The struggle between evolution and creation: an American problem

Huxley sold morphology to the teaching profession on the grounds that hands-on empirical study was much better training for modern life than the outmoded classics. Huxley himself sat on the new London School Board and started teacher’s training courses. His most famous student was the novelist H.G. Wells.

Evolution had no immediate pay-off. Learning phylogenies does not cure bellyache and it was still all a bit too daring for regular schoolroom instruction. But Huxley could see another place for evolution. The chief ideological support of those who were opposing the reformers - the support of the landowners and the squires and the generals and the others - was the church, particularly the Anglican Church. Hence, Huxley saw the need of his own church, and evolution was the ideal foundation. It offered a story of origins that (thanks to progress) put humans at the centre and top, and it was one that could even give moral messages.

Herbert Spencer was a great help here. This philosopher was ever ready to urge his fellow Victorians that the way to true virtue lies through progress, which comes from promoting a struggle in society as well as in biology. Hence, evolution had its commandments no less than did Christianity.

So Huxley, who was known in the popular press as “Pope” Huxley, preached evolution-as- Christianity-alternative non-stop at working men’s clubs, from the podia in presidential addresses, and in debates with clerics, notably Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Huxley, who invented for himself the religious label of “agnostic”, even aided the founding of the new cathedrals of evolution, stuffed as they were with displays of dinosaurs newly discovered in the American west. Except that these halls of worship were better known as museums of natural history.

As with Christianity, not everyone claimed exactly the same thing under the banner of their religion. Just as some Christians argue for war in the name of Jesus whereas others are pacifists, so some evolutionists promoted free trade and others protectionism; some argued for socialism and others for anarchism; some for feminism and some against.

Yet moral norms were the game in town and things continued this way - evolution as a secular religion preaching moral messages - and have continued this way right down to the present. I do not deny that a genuine science of evolutionary studies has emerged. It has. But still evolution is used as a vehicle for social and moral claims.

Look, for instance, at one of the great bestsellers of 2007, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins is today the most popular writer on things evolutionary but this book is a rant against religion, blaming it for all of society’s ills. The moral prescriptions of conservative religion are labelled ridiculous and the teaching of them is labelled “child abuse”. Hence, anyone today who says that evolution is morally neutral is just plain ignorant. It is rather presented as the apotheosis of the forward-looking person, who would cast off the shackles of ignorance and prejudice, especially ignorance and prejudice as represented and supported by religion.

So I am not surprised that there is an evolution-creation struggle or conflict (using the terms evolution and creation to represent the two sides). But why is it today especially an American conflict?

Here as always one must appeal to history. In the western world generally, as Tony Blair said when he was still Britain’s Prime Minister, anyone who takes religion seriously is considered “a bit of a nutter”. Grown-ups have simply gone beyond that.

But not in America! It was founded by people (the Puritans) who were determined to have their own religion, and right down to the present religion plays a major role in the lives of many (most) Americans. Church is where you go to find friends and to reconnect with the important social and moral issues that guide us all. This is more so today even than it was in the past.

No one much cared about the religious beliefs of Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower, but no one today could be elected president without a firm statement of religious conviction. Religion matters and, while it is true that there are religious people who happily accept evolution, most Americans belong to denominations - fervently Evangelical denominations - that make biblical literalism nigh mandatory.

The American evolutionists are happy to fight back. Consider Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor and rightfully considered one of the absolutely top, professional, evolutionary biologists of our time. In On Human Nature he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, “the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.”