most famously, the ruling in the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Ever since, biologists have seen their discipline as under threat from creationists, Numbers says.
"Science cannot comment on the role that supernatural forces might play in human affairs," concludes a National Academy of Sciences report, Science and Creationism. Most scientists are "naturalists," says science philosopher Michael Ruse of Florida State University in Tallahassee. They simply believe in natural causes for things.
Creationists have assailed evolution with scientific-sounding criticisms for decades, starting at least as far back as 1963's founding of the Creation Research Society. But creationists seemingly lost all hope of entering the science classroom with a 1987 Supreme Court decision striking down a Louisiana law calling for "balanced treatment" of creationism and evolution.
Now a 48-page booklet, Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook, co-written by Discovery Institute fellow Stephen Meyer, offers a $7 guide to legal arguments aimed at getting intelligent design taught in schools. Chapman argues that the controversy over evolution should be taught, an argument that scientists view with some bemusement.
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The "Evolutionary biology is famously full of controversy, but evolution remains the central organizing concept," says biologist Jeffrey Palmer of Indiana University in Bloomington. "If indeed deep flaws in parts of evolutionary biology of the kind speculated upon existed, scientists would be the first to change course," he says.
Scientists maintain that evidence mounts to support evolution, the theory proposed in the mid-1800s by British naturalist Charles Darwin that explains the shared genetic structure of people and plants.
Earlier this month, for example, at the unveiling of chimp genome data showing a 96% similarity to the human genetic blueprint, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Eric Lander said, "Darwin and his descendants couldn't have asked for a better example of how you make scientific predictions and how you verify them in a very rigorous way."
"An enormous amount of scientific investigation since the mid-19th century has converted early ideas about evolution proposed by Darwin and others into a strong and well-supported theory" backed by paleontology, anatomy, embryology and molecular biology, notes the National Academy of Sciences.
Darwin himself wrote, "The explanation of types of structure in classes — as resulting from the will of the Deity, to create animals on certain plans — is no explanation. It has not the character of a physical law and is therefore utterly useless. It foretells nothing because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts and whether constant or inconstant like that of man."
"At one level, scientists are just simply (angry)," says Ruse. "Anybody would feel a certain amount of indignation in being told they don't know what they are doing."
If that's the case, they've been angry for a very long time.
In an 1860 debate between the Darwin-doubting Bishop of Oxley and Darwin protégé Thomas Huxley, the bishop asked Huxley which side of his family was descended from an ape.
Huxley famously replied, "If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who ... plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."
Strong stuff at the time. The newspapers reported that Huxley said he'd "rather be an ape than a bishop."
—Dan Vergano; Contributing: Steve Sternberg
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Creationists: 'If you don't have God at the beginning ...'
Cut to the chase: It's about God.
In the war of worldviews, He cannot lose.
As famed orator William Jennings Bryan wrote in 1925, "God may be a matter of indifference to the evolutionists, and a life beyond may have no charm for them, but the mass of mankind will continue to worship their creator and continue to find comfort in the promise of their Savior that he has gone to prepare a place for them."
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Marvin Olasky puts it more bluntly: "If you don't have God at the beginning, you don't have God at the end and you don't have God in the middle," says the editor of World magazine, a weekly newsmagazine from a biblical perspective.
Set aside the Discovery Institute's insistence on a vague, unseen "designer." Olasky, like many theologically conservative Christians, is uninterested in a dry deist God who boots up Earth like a computer with a big bang, then disappears with no further intervention in human life, love and salvation.
They say if a supernatural force fine-tuned all creation to give rise to physics, chemistry, biology and, finally, to humanity — and then vanished — why pray in the howling storm or rejoice in the stars?
Olasky believes in design and in creation, in a God who causes and who maintains, who is "objectively present and psychologically available. ... It's about hope vs. hopelessness."
Olasky sees "the basic question is this: God vs. time plus chance" — his shorthand for the unguided evolution dear to many scientists. He doesn't want the schools preaching either view, but he's leery of any so-called neutrality that bans God from the classroom.
No creator God means no redeemer God, hence no need for Jesus to die for humankind on the cross. For evangelist Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham, who titled one of her many books Just Give Me Jesus, that would be the starkest tragedy imaginable.
"If you believe you evolved, you say your life is an accident, maybe even a mistake. You have come from nowhere. You are going nowhere, and your life has no eternal purpose. You don't belong to anyone, and you have no accounting to give to anyone."
Says Lotz: "We were created with a capacity to have a personal relationship with God, and that's the huge gap between us and animals. This personal one-on-one intimate love relationship with the Creator is the reason God created us."
Like Olasky, Lotz sees this as a fact, not a religion. "To talk about God as a Creator is not religion. Religion is man's attempt to reach God. This is simply looking at the facts of the world around us. You can't help but look at creation. It's all too phenomenal. You'd have to repress something to think this is all about evolution."
But to follow the views of people like Lotz and Olasky, first shed the "deep-rooted stereotype of Christian fundamentalists as backwoods hicks who hate science and modernity," says Dan Fagin, associate director of New York University's Science and Environmental Reporting program.
"Most fundamentalists in the United States are very much in the modern world, and they tend to be enthusiastic about science and technology except in cases where there's a conflict with a core religious belief, which there usually isn't," Fagin says.
"While all Christian fundamentalists believe the Bible is the word of God, most are not wooden, word-for-word literalists in the way they interpret Scripture," he adds. "There's more flexibility than many secularists realize."
Believers can be flexible on details because they're secure in their belief in an eternal God, says pastor Mark Coppenger, who teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. He envisions scientists clinging to a fading theory of evolution, a theory that strikes him as "a Rube Goldberg yarn," a reference to the cartoonist who imagined complicated devices that performed simple tasks in convoluted ways.
"Scientists are really stuck: They don't have testable, repeatable proof of evolution. You are seeing the extraordinary fight to hold on to a paradigm that is increasingly embarrassed," Coppenger says. "But Christians can think God used evolution or that he created humanity specially. You can take a position anywhere in that spectrum. We have alternatives."
Coppenger's own view is that God created the Earth fairly recently and that it was created "fully formed" with apparent age — rings in the tree trunks, strata in the mountains and all. His faith in God and Christ is not hanging in the balance. He can be wrong on Earth if not in heaven.
"If a believer comes before God in heaven and God says, 'I used evolution,' I don't think a believer will say, 'I want my money back.' Whatever the ultimate truth is, Christianity can ultimately accommodate it."
—Cathy Lynn Grossman
The Middle Ground: Two views compatible
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Many people stand somewhere between the ardent advocates of creationism or intelligent design and the secular proponents of pure evolution.
Although recent Catholic opinion appears to ping-pong between cardinals who dismiss evolution and those who don't, the Vatican's position in its 2004 International Theological Commission report concludes that God's creation and the evolutionary process of nature are not incompatible.
They don't see the Bible's Book of Genesis as a scientific treatise, but as the story of how "God intended for there to be humanity and destined humanity for union with him," says the Rev. Drew Christianson, editor of America magazine.
Many Christians and Jews are "more interested in God the Redeemer than God the Creator," says Margaret Wertheim, director of the Institute for Figuring, which promotes public understanding of science.
"For ordinary people, the workings of quantum mechanics or molecular biology (have) no bearing on the daily personal God people want in their lives. And I agree with them. We want to fit God, love, atoms and quantum mechanics into one theory of everything when there are different realms we have to accept," she says.
A Rice University poll of 2,200 natural and social scientists found nearly 67% view themselves as "spiritual."
Michael Ruse of the University of Florida says most scientists are "naturalists" who don't deny the existence of God but agree with the National Academy of Sciences' view: Science can say nothing authoritative about anything supernatural.
