A Sermon by Andrew L. Reeves
YOU HEARD, in what I chose to call the "Scripture Lesson", the first verses of the Judæo-Christian Bible. Although they stand at the beginning of the Bible, they are actually not the oldest part of the Bible; according to studies of Bible scholars the passage was composed during the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish nation and was inspired by the Babylonian creation myth. It is quite distinct from a second creation myth which contains the Adam and Eve story and which, al-though it follows in the Bible the passage read to you, is actually of much earlier origin. The two appear to have been combined during the general editing of scripture texts after the return of the Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem, probably by the prophet Ezra.
No one can gainsay the poetic beauty of the passage and, by the lights of 6th century B.C. philosophy, it is also remarkably profound. It suffices to point out the appearance of dry land by gathering of the waters under heaven during the third day, or creation of life in the waters preceding that on land during the fifth and sixth days. Of course, it was phrased in the terminology of the age and the same ideas would sound quite different if written today. I once amused myself by attempting to rewrite Genesis in contemporary language--how would it sound if expressed in modern scientific terms? Here is a sample:
In the beginning, God created space and matter.
Matter was not yet organized into atoms, and sub-
atomic particles were compressed into a singular-
ity. And God said, "Let there be an electromag-
netic field"--and there was an electromagnetic
field. And God saw that it was good because this
would explode in one Big Bang; and it was so.
This brought to conclusion the First Great Epoch
of the Universe.
There seems to be some question whether this "translation" would be readily accepted today by most ecclesiastical authorities. In fact, a much lesser reinterpretation of ancient beliefs in Galileo's time had dire consequences for its proponent. A new storm broke out a few centuries later when Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species". Just as it is not at all clear today why a geocentric Universe was viewed as essential for virtuous Christian beliefs in Galileo's time, it is no more clear why God should be required to have created all biological species in separate actions, rather than allowing them to evolve from one/another. The latter would be a much more parsimonious way of running the world, if you ask me.
Unfortunately, nobody is asking me, and the Christian fundamen-talists have brought this issue again into the forefront of the ideol-ogical battles of our age. The issue has a long and lamentable history in which the warring parties frequently do not even agree on the mean-ing of words. The biological definition of evolution simply is that life forms have evolved over the ages from the primitive to the com-plex, and since humankind is also a life form, it also evolved from less advanced precursors. According to its foes, the concept also en-compasses the notions that the Earth is millions of years old, con-trary to the Bible story; that the origin of life was a purely mechan-istic event with no supernatural intervention; and that the whole sequence of later development proceeded according to some "natural law", without direction, supervision, or purpose. Thus, it is inher-ently Godless. Although the sciences of modern biochemistry, geology and paleontology would in general agree with the cited propositions, it is noteworthy to point out that they are not automatic components of the concept of evolution.
The idea that life forms descended from one another did not orig-inate with Charles Darwin. Its earliest mention goes back at least to Descartes, and was explicitly or tacitly assumed by Linnæus, Buffon, and Lamarck. Darwin merely suggested a novel explanation for the phen-omenon: variability, the struggle for existence, and natural selection by survival of the fittest. It may be that these concepts offended the pious desires of decent people who wished that mutual assistance, rather than ruthless competition, were the universal governing factor in a moral world. Suffice it to say that most Christian denominations rose in outraged fury against the Darwinian doctrine, well illustrated by a Lutheran catechism published as late as 1946:
"The Bible doctrine that God is the universal Father,
the almighty Creator, is confirmed in nature. God's
world corroborates His Word. All creation points to
just such a Creator as the Scriptures make known to
us. Yet this doctrine of divine creation is opposed
and ridiculed by many people. Sad to say, it is bold-
ly denied by many who wish to be called Christians.
They refuse to accept what is stated in the first ar-
ticle of the Creed, and attempt to explain our exis-
tence and that of the creatures with which we are sur-
rounded, by some theory of evolution. They eliminate,
in whole or in part, the Creator, and put in His place
what is termed "Natural Law"...If evolution were like
many other scientific theories, even though it were
false, the Christian Church would have no direct in-
terest in its discussion. But this theory is in a high
degree pernicious as well as false. It is a doctrine
which robs the Creator of His glory. It contradicts
the Bible; it attacks the faith of the Christian; it
denies the truth which is dear to the child of God.
Evolution is being carried like poison gas into many
of our schools, especially our high schools and uni-
versities, where it has destroyed the faith of thousands
of youth. We do not expect the instructors of our pub-
lic schools to be teachers of religion, but when they
become deliberate destroyers of faith, the Church must
raise its voice in protest and warning."
Strong words from a group not otherwise regarded as extremist, and of course the reactions from the fundamentalist denominations were even stronger. American lawmakers acceded to public demand and the first law prohibiting the teaching of evolution was enacted in the early 1920's in the state of Tennessee. John Scopes, biology teacher in the high school of Dayton, Tennessee, was accused of violating this law; in his trial, both the prosecution and the defense were conducted by colorful personalities who created the first big legal media cir-cus. The trial ended in finding Scopes guilty and fining him $100--but the proceedings were actually a defeat for the fundamentalist position because the defense attorney succeeded in ridiculing the creationists before the public. The anti-evolution forces thereupon retreated from public confrontation; courts eventually held that the Tennessee stat-ute and another similar law in Arkansas were unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. It seemed that the secular position achieved vic-tory--but it turned out to be only a truce.
The anti-evolution forces regrouped; it became clear that the constitutional prohibition against teaching religion in the public schools required a different and more subtle approach. In 1963, the "Creation Research Society" was formed, with the express intent to shore up the creationist view with scientific, or at least seemingly scientific, arguments. To be sure, membership in the Creation Research Society was by strict religious test, and all prospective members had to sign a Statement of Faith which you can find as a handout enclosed to today's program. It is interesting to note that this text was al-ready a product of internal compromise. The hard-liners originally wanted to include an affirmation that the six days of Creation were actual 24-hour periods, and that all sedimentary layers of the Earth's crust, studied by geologists, were deposited during the "Noachian Flood"--but these points were in the end omitted from the final draft.
For all the seeming piety of Creation Research Society members, they were not above formulating a strategy that seems very worldly in-deed. The definitive book on the subject by Ronald Numbers, "The Crea-tionists", quotes an internal memorandum of the Creation Research Society that sounds pretty cynical:
"Sell more SCIENCE...Who can object to teaching
more science? What is controversial about that?
...do not us the word "creationism". Speak only
of science. Explain that withholding scientific
information contradicting evolution amounts to
"censorship" and smacks of getting into religi-
ous dogma. Use the "censorship" label as one who
is against censoring science. YOU are for science;
anyone else who wants to censor scientific data
is an old fogey and too doctrinaire to consider."
The problem was, of course, that the creationist movement had no science to sell. It could not point to any scientific work that even addressed in a credible fashion, let alone confirmed, the Genesis ac-count of Creation. All it could do was to to attack the evolutionary theory, and it did that mainly by attempting to show that the debate between biologists regarding the mechanisms of evolution was a symptom for the unsoundness of the theory itself. Catastrophism vs. gradual-ity, punctuated equilibrium, and occasional errors in fossil datings including the infamous Piltdown hoax, were exploited to show that evolution was just another theory. Perhaps one can forgive the Arch-bishop Usher who in the first half of the 17th century concluded from diligent calculation based on all pertinent Old Testament sources that the Universe was created on October 23, 4004 B.C., at 9 o'clock in the morning. It is harder to understand how Henry Morris, Director of the Institute for Creation Research, could write in 1978:
"The only way we can determine the true age of the
Earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since
He has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures
that it is several thousand years in age, and no more,
that ought to settle all basic questions of terres-
trial chronology".
So much for all geology, paleontology, physics (with radiocarbon dating alone going back to about 50,000 years) and astronomy (with numerous extragalactic objects being at millions of light years dis-tance). Nonetheless, creationism, or "creation science" as it was now called in deference to possible First Amendment objections, achieved considerable influence. During the 1980's the states of Louisiana and Arkansas enacted "Balanced Treatment" laws, which required that if "evolution science" is being taught in the public schools, "creation science" must be taught also. These laws were eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court but the issue is by no means dead. Quite recently, and in our own metropolitan area, the debate surfaced again when the school board in Melvindale announced its intent to put the question on its agenda--according to a survey by the Detroit News, 58 % of respondents agreed with the proposition that creationism was more than just religious theology, and deserved equal consideration with evolution in the public schools.
It would be interesting to find out what these respondents actu-ally meant by "creationism." The movement is not monolithic; there are degrees of creationism. The real diehards, also known as "Young Earth" advocates, insist on the literal inerrancy of the Genesis story, with each day of creation actually being a 24-hour period. There are others who are willing to compromise at least on this point and although they insist that the Genesis story is accurate, they allow that what is a day to God might actually be a whole epoch in our reckoning. These are the "Old Earth" Creationists. Still further down the line are those who do not insist that God must have created each and every species out of nothing in separate actions; they allow that some "development" from one life form to another might have occurred (note the avoidance of the E-word) and separate acts of creation pertained only to genera, or classes, or some other larger biological unit as indeed only the latter are explicitly mentioned in the Genesis text. Finally, in to-day's polarized atmosphere, even those are counted among the creation-ists who actually have no problem with the concept of evolution but insist that the latter proceeded not by Darwinian principles or other natural law, but shows evidence of "intelligent design."
I have to confess some personal sympathy with the latter posi-tion, and my only problem with it is, whose intelligence are we talk-ing about, ours, or God's? What evidence do we have that the two oper-ate along the same lines of logic? And, if they do, then does not the fact that we can comprehend Darwinian evolution show that even that might have been instituted by some type of intelligent design? It might turn out that the great intellectual controversy of our day is just so much ado about nothing. It is a melancholy comment on human intelligence that controversies of this sort are invariably carried our with the hottest passion and most bitter mutual venom.
To my knowledge, nobody has tested the question thus far whether the two billion years, more or less, of time that was available on Earth for organic evolution was, or was not, sufficient for the evolu-tion of all life forms from simplest organic precursors to humans by purely Darwinian mechanisms--i.e., random mutations and natural selec-tion. Yet such a test ought to be possible today by creating an appro-priate computer program. Of course, there would be uncertainties--the mutational rate might have changed from epoch to epoch if the solar system passed in and out of galactic regions of high radiation; we have only scantiest knowledge of climatic or other environmental changes that might have affected the Earth during its history. For that matter, the "two billion years, more or less" that have elapsed since the Proterozoic Era in which the first hints of biologic life are found could be easily twice that, or one-half. These uncertainties in my opinion matter little. A "ballpark" estimation of the time re-quirement is all that is needed, and should a computer program show that the time requirement for the evolution of life as we have it to-day by Darwinian principles is orders of magnitude out of kilter with what appears to have been the time available, I would accept that as proof--or perhaps not proof, but strong indication--that there must have been a guiding hand along the way rather than blind forces. Whether that "guiding hand" was simply an as yet undiscovered prin-ciple of nature, or proof for the existence of God, is a question that is truly worth some thought--and again, I deplore that neither the creationists nor the Darwinists have thus far bothered to ask that question, or seem to have given it any thought.
It happens that I have a grandson who is a graduate student of computer science at the University of Michigan, and also a natural philosopher who occasionally thinks about these things. He arrived at the insight, much like Laplace did 200 years ago, that he did not need the hypothesis of God for a satisfactory explanation of the world around him, which is more than what I am prepared to admit at this point. I have therefore asked him to respond to my presentation, spec-ifically whether he sees the creation of such a computer program feas-ible, and how would he interpret the results if those indeed showed that Darwinian evolution was not suitable to explain the multiplicity of life forms around us.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Danny Reeves.
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