YSU Speaker Studies Gulf Between Evolution, Creationism
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The dispute billed as evolution versus creationism or science pitted against religion is really a contretemps between evangelical Christianity and the modern world, says a philosopher of science and history.
The philosopher, Michael Ruse, is the Lucy T. Wekmeister professor and director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He grew up and was educated in England and taught 35 years at Guelph University in Ontario, Canada, before coming to the United States in 2000 and becoming a citizen in 2009.
Besides having the tattoo of a trilobite on his upper right arm, Ruse has been cited 44,200 times by other scholars in their work, philosophy professor Deborah Mower noted in her introduction.
Employing wit, irony, a gentle humor and pronounced understatement, Ruse told an audience of 300 Thursday at Youngstown State University that “Evolution has become identified with disbelief and atheism.” The two are not mutually exclusive and need not be incompatible, he said.
Ruse, who delivered the annual Shipka Lecture sponsored by the YSU department of philosophy and religious studies, sees the pronounced differences between the two camps as primarily “an American problem [with] a social-cultural divide, not a matter of theology or science.”
“Creationists are very intelligent,” Ruse declared. “They’re top-notch intellectuals, citing several including John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, authors of The Genesis Flood, and Philip E. Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial.
“Christians have long had to deal with science,” the philosopher said, “even if they haven’t always done a very good job,” a possible allusion to Galileo and Giordano Bruno. The former was forced to recant his belief in the Copernican theory, the latter burned alive at the stake in Rome for suggesting there are inhabited worlds other than ours.
Famous atheists such as biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, help fuel the perception that that Christian faith and science are incompatible. “There has to be something wrong about this harsh division,” Ruse said.
Some have bridged the gap, he continued, noting that Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, “believes in evolution, is a believer that Christ is his personal savior.
In 1996, Pope John Paul II sent a letter to the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in which he accepted evolution. “I don’t think anyone wants to doubt his Christian commitment,” Ruse observed.
When Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, there was little opposition to his theory in England, western Europe and the northern United States, Ruse said. In his study of college exams from that time, Ruse found that “by 1865, college students were told to assume [the reality of] evolution. Scientists and the educated community debated and disagreed on the details and mechanisms but that life evolved and continues to evolve was not doubted.
Darwin studied to be an Episcopalian minister and many advocates for evolution, such as Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as Darwin’s bulldog) favored liberal reforms and improvements in public hygiene. Their advocacy of public works, such as installing sewers instead of tolerating the practice of dumping raw sewage into the River Thames, was an uphill battle. Only “The Big Stink” of 1857 when human feces covered the Thames from bank to bank in London led to reform, the philosopher of history and science noted. His use of more colloquial terminology drew laughter.
Advocates of evolution saw themselves as going up against the forces of reaction and their opponents fought modernism on all fronts, not just evolution, Ruse suggested.
If there is more advocacy of creationism in the South, Ruse said, it’s because the South lost the Civil War and has resisted the social implications carried by all that is modern, including racial equality and equality between the sexes.
The Scopes Trial, the so-called “Monkey Trial” in 1925 in Dayton, Tenn., “was about social issues” of which the teaching of evolution was only one.
With the existence of U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for their efforts, with the downsizing of the Army and renewed concern about Russia’s adventure in the Crimea and Ukraine, “Americans feel a lot of tension about our place in the world,” Muse said. And more conservative Americans take offense at the acceptance of legal marijuana, same-sex marriages and sexual equality.
Denying the truth of evolution, even more so than denying global warming, is more comforting to these Americans when they fear for their future and think they see a the patience of a deity sorely tried.
Such fears are minimal in Western Europe and nonexistent in most of the rest of the world, Ruse pointed out. To the extent such concerns exist in Canada, “they’re an import from the U.S.”
American culture is different and has inherited a different legacy. Opponents of evolution have “perverted Darwin,” some going so far as to assert Darwin’s theory of evolution led to social Darwinism that led to eugenics, the basis of the genocide of 11 million in the territories in the Nazis controlled until 1945.
Can the gap between science and creationism be bridged, a student in the audience asked.
“I don’t know,” was Ruse’s short answer. Because so many who believe in creationism see their opponents as atheists, it would likely prove difficult.
“Atheism is a Christian problem,” he told a student at the reception in his honor afterward. “It’s not a problem for Hindus or Buddhists” who see the universe as having always existed and that it will always exist. “Religion binds societies together” and promotes survival by common beliefs. When those beliefs are challenged, its members feel their values are challenged, he said.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our twice-monthly print edition and to our free daily email headlines.