The Evolution-Creation Struggle

Michael Ruse has done us a great favor in setting the record staight on the early history of evolution. Even if you are a fairly literate layman on the subject, Ruse will probably put several big cracks in the evolution/creation spectacles you didn't even know you were looking through. For instance:

- The usual story about how the entire western world slavishly believed in six days' creation until the genius of Darwin set us free with science is completely wrong headed.

- Evolution, or "progress", was in the intellectual air for a full century before Darwin came along. Darwin's contribution was to give already enthusiastically embraced evolution a potential to develop in a truly scientific manner.

- Darwin never saw his evolutionary ideas turn into a true, hard science. Most of his disciples wandered off into what Ruse calls the pseudoscience of ideological "evolutionism". Those that remained true to the scientific enterprise wandered into the morass of comparative morphology, a field that was recognized as a scientific dead end by the beginning of the twentieth century.

- The theological response to evolution, early on, was not uniformly hostile. More than a few theologians were already caught up in "evolutionism" themselves.

- It was not until the 1930's that evolution, coupled with the new sciense of genetics, finally became the hard science Darwin had wanted to produce.

Unfortunately, "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" runs out of steam just when things start to get interesting. The Scope's trial gets amazingly short shrift, though Ruse does spend enough pages on it to explode a few more stereotypes we have all inherited from "Inheret the Wind." And then, the story of how we went from a nation where evolutionists had to fight in the courts to get into the public schools to today, when it is the creationists who have to do the fighting, is completely absent. Surely, regardless of which side you're on here, this story would be fascinating and surely belongs in a book of Ruse's chosen subject.

That being said, Ruse does provide a fair-minded review of the thoughts of all the major camps in the contemporary struggle that I think anyone on any side of the fight will find exceptionally informative. He makes a few mistakes, such as tending to lump the intelligent design folks in with the siz day's creationists. He spends several paragraphs on the cooperation between the two groups, but he shows no awareness of the attempts several big name creationsts have made to throw the ID believers under the theological bus. But, by and large, he does present very accurately and fairly what the IDers believe.

And he gets a few tangential issues wrong as well. The old canard about the American founders being deists and agnostics is only about fifteen per cent true. And, reading Ruse, it's easy to get the impression that the Pope "ex cathedra" declared evolution anathema in the 1800's. It never happened.

In the end, "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" is very helpful, perhaps indispensible, in our understanding the aspects of the evolution-creation struggle that it touches on. I just wish his history of the struggle hadn't left out most of the twentieth century.

A Methodist minister I know often preaches that the three men in recent history who have caused the greatest harm to humanity are Marx, Freud and Darwin. I am inclined to agree with him on the first two; and although I vehemently disagree with him on the third, I do understand his position. It is often argued, by theists and non-theists alike, that Darwin gave atheists a compelling argument for their lack of faith. However, in the book The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Michael Ruse disagrees, maintaining that both evolutionism and evangelism are responses to a general crisis of faith that has its roots in the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment.

The emphasis on reason over faith during the Enlightenment was due in part to advances in science that were beginning to have a positive impact on everyday living. Many influential thinkers of this period were deists, viewing God more as a prime mover than as an active participant in his creation, a belief that was more compatible with the naturalistic worldview required of science. Thus, the crisis in faith precedes Darwin. Indeed, Ruse claims that "[f]ew people became evolutionists and then lost their religious faith as a result"; rather, these people became "dissatisfied with their religion and then went looking for something else" (p. 29). On the other hand, this clash between reason and faith led others to reject reason and science, making emotion instead the focus of their faith. Hence, Ruse concludes that "both evolution and creation" are "rival religious responses to [this] crisis of faith" (p. 17).

Charles Darwin was far from the first to propose a theory of evolution. Indeed, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had proposed a theory of common ancestry based on the isomorphic features of living organisms. Around the same time in France, Lamarck proposed a theory of speciation based on acquired characteristics that were passed on to future generations. Furthermore, Lyell's argument that the natural world could be explained in terms of physical laws acting over eons (p. 46) gave evolution the time it needed to produce new species. Thus, Ruse comments that "[e]volution had been in the air for a long time, and many people had been looking for a reason to believe it" (p. 85). Darwin's theory of natural selection gave them that reason.

The idea of evolution, which Ruse calls evolutionism, arose during the Enlightenment and was intimately related to the idea of social progress. Both Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin interpreted the fossil record as a biological progression from simpler to more complex structures, a great Chain of Being, with humans, of course, at the top. Evolutionism also provided a vehicle for promoting social progress during the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century evolutionary biologists have tended to be progressivists as well. E. O. Wilson, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, at least in their popular writings, all linked social progress with biological evolution, and even Richard Dawkins' views are progressivist when he describes evolution as a "one-way ratchet of progressive innovation" (p. 222).

Ruse links the evolutionist-creationist debate to premillennial and postmillennial thinking in Christian eschatology. The premillennialist believes that the Second Coming of Jesus is approaching and that the focus of human endeavor meanwhile should be on spiritual development. The postmillennialist believes that the Second Coming is still a distant prospect and that the focus of human endeavor for the present should be on social progress. "Evolutionists are postmillennialists," Ruse maintains, because of their desire to "improve our lot and bring about heaven on Earth" (p. 267). Creationists, on the other hand, are more likely to be premillennialists.

It may seem odd to conflate evolutionism and postmillennialism, but Ruse maintains that evolutionists have made a religion of their science, offering the promise of progress as a substitute for traditional Christian faith. Thus, the clash between evolutionism and creationism is not simply a conflict between science and religion, but rather a conflict between two religions, "always the bitterest kind" (p. 267). Not only do fundamentalists object to the way that evolutionary theory challenges their faith in the Biblical story of creation, but scientists also object to the way creationists challenge their faith in methodological naturalism by insisting on bringing supernatural forces into the equation. Ruse disagrees with those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who insist that science and religion are different magisteria; rather, each impinges on the other.

During the twentieth century, Christian theologians have struggled with the question of how to integrate the science of evolution with their faith. Some, like Karl Barth, simply reject reason as a means of understanding God. Others, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, feel that they can successfully integrate science with their faith. In general, though, Christian thinkers recognize that the process of natural selection does not necessarily lead to the development of man created in the image of God, and so they prefer a more Lamarckian worldview that paints "nature as a harmonious web rather than a parched battlefield of struggle and strife" (p. 230). However, the natural world is not obliged to cater to our preferences, and a pick-and-choose approach to integrating evolution with theology is disingenuous. In contrast, Barth's position, at least, is intellectually honest.

Ruse closes his book by observing the political alliance that has formed between young-earth creationists, who reject nearly all of science, and the proponents of intelligent design, who generally do not necessarily reject geological time or evolutionary processes. What these two disparate groups have in common is a loathing for naturalism in science. In like manner, Ruse suggests that atheistic evolutionists cultivate Christian evolutionists as allies in the current ID war, calling for "a little more tolerance of those who might wish to make something more of the mystery of life" (p. 284). Yet, given the reluctance of Christian thinkers to accept all implications of evolutionary theory, one wonders just how fruitful this alliance would be.

Ruse is clearly on the side of the scientists. However, his painting of the evolution-creation debate as a religious war inadvertently lends support to the old creation science counter-argument that evolution is also "just" a religion. Nevertheless, Ruse provides a broad history of this debate from the Enlightenment to the present day, and he presents the various concerns that people of faith have about evolution with empathy and honesty. The Evolution-Creation Struggle is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the roots of this dispute.

In a very readable historical account of "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" the author takes the side of evolution in its major aspects, relying on an undirected process, which depends on "natural" causes. My main concern, as I related in other reviews here, is just the question of such undirectedness, absence of aim, the principal issue of the "struggle" in the title. For that reason I will concentrate on the author's "Conclusion", where this idea appears to be most discussed.

He speaks of the use of methaphor (e.g. p.277), mentioning "final cause" (designating goal-directed, purposeful, action) as a metaphor in "thinking of the heart pump, for example, ...as if...designed", the point being made that though the heart pump is functional, it evolved as a result of aimless natural forces.

My intent is to repeat here my concerned observations in the other reviews, observations that belong to more comprehensive ones in my book, dealing with knowledge in various fields. As I indicated, the approach to the question of design, of direction toward a goal, has on both sides of the dispute been "barking up the wrong tree". Because of centuries-old comparisons of organs like the heart to man-made devices, overlooked was a decisive distinction between the living and the lifeless. The former is not only functionally built, but also functionally active. That is to say, while it can be questioned whether a structure's unseen formation was aimed at, the same cannot be questioned regarding the organism's live activities. They are fully known to be aimed at self-preservation.

What is more, each individual organism is formed as part of that aim, which is to say that organisms do not come about by accident, in contradiction of the randomness claimed respecting, beside the formation of live beings, all of biology, alongside the rest of nature.

"My area of expertise is the clash between evolutionists and creationists, and my analysis is that we have no simple clash between science and religion but rather between two religions... Those of us who love science must do more than simply restate our positions or criticize our opposition. We must understand our own assumptions and, equally, find out why others have (often) legitimate concerns. This is not a plea for weak-kneed compromise but a more informed and self-aware approach to the issues. First understanding, and then some strategic moves. You now know why I wrote this book."


There it was; out of the blue. "You know now why I wrote this book." It is a good thing Ruse made that clear on the final page of his new book, for if he did not, I might have never known.

Michael Ruse has of late made a habit out of writing the same book over and over again. This is another "how we got there from here," book filled with much of the same history that he has given in past books (most notably, "Darwin and Design") with many of the same conclusions. I often caught myself wondering why he went through the trouble of writing this book when all he had to do was release an anthologized collection of excerpts from past ones.

This book, disjointed as it is, aims at showing us how the evolution/creation struggle developed from the pre-Darwin days to today. Ruse asserts that these two 'movements' stemmed from a 'crisis of faith' starting from the reformation. He tracks both how creationism became more and more fervent as a response to the growing evolutionary philosophy/science and how evolution became more fervent in response to that response.

Ruse has caught particular flack from the view, as seen in the above quote, that evolution has been and can be often taken as a religion. He trecks through the tired history of Spencer, Sumner, and the Social Darwinists, the believers in a directional evolution of the 1950s, up to todays 'true believers' in Dawkins, Dennett, and Wilson.

Ruse seems to be making the point that evolution is too easily seen as directional - teleological and when thus seen, it too easily becomes religion-like. This is a good point but I've seen it made better elsewhere by the likes of Mary Midgley, Steven Jay Gould, and even Ruse himself (in "Darwin and Design,' focusing exclusively on teleology and evolution).

Ruse is on significantly weaker ground in suggesting that religion and evolution can easily and peacefully co-exist. I used to be convinced of this but like Ruse, I now see Steven Gould's attempts at diplomacy as condescending to both sides. Point blankly: evolution simlpy contradicts one of the most sacred roles delegated to God in the Bible. Yes, Ruse points to Christians who have successfully balanced Christianity and evoluition, but only because they chose evolution over genesis (i.e., adapted the view that genesis and the bible are metaphorical and, hence, not to be taken at their word.) Ruse tries and tries but doesn't make any convincing case that one does not have to choose between genesis and evolution.

My big complaint, though, with this book is in its layout. If Ruse's above quote is right, and his point in the book was to suggest strategies for how the 'evolution problem' can be best fought, then most of the book was simply irrelevant. In his 'Conclusion' for instnace, he suggests that evolutionists need to band together in fighting ID instead of getting hung up on disagreements over detail. Agreed. But where, I ask myself, did he make that point in the book. The only answer I came to was, "Just now."

I fear that in trying to appeal to both sides of the evolution/Creation struggle, he will end up appealing to neither side. His arguments are often hasty, and most of the book (as another reviewer notes) just does not support, or even speak much to, his conclusions.

If you want a book that does make a persuasive case that evolution often passes into the 'zeaolot' category (I think this is true) read Mary Midgley's "Evolution as Religion." Or read Ruse's own "Darwin and Design."

It's becoming increasingly clear nowadays that there is something else going on with the discussions about creationism, Intelligent Design and evolution than merely a discussion concerning the 'facts' of evolution. Michael Ruse in this book really makes it clear that the discussions on evolution and religious belief are not about facts, but constitute a clash between worldviews, or - in James Hunter's terms - a culture war.

Ruse describes the history of the debates concerning evolution from the publication of Darwin's ideas until the contemporary debates concerning Intelligent Design. He shows (1) how scientists have interpreted Darwin's evolutionary theory in worldview terms, which, consequently, provoked responses from religious believers. Ruse argues that scientists making worldview claims based on evolutionary theory are NOT doing science, but are constructing worldviews! (2) Ruse also shows how the negative responses to evolutionary theoryby Christian theologians was often triggered by theological and moral presuppositions about e.g. human nature and the end of time (eschatology).

Ruse's main points are (1) that the clash between evolution and creationism and Intelligent Design can best be described as a clash between "religions", and (2) that there are plenty of bright theologians who have shown in a very nuanced way how evolutionary theory and Christian faith can live in peaceful coexistence.

This book simply is magnificent. Not only does this book show why scientific facts have so little impact on creation-evolution debates (they simply are irrelevant, since the underlying problems are not about the facts but go much deeper). Moreover, Ruse writes humorous and in an extremely human way.

As a theologian, I daresay that, though Ruse confessed to be an agnostic, he knows more about what religion is really about than the many American theologians and believers who embrace creationism or Intelligent Design...

FINAL NOTE:
If you liked this book and want more knowledge on the social-historical and political backgrounds of the culture war, I can warmly recommend the book "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America" by James Davison Hunter (New York: Basic Books 1991), also available through Amazon.com.