Objections to evolution

Abstract: Thomas Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for disseminating Darwin’s theory in the western world and maintained that investigating the history of life should be regarded as a purely scientific question free of theological speculation. The content and rhetorical strategy of Huxley’s defense of evolution is analyzed. Huxley argued that the classification of humans should be determined independent of any theories of origination of species. Besides providing evidence that demonstrated the close relationship between apes and humans, he also argued that a pithecoid ancestry in no way degraded humankind. In his broader defense of evolution he drew on his agnosticism to define what science could and could not explain. Theology made empirical claims and needed to be subject to the same standards of evidence as scientific claims. He maintained that even most scientific objections to evolution were religiously based. The objections to the theory fundamentally remain the same as in the nineteenth century and much can be learned from Huxley to develop effective strategies for educating the public about evolution. Huxley’s own scientific articles as well as his popular writings provide numerous examples that could be harnessed not only for the teaching of evolution, but also for understanding science as a process.

Abstract: Teaching materials frequently answer objections to evolution by demarcating science from religion. Because definitions of science shaped by demarcation tend to magnify its empirical features, they weaken students’ understanding of science’s theoretical dimension. Demarcation fails to answer creationism for the opposite reason; by insisting that the observable world is the exclusive domain of science, it undermines the core Abrahamic assumption that nature can make meaningful reference to a divine creator. After exploring how demarcation is employed in a booklet designed to guide educators who address evolution and creationism, the National Academy of Sciences’ Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008), I conclude by proposing a more balanced approach for teaching about NOS and creationism.

Abstract: Fundamentalists—those ministers, theologians, and laymen who joined forces against theological liberalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—cared deeply about history. In this sense they were no different from other protestants of their age, confronted with a historicized Bible and a world falling into the strict sequential order required by modernity. But fundamentalists were different. They viewed time in categories inherited from American protestant thought, as a logical unfolding of a single beginning rather than as open-ended development. This principle of “first things” lay behind their objections to evolution and biblical criticism, but also their stand on social issues, their insistence that the role of women could and should not progress and change over time. Among evangelicals today, the fundamentalist sense of time as the extension of full and complete beginnings still resonates, in opposition to abortion and homosexuality and in their continuing reverence for the American founding fathers. History can be powerfully immediate. For evangelicals, the Bible is not an ancient text about long-dead people but fully contemporary, and thus read not “literally,” as if every word were true, but as if time did not exist. Ultimately, however, history has no depth or traction, or any theological meaning, a parenthesis between the God-ordained beginning and end of time.

Abstract: The staying power of creationist objections to evolution needs explanation. It depends on the use of “blood” language. Both William Jennings Bryan and, a century later, Ken Ham connect evolution with the blood of predation and the blood of apes, and both also connect evolution with the blood of atonement. Drawing on Mary Douglas and Bettina Bildhauer, I suggest that blood becomes important to societies that image the social body on the human body. Blood reveals the body as porous and vulnerable and therefore needing social work to be constructed as whole and bounded. Blood is the place where society conducts this work. I conclude that blood language is ineliminable from Christian discourse and indeed from discourses that model the social on the individual body. The solution, I suggest, is not to avoid the language of blood, but to continue to use it in ways that broaden its focus from human sin to human and animal suffering.