This is my initial posting for the part of this thread which will address the specific point of whether scientific findings can be accepted by Christians who declare themselves to be evangelical, and, in particular, by those who are prepared to insist on the “inerrancy” of the Bible.

Let me reiterate that here and in subsequent postings I am using the term “creationist” in the sense in which it is now understood – an adherent of “strict young-earth, flood geology creationism” to use the term popularised by Henry M. Morris. And when I refer to “creationism” it will refer only to modern creationism, roughly from the early nineteenth century onwards. And, in particular, that variety which owes its widespread influence to “The Genesis Flood” by Whitcomb and Morris, first published in 1961 and still in print in unaltered form.

I have already posted in this thread Augustine’s criticisms of people who want to make deductions about “the way the world is”, to use a common phrase, but showed their ignorance of the world around, and thereby brought discredit on Christianity.

If we are to understand the range of ideas about the interpretation of Genesis as it relates to scientific ideas, it will be necessary to refer to assorted commentators, theologians, historians and scientists who have written about this. I have, over the years, collected a number of quotations on this topic and will be posting them here, so that people can respond by simply referring to my posts rather than resources which may be elsewhere on the Internet.

Let me start by saying that if creationists wish to hold their views as religious views, and simply say that modern science has got it all wrong, there would be few objections from scientists to this, even though most would regard them as quite off-beam.

However when they add “… and I have scientific evidence to back up my beliefs” it is only to be expected that at least some scientists will prick up their ears.

And when they then try to get their ideas into science classes in schools, under the guise of science, and use political influence or try to pass laws to this effect, those scientists who have taken an interest in education in schools become more than worried. And when news gets around the scientific community, as it has been doing since the 1960s, and scientists start looking into what is claimed as “science”, the fat is in the fire, to be polite. There is a common phrase about fans which some people have thought more appropriate.

Having said that, apart from Augustine and Calvin I am going to restrict my postings to citing from the works of evangelical theologians, historians and scientists from the 19th century onwards. In order to ensure that I am quoting the exact words of these people I will only quote from their own published works, not from editions of collected works and similar material which, I have found, can be slightly different to the original, and also, more importantly, may omit some crucial parts of the context. I may refer to other published material but this will only be for people to consult if they want further information – I will not quote these as authoritative original works.

I’ll start with a historian.

Since many people are unaware of what various eminent 19th century and early 20th century theologians wrote about the interactions between Christianity and science, and evolution in particular, the bulk of this post will be taken up with some quotes from the Introduction of David Livingstone’s book “Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought” (Scottish Academic Press, 1987). Livingstone is at The Queen’s University, Belfast, and this book consists of an examination of the attitude towards evolution of scientists of conservative Christian persuasion, and conservative theologians (principally of the so-called “Princeton School”) in USA. It shows that until the 1920s almost all of these supported some form of evolution.

I’ll add at the end a few references to other works people might like to consult.

I won’t quote from the body of the book, since that could get well beyond the legal limit of copying. But the Introduction, on pages ix-xii is well worth reading, with the proviso that this was written in 1986 and some of the references to what are best called “current events” date to then. The first three paragraphs if this read:

A new wave of evolution-phobia is sweeping through Britain and America. “Creation science,” championed by fundamentalist activists, has spread like wildfire, transforming an esoteric movement into a prevailing mood among many evangelical Christians. Combining political instinct and educational aggressiveness, the advocates of “scientific creationism” have put their stamp in no uncertain fashion on the cultural scene, particularly in the United States. Almost daily new books from propagandists pro and con find their way onto the shelves of the bookstores. Numerous articles on the subject appear in the glossy weeklies and a myriad Christian magazines. Even in the rarified atmosphere of the learned periodicals, a liberal page allowance has been granted to various assessments both scientific and sociological of the newly mobilized creationist forces. What is especially interesting is that the creationists present their case as impeccably evangelical and thereby have created the impression that their agencies stand as guardians of Christian orthodoxy and doctrinal purity. Somehow there is the feeling that the cause they represent is just the latest, if the most dramatic, expression of a long tradition of evangelical antievolutionism.

The time is ripe to question the assumption that creationists bear the imprimatur of evangelical orthodoxy on the issue of evolution. The whole tradition of English-speaking evangelicalism since the middle of the nineteenth century needs to be reexamined to ascertain just what the response to evolution really has been. My claim is that while no evaluation has gone uncontested, there has been a remarkable assimilation of the evolutionary perspective by many evangelical scholars. Certainly at the popular level there have been many who have felt disturbed, but this has had as much to do with the irresponsible vulgarizing of the theory as anything else. It was less a cool, rational assessment of the theory’s merits and liabilities than a kind of gut reaction to the parody “Darwinian man, though well behaved, / At best is only a monkey shaved.”

In considering the issue, I will focus on the leading representatives of evangelicalism in the areas of science and theology — not because they are ultimately more important than lay evangelicals but because they have on the whole offered more considered and articulate expressions of the tradition and have in particular offered more thoughtful evaluations of the Darwinian episode. If my case is sustained, and a considerable number of evangelical evolutionists are rediscovered, then the onus will be on the creationists to satisfy us that theirs is not a thoroughly modern movement cut off from the mainstream of the conservative Christian tradition. My argument may seem as merely multiplying testimonials. So be it. I, for one, am convinced that the depth of evangelicalism’s roots is not unrelated to the breadth of its appeal, and that the breadth of its appeal, in turn, determines the character of the tradition itself.

After some paragraphs about the cultural context of nineteenth century science and theology Livingstone writes, on pages xi and xii:

This ground-clearing exercise prepares the way for a look at the immediate and subsequent responses of evangelical scientists to Darwin’s ideas. The focus here will be largely on the United States simply because this is where the creationist campaign began and has had its greatest impact. We quickly find something quite surprising. Darwin’s cause in America was championed by the thoroughgoing Congregationalist evangelical Asa Gray, who set himself the task of making sure that Darwin would have “fair play” in the New World. Let us be clear right away that this cannot be dismissed as capitulation to the social pressure of academic peers. To the contrary, Gray had to take on one of the most influential naturalists in America at the time to maintain his viewpoint — none other than Louis Agassiz, a Harvard colleague who vitriolically scorned Darwin’s theory. But Gray was not alone. Many of his countrymen, associates in science and brothers in religion, took the same stand. And indeed even those who ultimately remained unimpressed with if not hostile to Darwin were quite prepared to admit that evolution had occurred. It is surely not without significance that Christian botanists, geologists, and biologists — that is to say, those best placed to see with clarity the substance of what Darwin had proposed — believed the evidence supported an evolutionary natural history.

What then of the theologians? Here I intend to concentrate largely, but not exclusively, on the Princeton school, because its faculty were in many ways the classical theological architects of modern conservative evangelicalism. At this point, perhaps more than anywhere else, we must allow the characters to speak for themselves, for the terrain is full of surprises. Even Warfield, the exponent of a particularly stringent view of biblical inerrancy, was an open supporter of the evolutionary perspective. This is a crucial case, because many creationist propagandists explicitly base their own doctrine of scriptural authority on the Warfieldian model. The extent to which they neglect to inform us of Warfield’s own views about evolutionary biology, therefore, reflects the degree of their inconsistency at the very least. Other actors figure in the drama, of course, and the ways in which they conceptualized the Darwin problem will be just as instructive.

Some observations on the early promoters of of creation science — their organizational maneuvers, their scientific credentials, and their denominational affiliations — will finally serve to answer the question of how they are to be related to the great figures of nineteenth-century evangelical religion. We will not fail to notice, moreover, that evolutionists were represented in the pages of the twelve-volume fundamentalist manifesto _The Fundamentals_ published between 1910 and 1915. This in itself points to a radical disjunction between an earlier pluralistic fundamentalism and its later, more caustic counterpart.

It is not my purpose in this book to judge Darwin at the bar of science. From the perspective of a mere historian of the debate, I cannot say whether the Darwinian theory has now been so falsified as to require a new paradigm. Nor can I review the state of play in a dozen disciplines from genetics to geology in which evolution is a crucial issue. My aim is rather to describe a tradition of evangelical scholarship devoted to the evolution question. I hope to show that a substantial number of the most distinguished representatives of evangelical orthodoxy found the theological resources to absorb the latest scientific findings. As a consequence I cannot agree with Henry Ford that “history is bunk.” History surely has its own lessons to teach: indeed in this case I think we will uncover an evangelical tradition too long awaiting rediscovery.

It is impossible to discuss creationism intelligently without being moderately familiar with legal battles in USA over the teaching of evolution in schools. The literature on this is vast, but the evangelical Christian lawyer Edward Larson has placed us all in his debt by writing two books on this.

“Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution”, third edition, Oxford University Press, 2003, covers all the legal tussles from the Scopes trial to the beginning of attempts to pass legislation about “intelligent design”. The titles of the chapters indicate the course of the struggle: `Scene of the Crime’; `Outlawing Evolution’; `Enforcing the Law’; `Legalizing Evolution’; `Legislating Equal Time’; Outlawing Creation’; `Mandating Evolution’.

Since there is still considerable confusion about the Scopes trial of 1925, between the second and third editions of “Trial and Error” Larson wrote “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion”, Harvard University Press, 1997. This is the most recent book which discusses the trial at some length.

For an account of events in USA which is more up-to-date than that of Livingstone, taking the story into the twentieth century, Ronald Numbers short book “Darwinism Comes to America” (Harvard University Press, 1999) will be more digestible than his longer and more comprehensive work “The Creationists” (Alfred Knopf, 1992).

I have not seen Jon H. Roberts “Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900” (University of Wisconsin Press, 1888), but it has received a number of favourable reviews by evangelical Christians.

For England by far the best book is the magisterial “The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A study of the Protestant struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900” (Cambridge University Press, 1979), by James R. Moore. Some sentences from the Preface are:

By considering the views of twenty-eight Christian controversialists in Great Britain and America, it is argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection could be accepted in substance only by those whose theology was distinctly orthodox; that this was so because the theory itself presupposed a cosmology and a causality which, owing much to orthodox doctrines of creation and providence, could be made consonant _a priori_ with orthodox theistic beliefs; and that, conversely, other theories of evolution, rationalist and immechanical alike, were embraced by those whose theology was notably liberal because such theories, themselves the product of heterodox theologies of nature, promised to secure theistic beliefs which Darwin seemed bound to offend.

These conclusions will certainly be regarded by some critics as dictated by `Darwinian’ prejudice and by others as dictated by prejudice in favour of orthodoxy. The only critics from whom _prima facie_ sympathy can be expected are those, on the one hand, who would be theologically orthodox Darwinians, and those on the other who radically question the metaphysical foundations of both Protestant orthodoxy and modern evolutionary science. If the sympathisers predominate and the conclusions summarised above are substantially accepted, then let it be said that the way forward will likely lie with those who perceive the orthodoxy of radicalism. They alone have begun to show why the Kingdom of God has yet to be realised in the science of any society.

The 58 page Bibliography is very comprehensive, and includes almost everything written on the topic in the period under review.

The above historians and lawyer, all of whom are highly respected by their peers, cover the historical aspects of the issues adequately.

In the next post I will start quoting theologians.

Salaam Ken Smith