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Creationism in California

1976; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-010-1887-6_13

2214-7942

John A. Moore,

Plant and animal studies

There is an element of pathos in Santayana's proverb to the effect that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The implication is that knowledge of the past will prevent error in the present; unfortunately, there is very little evidence to support such a hopeful philosophy. The generals and kings whose actions lead to disastrous ends are not unfamiliar with history. Their behavior depends not so much on ignorance of history as on the hope that history is not go ing to happen to them. Those evolutionary biologists who engage in cyclical debates with Biblical creationists on the origin and evolution of life are usually aware that these debates have occurred before. For more than a century, there has been a chronic level of activity that, at intervals of roughly a generation, becomes acute or even fulminating. We are in such a period of increased activity today; biologists and creationists are saying essentially what was being said in the mid-nineteenth cen tury by Huxley and Wilberforce, or by Gray and Agassiz.1 Neither group is convinc ing the other; indeed, an accord is impossible. The strict rejects the statements and procedures of the because he feels they do not lead to God. The rejects the statements and procedures of the because they do not lead to a scientifically acceptable understanding of nature. Creationists search nature for evidence for conclusions they have already accepted; evolutionists, on the other hand, use observations and experiments on natural phenomena to help them reach their conclusions. Thus the two groups are using wholly divergent and incompatible systems of thought. Yet the lines between the two camps were not always so sharply drawn. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw little conflict between Biblical statements and the slowly emerging sciences of biology and geology. Indeed, the beautifully adaptive struc tures and processes of animals and plants were viewed as evidence of the Creator's mode of action, and of His loving concern for the living world. In 1802, William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle, codified this point of view in his Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.2 During the 1830s, the eight volumes of the Bridgewater Treatises expanded this theme.8 Within decades of the publication in 1859 of On the Origins of Species, the terms evolutionist and creationist began to be taken as synonymous with scientist and fundamentalist, so that by the end of the century most of those in the former camp would have accepted Thomas Huxley's statement that