Jonathan Marks - Why Are There Still Creationists?

In addition to the development of biblical studies, natural history studies, and prehistoric archaeology, yet another strand of uncertainty was entwined in mid-nineteenth century Euro-American intellectual life – namely, the relationships among living groups of people, particularly slaves and slavers. Were they all of one flesh, and presumably therefore of one origin, as the Bible had it – but which in turn implied considerable mutability of appearance in human face and form since the Garden of Eden? Or might they have been the products of separate creations at different times, distinct since their beginnings – which seemed more harmonious with the new geology, and was also distinctly un-biblical? This debate also encoded a moral argument: if humans were the products of separate creations, then owning a slave might be no different in kind from owning a horse. But if they were the products of a single creation, and we are all ultimately brothers and sisters, then some people regarding other people as property may not seem quite right. And if the ancient earth seemed to lend scientific credence to the possibility of archaic, pre-Adamic racial origins, nevertheless the interfertility of human populations seemed to lend scientific credence to the biblical position.

A more curious biological/theological/political question lay just alongside that of the origin of the human races; namely, the nature and attainment of civilization. Assuming it to be readily enough identifiable, why do some peoples have it and not others? Is it due to a constitutional defect? Or might it be possible to lead people who do not have civilization to it?

By the mid-nineteenth century, exotic peoples were known who did not even practice agriculture but subsisted on wild foods alone. Moreover, they lacked the art of metallurgy, and used only tools made of stone. Archaeologists were also identifying an ancient past when the only tools Europeans themselves used were sharpened rocks – a “Stone Age.”

And yet, even this simple cultural history was difficult to reconcile with the Bible. Some patriarchs may have lived before Tubal-cain invented metallurgy in Genesis 4:22, but none was a hunter-gatherer; Adam and Eve had been horticulturalists from the very beginning, as Genesis 3:15 specifies that Eden was there to be tilled. Its authors could not even conceptualize a pre-agricultural human existence.

This, in turn, raised the question about the origin of hunter-gatherers. Were they indeed the most primitive form of humanity – savages, not even having discovered plant and animal domestication (a discovery which would make them barbarians, a step up)? Or were they degenerate descendants of a primordial Edenic horticultural society? Both alternatives are non-biblical, since the Bible doesn’t say anything at all about hunter-gatherers, but the degeneration theory was the one that seemed a bit more pious in the mid-nineteenth century. It was at least consistent with the Adamic narrative, as with the “fallen state of Man” theological doctrine.

Unfortunately it was less consistent with the secular doctrine of progress, and with the data from archaeology and ethnography indicating that agriculture came late, and foraging early, in human prehistory. Our species just seemed to have been advancing – perhaps not uniformly or evenly, but advancing nevertheless – from early savagery through barbarism and into civilization, all driven by the engine of technology, the increasing mastery of people over nature, and over each other.

Thus, theology coevolved with science in the nineteenth century. There is a commonplace view which holds that a crucial difference between science and religion is that religion is rigid, but science changes. Thus, a “fundamental difference between religion and science is that the former is all about the celebration of certainty, whereas the latter is all about the quantification of doubt.” 4But that simply isn’t true. Not only does “religion” change over time, but “science” can be pretty darn dogmatic as well. They are not at all so readily separable that way.

There is in fact a rich literature by modern Christian scholars on the meaning of evolution for modern Christian life, or on being a Christian in a post-Darwinian world. They all agree that denying evolution is a stupid way to tackle the problem. Smart ways generally invoke God’s action through evolution, and generally try to unpack the many possible meanings of “create.” As one eminent Christian theologian recently put it:

creation science is largely ignored in most mainstream contemporary theology, which is much more interested in what the doctrine of creation says theologically about the world and the place of human beings in it … The reason it is rejected in theology is not primarily because it is bad science, but because it is bad theology: In particular, it tends to assume a competitive relation between divine action and natural secondary causation, such that God and nature are taken to be alternative possible explanations of events, thereby denying the immediate dependence of all creation on the Creator for the gift of its existence. 5

If your goal is to make the natural realm meaningful by recourse to a supernatural realm that is inaccessible to science, then you might as well regard them as complementary, rather than as antagonistic.

But if the history of life does have meaning, unfortunately scientists are not the people to ask about it, because they know about the history of life, but not about its meaning, since that is a question not for science, but for semiotics and metaphysics. ‘Metaphysics’ is a word that is usually articulated scornfully by scientists, most likely, as a philosopher once noted, because they are afraid of having their metaphysics questioned.

There have been, nevertheless, thoughtful approaches taken by Christian scholars toward rendering evolution meaningful. One influential trajectory was followed by the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard worked with a teleological theory of evolution – seeing the emergence of our species as the unfolding of a cosmic plan – a genre of theory that is generally rejected by science but is nevertheless frustratingly impossible to disprove. Teilhard then went on to describe the details of that plan, involving the co-evolution of life, mind, and spirit (which we generally tend to treat separately in science, except for spirit), and their ultimate optimistic realization at the mystical Omega Point sometime in the distant future. The eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky found Teilhard’s spiritual thought intriguing. On the other hand, the eminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (himself the son of missionaries) once told me it was the only substantive matter he ever disagreed with his great friend Dobzhansky about. But some theologians find Teilhard’s evolutionary ideas valuable; he was quoted at length, for example, by Bishop Michael Curry in his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (see endnote 4, Chapter 4).

Another influential approach was taken by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who, for a nonbeliever (and erstwhile collaborator with the greatest atheist of all, Bertrand Russell), certainly expended a lot of effort on thinking constructively about God. Whitehead invites you to imagine a universe continually being created, and full of possibilities. In this universe the units of nature are not objects, but transformations; not beings, but becomings. God may nudge you toward certain ones, but this is a universe fundamentally in flux, and its Creation marked not the end but rather the beginning of creating. As a modern theologian asks rhetorically, “But what if God is not just an originator of order but also the disturbing wellspring of novelty ? And, moreover, what if the cosmos is not just an ‘order’ … but a still unfinished process ? … And suppose also that God is less concerned with imposing a plan or design on this process than with providing it opportunities to participate in its own creation?” 6