The Faith Angle Forum is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics & public life.
“The Bible and Biology: How Did We Get Here?”
South Beach Miami, Florida
Speaker:
Dr. Ted Davis, Professor of the History of Science, Messiah College
List of participants found here
Presentation audio | Q & A audio part 1 | Q & A audio part 2
Presentation slides
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Michael Cromartie, Moderator[/caption]
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, once a year we have a session on Christianity and science and the relationship therein, and we're delighted to have as our final speaker Dr. Ted Davis. He's a professor of the History of Science at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. We're going to hear from Dr. Davis this morning on "The Bible and Biology: How Did We Get Here?" Then we'll have plenty of time for Q&A.
TED DAVIS: Thank you, Michael.
So to start, here is what I want to try to accomplish. I want to answer three questions for you. (Slide 2) Why has evolution
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Dr. Ted Davis, Messiah College[/caption]
been so controversial among American Christians? There are a variety of reasons for that. That's a historical question as well as a contemporary question. I think the reasons have not changed significantly since the time of the Scopes trial, as you'll see. Second, there are two very prominent forms of anti-evolutionism today. One of them is sometimes called scientific creationism or young earth creationism or just creationism without an adjective in front. The other is intelligent design, which its critics often call intelligent design creationism. I'm a dissenter on that tag. If you want to explore that with me more fully in the Q&A, I'll give you my reasons. But also, what do these two positions claim about God, the Bible, and evolution? Then the third question, at the end, does the acceptance of evolution entail the denial of orthodox Christianity? Now, here I am using orthodox Christianity with a small "o." I don't mean specifically the Orthodox churches, that is, the churches of the east, the non-Roman forms of Christianity from the ancient world. I don't mean that. I'll define it for you clearly when we get to that point, what do I mean by orthodox Christianity, small "o"?
Let's start with perhaps the most famous trial of the 20th century. (Slide 3) I still think that might be true in spite of other trials we've had subsequently, certainly one of the most famous trials of the 20th century. The trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a public school in Tennessee in the summer of 1925.
I can say so much about this and not get past this slide and we would be done, but then I wouldn't have answered any of the questions I put on the screen. Suffice it to say that this was a show trial. It was technically a criminal trial for a misdemeanor, for breaking an act that Tennessee had just enacted a few weeks earlier. It was an act that made it illegal for any public school teacher-- also meant, in context, public university teacher, in Tennessee--to teach evolution or any theory which denies the biblical theory of creation, or words to that effect, making explicit reference to the Bible in the act.
As soon as that bill passed, the ACLU took out newspaper advertisements across the State of Tennessee inviting challenges and offering to pay the expenses of any public school teacher who would deliberately break the law in order to put the law itself on trial. So the whole point was to put the law on trial, not to put an individual on trial, to get a criminal conviction and then take the law itself to higher courts for appeal to try to overturn the law. That's a short version of what took place.
John Scopes was a science teacher who normally didn't teach biology, substituting for the principal when he was ill; he reviewed for the finals at the end of the year, perhaps used the "E" word in class, they found students who could testify to that effect, used the approved textbook in Tennessee, which is all about evolution. He had agreed to stand trial at the request of his boss, the head of the school board in that district, who wanted to put the town of Dayton, Tennessee, on the map.
So John Scopes, a rookie teacher, agreed to do that. He was charged with breaking the law. Right after he was told that he had broken the law, and thank you very much, he walked out of the conversation where that happened and went back to playing tennis with some of the boys at the school.
That summer the trial happened, and two people who weren't there in the beginning showed up on their own initiative. First, for the prosecution, to help uphold the law in Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan, who we see on our right, was a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president of the United States, the youngest candidate, in fact, in American history. He was 36 years old when he first ran for president in 1896. He was a very liberal Democrat. If you've read the article that was in your packet, you can see the kinds of things he supported. I will skip that.
Then on the left, Clarence Darrow, arguably the greatest trial lawyer of the 20th century, shows up in court because Bryan is already there. Bryan has gone there, volunteered his services to the prosecution because he was asked to do so by someone called William Bell Riley, who was the first President of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, which was founded right after World War I. Bryan had been crusading for anti-evolution laws across the country starting in 1922. Tennessee had taken the bait on that, had passed a law that was then broken and enforced. So that's what led to all this.
But when Darrow learned that Bryan was going to be there, he jumped at this. Darrow was an agnostic by his own religious admissions, that's what he tells people in correspondence, that he was an agnostic. He was seen publicly as an atheist, and that's because he was an anti-religious person. He loved to debate Christians in public settings about, for example, the reliability of the Bible, such things as, "Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale?" as Darrow puts it. In fact, when Bryan and Darrow go at this in the Scopes trial in a famous scene when Bryan himself is cross-examined by Darrow on the Bible, Bryan points out it's actually a big fish (in the Bible), and they get into arguments about things like this.
That's all famous. You can read about that in Ed Larson's Pulitzer Prize winning book on the Scopes trial called Summer for the Gods. And if I can digress for a second, I'm going to pass this book, Trial and Error around while I'm talking. If you want information, reliable information, about the legal history of creationism, this is the best source. This is another book by Ed Larson. This is the Third Edition updated to include the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. It's on the American controversy over creation and evolution. That's a wonderful source. Larson is an attorney and a professor of law at Pepperdine. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winning historian trained in my field, History of Science.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We also had him here.
[caption id="attachment_26669" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr. Ted Davis[/caption]
TED DAVIS: You had him here. Great. So that's a great resource. I'll just put it on your radar screens.
So Darrow has this reputation of being the village atheist, and he is showing up here in order to get opportunities to have a public platform from which, through the press, to debate William Jennings Bryan about issues about the Bible and Christianity. He offers his support to John Scopes, goes directly to the defendant. The defendant says, "Yes, I would like you to be my lead attorney," even though the ACLU already has a team onsite, and they don't want Darrow in this, but Darrow comes in and Scopes accepts him. Darrow pays his own expenses and he takes this opportunity to market his ideas in this way.
Now, why did Bryan get involved in a crusade? Why did he really effectively start a political crusade to try to outlaw the teaching of evolution in publicly funded schools? Private schools could do whatever they want. Well, he had never been a proponent of evolution. Going back into his history, he always saw evolution as what he called the "law of hate," the law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. He's referring to the popularly worded definition of Darwinian evolution, which was "survival of the fittest," language that Charles Darwin himself did not use in the first edition of the Origin of Species but used in some later editions after Herbert Spencer, the famous social philosopher, had described Darwin's theory as "survival of the fittest."
Bryan's opposition to monopolistic capitalism, which was rampant at the turn of the century, was one of the reasons he opposed evolution. It’s kind of ironic; isn't it? That forms of social Darwinism in the late 19th century, including rampant American capitalism, was itself justified in the eyes of the proponents by Darwin's theory of evolution, and yet, of course, Darwin's theory of evolution, in turn, had come out of what would have been called at the time liberal economics in the 19th century, that is, free market economics, the economics specifically of Malthus and of Adam Smith. Those are the intellectual currents underlying evolution by natural selection. I won't say more about that; you can go after that in the Q&A if you would like.
But for now, it has come full circle. These ideas expressed in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection are seen in Germany before World War I as justification for the German military dominance of Europe.
Now, these ideas reach America through a leading American biologist at the time, Vernon Kellogg, who is a professor at Stanford, and he is a pacifist, and during World War I, before the United States gets involved, Kellogg goes over to Belgium to help in the relief efforts for the civilian population there. (Slide 4) He is actually assisting his former student Herbert Hoover, who is setting this up in Europe. This is before the United States becomes a combatant nation.
Recall World War I begins in the summer of 1914, and the United States doesn't get involved until the spring of 1917, during which time, in fact, William Jennings Bryan is Secretary of State, and then he pulls out of Woodrow Wilson's government because he believes Wilson is duplicitously leading America into war, and at that point, Bryan is probably a pacifist himself. Indeed, he and Darrow both wrote pacifist tracts during World War I for the same collection of writings, and politically, Darrow and Bryan were very much on the same page for much of their lives. In fact, Darrow ran for Congress in 1896 in Chicago on the same ticket that Bryan is heading at the federal level, and they both get defeated.
In any case, back to Kellogg. Kellogg writes about his experiences in Belgium, specifically his conversations he has with German officers at the headquarters of the German command in that part of Belgium. It turns out he is billeted in a building where he has frequent conversations with German officers.
Kellogg, like many other American scientists of that generation, got his doctoral work done in Germany, so he's fluent in German. He has conversations with these officers, and then he comes back to America and writes about it in this book published by the Atlantic Monthly Press with a preface by Theodore Roosevelt. In this book, he relates that German officers (some of whom were university professors before the war) have given him the impression that what he calls the gospel of an Allmacht, an omnipotence of natural selection, it's really important to the German intelligentsia, and in their minds, it gives them justification for dominating the rest of Europe militarily as a necessary consequence of natural law. That’s the view he expresses, a view that horrifies Kellogg, but this is what he is hearing and this is what he tells the American people he is hearing about Germany.
Bryan reads this book and he is shocked, too. This is one of the reasons why after World War I he decides it's time now to ban the teaching of evolution in American schools. This is also the first time that most Americans are going through public high school, and so they're seeing evolution for the first time and bringing it back to their families.
So in 1922, William Jennings Bryan travels the country trying to persuade state legislatures to ban the teaching of evolution in publicly funded schools. Fundamentalists, who are only just appearing on the landscape by that name at this time are really excited by this, and the leading fundamentalist cartoonist of the day, Ernest James Pace, who had been a former political cartoonist in Chicago before his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, cartoons Bryan and his ideas in very favorable ways often.
(Slide 5) This particular cartoon shows us a lot. Notice the reference to the Battle of Verdun, and the iconography shows Bryan as the hero of Verdun with the banner, the French battle cry from that battle. Verdun, of course, had been one of the great battles of World War I. It was a fortified French town, many, many forts around it, multiple armies, I mean multiple German army groups, and multiple French army groups, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of men, I don't recall the right number, were fighting for a long time at Verdun, as they often were in World War I conflicts. His fundamentalist followers are behind him. Of course, outside the ramparts are the enemies of the Bible, and the enemies of the Bible, by implication of this iconography are who? Well, the Germans, of course.
There was a profound anti-German feeling in the United States after World War I. Germany was not only linked with Darwinian evolution in a social Darwinian way, as I've already indicated, but Germany was also the source of modern biblical scholarship, and that's another reason why Germany is seen as the land of infidelity on the part of American fundamentalists after World War I.
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Now, how fundamentalists themselves see their own situation is illustrated by this cartoon (Slide 6) from a leading fundamentalist periodical, of the time. This comes from something called The King's Business, which was published out of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which is now Biola University. It used to be in downtown L.A. It's now in suburban La Mirada. The dean of the faculty at Biola in the '20s was a leading fundamentalist biblical scholar and theologian named Reuben Torrey. He had been the third and final editor of a series of pamphlets published shortly before the war called "The Fundamentals," which were defending traditional Christianity against very liberal Christians who had already identified themselves as modernists; that is, "modernist" and "fundamentalist" were self-chosen labels from the period in the same way in which pro-choice and pro-life are self-chosen labels of a controversy going on right now. Opponents might have had other terms for people, but they were the terms that the proponents themselves chose.
This cartoon shows the battleships of modernity bombarding the Bible, and these battleships are labeled "Culture," "Liberal Theology," "Modern Thought," "Science," "Hypothesis" (you'll see why "Hypothesis" shortly) and "Atheism." They're bombarding a Bible which, of course, like the Rock of Gibraltar, is not going down, but it's an intense controversy. This is a contest, in other words, of culture wars, no less than today. There was a great culture war going on in the 1920s, and American Protestants were caught up in it. Bryan and other self-labeled fundamentalists saw evolution as just one of several aspects of modernity that's attacking the Bible.
Now, the word "fundamentalist" itself comes in this context. Verbally there is some suggestion that it may have been in use prior to its first use in print. Historians have not found an earlier reference to the word than from a Baptist magazine in July of 1920. So the word "fundamentalist" originates in an American context, in a Protestant context, at this time. (Slide 7)
Despite its later use in many ways, even the late Stephen Jay Gould used to describe some of his scientific colleagues as scientific fundamentalists for their attitude toward religion. Of course, it's been used in reporting on Islamic context for a while as well.
But it originates in this context, and the Baptist editor of a magazine called The Watchman-Examiner has just returned from a convention where he's been talking with friends who are concerned about liberal tendencies in the denomination and they have agreed that they need to start identifying themselves as a group in certain ways, they're looking for a name, and he himself, he says, speaking of himself, "We suggest that those who still cling to the great fundamentals," (he means traditional Christian doctrine), "and who mean to do battle royal for the fundamentals shall be called fundamentalists." This is how the word is used in that sense. The leading historian of fundamentalism, George Marsden, has emphasized this aspect of the definition I think properly, the militant anti-modernism, as the essence of the attitude of fundamentalists, and you can see that in the viewpoints they took toward evolution.
So this movement has been in existence really. It's been growing since the late 19th century, but it self-identifies as fundamentalists under that label in the decade of the 1920s, and that, of course, is the decade in which the Scopes trial takes place.
Now, what about evolution? What are the problems that Christians had with evolution then and that many still have now? Well, one of them is the view that evolution is simply a hypothesis, meaning an unwarranted guess, a wild guess, that it is not supported by the facts. Scientists use the word "hypothesis" in a different sense, as a possible truth for which evidence will be gathered over time in an effort to show that beyond a reasonable doubt we should believe it, whereas Bryan and fundamentalists use it in the sense of something you just thought of all of a sudden last night. It's shown in this cartoon by Pace (Slide 8) as a hypothesis in that sense, the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution. It's falling out of the clouds as speculation, it's full of hot air, and it's heading toward the facts, a collision with the facts. The gondola of the balloon is labeled "Science Falsely So-called," I'm going to come back to that. So the fundamentalists see this as unsupported speculation about to collide with facts.
Now, this gondola, labeled "Science Falsely So-called," this term has a long history. If you're interested in that, you can ask me about it later. I've written an article about that that I don't want to go into here, but evolution is an example, in their view, of science falsely so-called. The phrase "science falsely so-called" comes from the King James Version of the Bible, Paul's first letter to Timothy, Chapter 6, Verse 20. In context, it says, he advises Timothy to avoid “vain babblings” and “science falsely so-called.” The Greek word used there is the word "gnosis," meaning knowledge. "Knowledge" really is, in the ancient world, the closest word equivalent to our modern term "philosophy" maybe or "knowledge," not more narrowly equivalent to natural science, but "science" is a fair translation because the word "science" historically has had very broad meaning. It's only in the last couple of centuries it's usually taken a narrower meaning to mean natural science. So there you have it, "science falsely so-called," that's what James' translators thought in the early 17th century was the best English word to use.
Now, the idea that this is false science is crucial for understanding fundamentalist responses.
Here is a British cartoon. (Slide 9) You know, the Brits don't get off scot-free here. This particular cartoon comes from a London journalist in the 1930s named Newman Watts who wrote a little book called Why Be an Ape? that includes interesting cartoons drawn by a person named W. D. Ford, but in this particular cartoon the word "hypothesis" is a synonym used by scientists for the word "guess," which is just what William Jennings Bryan said. That's his understanding of a hypothesis, it’s a guess, and evolution is not truth, he says it's merely a hypothesis, it's “millions of guesses strung together,” so hence this slide, millions of guesses strung together. These are all guesses about the past that no one can demonstrate, and we end up with humans being evolved from apes at the top. That comes from Bryan's last statement at Dayton which he was going to read as his final argument in court, but final arguments were done away with by the judge, so he read it to journalists outside as his final speech. He died just a few days later.
(Slide 10) On the education side, from this cartoon of Pace, you can see how evolution was seen as headed toward infidelity and being driven there by educational authorities, like professors. I forgot my Mortar Board on the way here. Sorry. It's being blown toward the rocks by the God-denying theory of evolution as the Bible is being thrown overboard at the instruction of the professor.
Many Christians then and now see evolution as a God-denying theory that contradicts the Bible and therefore not religiously neutral and inappropriate for public education. You know, the view that public education should avoid sectarian religion goes back to the founding of public education in the United States, and for a while that worked well, but this is the first time I can think of that a really controversial subject in a religious way is coming into public schools, is in the early 20th century. It does, for many Americans, seem to violate that understanding of what public education is supposed to be about. They still see this as Bryan sees this and others see it at that time, as a violation of the constitutional mandate for religious neutrality on the part of the government.
(Slide 11) This image shows the intensity of the feeling on the part of fundamentalists about evolution, which is evolution here is shown as the Pied Piper taking American children toward death. Notice that the cave is shaped like a skull with "Disbelief in the God of the Bible," and they're following the rats around the path of education, being blown there by the hypothesis of evolution, and this guy is "Science Falsely So-Called," in case we didn't see that. So that is how they see this, American school children are being led to their spiritual death by the teaching of a hypothesis that it's not true, it's a false idea, and it's not religiously neutral.
In fact, this young woman at university (Slide 12) has to exchange her faith, which is more precious than gold, for a diploma, which is "Science Falsely So-Called," and as one of my students noticed, and I had not noticed until one day I was showing it in class and she pointed it out to me: that's a pistol which is aimed at her head in exactly the same way in which, of course, back in era of Bonnie and Clyde and others, you have highway robbery going on. So this college professor is extorting her faith from her in exchange for her diploma, and she's picking up false science in the process.
Now, these kinds of concerns are no evident no less today than they were then. (Slide 13) This is a book that is very influential on current American fundamentalist thinking about science. It's called The Lie, subtitle Evolution, written by Ken Ham. I'll say more about Ken Ham in just a minute. Ken Ham wrote this book in the 1980s and his attitude is displayed very well in the book. His ministry, Answers in Genesis, is probably the leading creationist website today. But unlike Bryan, who had no problem with the earth's great age, the earth's age being millions of years old or today we would say billions of years old, Bryan had no problem with that view, Ken Ham thinks that view itself is part of the problem--the view that the earth is really old. Ham rejects not only evolution but also the age of the earth. This makes him far more reactionary toward science than Bryan even had been.
(Slide 14) Here is a cartoon from Ken Ham's organization that shows where they're coming from and emphasizes indeed the young earth piece. There are earlier forms of this cartoon that have different wording on the foundation of the humanism castle that do not make reference to millions of years, that make reference simply to evolution, but current versions of this cartoon, which has undergone an evolution you might say, do show indeed changes in the emphasis of young earth organizations.
Culture wars are still part of the context today. Indeed, this is very similar ‑‑ isn't it? ‑‑ in its spirit to what you saw of the dueling, the battleships against the Rock of Gibraltar from the '20s. An addition from them (Answers In Genesis) would be also emphasis on the consequences of believing that the earth is old; that's what this cartoon is about, the fatal spiritual consequences of accepting an old universe and an old earth, because if you do that, in the opinion of Answers in Genesis, you're taking man's authority over the authority of the Bible. Whereas Christianity, the castle of Christianity, is based on the assumption that "6 Days Equals God Is Authority." Earlier versions of this cartoon don't have that specific point, but this current version does. It's current even though it's from 2002, it still looks like this, "6 Days Equals God Is Authority."
The humanism people, who are associated with evolution, are actually bombarding the right place, the roots of Christianity, by attacking the age of the earth issue, whereas the Christians are clueless. This guy is firing at these balloons, these social consequences of humanism, and this guy is firing in the wrong direction. This guy is about to fire at another Christian. This guy is firing at his own foundation. So this is how they see things as an embattled group in today's culture war.
Indeed, Ham and other fundamentalists see evolution as actually Satanic in origin. Earlier versions of this cartoon have Satan as the origin of this view on the left, and God is the origin of this view on the right, and they think it's inseparable from these various social consequences.
Now, what about the two current forms of these ideas that are the most common to encounter in the news? (Slide 15) Scientific creationism, which is the young earth creationist stuff of Ken Ham. The term "scientific creationism" is older than Webster's Online Dictionary will tell you. It goes back at least to the early 1970s. On the right, "Evolution Wars." Is the author of that article in the room?
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: No.
TED DAVIS: No? This occurred during the run-up I think to the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial a few years ago.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Jeff Hardin referred to this.
[caption id="attachment_26671" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr. Ted Davis[/caption]
TED DAVIS: Okay. Afterward, if you want, you can ask me about my experiences at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. A lot of the reporters were asking me stuff afterwards because the stuff that was happening in the courtroom was basically history and philosophy of science, and other than the actual people in the witness stand, I was the other person in the room who knew what was going on with all of that, and so it was very interesting. I won't come back to that in this session.
Ken Ham is an Australian by birth, former science teacher, who has been in the United States for a long time. He is in charge of Answers In Genesis, this organization (Slide 16), which has the famous Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky. Here is Ken with one of his friends from the museum. This photograph, from their own site, makes a point that I want to make, namely that in Ham's view, dinosaurs and human beings coexisted for a long time after the creation until sometime after the Flood. That's not true in mainstream science, although there are a few creatures from that period who are still around with us, like crocodiles and coelacanths in the ocean. Nearly all of the animals and plants from those periods when the dinosaurs flourished have been long gone from the earth.
Now, the website Answers in Genesis (Slide 17) is perhaps the best place to go to see what creationists themselves think of the topic. It even has a search engine on its own site where you can go and plug it in. I chose this particular version of their home page from not too many years ago to use because it emphasizes the same idea Bryan was emphasizing, that evolution isn't even a theory, it's just a wild guess.
Now, a central tenet of creationism is that the place you want to go to get information about the formation of the earth and living things is here (Slide 18), you want to go to the Bible. The reason is straightforward, namely, the Bible was directly spoken by God to human authors who record it, or human scribes essentially who record it, and therefore this is eyewitness testimony of the creation and you can't get higher than that. Whatever speculations science may have must be subordinated to the direct testimony of the only person who witnessed it, the divine person, and since God has told us directly what took place, how can you have a higher authority?
(Slide 19) That's evident in this cartoon from the person who is probably the leading contemporary creationist cartoonist, Dan Lietha. You see how God has painted this scene in 6 days, and that is the best evidence for the amount of time used for the creation, is the testimony of one who made it, and the best evidence for a young earth, these are where you find it according to creation scientists. No, it's not any of these (Dr. Davis points to sources of knowledge other than the Bible in the cartoon). That's the best. So creationists' arguments that arise out of science, out of their interpretation of science, aren't even as good as the Bible itself; the Bible is the evidence you want, it's the ultimate authority.
(Slide 20) Now, the book you're looking at here, illustrating this next point, is the bible of young earth creationism, speaking of the Bible. This was published in 1961 by two people I will tell you about shortly, John Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry Morris. A second central point would be that they would show in their book is that scientific evidence, when properly interpreted, is consistent with the literal interpretation of the Bible, but it's mainly the historical sciences that are the ones which are contested territory, if you will.
The historical sciences refer to the sciences that tell us about the past, the past of the earth and the universe, like cosmology or evolutionary biology or paleontology or geology. Areas like anatomy, physiology, atomic theory or nuclear fission, these kinds of things are not contested territory for the creationists, no issues there with that. That's all current science, you can verify that fully, and it doesn't impinge on the biblical story of creation, it's all fine, but it's these historical areas where people heavily contest scientific claims.
According to creationists, humans and dinosaurs were created on the same day, as I've indicated, the sixth day of creation, and they coexisted with us until sometime after the Flood. How old? (Slide 22) How old is the earth on creationists' views? Not more than somewhere from 6 to 12,000 years. I won't tell you how they get that number. If you want to ask me afterward, I can give you ideas about that, but it does contrast greatly with mainstream scientific ideas. Many of you probably have a sense of how old science thinks things are. Pretty current numbers for the earth itself would be this number, 4.5 billion years, that's what "BY" means, and the universe nearly 14 billion years old.
Order of magnitude matters. I mean, if you won the lottery and it was $10,000, it wouldn't change your life; if you win the lottery at $4.5 billion, it does. You get the idea. The order of magnitude is what matters here.
(Slide 23) I'll skip my comments on the big bang and move to one other point (Slide 24). Creationists do see alternative interpretations of the Bible as really heretical and even harmful to Christianity. The word "compromise" is used as its pejorative in this conversation, and that's not going to surprise anyone who reports about modern political events, but the word "compromise" is used as a dangerous term, and likewise the word "accommodation."
I will have to say something about this (Slide 25). A final piece, the Flood described in Genesis on the creationists' view produced at least a lot of the fossils on the earth. Of course, the Flood happened during human history, and this view that the Flood produced these fossils rather than the ages of the earth and all the processes producing fossils, that view is called Flood geology, and it does contradict natural history since the early 19th century.
Okay, now, from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century, for roughly a hundred years, most conservative Protestant writers in this country held to old earth versions of creationism, not young earth versions (Slide 26). I won't detail those two versions on the slide. I want to illustrate the point by saying that the most widely used Bible among conservative Protestants in England and America in this period, including Pentecostals, was the Scofield Reference Bible published in the early 20th century by Oxford University Press. It has extensive footnotes in it that specifically endorse old earth versions of interpreting Genesis. In fact, William Bell Riley (Slide 27), the man that sent Bryan to Dayton, Tennessee, who's in contact with fundamentalists across the entire country and in a better position, in my view, to say this than anyone else, is on the top of the fundamentalist pyramid. In a debate he has with an atheist in Arkansas in the 1920s, he says he cannot identify a single intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth is made 6,000 years ago, and the Bible never taught any such thing, says Riley. This has completely changed since the 1920s.
During that period I showed you, belief in a young earth and Flood geology was prominent only among certain fringe groups in Protestantism, such as the Seventh-day Adventists, who follow their prophet, 19th century prophet, Ellen White, and her teachings on these issues, about which I'll spell out for you in a moment. (Slide 28) I'm just going to add the point that Dr. Benjamin Carson is probably the most well-known Adventist today. I am not trying to say that the views of Ellen White are necessarily his. You would have to ask him personally about those views. I don't know Dr. Carson, I don't know whether he would agree with White on everything I'm going to tell you next, but this is what his tradition has held and in many cases people still would hold these views within the Adventist tradition. Notice how you spell it, by the way. Editors often get this wrong. This is spelled correctly, the capitalization and hyphenation, et cetera, and the correct pronunciation is "Ad'-ven-tist," emphasis on the first syllable, not "Ad-ven'-tist," as many other Christians will often say.
(Slide 29) White claimed to have these trancelike "visions" in which God had revealed truth to her, and in one of them, about the creation week, she says she was "carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week." You see the connection with Seventh-day Adventist teaching with religious teaching, which I'll tell you about in a minute. (Slide 30) She also taught that Noah's Flood had in fact sculpted the surface of the earth and produced fossils and that Flood geology, as it's later called, is a standard part of Adventist teaching.
(Slide 31) Another standard part of Adventist teaching is that other Christians who worship God on Sunday are Sabbath breakers, and therefore heretics. So we should worship God on the Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day, that's when God actually rested. Not on Sunday, the day on which Christ was raised from the grave, to remind us that creation week was literal and that God actually rested on the seventh day.
I'm going to skip George Price (Slide 32), that piece. It's an important piece of history, but I'm running out of time. The ideas of George Price, a Canadian disciple of White, are picked up on by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr. (Slide 33), two fundamentalist Americans, in the early '60s, and they write about these ideas without much reference to Price, but the ideas all come from Price, in the book The Genesis Flood, published in 1961.
Now, intelligent design, I don't have a lot to say about that, but Phillip Johnson (Slide 34) is basically the author of the intelligent design movement, which comes much later in the 20th century. It really emerges strong in public display in the 1990s. It has its roots in the 1980s. Phillip Johnson is still living. He is no longer in very good health, but he is a retired professor of law from the University of California Berkeley, and in the 1960s, as a young law graduate, having attended Harvard and Chicago undergraduate and graduate school, becomes clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren, you all know what that means in its significance.
He has a conversion to Christianity as a mature law professor after he has gone through a divorce, and he is suddenly motivated to start writing against the kinds of atheism he finds in Richard Dawkins in works like The Blind Watchmaker, which he encounters while he is on sabbatical in England. (Slide 35) To make a long story short, his intellectual disciples today have various locations, but the primary location would be an arm of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which has its own website with search engine as well where you can learn all about that from their own perspective if you want to.
(Slide 36) Surprisingly, the Bible is not part of this conversation for them in a direct way, not at all. They want to leave out the word "God," they want to leave out "theology," they want to leave the Bible out of the picture as well, and that is because they want to change the way science is taught in high school. For constitutional reasons, they leave it out. So you're all familiar with First Amendment (Slide 37). I can come back to that and creationism and the law if you want me to later, but this is an idea that's organized and directed by a law professor. Johnson has even himself said that the first thing you have to do is get the Bible out of the conversation (Slide 38). So this is a very different tone in that regard than creationism of a classical variety.
[caption id="attachment_26670" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr. Ted Davis[/caption]
I'll skip these slides (Slides 39 to 41) and what it's about, but the biblical issues and the theological issues that creationists dispute, that can all come later if you want, but that's not part of ID. ID is simply the secular notion that you need to challenge the secular establishment on thinking that naturalistic evolution has done everything. It's really in opposition to evolution in a naturalistic form or what they will often call “Darwinism,” using that term. That term has a long history, too, that I will leave out.
It's hard to separate from culture wars (Slide 42), but I need to move on.
(Slide 43) Finally the third main question: Does evolution deny orthodox Christianity? I need to define "orthodox" in this context, and I will in just a second, with another image.
William Jennings Bryan thought the answer was very clearly yes, evolution does deny orthodox Christianity. This cartoon, another Pace cartoon from Bryan's day, shows "Rationalism" pounding the wedge of "Theistic Evolution," which is the idea that God used evolution to create organisms. This term and idea goes back almost to Darwin's day, but in the 1920s, it's in common parlance, and it's splitting faith in the Bible. Bryan described theistic evolution in this language: theistic evolution was "an anesthetic that deadens the pain while the patient's religion is being gradually removed."
Remember Bryan was regarded in the 1920s as the leading political orator in the United States. He was a very gifted orator. Darrow didn't want to have to face off with him in final arguments. The great defense attorney thought he might actually lose in the opinion world to this great political orator. Bryan also said theistic evolution was "a way-station on the highway that leads from Christian faith to No-God-Land," and this is what he meant.
(Slide 44) This is a cartoon which you will see on the internet dated 1922. That's wrong, it's from 1924. The letter Bryan writes designing this cartoon, it's written in January of 1924 to the editor of a Sunday school magazine, called the Sunday School Times. Bryan says it will depict evolution as what we (meaning he and the editor) know it to be, the cause of modernism in religion. He says it will depict a student going down a staircase on which there is no stopping place ‑‑ i.e., a slippery slope ‑‑ and the student is stepping from "Bible Not Infallible" to "Man Not Made in God's Image"; halfway down a minister with a Bible in his hands stepping from "No Deity," meaning no deity of Jesus, to "No Atonement," and at the bottom a scientist stepping from "Agnosticism" to "Atheism." This is Pace's version of that letter that Bryan wrote.
I'll skip that (Slide 45), showing notes for a lecture on “The Religion of Science” from around 1925 by Princeton biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, a religious modernist, which illustrate how radically non-Christian his type of modernism was) and I'll skip that (Slide 46), a cartoon showing how a purely naturalistic approach to the Bible blinds scholars into missing the evidence for Christ’s miracles. Today, what's changed? (Slide 47) One thing that's changed is the presence of a fairly sizable group of scientists (and science journalists even in some cases) writing aggressively anti-religious books, like Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. You may be familiar with Dawkins' work.
(Slide 48) A second example is within liberal Christianity. Many theologians today would hold a view similar to John Shelby Spong, the former Bishop of Newark, Episcopal Bishop of Newark, who thinks you need to give up theism in Christianity, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
But a third alternative (Slide 49), the one that I want to end with, is the view represented by some leading Christian theologians and scientists whose views were not present in the earlier conversation in the 1920s. Views like theirs were not there, namely, that traditional Christian belief, the kinds of beliefs Bryan was afraid people were giving up because of evolution, can be maintained consistently side-by-side with a full acceptance of evolution. Francis Collins, the geneticist, is prominent for this. You probably all know who he is.
(Slide 50) You may not know who John Polkinghorne is. He was a leading particle physicist from England who has a very wide American readership. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was involved in the mathematics of CORP theory in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, until he became an Anglican priest, and the last 30 years he has written many books about science and faith, including a commentary on the Nicene Creed, which is a classical Christian statement of faith, from Princeton University Press called The Faith of a Physicist.
Or someone like Robert John Russell (Slide 51), who in my opinion is the leading Christian theologian dealing with science. He is also a trained physicist. He writes at the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences in Berkeley. He is an orthodox, small "o," Christian, but also a full evolutionist.
Or someone like Owen Gingerich (Slide 52), retired professor of Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard, whose recent books, are a series of things he has given as lectures in Harvard Chapel and other places. His two most recent are God's Universe and God's Planet. God's Planet is just off the press this past year. These are all defenses of orthodox Christianity to some extent. They mainly talk about the science itself, but they can talk about orthodox Christianity side-by-side with that.
(Slide 53) But for many Americans, the ideas of people like this are just not acceptable any more than those of Dawkins would be acceptable, but I do think historically they represent a significant new feature on the landscape, world-class scientists and theologians who accept evolution but also affirm the incarnation, the classical Christian view of the deity of Jesus, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. There wasn't anybody out there like them in the 1920s. I've been looking for those people in my historical work for the last 15 years. They probably existed, but they are very hard to find today. There weren't big public voices in the '20s.
(Slide 54) Will these voices have a permanent effect on the conversation? That's a good question, you know. Will this lead somewhere else? I'm afraid I have to say the same thing Professor Raboteau said yesterday: I'm a historian, not a prophet, and I really don't know how this is going to play out, but I do think it's not the same as the 1920s, and that could perhaps prove to be significant.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Thank you, Dr. Davis. Will Saletan is first, and then Daniel.
[caption id="attachment_26609" align="alignright" width="150"] Will Saletan, Slate[/caption]
WILL SALETAN, Slate: Ted, first of all, thank you. I wanted to go back to a cartoon that you showed earlier, and I missed a little bit of it, but the battleships cartoon, the battleships are lined up against the ‑‑
TED DAVIS: I'll find that right now (Slide 6).
WILL SALETAN: Okay. There were five of the battleships. I don't know if you remember off the top of your head. One of them was "Science."
TED DAVIS: That's right.
WILL SALETAN: What were the other four?
TED DAVIS: "Liberal Theology," "Modern Thought," "Culture," and "Hypothesis."
WILL SALETAN: Okay, so "Science," "Modern Thought," and "Hypothesis" are three of the five battleships.
TED DAVIS: That's right.
WILL SALETAN: It didn't say "Science Falsely So-called"? It just said "Science"?
TED DAVIS: Correct.
WILL SALETAN: So the question I have is, at that time, was there a different view, a more explicitly hostile view, specifically of science and hypothesis and modern thought? Well, I guess leave aside modern thought, but today I think most people who call themselves scientific creationists, they would embrace the term "science," they would embrace the concept of hypothesis; wouldn't they?
TED DAVIS: Yes, they would. But not the historical sciences.
WILL SALETAN: So my question is, have fundamentalists or has the evolving set of people who call themselves fundamentalists or who call themselves creationists, use whatever term you feel fits the record best, change their understanding of what science is from that era? Were they explicitly anti-scientific at that time?
There was another cartoon you showed where the two castles were shooting at each other, they were both castles, not battleships (Slide 14).
TED DAVIS: Yep, that's right.
WILL SALETAN: One of them says millions of years equals man's authority. So was there a notion of science as a human activity rather than an activity that reveals an underlying truth that is God's?
TED DAVIS: That's a really nice question. I'm not really sure how I can answer it. I am not confident fully in what I will say. I think the best way to address that is to say that modern notions of science and the process of science become increasingly given to the hypothetico-deductive method, which is the idea of proposing a hypothesis, looking for ways to test it, and then hoping to draw some confirmation for that hypothesis from the results of an experimental test. That notion has a long history, but it really emerges as the main way science is done in the 17th century. But the rhetoric of people like Francis Bacon, for example, suggest that observations themselves are the chief source of information in science, and we can generalize from them to general truths, inductive truths, which hold for all events. That's a so-called Baconian view of science. It's closely related to Scottish commonsense philosophy from Thomas Reid in the 18th century. Those ideas of Thomas Reid and commonsense philosophy, which are rooted in that kind of Baconianism, are extremely influential on American science in the 19th century, mainstream science as well as religious interpretations of it, the notion that it's what the observations actually show that you generalize from.
Now, since you cannot observe the past, in the view of the creation scientists, you cannot do genuine science on the past, you have to accept the authority of the eyewitness God for how the past has actually taken place in the development of nature.
Now, I don't want to go further with that here, but that's partly I think what's going on. What notion of science is legitimate in the opinion of creation scientists? It would be a kind of Baconian notion of science without generalizing beyond what you always see holds and going more hypothetical. The conversation about those ideas is intense in the 19th century actually. One of Darwin's critics is a great philosopher of science, John Herschel. John Herschel says that Darwin's theory of evolution is “the law of higgledy-piggledy,” because it does go beyond what we see happening right now and extrapolates into the past and involves randomness or variations, the causes of which we don't know. So he is very skeptical of Darwin's historical speculations. Darwin himself knows that his view of evolution is speculative in that sense, of going beyond just Baconian science.
But the sciences of natural history are hypothetico-deductive in nature, and the hypothetico-deductive method predates the 19th century, as I've indicated. It's just widely used in historical sciences because you can't do laboratory experiments to see how the earth got here. You have to take what we see now and make forensic reasoning. Like similar to a prosecuting attorney trying to convict someone of a crime that no living person says they witnessed, and you try to put together a plausible scenario that explains all the facts you have that no one actually says they saw. So that kind of reasoning from the law process is very similar to what goes on in the historical sciences.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Okay. Daniel Lippman, over here.
[caption id="attachment_26622" align="alignright" width="150"] Daniel Lippman, Politico[/caption]
DANIEL LIPPMAN, Politico: Do you think that with advocating for creationism and rejecting evolution, does that lead to a broader rejection of science that is agreed by lots of people, like climate change and fear of GMO foods and vaccines? Does that leak into the broader culture and have negative effects that you don't want to see?
TED DAVIS: Partly yes. I don't see in the United States at least among fundamentalists a wide rejection of the GMO foods. I don't see a wide rejection among fundamentalists of vaccines even. Some will. I think the rejection of vaccines is motivated by various reasons, none of them to me clearly religious. But the climate change one is very, very interesting in some ways and frustrating in others for me. There are objections being raised to climate change by creationists. They, in my opinion, have invented a theological objection to an issue that doesn't really have a theological piece in the same sense in which the evolution issue does have a theological or biblical piece. I believe it's politically motivated because of the fact that it's being pushed by the secular left. In culture wars, I think that the religious right, if you will, is responding to the secular left by questioning science, that most people involved in the climate change field think is pretty good science.
DANIEL LIPPMAN: If you reject evolution does that make you more suspicious of science in general in America?
TED DAVIS: Yes, it can. It can if you're suspicious of scientific authorities. Suspicious of a consensus, that the consensus may be driven by world view and ideology more than by actual facts that can be checked. So the attitude of suspicion toward authorities, which isn't confined to fundamentalists, but certainly is prominent in fundamentalist communities, can be driving them. Yes, I think it can, it can be driving that.
DANIEL LIPPMAN: Suspicion of what scientists are saying is different than suspicion of a scientific method.
TED DAVIS: Correct.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Okay. Emma Green? And I've got others.
[caption id="attachment_26617" align="alignright" width="150"] Emma Green, TheAtlantic.com[/caption]
EMMA GREEN, TheAtlantic.com: So it seems as though the controversy that you're describing, while certainly historically fascinating and still active among a certain portion of Americans and a certain portion of people who live abroad, is probably not one of the most salient current controversies in religion and science. I mean, it seems like the portion of Americans who are truly young earth creationists and totally dismiss any possibility of a role of science, sort of like you were saying in one of those last slides, is very, very narrow.
So what I'm interested in is the interstitial space. You know, there's a broad range, we actually had a session at the Faith Angle Forum a few times ago. Where Jeff Hardin was sort of plotting the spectrum of all of the different views of scientists, and religious scientists and people who accepted some form of religion ‑‑ It was a great session. So I'm interested in people who are doing work in that interstitial space where most people live, where people have both religious views that influences their views about the origins of the world, who have some sort of combination view and bring in some of the wisdom of creationism perhaps and maybe have some interest or curiosity about what science is doing, especially from a scholarly perspective. I mean, who is doing that work?
TED DAVIS: Well, I am at BioLogos. That's not the talk I brought today. I could have done that, but I understand you've had that done. I do columns for BioLogos every other week. Sometimes they're mine, in which case they're usually part of a lengthy series. Like the current series is on antebellum religion and science, and some of the Baconian stuff that I got asked about is part of that. I also have guest columns. I did have a recent guest column by a German sociologist, Tom Kaden, who is now at York University in Ontario. He calls attention to the imprecision of a lot of the polling that's been done of the beliefs of Americans about this issue of creationism among Christians even, and to what extent can we trust the data?
Jonathan Hill, a sociologist of religion at Calvin College, is regarded by his peers, from what I hear as the best person currently working on that question, of what religious beliefs of Americans actually are on these views.
There is reason to question how many Americans believe the young earth creationist views I gave you on every point or on most points. The numbers might be as small as 15 percent. The traditional data is very close to 50 percent. That's a huge gap.
So this is a controversy that's above my pay grade. I'm not a sociologist. I listen to what they say. I can just convey the information that if you want up-to-date information on it, go to Jonathan Hill, and he has written about this on some public websites, including Christianity Today and BioLogos.
EMMA GREEN: What data are you referring to that says 50 percent of Americans are young earth creationists? I mean, what polling firm is saying that?
TED DAVIS: Well, these questions aren't phrased very clearly, and that's the problem, but there are several polls going back many years to I think the '70s and '80s or '90s. Again, this isn't something I am prepared to talk about this morning. I don't want you to trust what I'm telling you without checking for yourself.
Laughter
TED DAVIS: But the polls have been done by various organizations, including Pew and Gallup, going back a long time about this as to what the views are. But the phrasing of those questions is crucial, and this has always been a problem in understanding public opinion.
For example, back in the 1920s, there was a survey of the religious views of Protestant ministers in many denominations asking them questions including about Genesis and creation, and it's hard to understand what was in the minds of those ministers as they were answering certain specifically worded questions about things like this.
For example, almost 90 percent of Lutheran ministers at that time affirmed something that would be consistent with young earth creationism but could very well have been interpreted in other ways as well, and I really doubt that 89 percent of Lutheran ministers, or 88 percent of Lutheran ministers, at that time would have been young earth creationists, I really doubt that. Judging from public writings, that wouldn't be true.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Tom, you're next.
[caption id="attachment_26619" align="alignright" width="150"] Tom Gjelten, NPR[/caption]
TOM GJELTEN, NPR: Real quick, two questions. The first one is really quick. You said that young earth creationists contest the historical sciences but not the natural sciences. How do they feel about speed of light and distance and things like that?
TED DAVIS: That's a complicated question. Maybe we should talk about that outside this session.
TOM GJELTEN: Okay.
TED DAVIS: But suffice it to say that there is not one single way in which young earth creationists respond to that.
TOM GJELTEN: Okay.
TED DAVIS: But the reason they're going after that i