The Science of Religion

Interview Transcripts

Michael Ruse

Interview 8/30/05 by John Rieger

Part One

Michael Ruse, you confess to being a committed evolutionist, and you’ve also been accused of being a notorious, atheistic humanist, and yet you characterize the evolution-creation struggle as a clash of “religions.” Is evolution a religion?

Well, why don’t we back off first. I mean, am I a notorious, atheistic humanist? Well, any publicity I can get I’m happy to have. I prefer to think of myself as something of a skeptic, or an agnostic if you like. I guess I’m fairly atheistic about the main claims of Christianity, but whether there’s something Beyond with a capital B, I don’t know yet, but I’m 65, so I guess I’m gonna find out in the not too far distant future.

I guess I should add the qualification that it was Henry Morris, the co-author of The Genesis Flood, who singled you out as an atheist.

Right (laughing). So anyhow, the fact is, I certainly, let me not mince words. I’m an evolutionist, I’m a committed Darwinian evolutionist, and I’m certainly a non-believer, so you can certainly put all of those together in the package for me. Now to just be autobiographical for a moment, I should say that my background, when I grew up in England, was as a Quaker, and although it’s a very long time since I’ve ever been to meeting, I think one thing about growing up as a Quaker is it’s very hard to dislike Christianity when you are a grown-up. So my attitude has always been one of much more friendly and tolerance towards Christians, than let us say an atheist like Richard Dawkins or Steven Weinberg or people like that.

Now I think Christianity is a religion, I think that Darwinian evolutionary theory is a science, and I think the two are quite different. Having said that, I do think that evolutionary ideas have in the past, and right up to and including today, have been used for more than just scientific ideas, and that they have been used to promulgate, to build a whole world picture which I think in certain respects certainly bears a family resemblance to religion. I mean, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, then maybe it is a duck, and that’s how I feel about evolution-ism.

The sort of people I’ve got in mind in the 19th century would be less Charles Darwin himself, and more “Darwin’s bulldog,” self-described “bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, the grandfather of Aldus Huxley the novelist. He certainly saw evolution as being more than just a science, but, as it were, a whole agnostic, materialistic, technological progressive vision of what he wanted in late 19th century England. And if you were to ask me whom today would I want to pin down in the same sort of way, I guess my in fact good friend, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist and sociobiologist. I think that in his books, like Consilience and On Human Nature and other works like that, I think Wilson has very clearly articulated a—as Morris says—a secular, humanistic, progressivist, evolutionary picture of life which I think for Wilson is quite open—he wants this to replace conventional Christianity.

Now, Charles Darwin is both celebrated and vilified as the father of evolutionary thinking, but you describe in your book a conflict that actually began before Darwin. Who were the antagonists, and what was at stake, what was going on?

Well, what I say, and I want to distinguish what is sort of standard history from the particular take I want to put on it, but standard history is clearly that in many respects the age of the Enlightenment, the 18th century, was more important in the history of Christianity than the Reformation, because after the Reformation, everybody went on believing in God, and Jesus as our savior, it’s just that they had different takes on it, but of course, in the 18th century I think for the first time—because people were now becoming aware of different religions, people were now becoming aware that the Bible is a human document as much as a religious document, people were now becoming aware that Christianity no longer functioned properly in an industrial society—I think for the first time people actually became aware of the possibility that it might not be true.

I mean, as I say, I think this is pretty standard history. And I think also pretty standard history is that there were two responses to this. On the one hand you’ve got those who said, “Right, we’ve got to push the heart, we’ve got to push the emotions, we’ve got to concentrate on the atonement, Jesus dying on the cross for our sins to make possible our eternal salvations,” people like the Methodists, people like the Wesleys in England, and of course somebody like Jonathan Edwards in America, at the time of the first Great Awakening. So, as I say, you’ve got that one strand of emotion-based religion—let’s call it “evangelical,” but using it in a rather broader sense than just a 20th century or 21st century evangelical.

And then on the other hand you’ve got the people who say, “Well, here it goes folks, reason, evidence über alles, this is the way to go,” and these would be people like the philosophes in France, people like Voltaire for instance, the philosophers and political economists in Britain, particularly in Scotland, people like David Hume and Adam Smith and others like that. And also in America, let’s not forget, you’re going to have many of the founders of the nation, people like Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson—I mean even George Washington, although he was an Episcopalian, quit taking communion at some point.

So, as I say, I think you’ve got these two positions, and one of the big sort of dividing points was not so much the whole question of Genesis and are the early chapters of Genesis literally true, but particularly the whole business of the way that the world is working, that the reason types were very much into progress, the feeling that we humans ourselves can make all the difference, whereas the religion types were very much into providence, the notion that there is nothing that we can do. For instance, take the second verse of Rock of Ages, written by Augustus Montague Toplady in 1776—something else happened in that year too, didn’t it. I mean, what is the hymn:

Not the labor of my hands
Can fulfill thy law’s demands.
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone.
Thou must save, and thou alone.

I mean, this is a very standard, evangelical sort of post-Calvinist position, that we humans can do absolutely nothing in our own right. It’s only through the blood of Christ on the cross that we have this possibility of eternal salvation.

So I see this major debate, major divide coming in Europe and also starting in America in the 18th century, and evolution is very much bound up with this, because if you believe in progress you think of things going up, getting better, and it’s very easy to read this not only into social systems—you know, you’ve got savages down at the bottom and Americans and British up at the top—but also into the biological world—that you’ve got sort of slugs and slime down below, and you’ve got Europeans up at the top, and if you really very lucky you’ve got the English right at the top. So, again, much of this is pretty standard history.

Now I want to focus on this myself and say I see this as something that 300 years later, 250 years later we’re still living with, and I see this as very much a divide which we’ve got particularly in American society today.

Now in setting the scene for this change of worldview in the Enlightenment, you cite Matthew Arnold’s great poem Dover Beach, in fact you open the book with it, and it is indeed very beautiful and very pertinent, and I wonder if you’d like to say a bit about that poem and what it captures about the spirit of the age.

Well, I would particularly, actually. It’s a poem which I’ve known for donkey’s years. You see, Matthew Arnold, who, of course, was the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the great educator, the headmaster at Rugby School that Tom Brown’s School Days is all about, Matthew Arnold was, he was a very classic mid-Victorian, middle class man who was wrestling with the whole issues of faith and doubt and all of these things. He never became, I mean he always said that Christianity, we can’t live with it, but obviously we can’t live without it. So I think he was somebody who never entirely resolved things to his own way of thinking. But this is a poem, Dover Beach, which he wrote in 1852—in fact he wrote it on his honeymoon—but the poem itself was not in fact published until 1867. And of course what makes this particularly fascinating is that right in the middle of this 15 year time span is 1859, which of course is the year that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.

Now the reason why Arnold’s poem is so important to me as a historian of evolutionary thought is that often people think that Darwin came along in The Origin of Species, and right until 1859 everyone believed the Bible absolutely literally, from Genesis I, right to the end of Revelation, and then along came Darwin, and as it were, rather like Iraq, he let off a roadside bomb, and things have never been the same since. Well, it’s not quite true, because clearly people were wrestling with some of these issues before this, and Arnold’s poem—and I’ll read the 3rd verse to you—makes it so clear. He’s looking out across the channel, he’s watching the sea, he’s listening to the waves, and a sort of a sadness as the waves pull in and then draw back, and there doesn’t seem to be any meaning to this, it’s just grinding on and on and on, and then he says:

The sea of Faith was once too at the full,
And round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,
But now I only hear it’s melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath of the night wind,
Down the vast edges drear, and the naked shingles of the world.

And then he ends the poem by saying:

Ah, Love, let us be true
To one another! For the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

And so, of course, what he’s doing is picking up on this and saying that this is a metaphor for him of what seems to be the essential meaninglessness of life, and how are we going to resolve it. Now the point I want to make is that Darwin, if you like, is casting seeds in a bed which has been very well fertilized.

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Part Two

Now The Origin of Species at first did not arouse universal opposition among religious thinkers, did it? Why not, and how did it come to generate more opposition as time went on?

Well, I mean it’s difficult to say. I mean there’s no question that you can certainly find people pretty early on who were opposed to The Origin on religious grounds. I mean, for instance, Darwin’s old geology teacher, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge University was one who flatly rejected it because he—it wasn’t so much that it went against Genesis; it was, he felt, that it went against the argument from design, it excluded the possibility of a creator, and things like that. So there’s no question that some people did reject it that way. The Bishop of Oxford was another. But again, this is not me, this is scholars of the period. People like John Roberts, who has written very extensively on this, point out that by let’s say 1870, that’s 10 or 11 years after The Origin was first published, that by and large Christians, certainly in Europe, certainly in Britain, and many in America, are fundamentally saying, okay, if it’s evolution then so be it, that’s God’s choice. Of course we believe that there had to be a special miracle for eternal souls or something like that, but basically that’s the way it should go.

I mean, I think it’s very revealing that, for instance, the person I think was the greatest religious genius in the 19th—certainly in the English-speaking world in the 19th century was John Henry Newman, the Anglican cleric who, of course, converted to Catholicism and ended up as a cardinal of the church. And Newman, he was interested in science, he wasn’t a scientist, he wasn’t obsessed with science, but when evolution came along, Newman was asked about it, and he said, well, frankly, he said, you know, St. Augustine says that we can interpret the Bible metaphorically, and it sounds pretty good to me. Of course, eternal souls are something different, but as far as evolution is concerned, I ain’t got no problem with that, whatsoever. And I think that was a fairly standard position that an awful lot of people took.

Now as I say, in America, what one had and what one might have expected, particularly in the north, was that evolution people became evolutionists, often they wanted some kind of direction, they usually all wanted something special for souls, but if that was the way it was going to be, well, so be it. I mean, somebody like Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of the novelist who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beecher said, well it’s God on the installment business rather than getting it all at once, and if God wants to do it that way, then that’s up to God and not up to us. It’s for us to find out what’s going on.

However, of course, we talked about 1859 as an important date, but of course in America even more important dates are the first four or five years of the next decade, which of course was the time of the Civil War, and ultimately of course the defeat of the South and the triumph of the North. And, again, this is pretty standard history, we know that to a great extent what happened after the civil war was that the South retreated into itself, they enacted things like Jim Crow laws and all of these things, and also a fairly rabid form of Evangelical Christianity became more and more and more important. I mean, basically the argument was that if you look at the Bible, you’ll see that often God puts his greatest burdens on those whom he loves most.

And so what we find then is what I think is already obviously an embryonic split before the Civil War, but after the Civil War you start to find a much greater divide in American Christianity, not because of evolution but because of other factors, particularly the Civil War and slavery. And what I want to say is that basically evolution gets swept up in this, and it becomes very much a kind of litmus test for where are you going to stand. Are you going to be with the North? Are you going to be with progress? Are you going to be with a much more metaphorical reading of the Bible? Are you going to be with what is known technically as a “postmillennialist” view, which thinks that our place here on earth is to make it ready for Jesus’ coming, or are you going to be with the South, and as it moves out to the West, with a much more literalistic reading, with a much more Biblical reading, with one which is going to put much heavier emphasis on providence, and of course one which is going to pick up on evolution and see it as something which goes against the whole way of looking at things which you get in America in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in the South

I read to you a passage from Rock of Ages, where I showed this whole providential view, the notion that there’s nothing that we can do on our own. And again if you look at the hymns that are being written, particularly the hymns which are being written and sung by the Evangelicals, by those great, you know, the Billy Grahams of the day, particularly Dwight Moody and his—the man who used to sing for him Ira Sankey—again you get exactly this kind of theology being expressed in the hymns, and I quote again now, this is from Ira Sankey, one of the hymns that he used to sing:

Oh to be nothing, nothing,
Only to lie at His feet,
A broken and emptied vessel,
For the master’s use made meet:
Empty, that He might fill me,
As forth to his service I go;
Broken, that so unhindered,
His life through me might flow.

Now, you think about it, you know, at a certain level, this is a very peculiar theological position to take. I mean. what we’re saying is what we want is God to absolutely smash us up, to make us feel like we’re total parasites, total worms, that we’re skid row bums, that we’re absolute scum of the earth…

He wants us to hit bottom.

Right! And then, and only then can Jesus take over. Please make me like this! Well, you know, I mean, let’s face up to it, your good Rotarian (laughs) in the Midwest, in fact if anybody was gonna suggest that he was gonna be like this, would have thought it was really bad taste! But, you see how the theology is working here…

Well, and it’s very interesting in your book to trace this theology through to the present and realize that just as Darwin’s theory of evolution was something new in the scientific world, this premillennialism was something novel in Christian theology as well.

Right. I mean premillennialism is not unknown. I mean the whole notion of millennialism goes back to the time of Christ or even before, people like the Book of Daniel, but the point is, in the middle of the 19th century, I think that what you get—and this is a claim I want to make—is a manufacturing of a particular kind of evangelical religion, which in its way is as novel as is Darwinism and particularly evolutionism, and—this of course is something that I want to argue very strongly—is in fact the other side of the same coin, that what the Darwinians are trying to do is offer us a philosophy, a religion for the age, and I think that what the premillennialist evangelicals are trying to do is once again to offer us a religion for the age.

So, for instance, what we find is all sorts of new elements now being introduced, particularly things like the rapture, the notion that before Armageddon at some point the truly good are going to be swept up to Jesus, and then they will fight on Jesus’ side alongside from then on. I mean this whole end time series of books is very much, I mean, that’s where it starts, I mean the whole thing about that series of books is that the earth is coming to an end, that—this is Left Behind, a Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, by Tim La Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins. I mean, the beginning of the book is suddenly that these people are flying this airliner, and then half the passengers disappear, and of course what has happened is that they’ve been raptured up.

Now this is not traditional Christianity, my goodness! This is something that a man called John Nelson Darby thought up in the first half of the 19th century, but it got picked up and became very much part of the kind of thinking that we get particularly by the end of the 19th century…

And I guess touched something in the American character, too, that it appealed to.

I think it is, because don’t forget you’ve also got the whole notion of America as something special, the whole notion of America as somehow God’s favored nation. I mean, my God, we see that today in almost any speech that any politician makes. And so as I say, I think that this is something which gets picked up and pushed in America, because religion is a very important phenomenon in American life, far more so than it is in Europe, or I lived for 35 years in Canada, far more so than it is in Canada.

Well now, as these premillennial ideas were forming, and on the other side as “evolutionism” as you call it was trying to offer answers, there were also professional biologists who were working hard to turn evolution into a professional science. Now, what do you mean by a “professional science”?

Well, what I mean by professional science is, at a trivial level, what goes on in the labs at UCLA or Florida State. What I mean by a professional science is the attempt to find out the way that the world is working, and not to have that finding out in any way influenced by the kinds of ideals, beliefs, hopes, backgrounds of the scientists. Karl Popper, the Austrian-Anglo philosopher used to say that “science is knowledge without a knower.” And likewise Popper famously had his criterion of demarcation. It’s got to be falsifiable. However good an idea is you’ve got to be prepared to let it be knocked down.

And I think particularly in the 20th century, with the coming of genetics, particularly Mendelian genetics, what we find is that people interested in evolutionary biology start slowly but increasingly to try to put their science on a scientific basis, and not just as something which is a kind of Christianity substitute. I mean, I think the interesting thing is they didn’t give up on the Christianity substitute, but they certainly, as it were, tried from Monday thru Friday to do a different kind of science.

Now, by your account, evolution in the years after Darwin had much more going for it as a metaphysical point of view than it did as a professional science. You call it “evolutionism.” It was used by people like Huxley and others to support social reform and other ideas of progress and human improvement.

I think I buy that. I think I would want to say that. I mean I don’t want to say that everybody all of the time was doing exactly that. I mean, you know, people are different. And I mean, for instance, I think that Darwin himself, at least in The Origin of Species, was trying to do something much more along the lines of what I call professional science. But then, you know, what happens of course, Darwin, you know, was a sick man. He gave over the ob of promoting his ideas to people like Huxley, and of course they took it up and did something else with it, and to a certain extent I think we find that Darwin went along with this. So if you look at Darwin’s second great book, The Descent of Man, which is published in 1871, what’s that 12 years after The Origin, it’s a very different book than The Origin. It’s much more about the meaning of life, and the status of white humans, and defense of capitalism, I mean things which would never, ever have gotten into The Origin.

Now I’m struck as you tell this story of the gradual professionalizing of evolutionary science, that one key idea is really the idea of natural selection. That’s the kernel of Darwinian thought that explains how organisms come to look as if they’d been designed, and I’m puzzled that this rather key idea got so little traction in the years after The Origin.

Well, I think there’s a number of reasons for this, and I think the most obvious one is that people like Huxley were morphologists, and embryologists and anatomists, and of course the kind of science that they were doing almost invariably involved, you know, catch your fish in the summer, put it in formaldehyde, go back, and then sometime in November when you’re in London, get the fish out of the jar, put it on the slab, and start cutting it up and examining it. And, of course, the point is, you’re not looking at the sorts of things that the fish did with the characteristics that it’s got.

You’re looking at static relations.

Your looking at static relationships! You’re comparing this fish to another fish that you caught let’s say in another bay or earlier this summer or something of this nature. And so in a way, they didn’t really need natural selection.

Now, who were the kind of people who would need natural selection, and who even in Darwin’s time actually used natural selection? Well, these would be people dealing with live organisms, and probably, since natural selection is about the struggle for existence and the struggle for survival, the “survival of the fittest” and reproduction, you’re gonna be looking at people who’re not only going to be looking at organisms that are alive, but organisms that are going to reproduce fairly often. People who were lepidopterists, people who were looking at butterflies, moths, and this sort of thing, in fact were very interested in natural selection, and issues to do with mimicry, and how in fact certain butterfly wing patterns can make the butterfly look like the background growth, and these things. And so, in fact, we find a man called Henry Walter Bates, and also his friend, the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, who were both collectors, both out there collecting butterflies and moths, they in fact are very interested in these sorts of issues.

Don’t forget, though, particularly in America many people went on believing, and wanted to take design onboard as it were. They couldn’t convince themselves that natural selection could do everything that they wanted. And so you get somebody like Darwin’s great supporter in America, Asa Grey, the botanist at Harvard, who in fact is keen on natural selection, but not as keen as he might be, because he always wanted to introduce some kind of guided mutation or things of that nature…

Well, that would be God on the installment plan?

Well absolutely, and I mean, let’s face up to it, I think that of those American s today who actually believe in evolution, most of them actually believe in something along those lines anyway. I mean… I mean look, you see this figures and they really are pretty stable. You find that 50% of Americans just don’t believe in evolution, and of those 50% who do, usually 25 or 30% believe in some kind of guidance. There are very few people who are, as it were, stone cold sober about evolution and the laws on their own can do just about everything.

I mean, I think, that just an awful lot of people look at it and, say, just don’t how it could happen, but “I want to stay on side with science, so as long as you can, you know, you can assure me that God was doing it in some way…” Now you know, I don’t think most people are all that worried about exactly how God did it. I mean, did God do it or does God do it on the installment basis at the quantum level. Does God get in to intervene. Does God, as it were, build it all into the machinery before he starts. I think, you know, they feel fairly comfortable as long as God’s involved somewhere. You don’t have to give me the details, I know that that’s important. You certainly in America get an awful lot of that kind of thinking.

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Part Three

Now, moving up to today, just as the sciences of genetics and evolution seem poised for really great achievements, we’re seeing an upwelling of premillennial fervor in America, with the tremendous popularity of books like The Late, Great Planet Earth, or the Left Behind series. What’s going on? What’s been happening here since, say, 1980?

Well I don’t think it’s just since 1980. And I mean I, look, again, I get these from others, but people who have been looking at this whole business of apocalyptic thinking in American thought have noted that particularly since the Second World War, that was the time, after the Second World War, was the time when we start to see this real rise in enthusiasm for apocalyptic thinking, clearly linked to a number of phenomena. First of all letting off the atomic bombs put people in mind of Armageddon. It really did. People said, here we are folks, we’re on the way to the end.

Just like it says in the Bible?

Right. Then you’ve got the Antichrist as represented by Russia, You’ve got people like Billy Graham, I mean, if you look at Billy Graham’s sermons in the 1950’s, they’re heavy-duty apocalyptic, I mean there’s no question about it. People have gone back and looked at some of these things. Another factor which was very, very important was the founding of Israel, because bound up with this whole evangelical premillennialism, and of course it comes right into the end time books, is the need for the Jews to return to Israel, and for things to happen there, and so we see this today, that people like Jerry Falwell are the keenest of all on supporting Israel.

So as I say I think that what you’re seeing in fact is something which started to build in the 1940s, the 1950s, and particularly I think America really did in many respects start to feel rather frail and rather threatened. And of course today, isn’t it fascinating, no sooner do we bring the Cold War to an end in 1990, then suddenly it’s all happening again, but now it’s the terrorists. And we strike out against terrorists real and imaginary, and we’re right back into this kind of apocalyptic scenario that’s going on at the moment.

Meanwhile, what about the association of evolution with the idea of progress? There have been many reasons in the 20th century to question that idea too, have there not?

Well there have, but you know, and again, this is a really interesting question, because when I started in on this, one of the things, you know, like everybody I read the New York Review of Books and places like that, and I know that any self-respecting intellectual in the 20th century can’t possibly believe in progress. I mean, how can you believe in progress with global warming and AIDS and world wars, and nuclear proliferation and all of these sorts of things. But in fact—and again I’m not the first to point this out by any means—scientists tend to be something of an atypical group here, because the only way that you’re going to do good science is to believe that you can make progress. The person who goes in on a Monday morning and says, “Oh, I don’t know whether we can find out the structure of this molecule, maybe will, but folks, let’s not bank on it…” I mean this is one of the reasons why scientists loathe intelligent design, because it’s so antithetical to the whole way of thinking of a scientist.

So what I’m saying is scientists have to be little progress boosters, otherwise they’re never going to make any successes as scientists, and I think that this certainly, what shall I say, seeps out into the way scientists think generally about the world. I mean, you know, my experience is that you ask a scientist about progress, whether it’s evolutionary progress or social progress, and they say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, Steve Gould told me that was completely wrong, no, no, no, no.” But you know, later on in the evening after they’ve had two or three drinks, suddenly they start saying, “You know Mike, don’t tell anyone I said this to you, but you know, damn it all, humans are a hell of a lot more interesting that trilobites! That doesn’t mean progress you understand! But really and truly…” I mean, I think scientists are happy little campers when it comes to this.

Alright, well, this looks like a good place to look more closely at where intelligent design fits in this historical drama.

Well, where does intelligent design fit in this historical drama? Intelligent design is the belief that at some points in the history of life an intelligent designer had to get involved in order to, as it were, get over the hump of what they call “irreducible complexity,” that you can’t do it without miracles. Now, I mean, people like Bill Dembski, one of the leaders, say, ah, well, we don’t necessarily imply scientifically that the intelligent designer is God, but you can tell that one to the Marines, because the simple fact of the matter is, the intelligent designer is not a super-bright grad student on Andromeda who’s running the earth as an experiment. I mean, the fact of the matter is they’re calling on God.

Intelligent designers are not simply old fashioned young-earth creationists. Young-earth creationists—and we’ve mentioned Henry Morris earlier and people like that, the Henry Morris who co-authored Genesis Flood—I mean these are people who believe in 6000 years of earth span, six days of creation, six literal 24 hours, a universal flood sometime thereafter. Some intelligent designers certainly believe in that, but I don’t think you have to believe in that to be an intelligent designer. In fact, Michael Behe, who wrote Darwin’s Black Box, who’s one of the leaders of the ID movement, certainly accepts a great deal of evolution. So I think you can certainly draw a distinction there.

I think you can also say that not every intelligent designer is necessarily an out-and-out premillennialist looking for Armageddon coming. I think some are. Paul Nelson would be a case in point, but others, I suspect, are not. I mean Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic, and as he said to me personally, he said, “Well of course, we Catholics just aren’t into that sort of thing.” So at that level I think you can certainly draw a distinction.

On the other hand, having said that, I still want to call intelligent design theory “creationism light.” Because I think that basically, you know I talked about a litmus test early on. As I’ve said all along, I look upon the evolution-creation struggle as in many respects a litmus test for a deeper struggle for the heart of the American soul, and I do see the intelligent designers allying themselves with a great many of the social prescriptions that I think are also to be found with people of the evangelical extreme. I mean anti-abortion, anti- the notion of universal health care, pro-Iraq, pro-capital punishment, anti-divorce.

I mean you read Phillip Johnson who’s been one of their leaders, and Phillip Johnson is always going on and on and on about how secular naturalist materialist progressivism has led to fractured families and divorce and homosexual rights, and a particular thing which seems to obsess Phillip Johnson is cross-dressing! I mean, you know, my experience is that the average male evolutionary biologist does not go home at night and put on, you know, pink frilly panties!

But you know, these are the things that these people feel very strongly about, and so at that level I do see intelligent design theory as being a kissing cousin of old fashioned creationism. And I think it’s very interesting to note that the old fashioned creationists clearly feel the same. I mean, clearly the old-fashioned creationists want a lot more, but at the moment they’re very happy to let the ID people do the blocking, I think on the grounds that once we get the foot in the door, or what they call the wedge strategy, we’ll be able to get a hell of a lot more later. You know, we’ll be able to divide up the spoils at some later point.

But I think this going to be like the Russian revolution. You need Trotsky to get the revolution going, but once you’ve got it going, well you know, Trotsky is expendable, and I suspect that if indeed ID does succeed, 20 years down the road we’ll find that people like Dembski and Behe are expendable too.

They’ll look like moderates?

They’ll look like moderates.

Well now right now many Americans are fighting to get intelligent design included in biology classes alongside evolution. Why not do that? Why not treat intelligent design as a potential science, and subject its hypotheses to scientific testing and criticism?

Well, first of all there’s no question that’s a very powerful emotive argument, and it’s a very powerful emotive argument for Americans, because you people are so committed to notions of freedom and democracy, and I mean you’ve got this ideology of this. So of course in America particularly, and I mean I know this from living in America and having been born in England, America has this almost veneration of common sense, that common sense is a good thing, and distrust of experts, and all these sorts of things, So at one level it sounds very attractive, but at another level, as soon as you look at it carefully, you see that it really is a Potempkin village, it really is a phony argument.

Now I believe you quote Dembski saying that the way God intervenes in the world to create intelligent design happens in a puff of smoke. Or happens miraculously.

Well, I think it’s Behe actually. Behe was asked by somebody… I mean the point is, you see, you’ve got a funny sort of situation here…

But if miracles did occur, surely they would be causes.

Well, they would be, and the point is, if miracles do occur, well let’s have some evidence of it! Remember the sadistic warden in The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy’s cell that morning is empty, and he walks in, and he says, “It’s a miracle, he’s vanished like a fart in the wind!” Well, of course, you know he’s talking sarcastically. People don’t vanish like farts in the wind. You don’t have miracles. That’s not a religious claim. It’s just the way that the world works! And the reason why scientists get so hot under the collar, quite apart from the religious factor, which of course the ID people are playing down for political reasons, is that if you take up ID, it’s the end of science. I mean, if you simply say, “it’s a miracle,” well, end of argument, pack up and go home. I mean, that’s not the way you do science. Science is: it didn’t work, I can’t find it out, go at it again and again and again and again. I mean, you keep plugging away, plugging away, plugging away until you get a breakthrough.

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Part Four

There are many Christian thinkers today who reject intelligent design theory and accept Darwinian evolution, and you cite some of them—theologian John Haught is one, philosopher Holmes Rolston is one that you mention, and evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris. Now why is it that they find compatibility where others see conflict?

Well, I think of course, you know, this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, that different Christian traditions have different ways of dealing with science. As I said, I grew up as a Quaker, and Quakers were always very comfortable with science. So I’m not saying that these are exactly the connections you’re going to be getting in every case. I mean, for instance, John Haught is a Roman Catholic. Although the Catholics made a big mistake over Galileo, by and large Catholicism has tended always to be pretty science friendly, and certainly the late pope was a case in point. So I don’t find it at all surprising—I mean I’m more surprised to find somebody like Michael Behe, who is a Catholic, pushing ID, than somebody like Jack Haught, who is a Catholic, arguing against ID.

So, as I say, at a certain level if I wanted to understand why these people come from where they come, I would want to ask questions about where do they stand on the Christian perspective, and why is it that they are able to accept these things and the evangelicals are not. But, of course, I suspect it’s because they just don’t buy into a lot of that premillennialist eschatology that I think an awful lot of Creationists of one sort or another do.

But are they ultimately fooling themselves? Are they not ultimately on a slippery slope where all truth claims of religion become empty in the face of endless scientific progress?

(Laughs) Well, you know, in a way you shouldn’t ask me that question, because I’m a philosopher, and philosophers are just about the world’s worst people at making predictions. So with that very strong caveat, look, my feeling is that the damage that has been done is damage that has been done. I don’t think that you’re gonna get any more now from science, really, which is gonna change things. What I’m saying basically is, if you can live with modern science and still proclaim yourself a Christian—and incidentally, people like Ed Larsen and others have done surveys to suggest that a great many American scientists are in fact Christians—my feeling is that there really isn’t going to be a lot more which comes up to change this. Now…

The major upheavals are over you think?

At that level I think it is. I mean this isn’t to say that for one reason or another American Christianity is always going to remain static. In fact, of course, I’ve argued that a lot of what we’ve got is a product of the 19th century anyway. But what I’m saying is, I really think that, inasmuch as Americans today, and many of them do, combine science and religion, I can’t see myself that science is going to throw up a lot more to challenge this. In fact, if anything it seems to me—J.B.S. Haldane used to point this out—the more we learn about the world, the more peculiar it seems. I mean, when you start to hear things like, well, if you’ve got an electron on one side of the universe and another on the other side, you alter the one, you get exactly the same converse alteration in the other on the spot, and everything’s made of strings and all of these things, I mean, boy, that’s pretty, as far as I’m concerned transubstantiation is easy after that one. (laughing)

There have been some storied encounters in this historic fight: Huxley and Wilberforce, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, and you testified in a case in Arkansas in 1981, and I’m wondering if it lived up to your expectations in terms of drama?

Oh it was very exciting, I mean, what’s a professor from a small college in Canada, an Englishman, doing down there along with people like Stephen Jay Gould and Francisco Ayala and other big names like that, and suddenly the eyes of the nation are upon you? And so the answer is it was one of the most exciting times of my life.

The circumstances were like this. In 1961, we’ve talked about this, Whitcomb and Morris, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published Genesis Flood, and this is the sort of start of the new creationism. So what we had then for 20 years was the growth from a very small movement of out-and-out young earth creationism. They realized that they couldn’t get directly into classes if it looked like that, so they had to tart it up to look like science, so they invented what they called “Creation Science,” which is Genesis supposedly backed by modern science, and finally, in 1981, they were hawking a model bill around, which would call for “balanced treatment,” the teaching of evolution and creationism in biology classes, and finally in 1981 the state of Arkansas passed such a law.

Now, you know, in all fairness, this was the interregnum in the Clinton years. It was a man called Frank White, who really and truly I don’t think—I like to joke he was as unqualified for his job as he was surprised at getting it. And this bill got shoved right through, and the governor basically I think didn’t even look at it, signed it, and then whoops! Suddenly the eyes of the world are on Arkansas.

And what was the bill?

The bill said that if children are to be taught evolution in state supported biology classes in the state of Arkansas, then they must also be taught creationism alongside, and when examinations come, students must be allowed to choose indifferently which position they want to support—“balanced treatment.” After the bill was passed, a lot of people in Arkansas were not at all pleased about this, including the junior chamber of commerce, because Arkansas like everywhere else was busy in the way of trying to attract high tech firms from up north, and so by the end of the year, in December, we had a two week trial, on whether or not the bill should be declared constitutional. It was a federal case. It was before a judge, judge Overton, and he heard it on his own, and after two weeks then he took rather longer to make his decision. I mean, I think he’d made his decision, but he realized that the eyes of the world were going to be on him, too.

So he took time to deliberate.

Oh, he sure did. And so in fact when it came out he just ruled flatly that Creation Science is not science, that it’s religion, and therefore it violates the U.S. constitutional separation of church and state.

I mean, if I can be totally immodest for a moment, I think what was satisfying was my feeling, and I think everybody agreed, that somebody like myself who is an historian and philosopher of science had a real contribution to make. I mean, you had to have your theologians, no question about that. You had to have your scientists. I mean the people I think who were really impressive were the science teachers, the high school teachers in Arkansas who came along and testified about how they tried to teach. I mean these people, I must say, they brought lumps to my throat, because these were not city slickers from New York or something like that.

But what was very satisfying for me personally was the realization that for once, even though I hadn’t become a real doctor, that the doctorate I’d got was something where I really felt that I could make a contribution to modern education, and particularly to modern American education, because certainly, as somebody who grew up during the Second World War, grew up with American culture all my life, finally ending up in America, I realize what a terrific debt I have to this country right or wrong, and often it’s very right, and for me it was something which was particularly satisfying, because at some little level I felt that I could say thank you.

I hate to ask you any more after that…

I know, I really should be on the stage, or preaching, shouldn’t I, have one of those crystal palaces of my own!

I’m a little choked up!

(Laughter) I know. You should see my technician here! He’s crying! You know, earlier on he had a big sign up that said “Darwin sucks,” but now he’s weeping!

Well, Michael Ruse, thank you so much for talking to me today. It has certainly been a pleasure.

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