In August 2008, governor of Alaska and self-styled hockey mom Sarah Palin became running mate of the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain. Given the would-be president’s relatively advanced age, media attention inevitably focused on the credentials of the 44-year-old ‘pit bull in lipstick’ who might, in a matter of months, be a heartbeat from occupying the most powerful office on earth. Some of the most heated debate raged around the implications of Palin’s commitment to creationism: the belief (minimally) that the world and the life it contains are the work of a divine creator.
‘Intelligent design is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation’s public school science classes.’
Senator Edward Kennedy, 2002
Liberal commentators speculated that Palin’s behaviour as president would be significantly influenced by her religious convictions. Just weeks before her nomination, she had announced to a congregation of fellow evangelicals that the bitterly divisive war in Iraq was ‘a task from God’ and had then requested their prayers for a controversial and environmentally sensitive natural-gas pipeline in Alaska. During her career she had also embraced a tranche of socially conservative views that were closely associated with the creationist lobby, including opposition to abortion, stem-cell research and the extension of gay rights. In her creationist views Palin was certainly in good company. Recent surveys suggest that around two-thirds of adults in the USA accept the central tenets of full-blown ‘young-earth’ creationism, believing that humans were definitely or probably created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
Just 4,499,993,988 years apart In public discourse today the term ‘creationist’ is generally used in a narrow sense referring mainly to evangelical Protestant fundamentalists in the USA. Such people believe that the bible is the directly inspired word of God and hence must be interpreted literally as gospel truth. Most contentiously, the early chapters of Genesis are held to give true and accurate accounts of the creation of the world and all the plants and animals that inhabit it (perplexingly, the bible contains two different accounts), a process of manufacture that was supposedly completed in six days at a date within the last 10,000 years. (The year 4004BC, the creation date calculated by Archbishop James Ussher in the 17th century, is generally regarded as a fair estimate.) Such accounts are in clear and direct conflict with many aspects of the orthodox scientific understanding of how things are. According to the standard geologically established chronology, the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, while the vast diversity of species (including humans) to be seen in the world today is the product of evolutionary processes that have taken place gradually over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
Most religious doctrines, Christian and other, have sought to prevent unbridgeable gulfs opening up between science and religion by recognizing a division between the physical and spiritual realms. Thus, for example, according to the Roman Catholic view expressed by Pope John Paul II in 1981, the purpose of the creation stories in the bible is not to offer a scientific treatise but to explain the correct relationship between God and man; understood allegorically or symbolically, rather than literally, these accounts aim to tell us not ‘how the heavens were made but how one goes to heaven’. This kind of accommodation, however, is closed off to strict, young-earth creationists by their insistence that the bible is (in the words of the Creation Research Society) the ‘Written Word of God and … all of its assertions are historically and scientifically true’.
‘Teach the Controversy’ Creationism in the US has always had a strong political dimension, and over the last century this has expressed itself in a concerted opposition to the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. The literal truth of the biblical accounts of creation entails the falsity of evolution, so it is little surprise that the creationists’ initial attempts were explicitly anti-evolutionary, aimed at having the study of Darwinism (as they usually called it) removed from public-school curricula. However, much of the momentum behind the call for an outright ban was lost after the notorious Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925.
Since the 1960s creationist energies have increasingly been directed towards the goal of ‘balanced treatment’. Marching under the banner ‘Teach the Controversy’, activists set out to show that scientific arguments could be marshalled in support of the creationist understanding of the world – arguments that were at least as strong as those for evolution – and therefore that the two views should be allowed equal time in science classrooms. A new discipline – ‘creation science’ – was born, whose main aim was to provide alternative, allegedly scientific explanations for the vast body of evidence (geological, palaeontological, biological, molecular) that massively corroborated orthodox science’s account and chronology of the earth and the life it contains.
Warmed-up watchmakers In accordance with the US Constitution’s insistence on the separation of state and religion, a number of landmark legal rulings continued to thwart the creation scientists’ efforts to redefine what counted as science and so to insinuate their rival theories into US public schools. In the closing years of the 20th century a new strategy was adopted. Disavowing any connection with creationism (tactically, in the opinion of their opponents) and hence with religion, a new generation of ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) theorists began to present what was in essence a resuscitated version of the argument from design – an argument that goes back at least to Thomas Aquinas and was most memorably expounded by the English philosopher William Paley in the early 19th century.
‘All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teachings of evolution. It would be better to destroy every book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’
William Jennings Bryan, 1924
If you happened to find a watch on a heath, Paley argued, you would inevitably infer from the complexity and precision of its construction that it must have been the work of a watchmaker; in the same way, when you observe the wondrous contrivances of nature, you are obliged to conclude that they, too, must have a maker – God. In its new ID incarnation, the buzzword was now ‘irreducible complexity’: the idea that certain functional features in living systems are organized in ways that cannot be explained by the usual evolutionary mechanisms. From this it is inferred that such features, and the living organisms that exhibit them, are better explained as the work of an intelligent designer. Evolutionary biologists, of course, simply deny the premise that there are any such irreducibly complex features. As the British biologist Richard Dawkins memorably put it, in allusion to Paley’s famous image, evolution’s chief mechanism, natural selection, is a ‘blind watchmaker’ that fashions the complex structures of nature without any foresight or purpose.
the condensed idea
When world-views collide