Links to:

Mike Mather's Crosstimbers Evolution article (July 2005)
Ingrid Shafer's Crosstimbers article on Ethics, Christianity, and Religious Pluralism (July 2005)
Ingrid Shafer's Debating Dr. Dino? original page (March 2005)

CROSSTIMBERS EDITORIAL
Big Boom—Evolution—Creationism—Intelligent Design: The Triumph
of Post-Modernism Run Amuck
Cecil Lee
 

In the early sixties, a colleague of mine at the University of Oklahoma offered, as a liberal studies question for college seniors, the issue of the Biblical creation versus the current theories offered by the mainstream science community. My response was that it was flailing a dead horse. Certainly, I thought, no educated people were ready to reject Darwin. A few people at that time might want to add that evolution was merely the means for a greater force (God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform), but that evolution would be rejected out of hand was unthinkable. As in many of my perceptions, I was terribly wrong.

Today, there are state legislators writing bills to require the Biblical account taught in the public schools. In some states they have had success in effecting their causes. Even in Washington a bill contains parts of the issue. According to H. Allen Orr in the May 30, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum got senate approval in the No Child Left Behind Act for a bill that was to state the “intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.” Although it was omitted from the final version, the bill passed. Public schools were to help students understand why the study of evolution was controversial.  Major secular magazines have featured the issue and even the Oxford press has published a book (Where Darwin meets the Bible: Creationists and Evolutionists in America by Larry A. Witham) exploring the positions. Witham is right in seeing the issue as principally an American one.  Juxtapose this public debate against the recent changes in the religious patterns of the American people. Tom W. Smith, University of Chicago, in a recent survey, has found significant changes since the early nineties. Now, for the first time in our country’s history, Christian Protestants are no longer in the majority. They remain the largest single group but they have fewer than half of the United States people in their fold. Protestant Evangelicals (which are the principal anti-Darwinian group) boast about three percent of the world population. Yet, they see themselves as the monitors of morality and ethics. 

President George W. Bush was wrong when in a recent press conference he said that we must form a balance between ethics and science. The wrong-minded part of his position is the assumption that the religious right is ethical, by nature, and that science, by its nature, is unethical. The reality of the question is between two different ethical positions. It is not my intent to argue the issue of stem-cell research at this point, but rather, to point out that it is possible for two sides of an issue to be, in different ways, right. For many, it is this possibility of two (or more) right positions that is disturbing. That there are questions which do not lend themselves to easy one-side-only answers make hasty action problematic. It was likely the existential thinkers of the post World War II period who most forcibly brought this to the attention of the public. These thinkers were, in themselves profound moralists. They saw mankind as condemned to moral decisions and ultimate choices. Some were Christian, some were of other religions, and some were atheist. But, the general public response was often that if they admitted that moral choices have no absolute basis, then they were saying that all choices are whimsical, and that silly choices are equal to carefully considered ones. Nothing could have been farther from the existentialist’s intent. Nonetheless, out of this interpretation came Post-Modernism. Modernism had been largely an esthetic movement which embraced the structure of the physical sciences as its template. By mid-century, many academic disciplines were to follow suit to become sciences. Departments of Government were renamed “Political Science” across the nation. Then, as though following some perverse cue, it was revealed that even the physical sciences took the relativist option. Matter was no longer absolute. It was subject to the vagaries of speed. Light came as particles, or waves, whichever. Everything seems to be a matter a choice. For many this is most discomforting. For the tough minded it meant constantly reexamining positions. That is—was last years view on race the best possible view? Or, do ethics depend on the situation? Should one lie to save lives? We are told not to lie. But, we are also told not to kill. Is telling the truth or saving lives the greater good?  It is much easier to pick a position and hold to it without questioning. Whatever we decide, do not expect scientists to offer assurances.

It is the function of the good scientist to disprove proposed hypotheses. Statements will be treated by the scientific community as true until they are disproven. And we clearly reward those who disprove the most hypotheses. However, if we were to use faith we can hold all matters to be undisputedly true. It is blasphemy to question revealed truth. This oxymoron was evident in the recent definition of faith, offered by the Vatican. It is right that we follow the guidance of our conscience, but, if our conscience causes us to differ with the Church, then our conscience is sick and in need of correction.

This line of thinking has favored offering a religious explanation as an alternative to scientific interpretation of worldly matters. It is argued then that the Biblical account of creation should be included in science text books. I find this especially odd in that traditionally one puts the lesser under the umbrella of the greater so as to lend authority to it. If religion is greater than science then scientists should want their works added as appendices to sacred texts. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church’s accepting Ptolemy and Aristotle, in the late Middle Ages, amounted to this. Later they were caught in the dilemma of having to recant views that they thought had supported religious ideals. But, today, the religious right is caught between wanting to be on the winning side of Biblical literalism while wanting to have the seal of approval from the scientific community.

It is in this spirit that a student group invited Kent Horvind (who bills himself as Dr. Dino) in March of this year to the USAO campus for a seminar “so students [according the group doing the inviting] can get some more information to make an informed decision.” Since the invitation to the Science Faculty to debate Horvind, a young-earth creationist, carried an implied condition that Horvind’s interpretation of Holy Scripture would always prevail, the group had no takers from the faculty to engage in such a dispute. Young-earth creationists believe the earth to be short lived (hence; their name, “young earth). Some even believe that in the near future, because of a radical shift in the plates upon which the continents rest, men and women will be able to walk to Jerusalem from any point on earth, and that dinosaurs, which they believe are now hiding in the Congo, will reappear and coexist with humans again. This strange occurrence combines an exocentric reading of scripture with a misunderstanding of the subtleties of plate tectonics. It is evident that this movement is the product of neither main line science nor main line Bible studies.

It is Horvind’s belief that the earth is under 10,000 years old and that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans and that dinosaurs and the children of Adam and Eve inhabited the earth together.  All fossil remains, he believes, are the result of the Noah flood. It is response to Horvind’s lecture that Professor Charles M. Mather wrote a simple explanation of Darwinian evolutionary thinking.

Why have so many turned to alternate explanations of creation? Not only are many disquieted by the lack of absolutes, many more find it hard to accept that they are not the personal and specific product of a kind and caring God, or, if not a caring God, at least, an intelligent designer. This belief has a larger and much broader following than creationism. But, like the Early Christians who read Aristotle’s first cause as a reference to their God, we may read the Intelligent Design as a way of being religious without defining a particular sect or any particular degree of belief. These thinkers—and there are many of them, and they vary widely in detail—hold that life is too complex to have just happened. Their religious positions vary from evangelical to agnostic. Perhaps the most crushing aspect of this extreme divisionism in civil life is that truth becomes trivialized and that many believers are being cleverly manipulated out of the ideals that have guided their lives. And they are being told to forget the ongoing search for the truth and accept ready made catchy substitutes. The carefully developed body of knowledge that has made the world a bit freer from hunger, sickness, and strife is summarily dismissed because it cannot be complete. As the opponents of Darwin glibly point out, even he admitted that his theories were incomplete and subject to adjustments. Progress is based on a constant search and hope for an improved world. Perhaps careful thinkers have lost the good fight and now are being told to “get over it.” They didn’t win the last election and truth has now become a matter of popularity.  CL

This Editorial was published in: Crosstimbers: A Multicultural, Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring/Summer 2005 (Chickasha: University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. 2005), 22.