Science and the Religious Right

Chapter 17. Intelligent Design

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

In the early nineteenth century, only shortly after the founding of the United States, a movement of the Protestant Church called fundamentalism arose in America. Convinced of biblical truth and the perceived evils of secularism, fundamentalists did not want to recognize that the United States was founded upon a secular Constitution that established a clear separation of church and state. They resisted the Enlightenment trend toward rationality, which strongly influenced the writers of the U.S. Constitution.

Charles Darwin published his theory in 1859, showing that biological evolution occurred, and that new species arose through natural selection of advantageous characteristics. The evidence for both ideas is overwhelming. But this theory elicited even more reaction from fundamentalists, culminating in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, in which John Scopes, a public school teacher, was convicted of teaching biological evolution, which was against state law. This law was not removed from the Tennessee books until 1967. In the twentieth century, American fundamentalists established many religious colleges (often Baptist) in the Southern “Bible Belt,” all of which discredit science and demand orthodox belief.

Most of these people believe in creationism. Following Bishop Ussher (see chap. 4), they believe that the generations listed in the Old Testament show that the Earth is only six thousand years old, and therefore that biological evolution could not have occurred. They explain the Grand Canyon as having been produced by the flood at the time of Noah’s Ark, thus also denying geological science. After about 1960, a more militant group emerged, the Religious Right, estimated to compose 15 percent of the U.S. electorate. Their growth was largely a response to the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was reinforced by the 1973 Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting abortion under some circumstances.

The Religious Right today has largely given up the fight against biological evolution, although they still call it “just a theory.” Now they use a more sophisticated approach—intelligent design or directed evolution—which posits that evolution could not have occurred simply by chance but required the guiding hand of a Creator. These people are more sophisticated than the earlier creationists. They do not deny that evolution occurred but declare that many aspects of evolution, such as the development of biological cells, the human eye, and human intelligence, are far too complex to have been produced simply by natural variation and selection. They have found a few dozen people with advanced science degrees (out of over two million in the United States) who agree with them. These people do no experiments and do not publish in reputable scientific journals. They claim that children in our public schools “have a right to question” the theory of evolution, even though such children generally have little knowledge of science.

Intelligent design was long ago rejected by Richard Dawkins (1987). Using the latest data, it has now been demolished by University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution Is True (2009, see “Recommended Books”).

If the idea of intelligent design is wrong, what is the evidence against it?

Darwinian evolution appears to operate in a random fashion. There is no evidence of a purpose, or long-term goal, in evolution. Natural variation can be explained in normal scientific terms as resulting from gene recombination and mutation. This variation makes some organisms of a species more successful than others by allowing them to maintain a healthy state until the period of normal reproduction is over. Such an organism is more likely to have more and healthier offspring, and will thus eventually, over long periods of time, predominate over related organisms that are less fit. Darwin called this natural selection “survival of the fittest,” and it is sufficient to explain the entire course of evolution.

It is often not recognized that the time available for evolution was tremendous. Scientific evidence suggests that life existed on Earth as early as 3.7 billion years ago. The Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old (see chap. 4), so life has been around for at least 80 percent of the age of the Earth. Commenting on the creationist estimate of the age of the Earth, Richard Dawkins noted that six thousand years is not just a little bit different from 4.5 billion years—it is so different that it is as though you were to claim that the distance from New York to San Francisco is not 3,400 miles but 7.8 yards. Evolution usually occurs very slowly, but there were eons of time available.

About 50 percent of Americans do not believe in a geologically very old Earth, and do not accept biological evolution (Gallup poll, 2007), both of which are clearly facts, and not “just theories” (see chaps. 4 and 5). People do not want to believe that humans and apes have a common ancestor, but all the evidence indicates that this is a fact. Those who work to have biological evolution removed from public school textbooks are not only scientifically ignorant, but also a danger to a modern society that professes to revere truth. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”