Evolution, religion entwined

On July 10, it will be exactly 80 years since John Scopes went on trial, charged with teaching evolution as briefly set forth in "A Civic Biology Presented in Problems" by George W. Hunter.

Echoes of this notorious "monkey trial" continue to resound: A school board in Georgia tries to put stickers on biology textbooks advising that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." A Pennsylvania school district wants science teachers to inform students that "intelligent design" is an alternative to Darwinian theory, a notion gaining support in Utah and at least 20 states, with Kansas in the lead.

These publicized disputes, furthermore, are only the tip of an iceberg of passive resistance, by many school boards and teachers who want to avoid controversy, to teaching evolution at all.

Opponents of such resistance can scarcely contain their exasperation. Why won't this conflict just go away? Why must the American Civil Liberties Union, which recruited Scopes so long ago to challenge Tennessee's anti-evolution statute, still be at it? How can it be that almost half the population rejects the idea that humans have evolved, and almost two-thirds want some form of creationism taught in public school science classes?

Michael Ruse has an answer. A professor of philosophy at Florida State University, he is, by his own account, "an ardent Darwinian," who testified for the ACLU in its successful challenge to a creationist law in Arkansas.

In "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" (Harvard, 2005), Ruse takes a long look at why opponents of evolution feel so threatened and why evolutionists are so surprised and perplexed at the opposition.

"The full story," he writes, "is far more complex than any of us, including (especially) us evolutionists, have realized." In his view, evolutionary thought and the strand of Christianity that rallied to oppose it were two "rival religious responses" to an existing crisis of faith stemming from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and its 19th-century sequel.

Although Darwin's own work was a model of professional science, a great deal of evolutionary thought before and after him, in Ruse's judgment, deserves to be termed evolutionism, a kind of secular religion built around an ideology of progress.

That ideology was not necessarily wrong, but it threw evolutionary theory into one of the two camps increasingly dividing Christians: the liberal postmillennialists, who believed that the building of Christ's rule on earth was already under way, and the conservative premillennialists, eagerly anticipating Christ's Second Coming.