Genesis hauled before the court

Christopher Joyce - 1 May 1988

To secure a place in American schools creationists now claim their doctrines are scientific, while evolution, on the other hand, is a ‘religion’.

Connoisseurs of bizarre Americana started a treat last month. At the United States Supreme Court in Washington educated people were seriously arguing that the biblical account of the Creation of the Universe (six days of work by God) is not religious doctrine but scientific fact.

These people call themselves creation scientists, and they claim that evolution is actually a religion.

Another group was trying to explain scientific method and Charles Darwin. These people call themselves scientists and they label creation science as nonsense.

Creationism is a tenet of Christian fundamentalism, whose adherents believe that the Bible is literally true historically. Creationists have been trying to put religion back into America’s public (state-run) schools since 1961 when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools were not the place for religious doctrine.

The creationists’ ardour increased as evolution began to make its reappearance in school text books after an absence of several decades.

To reach the nation’s highest court, creationists have had to do some rapid evolving themselves. The hearing examines the so-called science of creationism. If they can show that their methods are scientific, the creationists argue then they deserve space next to Darwin in science classes. Barring that, if evolution can be defined as the “religion” of “secular humanism” then it must go.

The vehicle of the debate is a law passed in 1981 in Louisiana. It required public schools to teach the tenets of creation science whenever they taught evolution. The law is the latest in a string of similar attempts by various southern states in the past 25 years. Considered by scientists as another episode in southern eccentricity, the law was challenged by parents and teachers in court and ruled unconstitutional.

Creationists do not give up easily. They appealed to the second tier of the judicial system. This circuit court declined to hear a debate on the merits, but by the narrowest of margins, an 8-7 vote. The ultimate jury, the Supreme Court, finally agreed last May to consider whether the law violates the Constitution. Creation science, if not a household word, made headlines.

Scientists realised that more than debating points were at stake. The day after the High Court accepted the case, several scientists in California began to rally the faithful. In three months, 72 Nobel prize-winners in science and medicine signed a statement opposing the creationists.

So did a host of scientific and educational organisations. Not since the famous trial of schoolteacher John Scopes in 1925 have so many scientists joined publicly to debunk creationism in defence of evolution.

What is creation science? Definitions are rare. A history of who creationists are is more illustrative.

The first person who could claim the title of creation scientist was George McCready Price. Born in 1870, Price was a desultory student of geology, high school principal and author. He despised Darwin’s theory of evolution and challenged its adherents at every turn.

Price’s most influential book was The New Geology, published in 1923. in it, he claimed that stratigraphy reflects the action of the flood of Noah’s time — a belief that now helps to support creation science.

Evolutionary biology also awoke in the 1920s, particularly in schools. In 1921, a new grammar school text appeared, Biology for Beginners by Truman Moon.

Bearing Darwin’s portrait on its frontispiece, Moon’s text planted biology squarely within the realm of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Creationists soon responded. In 1925 John Scopes, a school teacher in Tennessee, challenged a new state law that barred the teaching of evolution in grammar schools. The world-famous trial that followed pitted two giants of law against each other; William Jennings Bryan, fundamentalist and one time candidate for president; and Clarence Darrow; a liberal intellectual who won fame for defending the rights of the famous and infamous.

Scopes was convicted but the ruling was overturned on a technicality. Though the law stood in Tennessee, history records that Darrow and his scientists convincingly discredited the anti-evolutionists before the public eye. But the battle in Dayton, Tennessee, quietly took a host of silent victims — biology textbooks.

Almost 50 years after the trial, two researchers undertook a little literary research. Judith Grabiner and Peter Miller reviewed biology texts before and after Scopes.

They unearthed an abrupt disappearance reminiscent of the extinctions of the late cretaceous. After Scopes, publishers feared they would lose the big southern market. They invented the “index” game in which the word evolution could be buried in a text like a rare fossil but was yanked from the index.

Darwin’s visage disappeared from Moon’s text. Religious quotations crept into sections on human origins.

“Not only did (evolutionists) lose,” concluded Grabiner and Miller, “but they did not even know they had lost.”

Price kept up the diatribe against Darwinism, but by the 1930s many creationists could no longer swallow the notion that God actually created the universe in just six days.

They opted for the “day-age” concept — that “day” was a biblical metaphor for an indeterminate but much longer period.

According to Ronald Numbers, a historian of science, Price would have none of it. It was just such an admission of compromise that Darrow had wrested from Bryan in that courtroom in Dayton. Price went to southern California (as always the pole star for American eccentrics) and organised his own group, the Deluge Geology Society.

Fundamentalists remained split between Frice’s hard corps of Californians and those who compromised with geology in return for some scientific respectability. Then, in the 1940s, an engineer from Texas, Henry Morris, took up Price’s philosophy. Morris’s books, especially the Genesis Flood of 1961, applied the same coat of scientific varnish on the Book of Genesis and revitalised the literalists’ camp.

In 1963, several followers of Morris formed the Creation Research Society (CRS). The members had to (and still must) be Christian, hold at least a masters degree in science, and sign a statement of belief. The statement accepts the Bible as the word of God and true that all living things were created by God during “creation week”, and have not significantly evolved since and that the great flood determined the present state of the earth.

In 1970, a pair of fundamentalists from the Bible Science Association formed the Creation Science Research Centre, in Price’s old territory, southern California. Morris joined them, and two years later the centre spun off the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), headed by Morris.

The two centres became the Oxbridge of Creation Science. They published treatises on their philosophy, most of which are attacks on evolution. Their research includes a search for Noah’s Ark and fossil evidence that might contradict evolution.

The United States Government gave the creation scientists something to bite into when the National Science Foundation, spurred by the flight of Sputnik, funded the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. The study put evolution back into biology texts.

Outraged that Darwin had replaced God in public schools, fundamentalists marched into state legislatures and courtrooms through the south and southwest. They convinced Arkansas to jettison evolution from its schoolrooms, only to see the United States Supreme Court rule the law unconstitutional.

In 1973 in Texas they argued that teaching evolution infringed their children’s right to exercise their religion. Again they lost in court. They charged that the government was establishing the “religion” of “secular humanism”.

Even an exhibition on evolution at the Smithsonian Institute earned their wrath, but fundamentalists lost in one court after another.

During the 1970s creationists glued together the “equal time” strategy. They argued that if Darwin were to be taught, biblical creationism must get equal time. Equal time implies fair play to Americans, most of whom regard themselves as descendants of dissidents who, Luther-like, refused to buckle to conventional wisdoms of the old world.

But in 1975, a law demanding equal time in Tennessee’s schools met the same fate as its forerunners. Apparently, fair play alone would not seduce the courts.

So creationists turned to the “science” that Morris and his colleagues had revived from the early days of Price. The clearest example of the new creation science was a bill adopted in Arkansas in 1979. It stated that creationism could be proven scientifically, and thus had a place next to evolution in science classes.

The proofs were generally of the negative kind. For example, the creationists state that the second law of thermodynamics rules that order inexorably moves to disorder. The protein could not have evolved into the first living form.

Arkansas’s new law met the usual fate in court in 1982, having revealed too clearly its umbilicus to the Bible and religion. But legislators in Louisiana had been poised since 1980 with their own proposal for creation scientists, and they reckoned that Arkansas’s loss could be their gain.

Paul Ellwanger, a creationist, respiratory therapist and crusader for religious education, had written the Arkansas legislation. He also sent a version to Bill Keith, a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist and member of the Louisiana legislature in 1980. Keith put it before his legislature in 1981.

A host of supporters paraded through the legislature to support the bill (though no public school teacher did).

Ellwanger himself stated: “I view the whole battle as one between God and anti-God forces … the crux of the matter is that if evolution is permitted to continue with its monopoly in public education then, in effect, it will continue to be made to appear that a supreme being is unnecessary … so it behoves Satan to do all he can to thwart our efforts and confuse the issue at every tum.”

By 1981, things were going badly for the Arkansas Bill in Federal Court. Clearly, Louisiana’s version had to change. The bill’s “findings of fact” which stated that evolution is contrary and hostile to religion, were dropped.

In 1925, William Jennings Bryan plundered scientific literature for ways to confuse his lay audience. He quoted Sir Francis Bacon, who said that science is factual and non-theoretical, to denigrate evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary biology, a historical science, is still vulnerable to Bryan’s approach, notes Stephen Jay Gould, a geologist at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and the best known “revolutionist” in the United States. Evolutionary theory relies heavily on inference, not on balls rolling down inclined planes in laboratories.

“People don’t understand that,” says Gould, “and are prey to the arguments that creationists make — that you cannot prove evolution because you can’t see it, that science is only what you can see and that’s nonsense.”

To bolster their argument, the creationists seized on the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed in 1972 by Gould and Niles Eldredge.

The scientists theorised that new species appear “suddenly” in geological terms within thousands or tens of thousands of years, then settle into long periods of evolutionary stasis. Not all scientists accept the theory, so creationists claim that the dispute shows evolution’s crumbling foundation. Indeed, they say, it is evidence for their own notion of the “abrupt appearance” of all species.

The creationists have lately claimed that science does not draw its intellectual sustenance from the Bible at all. That will be difficult to defend, however, as the books offered in Louisiana as texts are exclusively those of the CRS and ICR.

Morris wrote the creationists’ only biology textbook. Called Biology: A Search For Order In Complexity it toes the creationists’ line that evolution is just a “theory” that is in contention. The book states as fact that the flood of Noah’s time laid down most fossils.

“As the flood water rose,” Morris writes, “less complex forms, being less able to escape, would be buried first. More complex and more mobile forms could move to higher ground.”

Further ties between the ICR, CRS and the State of Louisiana run through an organisation called the Creation Science Legal Defense Fund. The fund is helping to support Louisiana’s fight in court.

Bringing in the 72 winners of the Nobel Prize, almost the entire living collection, was the idea of a physics student in California.

Al Seckel and members of an organisation called the Southern California Skeptics enlisted the help of Murray Gell-Mann, who won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1969, to write to other prizewinners asking for their endorsement. Gell-Mann, who added quarks to particle science, views creation science as “‘an attack on all of science”.

As in the Scopes trial, the ultimate outcome for evolution and creation science will not lie in the courtroom, but in the classroom.

Gerald Skoog, past president of the National Science Teachers Association, has been reading biology textbooks of late. He counts words devoted to evolution, natural selection and related subjects. Coverage in one leading text, biology, was shorn from 22,000 words in 1968 to 11,400 in 1977. The 1981 version, coming out as the Arkansas law was being tested in court, was trimmed to 4300 words. Other texts showed the same trend.

California’s Department of Education made headlines last September by sending several biology textbooks back to their publishers.

One book stated that modern reptiles (instead of birds) are thought to have come from dinosaurs.

Publishers came back with “a sham”, reports William Bennetta, a consultant for the California Academy of Sciences and crusader against creation science in public schools. The passages on evolution were longer, but retained many of the errors of fact (including the ancestry of reptiles).

“The books are still grotesque catalogues of error, evasion, equivocation and deception,” Bennetta reports. Unfortunately perhaps they are also the best that schoolchildren will get

— The Australian.