The Science of Religion

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Michael Ruse: The Evolution Creation Struggle

Michael Ruse

Part One: Evolution, “evolution-ism,” and why the latter looks like a religion; Matthew Arnold’s great poem, Dover Beach, and the crisis of faith; and why the ground was already fertile for Darwin’s ideas. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Two: American evangelicalism; the advent of a professional evolutionary science; and why many evolutionists remained Christian believers. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Three: Apocalypse and premillennialism in America after WWII; science, scientists and the idea of “progress”; creation science and intelligent design. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Four: Prospects for coexistence between evolution and Christianity; and McLean vs. Arkansas, 1981: personal recollections of creationism on trial. Listen | Read Transcript

In the culture war between creationism and evolution, British-born philosopher and historian of science Michael Ruse has been a stalwart of evolutionary science, speaking, writing, and giving expert testimony in courtrooms from Arkansas to Pennsylvania; so it is all the more surprising when he speaks of this perennial American controversy as a “clash of religions.” But in The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Ruse argues that evolutionist and creationist ideas were rival responses to the Enlightenment, with a shared family history that colors the debate to this day.

Darwin himself was no enemy of Christianity, and many Christians in his day and ours have made peace with evolution, but other forces were already dividing Christians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Age of Reason provoked a crisis of faith, as people began to reason in new ways about religion and the Bible. One Christian response was to embrace reason, science and human progress. Another, evangelical response disparaged reason and progress, and reemphasized faith in Christ as man’s sole hope for salvation.

The two sides differed notably in their eschatology their interpretation of the end times prophesied in the Bible. The evangelicals were largely premillennialists who subscribed to an apocalyptic vision of Christ’s imminent return to begin a thousand-year reign on earth. The progressionists tended to be postmillennialists who believed Christ would return at the end of the millennium, and mankind’s task was to improve the world and ourselves in preparation.

For the postmillennialist, progressionist worldview, the idea of progress slid easily into the idea of evolution not the scientific discipline we know today, says Ruse, but a metaphysical system encompassing everything from hierarchies of organisms to the manifest superiority of European civilization. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a fervent evolutionist in this mold. But evolution remained disreputable among biologists until The Origin of Species proposed an actual mechanism for the evolution of living organisms, natural selection.

Here, however, evolution’s roots in religious metaphysics told, as the champions of Darwin’s work in the latter half of the nineteenth century largely ignored natural selection. Instead, men like T. H. Huxley proselytized for evolution as a kind of secular religion of progress, social reform and human improvement, a philosophy Ruse calls “evolution-ism.” It wasn’t until the dawn of the twentieth century that serious biologists, working on the mechanisms of heredity and selection, began to turn evolution into what Ruse calls a “professional science,” and even today, he notes, distinguished scientists like E. O. Wilson explicitly promote evolutionism as a secular alternative to religion.

Meanwhile, says Ruse, evangelical, premillennialist Christianity found fertile soil in America, particularly the South, powerless and defeated after the Civil War. New ideas like the rapture, subject of the recent Left Behind bestsellers, became important for the first time, in what Ruse calls a “manufacturing” of a new kind of evangelicalism, as novel in its way as evolutionism. For these American evangelicals, evolution represented, not just an alternative to Genesis, but a whole alternative worldview antithetical to their faith.

Evolution thus became a litmus test for a broad spectrum of religious and social issues, say Ruse, and so it remains today. Recent school board fights over evolution, “creation science” and “intelligent design” are just the latest skirmishes in this historical struggle, rooted, he says, in different religious responses to the Enlightenment. Ruse himself has been at the front lines: he gave expert testimony against creation science in Arkansas in 1981, and against intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005. (A Florida State University forum on the Dover decision, featuring Ruse and several other experts, can be viewed here.)

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