Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion Read Online Free PDF Page A

abstractions as scientific naturalism. In The Genesis Flood, for example, Morris stresses the theological significance of utter fidelity to the entire biblical narrative. When the Book of Genesis claims that God created the universe in six days, Morris maintains, it must mean six twenty-four-hour days; when Genesis says that God created humans and animals on the sixth day, then dinosaurs must have lived alongside early humankind; and when Genesis gives the genealogy of Noah’s descendants, believers can use the information to date the flood at between five thousand and seven thousand years ago.
    Despite judicial rulings against the incorporation of scientific creationism into the public school biology curriculum, opinion surveys suggest that at least four out of every ten Americans accept biblical creationism of the sort espoused by Morris and the Institute for Creation Research. If not propagated in the public schools, then creationism must be spread by other means—and conservative Christian religious organizations have the necessary resources to further propagate creationism. Fifty years after its initial publication, The Genesis Flood continues to sell well in Christian bookstores, but it’s now only one in a shelffull of such books. Christian radio and television stations bombard the nation with creationist broadcasts, such as Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis,” which is heard daily on hundreds of radio stations in the United States and around the world.
    In terms of educational trends, the number of students who are schooled at home or in Christian academies has steadily risen since 1980, with many such students learning their biology from creationist textbooks. At the post-secondary level, Bible institutes and Christian colleges continue to grow in number and size, with at least some of them offering degrees in biology and science education in a creation-friendly environment.
    All this creationist activity is nearly invisible outside the churches and religious communities where it occurs, but that has not stopped some evolutionists from striking back. To be sure, most biologists probably ignore religion. But some of them—ardent in their evolutionism and evangelistic about its social implications—have adopted a Darrowesque dislike of biblical Christianity. The British biologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins leads this group.
    In The Blind Watchmaker, published to great acclaim in the midst of legal wrangling over Louisiana’s balanced-treatment law, Dawkins takes aim at what he calls “redneck” creationists and “their disturbingly successful fight to subvert American education and textbook publishing.” Focusing on the philosophical heart of creationism, rather than simple biblical literalism, Dawkins challenges the very notion of purposeful design in nature, which he calls “the most influential of the arguments for the existence of God.” In a legendary articulation of this argument in 1802, British theologian William Paley compared living things to mechanical watches. Just as the intricate workings of a watch betrayed its maker’s purposes, Paley reasoned, so too the even more intricate complexity of individual organs and organisms proves the existence of a purposeful creator. Not so, Dawkins counters. “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin described, and which we now know is the explanation for existence and apparently the purposeful form of all life, has no purpose.... It is the blind watchmaker.” By banishing the argument for design, Dawkins proclaims, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” 3
    Renowned Harvard naturalist E. O. Wilson makes similar assertions. “The inexorable growth of [biology] continues to widen, not to close the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion,” Wilson wrote in 2005. “The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the