Creationism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Creationism
At a broad level, a Creationist is someone who believes in a god who
is absolute creator of heaven and earth, out of nothing, by an act of
free will. Such a deity is generally thought to be
“transcendent” meaning beyond human experience, and
constantly involved (‘immanent’) in the creation, ready to
intervene as necessary, and without whose constant concern the
creation would cease or disappear. Christians, Jews, and Muslims are
all Creationists in this sense. Generally they are known as
‘theists,’ distinguishing them from ‘deists,’
that is people who believe that there is a designer who might or might
not have created the material on which he (or she or it) is working
and who does not interfere once the designing act is finishing. The
focus of this discussion is on a narrower sense of Creationism, the
sense that one usually finds in popular writings (especially in
America today, but expanding world-wide rapidly). Here, Creationism
means the taking of the Bible, particularly the early chapters of
Genesis, as literally true guides to the history of the universe and
to the history of life, including us humans, down here on earth
(Numbers 1992).
Creationism in this more restricted sense entails a number of beliefs.
These include, first, that a short time has elapsed since the
beginning of everything. ‘Young Earth Creationists’ think
that Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation of
about 6000 years is a good estimate. Second, that there are six days
of creation – there is debate on the meaning of
‘day’ in this context, with some insisting on a literal
twenty-four hours, and others more flexible. Third, that there was a
miraculous creation of all life including Homo sapiens
— with scope for debate about whether Adam and Eve came together
or if Eve came afterwards to keep Adam company. Fourth, that there was
a world-wide flood some time after the initial creation, through which
only a limited number of humans and animals survived. Fifth, that
there were other events such as the Tower of Babel and the turning of
Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Creationists (in this narrow
sense) have variously been known as Fundamentalists or biblical
literalists, and sometimes – especially when they are pushing
the scientific grounds for their beliefs – as Scientific
Creationists. Today’s Creationists are often marked by
enthusiasm for something that is known as Intelligent Design. Because
the relationship between Creationism in the sense of literalism and
Intelligent Design is somewhat complex, examination of this
relationship will be left until later and, until stated otherwise, the
following discussion focusses on literalists. (Because
‘literalist’ is the common term, we continue to use it.
More accurately, such people are better known as
‘inerrantists,’ implying that the stress is less on the
actual words and more on the interpretation, especially given the
extent to which they interpret the Bible, especially when it comes to
prophecies.)
With significant provisos to be noted below, Creationists are strongly
opposed to a world created by evolution, particularly to a world as
described by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species.
Creationists (certainly traditional Creationists) oppose the fact
(pattern) of evolution, namely that all organisms living and dead are
the end products of a natural process of development from a few forms,
perhaps ultimately from inorganic materials (‘common
descent’). Often this is known as ‘macroevolution’
as opposed to ‘microevolution,’ meaning apes to humans
rather than merely one species of finch to another. Creationists also
oppose claims about the total adequacy of the Darwinian version of the
theory of evolution, namely that population pressures lead to a
struggle for existence; that organisms differ in random ways brought
on by errors in the material of heredity (‘mutations’ in
the ‘genes’); that the struggle and variation leads to a
natural form of selection, with some surviving and reproducing and
others failing; and that the end consequence of all of this is
evolution, in the direction of well-adapted organisms.
1. History of Creationism
Creationists present themselves as the true bearers and present-day
representatives of authentic, traditional Christianity, but
historically speaking this is simply not true (Ruse 1988 (ed.), 2005;
Numbers 1992; McMullin 1985). The Bible has a major place in the life
of any Christian, but it is not the case that the Bible taken
literally has always had a major place in the lives or theology of
Christians. For most, indeed, it has not (Turner 2002). Although, one
should remember that most literalists are better known as
inerrantists, because they often differ on the meaning of a literal
reading! Tradition, the teachings and authority of the church, has
always had main status for Catholics, and natural religion –
approaching God through reason and argument – has long had an
honored place for both Catholics and Protestants. Catholics,
especially dating back to Saint Augustine around 400 AD, and even to
earlier thinkers like Origen, have always recognized that at times the
Bible needs to be taken metaphorically or allegorically. Augustine was
particularly sensitive to this need, because for many years as a young
man he was a Manichean and hence denied the authenticity and relevance
of the Old Testament for salvation. When he became a Christian he knew
full well the problems of Genesis and hence was eager to help his
fellow believers from getting ensnared in the traps of literalism.
It was not until the Protestant Reformation that the Bible started to
take on its unique central position, as the great Reformers –
especially Luther and Calvin – stressed the need to go by
scripture alone and not by what they took to be the overly rich
traditions of the Catholic Church. But even they were doubtful about
totally literalistic readings. For Luther, justification by faith was
the keystone of his theology, and yet the Epistle of Saint James seems
to put greater stress on the need for good works. He referred to the
gospel as ‘right strawy stuff.’ (Wengert 2013). Calvin
likewise spoke of the need for God to accommodate His writings to the
untutored public – especially the ancient Jews – and hence
of the dangers of taking the Bible too literally in an uncritical
sense. The radical branch of the Reformation under Zwingli always put
primacy on God’s speaking directly to us through the heart, and to
this day one finds modern-day representatives like the Quakers
uncomfortable with too-biblically centered an approach to religion.
It was after the religious revivals of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth century in Britain and America – revivals that led to
such sects as the Methodists – that a more full-blooded
literalism became a major part of the religious scene. In America
particularly literalism took hold, and especially after the Civil War,
it took root in the evangelical sects – especially Baptists
– of the South (Numbers 1998; Noll 2002). It became part of the
defining culture of the South, having (as we shall see below) as much
a role in opposing ideas and influences of the leaders and policy
makers of the North as anything rooted in deeply thought-through
theology. Note the important qualification, ‘leaders and policy
makers’ of the North. Many – especially working and
lower-middle-class people – living in the large cities of the
North felt deeply threatened by the moves to industrialism, the
weakening of traditional beliefs, and the large influx of immigrants
from Europe. They provided very fertile material for the literalist
preachers. (See the extended discussions of these happenings in Ruse
2013.) Thanks to a number of factors, Creationism started to grow
dramatically in the early part of the twentieth century. First, there
were the first systematic attempts to work out a position that would
take account of modern science as well as just a literal reading of
Genesis. Particularly important in this respect were the Seventh-day
Adventists, especially the Canadian-born George McCready Price, who
had theological reasons for wanting literalism, not the least being
the belief that the Seventh Day – the day of rest – is
literally twenty-four hours in length. Also important for the
Adventists and for fellow travelers, that is people who think that
Armageddon is on its way, is the balancing and complementary early
phenomenon of a world-wide flood. (This, as we shall see, was to
become a major theme in twentieth-century Cold War times.) Second,
there was the released energy of evangelicals (referring generically
to Protestants whose faith was tied to the Bible, taken rather
literally) as they succeeded in their attempts to prohibit liquor in
the United States. Flushed from one victory, they looked for other
fields to conquer. Third there was the spread of public education, and
more children being exposed to evolutionary ideas, bringing on a
Creationist reaction. Fourth, there were new evangelical currents
afloat, especially the tracts the Fundamentals – a series of
evangelical publications, conceived in 1909 by California businessman
Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian –
that gave the literalist movement its name. And fifth, there was the
identification of evolution – Darwinism particularly –
with the militaristic aspects of Social Darwinism, especially the
Social Darwinism supposed embraced by the Germans in the First World
War (Larson 1997; Ruse 2018a).
This battle between evolutionists and ‘Fundamentalists’
came to a head in the mid 1920s in Dayton Tennessee, when a young
school teacher John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching
evolution in class, in defiance of a state law prohibiting such
teaching. Prosecuted by three-times presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan and defended by noted agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow,
the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ caught the attention of the
world, especially thanks to the inflammatory reporting of
Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken. Matters descended to
the farcical when, denied the opportunity to introduce his own science
witnesses, Darrow put on the stand the prosecutor Bryan. In the end,
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. This conviction was overturned
on a technicality on appeal, but there were no more prosecutions, even
though the Tennessee law remained on the books for another forty
years. In the 1950s, the Scopes trial became the basis of a famous
play and then movie, Inherit the Wind. This portrays the Bryan
figure as a bigot, wedded to a crude picture of life’s past. In fact,
Bryan in respects was an odd figure to be defending the Tennessee law.
He thought that the days of Creation are long periods of time, and he
had little sympathy for eschatological speculations about Armageddon
and so forth. It is quite possible that, humans apart, he accepted
some form of evolution. His objections to Darwinism were more social
than theological. He hated what he thought were the militaristic
implications that many drew from the struggle for existence at the
center of Darwin’s thinking. The First World War, with many justifying
violence in the name of evolutionary biology, confirmed his
suspicions. (The Pulitzer Prize winning, Summer of the Gods,
Larson 1997, is definitive on the Scopes trial. It is generally agreed
that Inherit the Wind is using history as a vehicle to
explore and condemn McCarthy-like attacks on uncomfortably new or
dissenting-type figures in American society.)
2. Creation Science
After the Scopes Trial, general agreement is that the Creationism
movement had peaked and declined quite dramatically and quickly. Yet,
it (and related anti-evolution activity) did have its lasting effects.
Text-book manufacturers increasingly took evolution – Darwinism
especially – out of their books, so that schoolchildren got less
and less exposure to the ideas anyway. Whatever battles the
evolutionists may have thought they had won in the court of popular
opinion, in the trenches of the classroom they were losing the war
badly. Things started to move again in the late 1950s. It was then
that, thanks to Sputnik, the Russians so effectively demonstrated
their superiority in rocketry (with its implications for the arms race
of the Cold War), and America realized with a shudder how ineffective
was its science training of its young. Characteristically, the country
did something immediate and effective about this, namely pouring money
into the production of new science texts. In this way, with class
adoption, the Federal Government could have a strong impact and yet
get around the problem that education tends to be under the tight
control of individual states. The new biology texts gave full scope to
evolution – to Darwinism – and with this the Creationism
controversy again flared right up. Children were learning these
dreadful doctrines in schools, and something had to be done (Ruse (ed.)
1988; Gilkey 1985).
Fortunately for the literalist, help was at hand. A biblical scholar,
John C. Whitcomb, and a hydraulic engineer, Henry M. Morris, combined
to write what was to be the new Bible of the movement, Genesis
Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications
(1961). Following in the tradition of earlier writers,
especially those from Seventh-day Adventism, they argued that every
bit of the Biblical story of creation given in the early chapters of
Genesis is supported fully by the best of modern science. Six days of
twenty-four hours, organisms arriving miraculously, humans last, and
sometime thereafter a massive world-wide flood that wiped most
organisms off the face of the earth – or rather, dumped their
carcasses in the mud as the waters receded. At the same time, Whitcomb
and Morris argued that the case for evolution fails dismally. They
introduced (or revived) a number of arguments that have become
standard parts of the Creationist repertoire against evolution. Let us
look at a number of these arguments, together with the
counter-arguments that evolutionists make in response.
First, the Creationists argue that at best evolution is only a theory
and not a fact, and that theories should never be taken as gospel (if
one might be permitted a metaphor). They claim that the very language
of evolutionists themselves show that their ideas are on shaky
grounds. To which charge evolutionists respond that this is to confuse
two senses of the word ‘theory.’ Sometimes we use it to
mean a body of scientific laws, as in ‘Einstein’s theory of
relativity.’ Sometimes we use it to mean an ‘iffy
hypothesis,’ as in ‘I have a theory about Kennedy’s
assassination.’ These are two very different senses. There is
nothing iffy about the Copernican heliocentric theory. It is true. It
is a fact. Evolutionists argue that the same is the case with
evolution. When talking about the theory of evolution, one is talking
about a body of laws. In particular, if one is following the ideas of
Charles Darwin, one is arguing that population pressures lead to a
struggle for existence, this then entails a natural selection of
favored forms, and evolution through shared descent is the end result.
This is a body of general statements about life, since the 1930s given
in a formal version using mathematics with deductive inferences
between steps. In other words, we have a body of laws, and hence a
theory in the first sense just given. There is no implication here
that the theory is iffy, that is in the second sense just given. We
are not necessarily talking about something inherently unreliable. Of
course, there are going to be additions and revisions, for instance
the possibility of much greater hybridization than someone like Darwin
realized, but that is another matter (Quammen 2018).
Second, Creationists like Whitcomb and Morris claim that the central
mechanism of modern evolutionary thought, Darwin’s natural selection,
is bogus. They argue that it is not a genuine claim about the real
world but merely a truism, what philosophers call a tautology –
something true by the meaning of the words like ‘bachelors are
unmarried.’ In the case of natural selection, the Creationists
point out that an alternative name for the mechanism is ‘the
survival of the fittest.’ But, they ask, who are the fittest?
They reply: Those that survive! Hence, natural selection reduces to
the tautology that those that survive are those that survive. Not a
real claim of science at all. To which evolutionists respond that this
is a sleight of hand, showing ignorance of what is genuinely at stake.
Natural selection is truly real, for it talks about some organisms
actually surviving and reproducing in life’s struggles and others
failing to do so. Some of our would-be ancestors lived and had babies
and others did not. There was a differential reproduction. This is
certainly not a mere truism. It could be that everyone had the same
number of children. It could also be that there is no difference
overall between the successful and the unsuccessful. This too is
denied by natural selection. To say that something is the fitter or
fittest is to say that it has certain characteristics (what biologists
call adaptations) that other organisms do not have, and that on
average one expects the fitter to succeed. But there is no guarantee
that this must be so or that it will always happen. An earthquake
could wipe out everyone, fit and unfit.
Before discussing the third argument Creationists level against
evolution, it is worth pausing over this second one. Most if not all
professional evolutionists argue that sometimes natural selection is
not a significant causal factor. In this sense, it is false that
selection is something that by definition is and always is the reason
for lasting change. The fittest do not always win. It cannot be a
tautology. In the 1930s, the American population geneticist Sewall
Wright devised his hypothesis of “genetic drift,” arguing
that sometimes mere chance can lead to effects overriding the forces
of selection (Wright 1931, 1932). Although, at first, this was
embraced enthusiastically (Dobzhansky 1937), it soon became clear that
at the gross physical (phenotypic) level it is at most minor (Coyne,
Barton, and Turelli 1997). However at the level of the gene
(genotype), it is still thought very important. Indeed, it is a
powerful tool in discovering the exact dates of key evolutionary
events, especially those involving speciation (Ayala 2009). Moreover,
as we shall see in a moment, somewhat paradoxically, as Creationism
has evolved (!), increasingly the virtues of selection working at the
microevolutionary level have become apparent. Thus can one explain the
diversity of life on earth – it evolved since leaving the Ark,
which contained only generic kinds. For all its supposed faults, there
is a better discussion of natural selection at the Creationist museum
in Kentucky than in the Field Museum in Chicago, 300 miles north. The
bar on macroevolution remains absolute.
Third, Creationists point out that modern evolutionary theory asserts
that the raw building blocks of evolution, the genetic mutations, are
random. But this means that there are minimal chances of evolution
producing something that works as well and efficiently as an organism,
with all of the functioning parts in place. A monkey typing letters
does so randomly. It could never in a million years (in a billion,
billion, billion… years) type the works of Shakespeare. The
Creationists say that same is true of evolution and organisms, given
the randomness of mutation. To which evolutionists reply that this may
all be well and true of the monkey, but in the case of evolution
things are rather different. If a mutation works, then it is kept and
then built upon, until the next good mutation comes along. This
shrinks considerably the odds of evolution producing organisms, even
though the appearance of mutation is random. Suppose you take just one
phrase from Shakespeare. ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me
your ears.’ If you had to get every letter right straight off,
you would be into a huge time-span. Twenty-six (the number of letters,
more if you include capitals and gaps and punctuation) to the power of
the number of spaces. But if you are allowed to keep the
‘F’ as soon as you get it, and then go on to try for a
‘r’, you are no longer going back to square one each time
and suddenly the task becomes much more manageable. (Dawkins 1986 has
a good discussion of these issues.) Incidentally, add evolutionists,
one must take care in speaking of mutation as ‘random.’
There is no implication that mutation is uncaused or something else
rather peculiar. Rather is meant that mutations do not occur according
to need. Suppose a new disease appears. Evolutionary theory does not
guarantee that a new, life-protecting mutation will occur to
order.
Fourth in the litany of Creationist complaints, there is a perennial
favourite based on paleontology. Creationists agree that the fossil
record is sequential, fish to primates moving upwards, but argue that
this is the result of the sorting effect of the Flood. Primates are
above dinosaurs, for example, because primates are more agile and
moved further up the mountain before being caught and drowning. They
also argue, however, that the fossil record ought to be continuous if
evolution occurred, but in real life there are many gaps between
different form – jumps from one kind of organism to another.
Apes to humans would be a case in point. This spells Creation not
evolution. To which the response comes that on the one hand one
expects such gaps. Fossilization is an uncommon occurrence –
most dead bodies get eaten straight away or just rot – and the
wonder is that we have what we do have. On the other hand argue
evolutionists, the record is not that gappy. There are lots of good
sequences – lines of fossils with little difference between
adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or (in
more detail) the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to
the modern horse on one toe. Moreover, in refutation of Creationism,
we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood.
For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never
found down with the dinosaurs. Those brutes of old expired long before
we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this.
Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second
law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down –
entropy increases, to use the technical language. Energy gets used and
converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service. But
organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law. This would be
impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind
evolution (meaning change without direct divine guidance) of organisms
from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like
humans. There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous
intervention to produce functioning life. To which argument the
response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that
things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of
the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy
from elsewhere. And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the
energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while. Eventually the sun
will go out and life will become extinct. The second law will win
eventually, but not just yet.
Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is
said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law (that is,
unguided law), especially not by blind evolutionary laws. They must
have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary
supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional. In fact,
today the fossil record for humans is strong – we evolved over
the past four million years from small creatures of half our height,
who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we.
There is lots of fossil proof of these beings (known as
Australopithecus afarensis). Recently, there are other
pertinent discoveries, showing that (as one would expect) there is not
only evolution towards modern humans, but branching and sidelines, for
instance of the so-called “hobbit,” Homo
floresiensis (Falk 2012). Perhaps it is true that we humans are
special, in that (as Christians claim) we uniquely have immortal
souls, but this is a religious claim. It is not a claim of science,
and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls.
There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution,
but this is the nature of science. No branch of science has all of the
answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the
answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true
of their branch of science.
3. Understanding Creationism in its Cultural Context
Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment
and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the
cultural context. First, as a populist movement, driven as much by
social factors – a sense of alienation from the modern world
— one would expect to find that cultural changes in society
would be reflected in Creationist beliefs. This is indeed so. Take,
above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the
middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was
very popular because it was thought to justify slavery (Noll 2002).
Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly
against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends
making people into the property of others – the Bible elsewhere
seems to endorse slavery. Remember, when the escaped slave came to
Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey
him. Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist
circles well into the twentieth century. Price, for instance, was
quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites. By the time of
Genesis Flood, however, the civil rights movement was in full
flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully. They explained in
detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as
inferior. The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to
a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy
Scriptures. Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but
literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato
or Aristotle. That is why many refer to Creationists as
“inerrantists” rather than “literalists.”
Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons,
Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright
opposition to evolution of all kinds. Could it really be that Noah’s
Ark carried all of the animals that we find on earth today? It would
be much easier if the Ark carried only the basic “kinds”
of Creation, and then after the Flood the animals dispersed and
diversified. We find in fact then that although Creationists were (and
are) adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of
natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from
early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be
called evolution! This said, Creationists were convinced that this
change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists
would allow. Although it took some time to formulate, gradually we see
emerging the strategy of (what we have seen as) distinguishing between
what is called “microevolution” and
“macroevolution.” Supposedly, microevolution is the sort
of thing that brought diversification to Darwin’s finches, and many
Creationists – notwithstanding the fact that it is supposedly a
tautology – are even prepared to put this down to natural
selection. Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals
mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during
the days of Creation. Although he was a lifelong opponent of
Creationism (see below), forever committed to common descent, and
thought that all changes must be natural, Creationists seized with
glee on paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s claims that microevolution
must be selection-fueled and macroevolution might require other causal
forces (Gould 1980).
Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that
Creationism is purely an epistemological matter – a matter of
facts and their understanding. Moral claims have always been
absolutely fundamental. Nearly all Creationists (in the Christian
camp) are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing
that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last
Judgement. They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus
will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that
perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era.
Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus
– hence, we should engage in social action and the like.
Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better
the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready
for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others.
For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all
Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family
sanctity (which today encompasses anti-abortion), sexual orthodoxy
(especially anti-homosexuality), biblically sanctioned punishments
(very pro-capital punishment), strong support for Israel (because of
claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End
Times), and so forth. It is absolutely vital to see how this moral
agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods
and Arks. (Ruse 2005 discusses these matters in much detail.)
4. Arkansas
Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful,
and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris
particularly and his coworkers and believers – notably Duane T.
Gish, author of Evolution: The Fossils Say No! – pushed
the literalist line. Particularly effective was their challenging of
evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical
trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with
bold statements (provocatively made most often by Gish) about the
supposed nature of the universe (Gilkey 1985; Ruse (ed.) 1988). This all
culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the
1970s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for
state legislatures, that would allow – insist on – the
teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools. In the
biology classes of such schools, that is. By this time it was realized
that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the
Constitution (that which prohibits the establishment of state
religion), it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution
from such schools. The trick was to get Creationism – something
that prima facie rides straight through the separation of
church and state – into such schools. The idea of Creation
Science is to do this. The claim is that, although the science
parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as
good science. Hence, these draft bills proposed what was called:
‘Balanced treatment.’ If one were to teach the
‘evolution model,’ then one had also to teach the
‘Creation Science model.’ Sauce for the evolutionist goose
is also sauce for the Creationist gander.
In 1981, these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was
passed and signed into law – as it happens, by a legislature and
governor that thought little of what they were doing until the
consequences were drawn to their attention. (William Clinton was
governor from 1978 to 1980, and again from 1982 to his winning of the
presidency, in 1992. The law was passed during the interregnum.) At
once the American Civil Liberties Union sprang into action, bringing
suit on grounds of the law’s unconstitutionality. The theologian
Langdon Gilkey, the geneticist Francisco Ayala, the paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould, and as the philosophical representative Michael
Ruse appeared as expert witnesses, arguing that Creationism has no
place in state supported biology classes. The state’s position was not
exactly helped when one of its witnesses (Norman Geisler, a
theologian) admitted under cross-examination to his belief in UFOs as
a satanic manifestation. Hardly surprisingly, evolution won. The judge
ruled firmly that Creation Science is not science, it is religion, and
as such has no place in public classrooms. The judge (William Overton)
ruled that the ‘essential characteristics’ of what makes
something scientific are:
It is guided by natural law;
It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
It is testable against the empirical world;
Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final
word; and
It is falsifiable.
In the judge’s opinion, Creation Science fails on all counts, and that
apparently was an end to matters. In 1987 this whole matter was
decided decisively in the same way, by the Supreme Court, in a similar
case involving Louisiana. (See Ruse (ed.) 1988, for an edited
collection that reproduces many of the pertinent documents, including
state bills, as well as witness testimony and the judge’s
ruling.)
Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was
certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial
was less theological or scientific, but philosophical. (Paradoxically,
the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and
only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand. As
it happens, as the judge’s ruling shows, the philosophical testimony
proved crucial.) Look again at the fifth of the judge’s criteria for
what makes for good or genuine science. The Creationists had started
to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing
philosopher
Karl Popper
(1959). As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be
genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable. By this, Popper meant
that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world.
If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight
another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be
rejected – or at least revised. Popper (1974) himself expressed
doubts about whether evolutionary theory is genuinely falsifiable and
he rather inclined to think that it is less a description of reality
than a heuristic to further study, what he called a
‘metaphysical research programme’ (Ruse 1977). The
Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best
authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a
science than Creationism. (To his credit, Popper revised his thinking
on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was
a genuine scientific theory; see Popper 1978).
Part of the testimony in Arkansas was designed to refute this
argument, and it was shown that in fact evolution does indeed make
falsifiable claims. As we have already seen, natural selection is no
tautology. If one could show that organisms did not exhibit
differential reproduction – to take the example given above,
that all proto-humans had the same number of offspring – then
selection theory would certainly be false. Likewise, if one could show
that human and dinosaur remains truly did occur in the same time
strata of the fossil record, one would have powerful proof against the
thinking of modern evolutionists. This argument succeeded in court
– the judge accepted that evolutionary thinking is falsifiable.
Conversely, he accepted that Creation Science is never truly open to
check. On-the-spot, ad hoc hypotheses proliferate as soon as any of
its claims are challenged. It is not falsifiable and hence not genuine
science. However, after the case a number of prominent philosophers
(most notably the American Larry Laudan) objected strongly to the very
idea of using falsifiability as a ‘criterion of
demarcation’ between science and non-science. They argued that
in fact there is no hard and fast rule for distinguishing science from
other forms of human activity, and that hence in this sense the
Creationists might have a point (Ruse (ed.) 1988). Not that people like
Laudan were themselves Creationists. They thought Creationism false.
Their objection was rather to trying to find some way of making
evolution and not Creationism into a genuine science.
Defenders of the anti-Creationism strategy taken in Arkansas argued,
with reason and law, that the United States Constitution does not bar
the teaching of false science. It bars the teaching of non-science,
especially non-science which is religion by another name. Hence, if
the objections of people like Laudan were taken seriously, the
Creationists might have a case to make for the balanced treatment of
evolution and Creationism. Popperian falsifiability may be a somewhat
rough and ready way of separating science and religion, but it is good
enough for the job at hand, and in law that is what counts.
5. The Naturalism Debate
Evolutionists were successful in court. Nevertheless, Laudan and
fellow thinkers inspired the Creationists to new efforts, and
since the Arkansas court case, the philosophical dimension to the
evolution/Creationism controversy has been much increased. In
particular, philosophical arguments are central to the thinking of the
leader of today’s creationists, Berkeley law professor, Phillip
Johnson, whose reputation was made with the anti-evolutionary tract
Darwin on Trial (1991). (Johnson’s influence and importance
is recognized by all and he has become leader emeritus. As we
shall see, the task of leadership then got passed to younger people,
especially the biochemist Michael Behe and the
philosopher-mathematician William Dembski.) In respects, Johnson just
repeated the arguments of the Creation Scientists (those given in an
earlier section) – gaps in the fossil record and so forth
— but at the same time he stressed that the Creation/evolution
debate is not just one of science versus religion or good science
versus bad science, but rather of conflicting philosophical positions.
The implication was that one philosophy is much like another, or
rather the implication was that one person’s philosophy is another
person’s poison and that it is all a matter of personal opinion.
Behind this one sees the lawyer’s mind at work that, if it is all a
matter of philosophy, then there is nothing in the United States
Constitution which bars the teaching of Creationism in schools. (For
better or for worse, one sees the heavy hand of Thomas Kuhn here, and
his claim in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that
the change from one paradigm to another is akin to a political
revolution, not ultimately fueled by logic but more by
extra-scientific factors, like emotions and simple preferences. In the
Arkansas trial, Kuhn was as oft mentioned by the prosecutors as was
Popper.)
Crucial to Johnson’s position are a number of fine distinctions. He
distinguishes between what he calls “methodological
naturalism” and “metaphysical naturalism”. The
former is the scientific stance of trying to explain by laws and by
refusing to introduce miracles. A methodological naturalist would
insist on explaining all phenomena, however strange, in natural terms.
Elijah setting fire to the water-drenched sacrifice, for instance,
would be explained in terms of lightning striking or some such thing.
The latter is the philosophical stance that insists that there is
nothing beyond the natural – no God, no supernatural, no
nothing. ‘Naturalism is a metaphysical doctrine, which
means simply that it states a particular view of what is ultimately
real and unreal. According to naturalism, what is ultimately real is
nature, which consists of the fundamental particles that make up what
we call matter and energy, together with the natural laws that govern
how those particles behave. Nature itself is ultimately all there is,
at least as far as we are concerned’ (Johnson 1995, 37–38).
Then there is someone that Johnson calls a ‘theistic
realist.’ This is someone who believes in a God, and that this
God can and does intervene in the natural world. ‘God always has
the option of working through regular secondary mechanisms, and we
observe such mechanisms frequently. On the other hand, many important
questions – including the origin of genetic information and
human consciousness – may not be explicable in terms of
unintelligent causes, just as a computer or a book cannot be explained
that way’ (p. 209). Johnson thinks of himself as a theistic
realist, and hence as such in opposition to metaphysical realism.
Methodological realism, which he links with evolutionism, would seem
to be distinct from metaphysical realism, but it is Johnson’s claim
that the former slides into the latter. Hence, the evolutionist is the
methodological realist, is the metaphysical realist, is the opponent
of the theistic realist – and as far as Johnson is concerned,
the genuine theistic realist is one who takes a pretty literalistic
reading of the Bible. So ultimately, it is all less a matter of
science and more a matter of attitudes and philosophy. Evolution and
Creationism are different world pictures, and it is conceptually,
socially, pedagogically, and with good luck in the future legally
wrong to treat them differently. More than this, it is incorporated
into Johnson’s argument that Creationism (a.k.a. Theistic Realism) is
the only genuine form of Christianity.
But does any of this really follow? The evolutionist would claim not.
The key notion in Johnson’s attack is clearly methodological
naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism, having been defined as something
which precludes theism, has been set up as a philosophy with a
religion-like status. It necessarily perpetuates the conflict between
religion and science. But as Johnson himself notes, many people think
that they can be methodological naturalists and theists.
Methodological naturalism is not a religion equivalent. Is this
possible, at least in a consistent way with intellectual integrity? It
is Johnson’s claim that it is not, for he wants the religion/science
war to be absolute with no captives or compromises.
6. Can an Evolutionist Be a Christian?
To sort out this debate, let us agree (to what is surely the case)
that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to
accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your
cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package
deal. Take one, and you take the other. Reject one, and you reject the
other. Clearly then, if your theism is one which gets its knowledge of
God’s actions and purposes from a literal reading of the Bible, you
have got a conflict. You cannot accept Genesis literally and
evolution. That is a fact. In other words, there can be no
accommodation between Creationism and evolution. However, what if you
think that theologically speaking there is much to be said for a nice
shade of grey? What if you think that much of the Bible, although
true, should be interpreted in a metaphorical manner? What if you
think you can be an evolutionist, and yet take in the essential heart
of the Bible? What price consistency and methodological naturalism
then? The answer depends on what you take to be the “essential
heart” of the Bible. At a minimum we can say that, to the
Christian, this heart speaks of our sinful nature, of God’s sacrifice,
and of the prospect of ultimate salvation. It speaks of the world as a
meaningful creation of God (however caused) and of a foreground drama
which takes place within this world. One refers particularly to the
original sin, Jesus’ life and death, and his resurrection and anything
which comes after it. And clearly at once we are plunged into the
first of the big problems, namely that of miracles – those of
Jesus himself (the turning of water into wine at the marriage at
Cana), his return to life on the third day, and (especially if you are
a Catholic) such ongoing miracles as transubstantiation and those
associated, in response to prayer, with the intervention of saints.
There are a number of options here for the would-be methodological
naturalist. You might simply say that such miracles occurred, that
they did involve violations of law, but that they are outside your
science. They are simply exceptions to the rule. End of argument. A
little abrupt, but not flatly inconsistent with calling yourself a
theist. You say normally God works through law but, for our salvation,
miracles outside law were necessary. Or you might say that miracles
occur but that they are compatible with science, or at least not
incompatible. Jesus was in a trance and the cure for cancer after the
prayers to Saint Bernadette was according to rare, unknown, but
genuine laws. This position is less abrupt, although you might worry
whether this strategy is truly Christian, in letter or in spirit. It
seems a little bit of a cheat to say that the Jesus taken down from
the cross was truly not dead, and the marriage at Cana starts to sound
like outright fraud. Of course, you can start stripping away at more
and more miracles, downgrading them to regular occurrences blown up
and magnified by the Apostles, but in the end this rather defeats the
whole purpose.
The third option is simply to refuse to get into the battle at all.
You argue that the law/miracle dichotomy is a false one. Miracles are
just not the sorts of things which conflict with or confirm natural
laws. Traditional Christians have always argued this in some respects.
Take the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The turning of the
bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not
something open to empirical check. You cannot disconfirm religion or
prove science by doing an analysis of the host. Likewise even with the
resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion, his mortal body was
irrelevant. The point was that the disciples felt Jesus in their
hearts, and were thus emboldened to go forth and preach the gospel.
Something real happened to them, but it was not a physical reality
– nor, for instance, was Paul’s conversion a physical event,
even though it changed his life and those of countless after him.
Today’s miracles also are really more a matter of the spirit than the
flesh. Does one simply go to Lourdes in hope of a lucky lottery ticket
to health or for the comfort that one knows one will get, even if
there is no physical cure? In the words of the philosophers, it is a
category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set. (Hume
(1748, 1779) is the starting place for these discussions. Although
somewhat dated, Flew and MacIntyre (1955) is still invaluable.
Paradoxically, both of these then-atheist authors came to see the
light and returned to the Christianity of their childhoods!
Apparently, the “words of the philosophers” are not
definitive.)
What has Johnson to say to all of this? Frustratingly, the answer is:
“remarkably little”! In main part this stems from a
refusal to spell out exactly what is meant by “theism”.
What Johnson does say is more in the way of sneer or dismissal than
argument.
Persons who are sufficiently motivated to do so can find ways to
resist the easy pathway from M[ethodological] N[aturalism] to atheism,
agnosticism or deism. For example, perhaps God actively directs the
evolutionary process but (for some inscrutable reason) does so in a
way that is empirically imperceptible. No one can disprove that sort
of possibility, but not many people seem to regard it as
intellectually impressive either. That they seem to rely on
“faith” — in the sense of belief without evidence
– is why theists are a marginalized minority in the academic
world and always on the defensive. Usually they protect their
reputation for good judgment by restricting their theism to private
life and assuming for professional purposes a position that is
indistinguishable from naturalism. (Johnson 1995, 211)
He adds:
Makeshift compromises between supernaturalism in religion and
naturalism in science may satisfy individuals, but they have little
standing in the intellectual world because they are recognized as a
forced accommodation of conflicting lines of thought (p. 212).
At this point, the evolutionist will probably throw up his or her
hands in despair. Where did the idea of ‘makeshift
compromise’ come from except from Johnson’s imagination? In
actual fact, many significant theologians of our age think that, with
respect to miracles, science and religion have no conflict (Barth
1949; Gilkey 1985). They would add that faith without difficulty and
opposition is not true faith, either. “As the Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard … taught us, too much objective
certainty deadens the very soul of faith. Genuine piety is possible
only in the face of radical uncertainty” (Haught 1995, 59). Such
thinkers, often conservative theologically, are inspired by Martin
Buber to find God in the center of personal relationships, I-Thou,
rather in science, I-It. For them there is something degrading in the
thought of Jesus as a miracle man, a sort of fugitive from the Ed
Sullivan Show. What happened with the five thousand? Some hokey-pokey
over a few loaves and fishes? Or did Jesus fill the multitude’s heart
with love, so there was a spontaneous outpouring of generosity and
sharing, as every one in the crowd was fed by the food brought by a
few? These theologians would agree fully with the first part of
Johnson’s characterization of “theism”. Things were very
different thanks to Jesus’ presence and actions. What they deny, here
or elsewhere, is the need to search for exception to law.
Johnson’s Creationism and evolution/naturalism are indeed in conflict.
But Johnson’s Creationism is not all that there is to religion, to
Christianity in particular. There are those who call themselves
theists, who think that one can be a methodological naturalist, where
today this would imply evolution (Ruse 2010). Johnson has not argued
against them.
7. Intelligent Design
Let us move on now from the more philosophical sorts of issues.
Building on the more critical approach of Johnson, who is taken to
have cleared the foundations as it were, there is a group of people
who are trying to offer an alternative to evolution. These are the
enthusiasts for so-called ‘Intelligent Design.’ Supporters
of this position think that Darwinism is ineffective, at least
inasmuch as it claims to make superfluous or unnecessary a direct
appeal to a designer of some sort. These are people who think that a
full understanding of the organic world demands the invocation of some
force beyond nature, a force which is purposeful or at least purpose
creating. Often the phrase which is used is “organized
complexity,” a term much used by the German Romantic philosopher
Friedrich Schelling, and which by invoking the intentional predicate
“organized” rather gives the game away (Richards
2003). For the moment, continue to defer questions about the
relationship between Intelligent Design Theory and more traditional
forms of Creationism.
There are two parts to this approach: an empirical and a
philosophical. Let us take them in turn, beginning with he who has
most fully articulated the empirical case for a designer, the
already-mentioned, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. Focusing
on something which he calls ‘irreducible complexity,’ Behe
writes:
By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to
effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be
produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor
to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by
definition nonfunctional. (Behe 1996, 39)
Behe adds, surely truly, that any
irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would
be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. Since natural
selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a
biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise
as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to
have anything to act on (p. 39).
Now turn to the world of biology, and in particular turn to the
micro-world of the cell and of mechanisms that we find at that level.
Take bacteria which use a flagellum, driven by a kind of rotary motor,
to move around. Every part is incredibly complex, and so are the
various parts, combined. The external filament of the flagellum
(called ‘flagellin’), for instance, is a single protein
that makes a kind of paddle surface contacting the liquid during
swimming. Near the surface of the cell, just as needed is a
thickening, so that the filament can be connected to the rotor drive.
This naturally requires a connector, known as a ‘hook
protein.’ There is no motor in the filament, so that has to be
somewhere else. ‘Experiments have demonstrated that it is
located at the base of the flagellum, where electron microscopy shows
several ring structures occur’ (p. 70). All, way too complex to
have come into being in a gradual fashion. Only a one-step process
will do, and this one-step process must involve some sort of designing
cause. Behe is careful not to identify this designer with the
Christian God, but the implication is that it is a force from without
the normal course of nature. Irreducible complexity spells design.
8. Is Complexity Irreducible?
Irreducible complexity is supposedly something which could not have
come through unbroken law (meaning law that has no special divine
guidance), and especially not through the agency of natural selection.
Critics claim that Behe shows a misunderstanding of the very nature
and workings of natural selection. No one is denying that in natural
processes there may well be parts which, if removed, would lead at
once to the non-functioning of the systems in which they occur. The
point however is not whether the parts now in place could not be
removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in
place by natural selection. Consider an arched bridge, made from cut
stone, without cement, held in place only by the force of the stones
against each other. If you tried to build the bridge from scratch,
upwards and then inwards, you would fail – the stones would keep
falling to the ground, as indeed the whole bridge now would collapse
were you to remove the center keystone or any surrounding it. Rather,
what you must do is first build a supporting structure (possibly an
earthen embankment), on which you will lay the stones of the bridge,
until they are all in place. At which point you can remove the
structure for it is no longer needed, and in fact is in the way.
Likewise, one can imagine a biochemical sequential process with
several stages, on the parts of which other processes piggyback as it
were. Then the hitherto non-sequential parasitic processes link up and
start functioning independently, the original sequence finally being
removed by natural selection as redundant or inconveniently draining
of resources.
Of course, this is all pretend. But Darwinian evolutionists have
hardly ignored the matter of complex processes. Indeed, it is
discussed in detail by Darwin in the Origin, where he refers
to that most puzzling of all adaptations, the eye. At the biochemical
level, today’s Darwinians have many examples of the most complex of
processes that have been put in place by selection. Take that staple
of the body’s biochemistry, the process where energy from food is
converted into a form which can be used by the cells. Rightly does a
standard textbook refer to this vital organic system, the so-called
‘Krebs cycle,’ as something which ‘undergoes a very
complicated series of reactions’ (Hollum 1987, 408). This
process, which occurs in the cell parts known as mitochondria,
involves the production of ATP (adenosine triphosphate): a complex
molecule which is energy rich and which is degraded by the body as
needed (say in muscle action) into another less rich molecule ADP
(adenosine diphosphate). The Krebs cycle remakes ATP from other energy
sources – an adult human male needs to make nearly 200 Kg a day
— and by any measure, the cycle is enormously involved and
intricate. For a start, nearly a dozen enzymes (substances which
facilitate chemical processes) are required, as one sub-process leads
on to another.
Yet the cycle did not come out of nowhere. It was cobbled together out
of other cellular processes which do other things. It was a
‘bricolage’, that is to say it was something put together
in a haphazard fashion. Each one of the bits and pieces of the cycle
exists for other purposes and has been coopted for the new end. The
scientists who have made this connection could not have made a
stronger case against Behe’s irreducible complexity than if they had
had him in mind from the first. In fact, they set up the problem
virtually in Behe’s terms: ‘The Krebs cycle has been frequently
quoted as a key problem in the evolution of living cells, hard to
explain by Darwin’s natural selection: How could natural selection
explain the building of a complicated structure in toto, when the
intermediate stages have no obvious fitness functionality?’
(Meléndez-Hervia et al 1996, 302). (Readers who want to dig
more deeply into some of the technical issues should start with the
entry on
fitness.)
What these workers do not offer is a Behe-type answer. First, they
brush away a false lead. Could it be that we have something like the
evolution of the mammalian eye, where primitive existent eyes in other
organisms suggest that selection can and does work on proto models (as
it were), refining features which have the same function if not as
efficient as more sophisticated models? Probably not, for there is no
evidence of anything like this. But then we are put on a more
promising track.
In the Krebs cycle problem the intermediary stages were also useful,
but for different purposes, and, therefore, its complete design was a
very clear case of opportunism. The building of the eye was really a
creative process in order to make a new thing specifically, but the
Krebs cycle was built through the process that Jacob (1977) called
‘evolution by molecular tinkering,’ stating that evolution
does not produce novelties from scratch: It works on what already
exists. The most novel result of our analysis is seeing how, with
minimal new material, evolution created the most important pathway of
metabolism, achieving the best chemically possible design. In this
case, a chemical engineer who was looking for the best design of the
process could not have found a better design than the cycle which
works in living cells. (p. 302)
Rounding off the response to Behe, let us note that, if his arguments
are well-taken, then in respects we are into a bigger set of problems
than otherwise! His position seems simply not viable given what we
know of the nature of mutation and the stability of biological systems
over time. When exactly is the intelligent designer supposed to strike
and to do its work? In his major work, Darwin’s Black Box,
Behe suggests that everything might have been done long ago and then
left to its own devices. ‘The irreducibly complex biochemical
systems that I have discussed… did not have to be produced
recently. It is entirely possible, based simply on an examination of
the systems themselves, that they were designed billions of years ago
and that they have been passed down to the present by the normal
processes of cellular reproduction’ (Behe 1996, 227–8).
This is not a satisfactory response. We cannot ignore the history of
the genes from the point between their origin (when they would not
have been needed) and today when they are in full use. In the words of
Brown biochemist Kenneth Miller: ‘As any student of biology will
tell you, because those genes are not expressed, natural selection
would not be able to weed out genetic mistakes. Mutations would
accumulate in these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering them
hopelessly changed and inoperative hundreds of millions of years
before Behe says that they will be needed.’ There is much
experimental evidence showing that this is the case. Behe’s idea of
designer doing everything back then and then leaving matters to their
natural fate is ‘pure and simple fantasy’ (Miller 1999,
162–3).
What is the alternative strategy that Behe must take? Presumably that
the designer is at work all of the time, producing mechanisms as and
when needed. So, if we are lucky, we might expect to see some produced
in our lifetime. Indeed, there must be a sense of disappointment among
biologists that no such creative acts have so far been reported. More
than this, as we turn from science towards theology, there even
greater disappointments. Most obviously, what about bad mutations (in
the sense of mutations that lead to consequences very non-helpful to
their possessors)? If the designer is needed and available for complex
engineering problems, why could not the designer take some time on the
simple matters, specifically those simple matters which if unfixed
lead to absolutely horrendous problems. Some of the worst genetic
diseases are caused by one little alteration in one little part of the
DNA. If the designer is able and willing to do the very complex
because it is very good, why does it not do the very simple because
the alternative is very bad? Behe speaks of this as being part of the
problem of evil, which is true, but not very helpful. Given that the
opportunity and ability to do good was so obvious and yet not taken,
we need to know the reason why. (A comprehensive collection, edited by
an Intelligent Design Theorist and an avid Darwinian evolutionist,
contains arguments from both sides, by biologists and philosophers;
see Dembski and Ruse (eds.) 2004.)
9. The Explanatory Filter
Behe is in need of help. This supposedly comes from a conceptual
argument in favor of Intelligent Design due to the also-mentioned,
philosopher-mathematician William Dembski (1998a, b). Let us first
look at his argument, and then see how it helps Behe.
Dembski’s aim is two-fold. First, to give us the criteria by which we
distinguish something that we would label ‘designed’
rather than otherwise. Second, to put this into context, and show how
we distinguish design from something produced naturally by law or
something we would put down to chance. As far as inferring design is
concerned, there are three notions of importance: contingency,
complexity, and specification. Design has to be something which is not
contingent. The example that Dembski uses is the message from outer
space received in the movie Contact. The series of dots and
dashes, zeros and ones, could not be deduced from the laws of physics.
But do they show evidence of design? Suppose we can interpret the
series in a binary fashion, and the initial yield is the number group,
2, 3, 5. As it happens, these are the beginning of the prime-number
series, but with so small a yield no one is going to get very excited.
It could just be chance. So no one is going to insist on design yet.
But suppose now you keep going on the series, and it turns out that it
yields in exact and precise order the prime numbers up to 101. Now you
will start to think that something is up, because the situation seems
just too complex to be mere chance. It is highly improbable.
‘Complexity as I am describing it here is a form of
probability….’ (Dembski 2000, 27).
But although you are probably happy now to conclude (on the basis of
the prime-number sequence) that there are extraterrestrials out there,
in fact there is another thing needed. ‘If I flip a coin 1000
times, I will participate in a highly complex (that is, highly
improbable) event…. This sequence of coin tosses will not,
however, trigger a design inference. Though complex, this sequence
will not exhibit a suitable pattern.’ Here, we have a contrast
with the prime-number sequence from 2 to 101. ‘Not only is this
sequence complex, but it also embodies a suitable pattern. The SETI
researcher who in the movie Contact discovered this sequence put it
this way: “This isn’t noise, this has structure”’
(pp. 27–8). What is going on here? You recognize in design something
which is not just arbitrary or chance or which is given status only
after the experiment or discovery, but rather something that was or
could be in some way specified, insisted upon, before you set out. You
know or could work out the sequence of prime numbers at any time
before or after the contact from space. The random sequence of penny
tosses will come only after the event. ‘The key concept is that
of “independence”. I define a specification as a match
between an event and an independently given pattern. Events that are
both highly complex and specified (that is, that match an
independently given pattern) indicate design.’
Dembski is now in a position to move on to the second part of his
argument where we actually detect design. Here we have what he calls
an ‘Explanatory Filter’ (Dembski 1998a, b). We have a
particular phenomenon. The question is, what caused it? Is it
something which might not have happened, given the laws of nature? Is
it contingent? Or was it necessitated? The moon goes endlessly round
the earth. We know that it does this because of (the updated version
of) Newton’s laws. End of discussion. No design here. However, now we
have some rather strange new phenomenon, the causal origin of which is
a puzzle. Suppose we have a mutation, where although we can quantify
over large numbers we cannot predict at an individual level. There is
no immediate subsumption beneath law, and therefore there is no reason
to think that at this level it was necessary. Let us say, as
supposedly happened in the extended royal family of Europe, there was
a mutation to a gene responsible for hemophilia. Is it complex?
Obviously not, for it leads to breakdown rather than otherwise. Hence
it is appropriate to talk now of chance. There is no design. The
hemophilia mutation was just an accident.
Suppose now that we do have complexity. A rather intricate mineral
pattern in the rocks might qualify here. Suppose we have veins of
precious metals set in other materials, the whole being intricate and
varied – certainly not a pattern you could simply deduce from
the laws of physics or chemistry or geology or whatever. Nor would one
think of it as being a breakdown mess, as one might a bad mutation. Is
this now design? Almost certainly not, for there is no way that one
might pre-specify such a pattern. It is all a bit ad hoc, and
not something which comes across as the result of conscious intention.
And then finally there are phenomena which are complex and specified.
One presumes that the microscopical biological apparatuses and
processes discussed by Behe would qualify here. They are not contingent,
for they are irreducibly complex. They are design-like for they do
what is needed for the organism in which they are to be found. That is
to say they are of pre-specified form. And so, having survived the
explanatory filter, they are properly considered the product of real
design.
Now, with the conceptual argument laid out in full, we are in a
position to turn back to Behe and to see how Dembski’s explanatory
filter is supposed to let Behe’s god off the hook with respect to the
problem of evil. Given the explanatory filter, a bad mutation would
surely get caught by the filter half-way down. It would be siphoned
off to the side as chance, if not indeed simply put down as necessity.
It certainly would not pass the specification test. This would mean
that a dreadful genetic disease would not be the fault of the
designer, whereas successful complex mechanisms would be to the
designer’s credit. Dembski stresses that these are mutually exclusive
alternatives. ‘To attribute an event to design is to say that it
cannot plausibly be referred to either law or chance. In
characterizing design as the set-theoretic complement of the
disjunction law-or-chance, one therefore guarantees that these three
modes of explanation will be mutually exclusive and exhaustive’
(Dembski 1998b, 98).
10. Mutually Exclusive?
The key assumption being made by Dembski is that design and law and
chance are mutually exclusive. This is the very essence of the
explanatory filter. But in real life does one want to make this
assumption? Suppose that something is put down to chance. Does this
mean that law is ruled out? Surely not! If one argues that a Mendelian
mutation is chance, what one means is with respect to that particular
theory it is chance, but one may well believe that the mutation came
about by normal regular causes and that if these were all known, then
it would not longer be chance at all but necessity. The point is that
chance in this case is a confession of ignorance not, as one might
well think the case in the quantum world, an assertion about the way
that things are. That is, claims about chance are not ontological
assertions, as presumably claims about designers must be.
More than this, one might well argue that the designer always works
through law. This may be deism and hence no true Christianity –
some Christians would insist that God does sometimes intervene in the
Creation. But truly Christian or not, a deity who always works through
law is certainly not inconsistent with the hypothesis of a designing
intelligence. The designer may prefer to have things put in motion in
such a way that his/her/its intentions unfurl and reveal themselves as
time goes by. The pattern in a piece of cloth made by machine is as
much an object of design as the pattern from cloth produced by a hand
loom. In other words, in a sense that would conform to the normal
usage of the terms, one might want to say of something that it is
produced by laws, is chance with respect to our knowledge or theory,
and fits into an overall context of design by the great orderer or
creator of things. In short, Dembski’s filter does not let Behe’s
designer off the hook.
If the designer can make – and rightfully takes credit for
— the very complex and good, then the designer could prevent
— and by its failure is properly criticized for – the very
simple and awful. The problems in theology are as grim as are those in
science. (The intelligent design theorists have provided work for many
philosophers eager to refute them. Pennock 1988 and Sober 2000 are
good places to start. See the entry on
teleological notions in biology.)
11. Intelligent Design and Traditional Creationism
Let us now try to tackle the somewhat complex issue of the
relationship between Intelligent Design Theory and traditional
Creationism, as discussed earlier in this essay. In significant
respects, they are clearly not the same. Most Intelligent Design
Theorists believe in a long earth history (even the scientific
estimation of a universe of about 15 billion years in age) and most
accept overall common descent. In a recent book, The Edge of
Evolution , Michael Behe has made this point very clear indeed.
However, there are major overlaps, sufficient to encourage some
critics (myself included) to refer to Intelligent Design Theory as
‘Creationism-lite’ (Ruse 2017, 114).
First, politically, the Creationists are more than willing at the
moment to let the ID theorists do the blocking. Openly they support
the ID movement, believing in taking one step at a time. If ID is
successful, then is the time to ask for more. A major funding and
emotional support for the ID movement is the Discovery Institute, a
privately-supported think tank in Seattle. One of its prominent
members is University of Chicago educated philosopher Paul Nelson, who
is a young-earth creationist and a strong believer in the
eschatological significance of Israel.
Second, do note that both Creationists and ID enthusiasts are
committed to some form of non-naturalist account of origins. The ties
of course are stronger. ID enthusiasts pretend to be neutral about the
Intelligent Designer, but they clearly do not think that he or she is
natural. No one pretends that the earth and its denizens are a lab
experiment being run by a grad student on Andromeda. In fact, in their
own correspondence and works written for followers, they make it very
clear that the Designer is the Christian God of the Gospels. They are
always quoting the first chapter of John – “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.” So in both cases we have an evangelical Christian motive
setting the agenda on origins. Some ID enthusiasts are quite strong
literalists. Johnson for instance thinks that Genesis Chapter Six
might be right about their beings giants in early times – a
point made much of in Genesis Flood. (Forrest and Gross 2004 do a
superb job of ferreting out much of the unstated biblical foundations
of Intelligent Design Theory.)
Third there is the moral factor. There is a very strong streak of
anti-postmillennialism in the writings of ID theorists. They share the
same concern about the moral values of the Creationists –
anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, pro-capital punishment, pro-Israel
(for eschatological reasons) and so forth. Phillip Johnson feels very
strongly that the tendency to cross-dress, including apparently women
who wear jeans, is a sign of the degenerate state of our society
(Johnson 2002).
In short, while there are certainly important differences between the
position of most literalists and most ID supporters, the strong
overlap should not be ignored or downplayed.
12. Recent Developments
Creationism in the sense used in this discussion is still very much a
live phenomenon in American culture today – and in other parts
of the world, like the Canadian West, to which it has been exported.
Popularity does not imply truth. Scientifically Creationism is
worthless, philosophically it is confused, and theologically it is
blinkered beyond repair. The same is true of its offspring,
Intelligent Design Theory. But do not underestimate its social and
political power. As we move through the second decade of the new
millennium, thanks to Johnson and his fellows, there are ongoing
pressures to introduce non-evolutionary ideas into science curricula,
especially into the science curricula of publicly funded schools in
the United States of America. In 2004, in Dover, Pennsylvania, there
was an attempt by the school board to introduce Intelligent Design
Theory into the biology classrooms of the publicly funded schools. As
it happens, this was rejected strongly by the federal judge trying the
case – a man who was appointed by President George W. Bush no
less – and the costs of the case will surely deter others from
rushing to follow the example of this board (who were incidentally
then promptly dropped by the voters.) (A lively account of this trial
is by Lauri Lebo, The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s
Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America. Philosopher
Robert Pennock argued that IDT is not genuine science, and taking
somewhat of a post-modernist stance, philosopher Steven Fuller argued
that it as good science as any other. Pennock and Ruse (eds.) 2008 is
an updated version of Ruse (ed.) 1988, and includes full discussion of
Dover as well as Arkansas.) The battle is not yet over and things
could get a lot worse before they get better, if indeed they will get
better. Already, there are members of the United States Supreme Court
who have made it clear that they would receive sympathetically calls
to push evolution from a preeminent place in science teaching, and
with its turn to the right it would be foolish to assume that if a
case came its way that Creationism or ID theory would be rejected as
unsuitable for public school classroom use. If additions are made,
with present appointments, we could find that — nearly a century
after the Scopes Trial, when the Fundamentalists were perceived as
figures of fun – Creationism in one form or another finally
takes its place in the classroom.
Unfortunately at the moment, those opposed to Creationism are spending
more of their energies quarreling among themselves than fighting the
opposition. There is a crop of “new atheists”, including
the biologist and popular writer Richard Dawkins (2006) and the
philosopher Daniel Dennett (2005) who are not only against religion
but also against those – including non-believers – who do
not share their hostility. At least since the time of the Arkansas
trial, many fighting Creationism (including Gould 1999, 2002; Ruse
2001) have argued that true religion and science do not
conflict. Hence, evolutionists (including non-believers) should make
common cause with liberal Christians, who share their hatred of
dogmatic Christian fundamentalism. Prominent among those so arguing
include the author of this piece, as well as Eugenie Scott of the
National Center for Science Education. They argue that in their
hostility to religion, the new atheists get close to making their own
views quasi-religious – certainly they argue that Darwinism is
incompatible with religion – and hence ripe for the
Creationists’ complaint that if Creationism is not to be taught in
schools (because it violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation of
Church and State), then neither should evolution be so taught. It is
to be hoped that this quarrel will soon subside.
We conclude by noting four recent developments in the Creationism
debate. First, a number of well-known philosophers have started to
make encouraging sounds about Intelligent Design Theory. Calvinist
philosopher Alvin Plantinga has long been a critic of naturalism and
now (in a work based on his 2005 Gifford Lectures at St Andrew’s
University in Scotland) he extends this critique to Darwinian
evolutionary theory, arguing that the evidence in its favor is scanty
(Plantinga 2011). He hedges somewhat on alternatives, but gives a very
sympathetic reading of the thinking of Michael Behe and clearly finds
much in such a position that meshes nicely with his own theological
concerns. Coming from a very different perspective, as he is openly
atheistic, Thomas Nagel (2008) likewise finds much in modern biology
that worries and disappoints him—he makes special reference to
what seems to him to be a total inability to give a naturalistic
explanation of the origin of life—and although obviously he does
not want to endorse Intelligent Design Theory, given the supposition
that it is God who is doing the designing, nevertheless he argues that
Intelligent Design Theory should be taught as an alternative in
state-supported schools in the USA. Recently, in a full-length work,
Mind and Cosmos, he has continued this attack, arguing (2011,
7) that “the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools
needed to understand [the world] is no more credible now than it was
in Aristotle’s day”, thereby implying that the work of
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein and Darwin has not led to
any new tools needed to understand the world. Backing Nagel, at least
in his visceral dislike of Darwinism, is another prominent American
philosopher Jerry Fodor, whose recent, co-authored book is titled
What Darwin Got Wrong. Even if (with reason) Fodor might
argue that he is no Creationist, his position is grist for their mill.
A more thoughtful critique of Darwinism might allay this worry.
It is difficult to know how seriously one is expected to take these
criticisms. Let it be said that one would have a great deal more
respect for the arguments and conclusions put forward if they had been
informed by contemporary writings on evolutionary theory, for
instance, the brilliant and painstaking work of the husband and wife
team of Peter and Rosemary Grant (2007), who have spent decades
studying the evolution and speciation of finches in the Galapagos
Archipelago. Or the groundbreaking work of people like Francisco Ayala
(2009) as they study the molecular factors involved in ongoing
development and change. Not to mention the seminal studies of Brian
Hall (1999) and Sean Carroll (2005) on the ways in which individual
development can get reflected in long-term changes (so-called
“evo-devo”). Though Richard Dawkins can put people off
when he holds forth on matters philosophical or theological, that is
no good reason simply to dismiss without argument his scientific
claims, as Plantinga often does. Likewise, it is true indeed that no
one yet has been able to spell out the full story of the origin of
life, but this doesn’t justify Nagel’s failure to mention that a huge
amount now is known about life’s origins, most especially about the
crucial role played by the secondary ribonucleic acid RNA (rather than
the more familiar DNA) (Ruse and Travis (eds.) 2009). Until the criticisms
put forward by Nagel, Plantinga, Fodor, etc. do start to take
seriously modern science, we might justifiably continue to take them
less than seriously.
One observation to make about these criticisms is that they are put
forward by philosophers in the analytic tradition, which in its early
days involved some opposition to Darwinism (Cunningham 1996). This
goes back to Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, neither of whom
had much time for the theory and (in Russell’s case at least) was
mirrored by a strong dislike of American Pragmatism, a school of
thought that did take Darwin very seriously (Ruse 2009). In both the
case of Russell and Wittgenstein this opposition is based primarily on
a mistaken identification of the thinking of Charles Darwin with that
of
Herbert Spencer.
It was the latter who was much given to seeing evolutionary processes
as justifying extraneous claims about the necessity of struggle and so
forth, views that both Russell and Wittgenstein viewed with as little
enthusiasm as did William Jennings Bryan. Russell learnt his dislike
of evolution as applied to philosophy from his teacher Henry Sidgwick
and Wittgenstein (like other European-born philosophers like Karl
Popper) from the general culture of their youth. Significantly, those
philosophers of the English-speaking tradition of the twentieth
century who have had kind words for Darwin – W.V.O. Quine,
Richard Rorty, and Thomas Kuhn to name three – have all been
sympathetic to Pragmatism in one form or another (Ruse 2018b,
2018c; see also, the entry on
pragmatism).
Second among new or revived discussions of Creationism and its various
aspects, one question often asked is why evolution in particular
raises such ire in evangelicals and related religionists. The Bible
states that the sun stopped for Joshua and yet no one today worries
about the theological implications of the Copernican Revolution.
Michael Ruse particularly, has argued strongly that the main reason
for the conflict is that often evolutionists – Darwinian
evolutionists – turn their secular science into a religion, with
moral imperatives and much more (Ruse forthcoming). The argument is
that, as opposed to the Christian notion of Providence, where we are
entirely in the hands of God, such evolutionists are progressionists,
thinking that change is in our hands and can be for the better. In
theological terms, Creationists tend to be premillennialists,
believing that Jesus will return and rule for a thousand years and all
we can do is get ready for this for instance through converting
others, as opposed to evolutionists who are postmillennialists,
thinking (metaphorically) that paradise is to be made down here by us,
before there is any appropriate talk of a Second Coming.
Thomas Henry Huxley, his grandson Julian S. Huxley, and today’s most
eminent Darwinian evolutionist, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, have been
or are open in their secular religion building. Against the
Creationist urge to save souls, they want to improve science education
(THH), support public mega-works (JSH), and promote biodiversity
(EOW). There is a strong odor of this secular religion building around
the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins (2006), despite denials.
Expectedly, this thesis has not gone down well with many
evolutionists, and conversely has been welcomed by Creationists who
have long made this claim. It should be noted that the arguments do
not and are not intended to give comfort to Creationism as such. The
claim by Ruse and others (for instance Miller 1999 and Pennock 1998)
is that there is a good, scientific theory of evolution, based on
Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. They are not offering a
thesis about the science, but more one almost sociological in trying
to understand the tension. If the thesis proves true, then
evolutionists themselves are in a better position to defend themselves
and to defend their science.
Third among developments in Creationist thinking, especially since the
failure at Dover, we find somewhat of a shift in strategy by religious
critics of Darwinism. Now it is the moral issues that are brought to
the fore. For instance, Richard Weikart (2004) claims that “no
matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly
Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially
from the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial
extermination.” In a similar vein, in the 2008 film
Expelled—a work very favorable to Intelligent Design
Theory—the link is drawn explicitly. Philosopher David Berlinski
is blunt: “if you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you
can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and
Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.” In other words, if you are
into Darwin, you are into National Socialism.
As always, as soon as one starts to look at things a little more
closely, the story becomes more complex (Richards 2013). Let us agree
that something had to lead to Hitler and that given the racism that
infects huge amounts of nineteenth century thinking about
humankind—including Darwin’s Descent of Man—one
should not give evolutionary theory a knee-jerk absolution. In fact,
some early twentieth century writers on war and strife, clearly
inspired in some fashion by Darwin, give one great pause for
reflection. Listen to the sometime member of the German High Command,
General Friedrich von Bernhardi. Darwinism endorses war endorses that
which is morally good or acceptable. “Struggle is therefore a
universal law of Nature, and the instinct of self-preservation which
leads to struggle is acknowledged to be a natural condition of
existence. ‘Man is a fighter’” (von Bernhardi 1912,
13). And “might gives the right to occupy or to conquer. Might
is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is
decided by the arbitration of war. War gives a biologically just
decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things”
(ibid., p. 15). Hence “It may be that a growing people
cannot win colonies from uncivilized races, and yet the State wishes
to retain the surplus population which the mother-country can no
longer feed. Then the only course left is to acquire the necessary
territory by war.”
Yet when one turns to Hitler himself, one soon sees that any
similarities are superficial. One doubts very much that the (to be
generous) ill-educated Fuhrer had ever read Darwin, and his concerns
are not that of the old English evolutionist.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally
creative race died out from blood poisoning. The ultimate cause of
such a decline was their forgetting that all culture depends on men
and not conversely; hence that to preserve a certain culture the man
who creates it must be preserved. This preservation is bound up with
the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and
stronger in this world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and
those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do
not deserve to live. (Hitler 1925, 1, chapter 11)
“Blood poisoning”! The worry here is about the Jews and
their supposed ill-effects on pure races. The Jews do not get a
mention in the Descent of Man (1871), and although Darwin
supposes that white races tend to wipe out others, it is not from any
mental or physical superiority, but because we can tolerate their
diseases but they cannot tolerate ours! And this is all because whites
have had a bigger pool of variants to draw on than have others.
A final brief (fourth) comment is that increasingly the struggle
against Creationism and its various offspring is rapidly becoming a
world-wide struggle. Leading historian of the Creationism movement,
Ronald Numbers (2006), is particularly concerned about this fact. Not
only do we find Creationism on the rise in countries like the
Netherlands (where, with its large conservative Protestant population,
such a rise is not altogether unexpected) but we find enthusiasm in
non-Christian cultures, especially in cultures where Islam is a major
factor. The exact reasons for such a rise have, as yet, been barely
explored, but Numbers is surely right in thinking that theology
probably plays but a minor role, and more sociological
factors—dislike of the hegemony of the West and the role that
science and technology play in such dominance—are probably very
significant.
The fact is that, for whatever reason, if anything Creationism is on
the rise. And with that somber point, this is perhaps a good place to
draw this discussion to a close. If this essay persuades even one
person to take up the fight against so awful an outcome, then it will
have served its purpose.
Bibliography
Ayala, F. J., 2009. “Molecular evolution”, in Evolution: The
First Four Billion Years, in Ruse and Travis (eds.) 2009,
132–151.