Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

—Judge John Jones, Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.

—Proverbs 12:22

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

—Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

As discussed in chapter 2, creationism is not about science, but about political power and dictating the agenda for schools and textbooks now and eventually exerting control over society. Creationists play by whatever rules (dirty or otherwise) they need to in order to win. I have tried to document how they routinely distort or deny the evidence, quote out of context, and do many other dishonest and unethical things—all in the name of pushing their crusade. I was raised in a Christian church and learned Bible verses every Sunday, so it appalls me to see how unethically these supposedly “Christian” men and women act in their battle against their perceived foes. It makes you wonder whether they have second thoughts about violating the word and spirit of many parts of the scripture with their lies and deceptions.

How do they reconcile this un-Christian behavior with their Christian beliefs? Psychologists have long shown that humans are very good at self-deception and trying to convince themselves of anything that they fervently want to believe. Given a strong belief system, humans can convince themselves that black is white or ignore obvious evidence and focus only on what they want to see, missing the forest for the trees.

Psychologists have found that despite our hopes, humans are not rational creatures after all. Instead, we have what Michael Shermer calls “believing brains.” We are all built to hold certain core beliefs or worldviews about ourselves, and anything that conflicts with this core belief will be rejected, dismissed, or simply ignored. Psychologists call this reduction of cognitive dissonance. Our brains are actually highly compartmentalized, with different ideas held in different parts of the brain, creating a dissonance or conflict in our minds. Thus, we are constantly struggling to reconcile or justify these conflicting beliefs. For example, one part of our brain may want to believe we are moral, but another part remembers when we told a white lie or broke the speed limit. Then our brain does all it can to rationalize and justify these conflicts, trying to make us feel less conflicted and remorseful about these inconsistencies between our beliefs about ourselves and our behavior. As George Orwell put it, “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time; the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against a solid reality.”

All humans live with these conflicts most of the time, but in some cases the conflict is extreme. Creationists’ entire sense of self and worldview are tied up in their literalistic belief in the Bible, and anything that challenges or conflicts with it must be false, no matter how strong the evidence. This explains the incredible mental gymnastics and twisted logic and outright denial of the facts that are right in front of their noses. And that core belief is extremely powerful in the mind of a creationist. Not only does it define who they are, but they are even more concerned about salvation and going to hell. Mountains of evidence about evolution will not shake them or make them pay attention, when they believe eternal torture in the underworld is the alternative.

This kind of dogmatic, inflexible religious belief explains many aspects of their bizarre behavior. Apparently, to the creationists, lying and deception are lesser sins than accepting evolution, and they are willing to sacrifice their integrity in their crusade against what they believe to be the source of all evils in the world. Their intellectual blinders are so strong that they see only what they want to see and read only what they want to read in a quotation, all in the name of their religious beliefs. To creationists, a literal belief in the Bible is essential to their religious salvation, and everything else (including science) must be sacrificed so their souls can go to heaven. A famous quote by Judge Braswell Deen (Pierce 1981:82) of Georgia says it all: “This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornography, pollution, and proliferation of crimes of all types.”

British reporter Bruno Maddox (2007:29) described the creationists’ attempt at reduction of cognitive dissonance in his Discover magazine column, “Blinded by Science,” focusing on his visit to the Answers in Genesis creationism museum in Kentucky. He wrote,

I find myself reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proposition in The Crack-Up, that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald’s first-rate mind, of course, eventually stopped retaining its ability to function, and watching [creationist Jason] Lisle try to reconcile the cutting edge of modern planetary physics with the offhand assertions of a religious tract written thousands of years ago by an unknown assortment of bearded semi-cave dwellers, I found myself wondering how long the poor chap has.

For the record, I have even less patience now with the creationist agenda than I did going in, because I now suspect that they don’t really believe the falsehoods with which they are trying to flood the world. But at the same time I got the clear impression that they don’t have any choice. I thought I was going to meet people who love God and therefore hate science. What I found instead were people who love God but who have at least a pretty serious crush on science as well, and thus find themselves in the Fitzgeraldian nightmare of waking up every day and trying to believe in both. They will—they must—spend their lives, and brains, trying to think of ways that patently false ideas can be made to seem, if not actually true, at least not quite so patently false….

Not to overdo the Fitzgerald, but I shall think of [the creationists] often, as day after day they beat on, boats against the current of truth, borne back ceaselessly into being just completely, utterly wrong.

One of the chief mechanisms that humans use to hang on to their core beliefs and reduce cognitive dissonance is called confirmation bias, or remembering the successes and forgetting the failures. “Psychics,” fortune-tellers, and other con artists take advantage of this human weakness when they do a “cold reading,” trying to “predict the future” for an unsuspecting victim. If you listen carefully to what they say, you’ll realize that they throw out a lot of random vague guesses until they get a “hit,” then they follow the victim’s body language and verbal cues to refine their guesses and amaze the victim. If you keep a tally, you’ll see that most of their guesses are wrong—but the victim only remembers the successful “hits” and comes away amazed that the “psychic” knew so much.

The same is true of most horoscopes and astrology. Most of the statements are vague platitudes that tend to be true of most people, and even a detailed personal horoscope will be full of misses—but most listeners will only be impressed by the “hits.” Confirmation bias (also called “cherry-picking” the best data or examples) explains how many creationists can ignore the conflicts of different verses in the Bible (discussed in chapter 2) or read a passage about evolution and “quote mine” just a tiny piece of the text that seems to fit their beliefs. The power of confirmation bias in the brain completely blocks the overall context of the evidence or the statements in the text, and only a tiny out-of-context quotation registers in their cognition as important—because it seems to agree with their existing biases. This is why quote mining, as we have seen throughout this book, seems so bizarre and frustrating to most of us—but makes perfect sense to creationists, whose filters and biases can only allow certain ideas that fit their belief system.

Another factor is at work here as well: tribalism. We are all products of our backgrounds, especially our families and communities, and we learn and accept whatever our families and peers teach us. Adopting these ideas is essential to our sense of belonging and acceptance by our families and communities, and going against their beliefs is very difficult for most people. Most people don’t want to be the “black sheep” but just want to fit in and belong. Rebelling or breaking from family or community is truly terrifying to to almost anyone. People from small towns in rural America know this phenomenon well. The first question people will ask you after “What is your name?” is “What church do you attend?” Your church membership in a small town defines your place in that society, and if you’re not a church-going Christian, you can expect harsh judgment from the rest of the small community. With powerful incentives like this, it is no wonder that most creationists will never listen to evidence that threatens their core beliefs and their membership in their churches and communities.

In addition, people often don’t realize just how intellectually isolated people in evangelical and fundamentalist churches are. In his brilliant 2008 book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, reporter Matt Taibbi describes the experience of going “undercover” and immersing himself as a spy within a fundamentalist church in Texas. He attends all their services throughout the week and goes to their weekend “retreats” and special seminars about creationism. Although he hides his true beliefs well and doesn’t give away his reactions to their bizarre notions, he confesses in his writing how he is shocked and sickened and truly amazed by the kind of illogical behavior these people exhibit. What is more revealing is their social and intellectual isolation from the rest of the world. Despite the availability of 24/7 news channels and unlimited Internet access, these people only read and listen to what their church approves of and are made to feel very guilty if they expose themselves to any media that might challenge their beliefs.

The scientific and educational community has despaired for years about how to make the evidence for evolution plainer or the message clearer to the creationists so they can learn the truth about evolution. If Taibbi is right, however, none of it makes a difference. Hard-core creationists are deeply embedded in this belief system and isolated from any outside information, and no improvements in the quality or quantity of evidence or how we communicate it will reach them. When they are exposed to evidence, they will ignore it or dismiss it or try to rationalize it away. Most of the time they will avoid being exposed to challenging ideas in the first place. We’ve seen this over and over throughout this book. A classic example is an interview posted on YouTube between Richard Dawkins and creationist Wendy Wright (just Google those two names and it will be the first hit). For most of us, it’s excruciating to watch. Over and over again, Dawkins patiently and gently shows examples of transitional fossils to the creationist, and over and over again she just repeats the mantra, “There are no transitional fossils.” No amount of evidence could ever reach a person so thoroughly indoctrinated and brainwashed by creationism.

Instead of trying to reach people who are deep in the creationist cult, our efforts are better spent reaching people who may have been raised as fundamentalists but are beginning to open their minds and listen to evidence that was once forbidden to them. Based on the hundreds of letters and emails I received and on the reviews of the first edition of this book on Amazon.com, such people were the audience that this book reached most effectively. The hard-core creationist community never even bothered to attack or take notice of this book when it first appeared in 2007, and they ignored it for years afterward. But those people who were uncertain about what to think and were fence-sitting between fundamentalism and science were reached effectively, and they responded very positively.

Bit by bit, this will be the way that we can slowly erode the creationist hold on people: by reaching those who are beginning to open their minds and question what they were taught. Thanks to the Internet and books like this, it’s much easier than ever to do so. When I grew up in the 1960s, there were no books disputing or debunking creationism or explaining evolution clearly, let alone books that challenged religion. I was searching hard for such resources as I began to doubt my Presbyterian background and look for answers in my community. It’s still that way in many small towns in America today. But thanks to the Internet, even the most isolated person can now find all the evidence needed with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Although many rank-and-file creationists may sincerely believe these ideas because their leaders tell them to, and they’ve never heard of or read other sources, many of the leaders themselves may be exploiting creationism for power and money. We’ve all heard the accounts of hypocritical evangelists who turned out to have feet of clay, from Jimmy Swaggart to Jim Bakker to the recent case of the Rev. Ted Haggard. The creationist leaders also have their share of crooks. The most outrageous is Kent Hovind, who called himself “Dr. Dino” (even though he has no experience in dinosaurs or paleontology and his “Ph.D.” was bought from an online diploma mill) and even built a Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park in Pensacola, Florida, to promote creationist ideas. He just finished doing a 10-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution in Florence, Colorado, for cheating and lying—to the IRS. Their creationist ministries give men like these lots of money and an enormous influence over a lot of people, and it’s no surprise that they abuse the privilege.

What often shatters the beliefs of creationists, however, is not the misdeeds of their leaders, but the fact that the leading creationist authors and debaters keep repeating deceptive and discredited arguments, even after they have been shown to be lies. This is often the critical moment that causes a crisis of faith that turns people away from creationism. Saddest of all, however, is how these fanatical “Christians” treat members of their own flock when they stray from the strict creationist dogma when finally confronted by the evidence for evolution. The story of oil geologist Glenn Morton (http://www.oldearth.org/whyileft.htm), who was abused and harassed by his fellow “flood geologists” when his own discoveries led him away from creationism, is heart-rending. Likewise, these stories show that the “brotherly Christian love” of some fanatical creationists is a sham (see www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan03; www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/nov02.html).

As we have seen throughout this book, these supposed “Christians” will twist the facts and refute logic to salvage their unshakable belief that a literal interpretation of the Bible is final truth. To them, nothing else matters. Their religion is foremost in their lives, and if the scientific world didn’t intrude, they wouldn’t pay much attention to science at all. But evolution, cosmology, geology, anthropology, and many other sciences do impinge on their beliefs, so they try to attack science by pretending to be scientists and using scientific language wherever possible. Unlike real scientists, however, creationists do not follow the first rule of science that we discussed in chapter 1: a scientific hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable, and scientists must be willing to give up their cherished ideas if the data show they are wrong. Thomas Henry Huxley said it best: “Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

Christian evolutionary biologist Ken Miller of Brown University, who has beaten all the ICR’s debaters many times, provides an insight. In his book, Finding Darwin’s God (1999:172), he describes an encounter with Henry Morris, whom he had just beaten in debate the night before. He asked Morris about his discredited positions, and said “Do you actually believe all this stuff?” Morris replied, “You don’t realize what is at stake. In a question of such importance, scientific data aren’t the ultimate authority. Scripture tells us what the right conclusion is. And if science, momentarily, doesn’t agree with it, then we have to keep working until we get the right answer. But I have no doubts as to what that answer will be” (Miller 1999:173).

Morris may be sincere and believe he is serving God. But he could not have provided a more chilling indictment of the narrow self-righteousness, fanaticism, and antiscientific attitude that is creationism.

Why Should We Care?

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

An educated citizenry is the only safe repository for democratic values.

—Thomas Jefferson

In a democracy, it is very important that the public have a basic understanding of science so that they can control the way that science and technology increasingly affect our lives.

—Stephen Hawking

Scientific literacy may likely determine whether or not democratic society will survive into the 21st century.

—Leon M. Lederman, Nobel laureate

So what if the creationist extremists have weird beliefs? Why should we care? How does it make any difference in our own lives? There are so many crazy religious cults in America who believe weird things, and thanks to our Constitution, they all have a right to believe anything they like. If we leave them alone, won’t the problem go away?

The short answer to those questions is no; we cannot just ignore creationism. Unlike most religious extremists who are harmless and somewhat amusing (or suicidal, like the Jim Jones cult in Guyana, or the Heaven’s Gate cult), the creationists are not planning to leave the rest of us alone. They are fanatics on a crusade to overcome all those who oppose them. The reasons for resisting them are very clear and straightforward.

1. Creationism is a narrow sectarian religious belief and cannot be taught in public schools without violating the Constitution.

In chapter 2, we detailed the history of creationism and showed how every single court has found that their ideas are the religious beliefs of a specific sectarian group. No matter how they disguise their ideas as “creation science” or “intelligent design,” the fact remains that they cannot be allowed to push their narrow sectarian beliefs in preference to those of other religions without violating the First Amendment of the Constitution concerning the separation of church and state.

As we saw in chapter 2, creationists have been more and more clever in disguising their religious tracks each time they are defeated in court. Right after the 2005 Dover decision, intelligent design (ID) creationism died, and the creationists tried even more subtle strategies. During the past decade, many states have seen creationists propose (and some states adopt) bills allowing creationism in new forms. One form is “teach the controversy,” where the teacher gives equal time to creationism, and then “let the kids decide.” In other cases, these laws have allowed teachers to introduce “evidence against evolution” (provided by creationists but not mentioning creationism) to science classes. No other topic in science is so targeted except climate change, another inconvenient truth that fundamentalists deny. Still other approaches have been proposing “academic freedom” bills that allow teachers to say anything, including creationism, without anyone stopping them for teaching pseudoscience in science classes. Creationists are always creative in their strategies to sneak religion into public school science classrooms, and they have unlimited time, energy, and resources to do so. Most scientists don’t have the time or energy to fight them, because they must pursue their scientific careers and focus on real research, not on fighting political battles with religious extremists.

Nick Matzke (2016) published a clever study, where he used the language and key phrases of many different creationist policies and bills submitted to different state legislatures. He inserted them into a software program that deciphers the evolutionary tree of real organisms. From this he showed that you could trace the ancestry of various creationist bills and documents as they copied each other, then were modified (evolved) into different strains of creationist bills. Almost all versions of creationist laws are copycats of one another, all modified and evolving through time to avoid the problems of the separation of church and state and trying to hide their religious motivations deeper and deeper. But the religious roots of any creationist law or policy are easy to trace.

Why not let them have “equal time” or “teach the controversy,” as some (including former president George W. Bush) advocate? Our culture is fond of equal time and fairness, so this sounds OK to lots of people. But science is not about popularity contests but about what scientists have discovered about the real world. There is no time or valid reason to teach outdated and discredited ideas from the past like astrology, the flat earth, the geocentric universe, or creationism. In addition, if we allowed them equal time, we would open the door of public school science classes to any or all religious beliefs that wanted equal time. For example, there are a significant number of extreme creationists (including an entire Flat Earth Society) who point out that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat and believe that all those NASA photos of the earth from space are hoaxes. Should they be allowed equal time in science classes too? Their beliefs are just as sincerely held as those of the more polished and scientific-sounding ID creationists, yet they still fail the fundamental test of science.

The conclusions of the creationists are determined in advance and not subject to testing and falsification, so no matter how much they call it “creation science,” it is not science. If we allow creation science, do we also flat-earthers to teach their ridiculous ideas? Do we allow astrology instead of astronomy, or parapsychology and phrenology (reading bumps on the head) instead of psychology, or replace chemistry with alchemy, or physics with magic? (See fig. 16.1.) All of these nonscientific and pseudoscientific notions are believed by at least some of American society, but that doesn’t entitle them to equal time in a science classroom.

FIGURE 16.1. Creationist attacks on science are not just attempts to replace evolutionary biology with religious dogma but to replace other sciences with pseudoscience: astronomy with astrology; neurology with phrenology; physics with magic; and chemistry with alchemy. (Cartoon from the Philadelphia Inquirer; copyright Universal Press Syndicate)

Science teaching in this country is difficult enough with the incredible crowding of the curriculum and the time lost to standardized testing. Students have short attention spans and are distracted by video games and television, so most science teachers barely have time to cover the basics, let alone take time to discuss an unscientific religious belief just because some noisy minority wants it.

2. The attack on evolution is really an attack on all of science.

If they could, creationists would abolish the teaching of many fields of science—not just evolutionary biology but also geology, paleontology, astronomy, anthropology, and any other field that does not conform to a literal reading of Genesis. More importantly, their attempts to introduce supernaturalism and unscientific ideas to science classes undermine the very foundations on which science is based. This is not just an intellectual issue either. If we reverted to flood geology, we would never find any oil, and our economy would be in a shambles. If we followed creationist astronomy, none of our space program (and the benefits it provides) would be possible.

3. Creationists are threatening, harassing, and intimidating our public schools, universities, and museums.

The creationists are not content just to preach to their followers. They insist on forcing their views on everyone else, even though it is unconstitutional to do so in public schools and museums. Because the courts have turned them down every time, they resort to pressure tactics on school boards and especially on state textbook-adoption boards. Consequently, most high school biology textbooks are still shamefully weak on the topic of evolution, and the majority of high school biology teachers and classes still avoid the topic or teach it in a watered-down version so as not to offend one or two kids who have fundamentalist parents. Many textbooks are forced to avoid the dreaded “E” word altogether and use euphemisms like “organic change through time” just to avoid terrible fights with the school boards and in classrooms.

Lately, the creationists have adopted even more aggressive tactics, including filling young kids with lies about the fossil record and coaching them to talk back, sass, and disrespect their teachers. The foremost example of this is Ken Ham, the head of the huge Answers in Genesis organization, with 160 employees and an annual budget of over $150 million. He tours the country indoctrinating young children to believe that biologists, paleontologists, and geologists are liars, that no transitional fossils exist, that dinosaurs lived with humans, and that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Even more frightening is the way he coaches the kids to challenge their teachers and disrupt classroom activities. His song and dance is chillingly recorded in Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God, about the radical evangelicals who want to take over political power in the United States. An article by Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times on February 27, 2006, describes it this way:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With puppets and cartoons, he was showing them how to reject geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

If a teacher mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled Earth, Ham said, “You put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ”

He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked. “God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?” The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

A former high school biology teacher, Ham travels the U.S. training kids as young as 5 to challenge scientific orthodoxy. He doesn’t engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views—aggressively.

He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham does his job well, his acolytes will ask enough questions—and spout enough arguments—to shake the evolution theory of Charles Darwin.

“We’re going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles,” Ham, 54, recently told 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple in northern New Jersey. It was Friday night, the kickoff of a weekend conference sponsored by Ham’s global ministry, Answers in Genesis.

To a burst of applause, Ham exhorted: “Get out and change the world!”

Over the past two decades, “creation evangelism” has become a booming industry. Several hundred independent speakers promote biblical creation at churches, colleges, private schools, Rotary clubs. They lead tours to the Grand Canyon or museums to study the world through a creationist lens.

They churn out home-schooling material. A geology text devotes a chapter to Noah’s flood; an astronomy book quotes Genesis on the origins of the universe; a science unit for second-graders features daily “evolution stumpers” that teach children to argue against the theory that is a cornerstone of modern science.

But the creationist political pressure, propaganda, and lies are not restricted to public schools. In many smaller colleges (especially community colleges and those that focus primarily on teaching and do not have a strong research emphasis), the professors are just as intimidated by creationist bullies who are eager to disrupt class and trash the professor‘s reputation on the course evaluation forms. Yet this is in a college setting, where the faculty is supposed to have intellectual freedom and the protection of tenure, and the system is not run by highly politicized local school boards. It should not be so—but it is.

The saddest commentary of all is how creationists have repeatedly used lawsuits and political pressure to intimidate and threaten museums into advocating their particular religious viewpoint (in violation of the Constitution). Failing that, they try to remove any mention of evolution, geology, or astronomy. The Smithsonian Institution, as the largest federally funded science museum in the United States, has been repeatedly attacked in this way. Creationists have pressured sympathetic right-wing politicians to investigate and bully this esteemed institution into removing their displays on paleontology and evolution. Fortunately, they have been rebuffed so far, but they keep trying. Even sadder, a story in the British newspaper the Telegraph (dated December 8, 2006) reported that evangelicals in Kenya are trying to force the National Museums of Kenya, repository of most of the important hominin fossils discussed in chapter 15, to remove their displays because they don’t want to be exposed to the fact that we evolved in Africa. As the outraged Richard Leakey, the museum’s director and famous paleoanthropologist, put it, “The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science.”

It is one thing when creationists try to intimidate public schools and prevent their children from hearing stuff they don’t want to believe. But museums? If they don’t want to be exposed to science, they don’t have to visit museums! They have no right to force a museum to remove displays that contradict their religious beliefs. Given the political instability in Africa, it is a frightening thought that such a fanatic religious group might take power, or riot in the streets, and attempt to break into the museum and destroy this fantastic and irreplaceable evidence of our own evolution whose very existence they don’t want to acknowledge.

The attempt by Kenyan evangelicals to suppress the evidence of human evolution is reminiscent of one of the last scenes in the classic 1968 movie (and Pierre Boulle novel) Planet of the Apes. Taylor, the marooned human astronaut (played, ironically, by the conservative icon Charlton Heston), has fled into the Forbidden Zone, where the sympathetic ape, Dr. Cornelius, has shown him an archeological excavation that proves humans lived on the planet before apes became dominant. Once they are all captured by the gorilla storm troopers, the head ape, Dr. Zaius, orders the cave dynamited and the evidence destroyed. As he says in the film, the evidence might shake their belief systems and therefore it is too dangerous.

With the creationist threats to schools, universities, and museums, are we in danger of letting dogmatic religious authorities destroy the evidence of our own evolution because it challenges their belief systems? If the fundamentalists continue to expand their political power, are we in for another Inquisition, with the religious fanatics suppressing and destroying books and evidence, and harassing anyone who doesn’t agree with them? Many countries in the world ruled by fundamentalist regimes (especially in fundamentalist Muslim countries, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or the extremist mullahs ruling Iran) already showed that this is possible.

4. Thanks in part to creationists, the American public is appallingly illiterate in basic science.

Every study and survey that has been done for decades shows consistently that Americans are among the most scientifically illiterate of all westernized nations. Carl Sagan (1996) estimated that 95 percent of Americans were scientifically illiterate, and most could not give the correct scientific answers to the simplest questions such as: What is a molecule? What is a cell? What is DNA? Less than 50 percent knew that the earth goes around the sun once a year, and a small percentage thought the sun goes around the earth. And thanks to creationism, only 35 percent thought that the Big Bang theory was correct, and 48 percent agreed with creationists and the Flintstones that humans lived with dinosaurs. The embarrassing list goes on and on, making the United States the laughingstock of the educated world. Every survey that has been conducted in recent years ranks American science literacy near the bottom of the 40 westernized nations that were compared. Countries like Japan, China, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany nearly always rank at the top, while America usually ranks with several underdeveloped nations with a fraction of our wealth and nowhere near the money available to spend on education (fig. 16.2).

FIGURE 16.2. Plot comparing acceptance of evolution (measured by acceptance of ideas that “human beings, as we know them, evolved from earlier species of animals”) versus national wealth (as measured by GDP per capita). Northern European countries are at the top of the graph, followed down the curve by southern European countries, and then by former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe. The United States is the sole outlier, with science literacy on the level of Turkey, but more spending per student than any country except Norway. (Modified from Prothero 2013a).

There have been lots of arguments about why Americans are so scientifically illiterate, but the evidence is pretty clear. Of all the developed nations of the world, only the United States has a significant creationist influence in politics. There is no significant creationist influence pressuring lawmakers in Canada or in any other European or Asian country with a developed economy. As figs. 16.2 and 16.3 show, the key predictor of science illiteracy is any question that is influenced by creationism, whether it deals with the Big Bang, the age of the earth, or evolution directly. No other variable is so predictive of science illiteracy in a westernized country.

FIGURE 16.3. Percentage of population in each country that accepts evolution as true (dark bar to left) and regards it as false (solid bar to right); the undecided are indicated by the light bar in the middle. Note that nearly every developed country in Europe and Asia has at least 75 percent or higher acceptance of evolution. These are also the countries ranked highest in science literacy by numerous studies. The United States is down at the bottom with Cyprus and Turkey, countries with heavy influence of religion like Greek Orthodoxy or Islam, yet the United States has a much higher GNP and spends much more per child than almost every country on this list except Norway. (Modified from Prothero 2013a).

It wasn’t always this bad. During the Sputnik scare and space race of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Americans were shocked to discover how far they had fallen behind and brought back rigorous and engaging science education—only to see it languish as creationism has eaten away at the textbooks and the demands of standardized testing have pushed the time in the curriculum toward subjects covered in the test, leaving science (and physical education and art and music and many other subjects) out in the cold.

5. America has fallen behind many other nations in technological and scientific supremacy, which threatens the economic future of us all.

Thanks to the scientific illiteracy of our general population and the hostile environment for science that creationism is promoting, we are falling behind many other nations in the one area where we used to excel, science and technology. Study after study has documented a “brain drain” of scientists going to other countries with less anti-intellectualism and more favorable climates for science, especially in fields that are opposed strenuously by fundamentalists (like stem-cell research or cloning). America can no longer compete to make the cheapest or best electronics, toys, cars, or most anything else, as China, Korea, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and many other nations have taken those tasks away from us in corporate cutbacks and outsourcing. For many years, we could brag that we won a lion’s share of the Nobel Prizes in science, but that dominance is now coming to an end as well. If we can’t compete with other nations in manufacturing and commerce, and we give away our advantages in science and technology, what kind of world are we leaving for our children? What does this imply for our national security when we farm out not only blue-collar but also white-collar jobs and then are slaves to other countries that are doing better science and technology as well?

6. Denial of evolution is not just bad science, but it threatens our health and well-being.

As discussed in chapter 3, evolution keeps happening all the time, whether creationists want to believe it or not. Yet if we deny the fact that evolution is happening in viruses and bacteria and in other pathogens and pests, it only makes the problem worse when they evolve resistance to whatever we throw at them. If creationists ran the labs that produce these protective chemicals, do you think we would have a chance when the next deadly pest hits us?

A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available. Bailey was never prosecuted for this unethical and shocking example of medical malpractice and kept doing surgery at Loma Linda until he retired.

7. Allowing ideologues of any type to suppress science through political means is deadly for a society as well.

The classic illustration of this is the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko, who became Stalin’s favorite scientist and wielded almost absolute power over Soviet science from 1927 until 1964. By all accounts, he was a mediocre geneticist who held onto discredited notions of how Lamarckian inheritance might improve Soviet crop yields and stave off famine. Most of his results were inconclusive or outright fraudulent, yet he told Stalin that he could produce incredible crop yields. Consequently, he rose to power in the Soviet scientific establishment then used his clout with the brutal dictator to suppress the legitimate Mendelian geneticists, who did understand how inheritance worked. Most of them were killed outright, sent to concentration camps, or driven into exile, forever destroying the vitality and strength of Soviet genetics and biology. Soviet biology fell decades behind that of the rest of the world until the 1960s, when Lysenko was finally denounced, his work was discredited, and he fell from power.

The point here is that science cannot be subservient to ideology and be forced to compromise the truth in order to please the political leadership. Lysenko and Stalin did not want to believe in Mendelian genetics or Darwinian biology, and they murdered hundreds of legitimate scientists who had the temerity to disagree with them. Other regimes (such as the Nazis) have distorted science to support their ideas, but ultimately scientific reality must win.

Some might argue that we’re not in the Soviet Union of Stalin, and that the United States has safeguards against such oppression of scientific ideas. But the Bush administration was well documented (see Mooney 2005, and Shulman 2007) as interfering with legitimate scientists, rewriting reports by federal scientists that disagreed with their right-wing ideology, encouraging fringe scientists to testify as legitimate equals with well-regarded scientists in order to cancel out politically inconvenient messages, and generally ignoring the conclusions of scientists who didn’t agree with them. Already the stem-cell research program in the United States has been set back compared to that in other countries, as our best scientists go to countries with less political oppression. Likewise, the foot-dragging and denials of global warming by the Bush administration and the flunkies of the oil industry in Congress cost the world valuable time in addressing this serious crisis.

And now we have a Trump Administration in power that is run by science deniers from top to bottom, with a Congress controlled by climate deniers as well. Many are strident creationists, such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, as well as climate deniers like EPA head Mike Pruitt, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and of course Donald Trump himself. Who knows what will happen to science education when a creationist like DeVos tries to cripple public education while funneling tax dollars to private religious schools that teach creationism, not science?

When the prophetess Cassandra told the Trojans what they didn’t want to hear, they ignored her and were eventually destroyed. If science tells us that we have evolved from the animal kingdom, or that microbes are evolving resistances to all our medicines, or that our wasteful society is destroying our planet, we had better learn from it, rather than shooting the messenger—and letting our children pay the ultimate price for our folly.

Polling Problems—and a Ray of Hope

Having battled creationism for most of my professional career (more than 40 years now), I sometimes find myself despairing that nothing ever seems to change or get better. For decades now, the Gallup Poll has surveyed Americans about their belief in evolution and creation. Year in and year out, the numbers seem to remain constant: about 40–45 percent of Americans appear to be young-earth creationists (YEC). The exact phrasing of the question in the Gallup Poll is as follows:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings: human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process, human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process, or God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

For decades about 44 percent of the respondents agree to the last answer (YEC), another 37 percent chose the first answer (theistic evolution, ID creationist), and only 12 percent favor the second answer (nontheistic evolution). Gallup wrote these questions decades ago, before there was much understanding of how the framing of a question can bias the answer, and for decades, they have kept the question the same, so comparisons remain consistent. But social scientists know that polls can be very misleading, especially in the way the question is framed to force certain responses. For example, the Gallup poll only gives us three possibilities and loads two of the answers with “God,” which is an obvious bias right from the start. In addition, there is good evidence to suggest that human evolution is the real sticking point and that most people don’t care one way or another if nonhuman creatures evolve or not. What if we asked people what they thought about specific scientific ideas, independent of emotional issues like “God” and “humans”?

As Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) pointed out:

In 2009, Pew stripped away the religious issues and explicit reference to the age of the earth by asking people if they agreed that “Humans and other living things have evolved over time due to natural processes” or alternatively “existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Six in ten opted for evolution.

In 2005, when the Harris Poll asked people “Do you think human beings developed from earlier species or not,” 38 percent agreed that humans did develop from early species, but in the same survey, 49 percent agreed with evolution when asked: “Do you believe all plants and animals have evolved from other species or not?” So explicitly mentioning human evolution led to 11 percent of people switching from pro-evolution to anti-evolution. In a 2009 survey, Harris asked a Gallup-like question, in which only 29 percent agreed that “Human beings evolved from earlier species,” but in a separate question from the same poll, 53 percent said that they “believe Charles Darwin’s theory which states that plants, animals and human beings have evolved over time.” Placing the issue in a scientific context, with no overt religious context, yields higher support for evolution.

The National Science Board’s biennial report on Science and Engineering Indicators includes a survey on science literacy which, since the early 1980s, has asked if people agree that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” About 46 percent of the American public consistently agree with that option, about the same number who back the middle option in Gallup’s surveys.

Clearly, people respond to these subtle shifts in how the question is framed, taking a harder stance toward human evolution than to the idea that animals and plants evolve, and stepping away from evolution if it is pitched in opposition to religion. Pollster George Bishop surveyed the diversity of survey responses in 2006 and concluded: “All of this goes to show how easily what Americans appear to believe about human origins can be readily manipulated by how the question is asked.”

In 2009, Bishop ran a survey that clarifies how many people really think the earth is only 10,000 years old. In survey results published by Reports of NCSE, Bishop found that 18 percent agreed that “the earth is less than 10,000 years old.” But he also found that 39 percent agreed “God created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and the first two people within the past 10,000 years.” Again, question wording and context clearly both matter a lot.

For more evidence that the number of true YECs is fairly small, consider another question from the survey run by the National Science Board since the early ’80s. In that survey, about 80 percent consistently agree “The continents on which we live have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.” Ten percent say they don’t know, leaving only about 10 percent rejecting continental drift over millions of years. Though young-earth creationists often latch onto continental drift as a sudden process during Noah’s flood (as a way to explain how animals could get from the Ark to separate continents), they certainly don’t think the continents moved over millions of years. This question puts a cap of about 10 percent on the number of committed young-earth creationists, lower even than what Bishop found. More people in the NSB science literacy survey didn’t know that the father’s genes determine the sex of a baby, thought all radioactivity came from human activities, or disagreed that the earth goes around the sun.

This is a very different picture than the Gallup polls suggest. Most people don’t regard plate tectonics and continental drift as controversial (YECs must deny its existence), don’t have any problem with the evolution of nonhuman animals and plants, or an earth more than 10,000 years old. On average, this suggests that the true YECs are only about 10 percent of the American population (31 million people), another 25 percent prefer creationism but not necessarily a young earth. That’s about 35 percent creationists total, not the 45 percent Gallup suggests. About 10 percent of Americans (another 31 million people) are nontheistic evolutionists, another 33 percent or so lean toward evolution, giving us about 35 percent evolutionists, not the 12 percent suggested by Gallup. The remaining third in the middle also seem to accept evolution, but believe God or gods were involved somehow. Thus, about 65 percent of Americans seem to accept evolution in some form, not the 55 percent that Gallup suggested. The wording of the poll makes all the difference.

Yet another set of polls seem to confirm that the number of YECs is much smaller than Gallup suggests and is also declining. A combined CBS/YouGov poll showed that between 2004 and 2013, the number of people accepting the statement “Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process” jumped from 13 percent to 21 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of people agreeing with the statement “God created human beings in their present form within the last ten thousand years” dropped from 55 percent to 37 percent over the same interval (2004–2013). According to the analysis:

The demographics of the respondents is fairly predictable. Fewer women (37 percent) accept some form of evolution than men (56 percent) and fewer women (13 percent) tend to identify themselves as non-religious than men (20 percent). Older respondents favored creationism, while respondents under the age of 30 favored evolution, whether guided by a deity or not. The largest number of strict evolutionists was among this youngest age group, which tells us that insisting on keeping science in science class is working. Unsurprisingly, only 5 percent of Republicans agreed that evolution happens without a deity guiding it. The additional 30 percent of Republicans who agreed evolution is a thing believe that their god directs it. Democrats (28 percent) are closely followed by political independents (26 percent) in their acceptance of non-divine evolution, while an additional 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, think God drives the evolution train. This means that more than half of non-Republicans accept evolutionary science. Among Republicans, 55 percent believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and a god created human beings in their present form. The respondents most strongly denying evolution were Muslims, with 64 percent believing young-earth creationism and 36 percent uncertain. None of the respondents identifying as Muslim would admit that they accepted evolution. Protestant (59 percent) and the various Orthodox churches (53 percent) tied for the next largest group of evolution deniers. The strongest supporters of evolution? Believe it or not, it isn’t the religiously unaffiliated. All of the Buddhists polled accepted evolution, although 13 percent of them said a deity guided it. Agnostics (85 percent) accept evolution, 17 percent of whom say God guided it. The remaining 15 percent aren’t sure. The atheist respondents throw a curve to the poll, though. Two percent of those identifying as atheist also claim to be young earth creationists. Since 48 atheists responded to the survey, that means one person in there somewhere is either very confused or clicked the wrong radio button.

Other demographics spread pretty much as we might expect: the more educated the respondent, the less likely to believe in creationism. The coasts, made up mostly of blue states, are more accepting of evolution than the mostly-red Midwest and Southern states. People identifying as white were more likely than Hispanics to accept evolution, while only 6 percent of black people participating in the poll did. The percentage of respondents who favor teaching creationism in public schools (40 percent) followed the same trends among the different groupings of respondents. Younger people opposed teaching creationism in larger numbers (42 percent), as did Democrats (29 percent) and Independents (31 percent). The more educated respondents disapproved of creationism in public schools more strongly than the less educated.

In short, not only are the polls skewed by the way questions are written, but the trends are positive. YECs are nowhere near as numerous as Gallup suggested, their numbers are declining rapidly, and the YECs are older and dying off. In every other developed nation in the world—Canada, northern Europe, Japan, Australia, and others—creationism has no influence on public policy. This is striking contrast to the United States, where (despite the fact that YECs are a small minority according to these polls), creationists form the majority of the House and Senate science committees and are the majority of GOP presidential candidates in the past three elections.

The other encouraging sign is the change in the religious composition of the U.S. population. The United States is the last major developed nation in the world that has such a high degree of religiosity. If you travel in Canada, northern Europe, or the United Kingdom, you’ll find that nearly everyone there is secular now, and that religion has just about vanished from the cultural landscape. Spectacular churches and cathedrals all over Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and much of northern Europe have lost their flocks, and are now being repurposed as public meeting places or bars and restaurants or just sit empty and serve as tourist attractions—but no one worships there any more.

According to a 2013 Pew poll in the United States, the “religiously unaffiliated” are now about 20–30 percent of the general population, outnumbering nearly every other group (Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, and most Protestant denominations) by a big margin (each of the rest of these groups is 2 percent or less of the population). Only the Catholics and the Southern Baptists are still more numerous, and both of these are losing ground. And of those who said that they had “nothing in particular” in the way of a religious affiliation, 88 percent also said they were “not looking.” Thus, the decline in religiosity across the board in the United States is not some sort of hippy-dippy movement to “New Age” religions from the old stale Protestant churches—but a movement away from any form of organized religion, especially fundamentalism.

Even more striking is how this breaks down demographically. The most remarkable of the trends is how much it is stratified by age. Young people are becoming increasingly secular and nonreligious, so much so that the youngest cohort (the “young millennials,” born 1990–1994) are 34 percent nonreligious! About 30 percent of the “older millennials” (born 1980–1989) are also nonreligious, while the “Gen Xers” (born 1965–1980) report 21 percent “unaffiliated,” so the percentage declines only very slightly as the cohorts age. All of these people together contribute to the overall 20–30 percent of “unaffiliated” in the poll and will increase through time. Clearly, organized religion is fading rapidly in this country, driven by a combination of young people who see no need of it and the dying off of the older generations that were raised in a strongly religious society. As sociologists like Phil Zuckerman have shown, such trends have already happened in most of the western industrialized nations (especially those in Scandinavia), as the benefits of a modern secular society and modern medicine and science become more central to their lives.

We can all speculate about why younger generations are alienated from organized religion, and certainly there are many reasons. But knowing the current political trends in this country, we might suggest that one factor of great importance is how “organized religion” in this country is largely dominated by the shrill and intolerant evangelicals and their hate-filled message against science, gays, women, and minorities. With the incredibly rapid shift in this country toward majority acceptance of gays (who are overwhelmingly supported by young people, among whom homophobia and religious intolerance is rare), it might seem that such an issue is driving people away from religious zealots in politics, and their causes. Sure enough, that is confirmed by recent polling. The Pew Study cited earlier shows almost mirror-image percentages: those who are “unaffiliated” are largely supportive of gay rights and abortion rights; those who are religious are just the opposite. Another study drives the point home in stark relief. The single biggest factor driving people away from churches is indeed the intolerance and hatred shown by the evangelicals, and how they have manifested this whenever they have secured political power. As the Los Angeles Times describes it, this is a striking change from only 30 years ago:

During the 1980s, the public face of American religion turned sharply right. Political allegiances and religious observance became more closely aligned, and both religion and politics became more polarized. Abortion and homosexuality became more prominent issues on the national political agenda, and activists such as Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed began looking to expand religious activism into electoral politics. Church attendance gradually became the primary dividing line between Republicans and Democrats in national elections.

This political “God gap” is a recent development. Up until the 1970s, progressive Democrats were common in church pews and many conservative Republicans didn’t attend church. But after 1980, both churchgoing progressives and secular conservatives became rarer and rarer. Some Americans brought their religion and their politics into alignment by adjusting their political views to their religious faith. But, surprisingly, more of them adjusted their religion to fit their politics.

We were initially skeptical about that proposition, because it seemed implausible that people would make choices that might affect their eternal fate based on how they felt about George W. Bush. But the evidence convinced us that many Americans now are sorting themselves out on Sunday morning on the basis of their political views. For example, in our Faith Matters national survey of 3,000 Americans, we observed this sorting process in real time, when we interviewed the same people twice about one year apart.

For many religious Americans, this alignment of religion and politics was divinely ordained, a long-sought retort to the immorality of the 1960s. Other Americans were not so sure.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new century, the increasingly prominent association between religion and conservative politics provoked a backlash among moderates and progressives, many of whom had previously considered themselves religious. The fraction of Americans who agreed “strongly” that religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions nearly doubled from 22 percent in 1991 to 38 percent in 2008, and the fraction who insisted that religious leaders should not try to influence how people vote rose to 45 percent from 30 percent.

This backlash was especially forceful among youth coming of age in the 1990s and just forming their views about religion. Some of that generation, to be sure, held deeply conservative moral and political views, and they felt very comfortable in the ranks of increasingly conservative churchgoers. But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were “always” or “almost always” wrong plummeted from about 75 percent in 1990 to about 40 percent in 2008. (Ironically, in polling, Millennials are actually more uneasy about abortion than their parents.)

Hemant Mehta argues that the regressive social policies of fundamentalists aren’t the only factors. He points to the fact that younger generations are more likely to learn from the Internet, and less likely to obey everything their parents tell them, especially when they have questions for which organized religion has no good answers. Certainly, the virtual community of Web-enabled young people can explore and learn about topics like secularism and evolution in a way that would have been impossible in many small religious American towns just a generation ago. Even if the social pressure of the conservative community censors or hushes up these topics in school and at the library, the Internet opens a window that cannot be shut by local authorities—and younger people are more likely to find their own answers this way than ever before.

For those of us who value science and science education in this country, this is good news. As I’ve argued in this chapter, the single biggest factor that causes us to fall behind nearly all the other westernized industrial nations (including Japan, South Korea, China, and Singapore, along with most of Europe) in science literacy is fundamentalism and creationism. When you break down the polling, it’s always questions about evolution, the age of the earth, cosmology, and human evolution that nearly always cause Americans to flunk science literacy tests. These are all questions that reflect the creationist-evangelical influence on our culture. Thankfully, it is apparently declining. The United States probably won’t become Denmark during my lifetime, but I’m optimistic that the never-ending battles with creationism in the United States will gradually end as all the old evangelicals die off and they are not replaced by a comparable cohort of the younger generation that was similarly brainwashed. One can only hope…

Choices for the Future

It is to be hoped that the ID movement, because of the very publicity that it has sought and achieved, will be seen by the majority of Americans for the giant step backward that it is. Our children are literally the future of our nation, which will increasingly need competent scientists and engineers to guide us through the coming technological revolutions—revolutions that are already under way all around us. There are examples in history of the collapse of great civilizations. There is no particular reason that the United State should be exempt from historical forces. The Visigoths are at the gate. Will we let them in?

—John Brockman, Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement

When all is said and done, we have just a few choices. We can let the creationists further damage our scientific literacy and technological and scientific advantages, or we can try to bring back rigorous science education in our schools and make it our priority. We can reject evolution, astronomy, geology, paleontology, and anthropology for some minority’s religious viewpoint, or we can accept what science has taught us about the world and see ourselves in this humbling new light. As George Gaylord Simpson wrote in 1961, “One hundred years without Darwin [and now over 150 years] is enough!”

Instead of the narrow, claustrophobic extremist worldview of the creationists, we can accept the vastness of the universe and the immense length of geologic time and reach a humbler, less anthropocentric, less arrogant attitude about our place in nature. We can embrace the fact that we are part of the biosphere and need to shepherd and care for this planet before we destroy it. Many scientists and authors have written about how uplifting and liberating the scientific worldview can be for humankind, especially in comparison to the vengeful God of the Old Testament or the hateful practices of many religions that persecute and sometimes murder people in the name of their faith. Michael Shermer gives a good argument for why the evolutionary and scientific worldview is not only no threat to true religion or spirituality but actually helps us better understand our spirituality when complemented by our scientific understanding of the world. As Shermer (2006:159–161) writes,

Does a scientific explanation for the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my Meade eight-inch reflecting telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the plains of Africa….

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciensuality, if you will pardon the awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are supposed to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, or the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

In his famous television series Cosmos (1980), the late great Carl Sagan put it beautifully:

The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as of a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries…. We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps through the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

Darwin (1859) said it best in the concluding paragraph of On the Origin of Species,

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

For Further Reading

Brown, B., and J. P. Alson. 2007. Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge House.

Ehrlich, P. R., and A. H. Ehrlich. 1996. Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Humes, E. 2007. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul. New York: Ecco.