CREATIONISTS insist their claims are supported empirically, so we can test
them against the evidence. Invariably, they fail—or so it’s said.
You can test this assertion for yourself by reading Kenneth Miller’s
Finding Darwin’s God(Cliff Street Books, 1999). He writes textbooks, which
shows in the clarity and fairness of his portrayals of creationist arguments.
His book is ideal exercise for a wavering mind: he takes each case, measures it
against the evidence and shows how each falls short of proof. Miller also
explains why he accepts both the Bible and science.
It is all too easy, when reading creationists, to forget that
plausible-sounding statements of fact may often be far from factual. You’ll need
a debunker like Miller as your companion. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb created
young-Earth orthodoxy with The Genesis Flood (Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing Company, 1961). Duane Gish pursued it in Evolution: The Fossils
Still Say No! (Spring Arbor, 1973). The bibles of the recent intelligent
design movement are Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe (Free Press,
1996) and Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson (InterVarsity Press,
1993).
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Biologist Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York at Stony Brook
gives the classic scientist’s reply to creationists in Science on Trial
(Sinauer, 1995). He presents the main evidence for evolution, a brief rebuttal
of creationist claims and a history of the debate in the US locating creationism
within a larger political movement “that strives to replace pluralism . . . with
its version of absolute, unquestioned truth”.
Critics have said the same of Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker
(Penguin, 1990). This opposite extreme to creationism confirms creationist
suspicions that scientists want to win the world for atheism. There are two
stories here: the science, and the beliefs Dawkins draws from it. Both are
brilliantly argued. But don’t forget that science and religion play by different
rules.
In religious matters, for example, people may make the same observations but
come to opposite, equally valid conclusions. In God after Darwin
(Westview Press, 1999), theologian John Haught argues that evolution doesn’t
abolish the idea of God—it improves it. He is merciless with both
materialism and creationism.
When it comes to history, Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison leads the rest. He isn’t a creationist himself, but The
Creationists (University of California Press, 1993) is endorsed by
arch-creationist Henry Morris, surely a tribute to objectivity. With John
Stenhouse of the University of Otago, New Zealand, Numbers edited
Disseminating Darwinism (Cambridge University Press) on reactions from
around the world to Darwin’s iconoclastic ideas. You’ll find a more succinct
analysis of American reaction in Numbers’s Darwinism Comes to America
(Harvard University Press, 1998).
Philosopher Michael Ruse explained what science is to the US Supreme Court in
the 1982 trial in Arkansas that overturned US laws requiring the teaching of
creationism as science. But Is It Science? (Prometheus, 1996) is the
gripping tale of the trial. It’s also a remarkable source of original readings
from Genesis to Darwin, Karl Popper to Gish, taking in the 1805 essay on “God
the Designer” that gave Dawkins his watchmaker.
In Seduced by Science (New York University Press, 1999), Steven
Goldberg accuses creationists and others of abandoning religion’s proper tasks
for quasi-science, as though that was the only kind of truth that matters.
As we enter a new Christian millennium, the war between science and
religion seems to be over. Now the problem is that each keeps trying, wrongly,
to be the other.
