On February 4, evangelist Ken Ham will debate television
personality Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) on the subject of creationism, at the
Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
It will be streamed live, and should attract considerable attention
among those with an interest in the decline of modern civilization.
A public debate between non-experts is theater, not
scholarship. The debate is predicated on
a critical misrepresentation, as if Creationism/Evolution mapped cleanly on to
Religion/Science. But it doesn’t. Evolution is compatible with many
theologies.
Certainly creationism is religious, and evolution is
scientific. But aside from a bit of old
revisionist history, the judgment of modern
historians and anthropologists alike is that science and religion can, and do,
coexist peacefully for most people. The
reason is that science is a fairly narrow intellectual domain, consisting of a
series of methods for establishing reliable knowledge about the natural world;
while religion broadly encompasses social, experiential, and moral
domains.
Religion is so fundamentally an aspect of the human
condition that, as scholars have realized for many decades, most people
integrate religious beliefs and attitudes seamlessly into their daily
lives. The ancient Greeks had no word
for it. It’s not that they weren’t
religious, it’s just that they didn’t separate and label it, as we do.
Ritual behaviors extend beyond religion. As football fans are well aware - with commercials
for Bud Light invoking the old Stevie Wonder song “Superstition” – religious
beliefs and attitudes hardly end at the outer side of the church door. And as anyone who as ever shouted “stupid
computer!” and smacked the side of their monitor knows, the attribution of
sentient properties to inanimate objects – loosely called “animism” – is not
limited to the formally demarcated religious domain.
Creationists today are a diverse lot. Ken Ham represents “young-earth creationism”,
rejecting not simply anthropology and biology, but geology and astrophysics as
well. That position existed back in
1925, when John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in Tennessee,
and William Jennings Bryan held center stage as the nation’s leading spokesman
for creationism. But young-earth
creationism was too dumb even for Bryan, who made it clear during the infamous
trial that he accepted the great antiquity of the heavens and the earth. He was an “old-earth” creationist.
A more recent version of creationism - “intelligent
design” - preaches neither an old cosmos
nor a young cosmos, but presents simply a theology of negativity, whose
adherents are united solely in their opposition to the naturalistic explanation
of human origins provided by modern science.
But the modern conflict is complicated by two other
factors.
First, the cultural prominence of evangelical atheists, who
would cast themselves not simply against creationism, but against religion more
generally. These people, however,
imagine that religion is as narrow as science is – simply a set of alternative
and false narratives about nature. But
these people do no favors for science, for its authority on natural matters
does not extend to the cultural, ethical, spiritual, or esthetic domains.
Second, the mistake of lumping anti-vaccinators,
climate-change deniers, and creationists into a single “anti-science” bin. Nobody is “anti-science” – that person exists
only in the mind of a paranoiac. After
all, Republican resistance to anthropogenic climate change is about business
and money, not about theology.
Creationism is a poor representation of religion, whose basis
is not merely an alternative narrative of our origins, but lies in the
construction of a complex and very human social, emotional, and moral
universe. And atheism is a poor
representation of science, whose methods were developed to study natural
processes and make no sense when extended beyond nature – if indeed there is
anything beyond nature, which science doesn’t, and can’t, know.
There are individual exceptions, of course, but Judaism
holds that the Torah must be interpreted properly for every generation, and
that only a poltroon would take it at face value. The Catholic Church accepts the descent of
the human species from earlier nonhuman species. That leaves Biblical literalist creationism
as a sectarian theological dispute within Protestantism.
It’s time to separate science from atheism, and religion
from Biblical literalism. The atheists
and the literalists can slug it out, but the rest of us will continue trying to
make decent intellectual sense of the things in our lives that science does
explain and the things it doesn’t.