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    Fighting creationism through debate is pointless; how then can we do it?

    A friend of mine is doing her DPhil in Oxford. She's American, and out of term she goes back to her home in middle America. She recently went to see the newly refurbished museum in her home town. When she was looking at the displays on human evolution, a museum guard, who had been observing her, suddenly said "So, what side are you on: the Bible or evolution?" Whereupon my friend replied "What do you mean what side am I on? This is not a football game, you know".

    I am deeply troubled by the incipient creationism, which treats biblical literalism as a serious intellectual contender to scientific inquiry. I want my children to grow up with normal biology textbooks, not with Of Pandas and People. If creationists win their lobbying efforts to make creationism mainstream in schools and the public sphere, that is a loss for everyone (including the creationists). Debates don't seem to do any instrumental good. If we are not going to fight creationism through debates, how can we – as public intellectuals – ensure that creationism doesn't encroach even further upon our schools and public life?


    As Kahan has shown with his work on cultural cognition, just presenting people with arguments and evidence will not make them change their minds. This has been demonstrated for several issues where opinions are highly polarized, such as climate change, gun control and vaccines. What happens instead is that people think that the person in the debate who defended their viewpoint has won the debate.

    So if anything, debates entrench and further polarize beliefs. This probably explains Karl Giberson's attempts to debate  Intelligent Design creationists sensibly have turned out fruitless:

    The ID folk are now assuring their readers that their guy won; my defense of evolution was apparently pitiful: “Where was the new evidence?” the reviewer asks. “Where were the cutting-edge studies supportive of [my] view? Such questions seem profoundly irrelevant, given that evolution has been an established scientific theory for many decades"

    So how can we stop the tidal wave of anti-scientific creationist beliefs that are flooding our schools and public life? For one thing, instead of debating the intellectual "virtues" of creationism versus evolution (a method that misleadingly puts these positions on an equal footing), we can point out that biblical literalism is a very recent way of reading the Bible, only emerging in the late 19th and early 20th century.

    Augustine and Origen, as well as other Patristic and post-Patristic authors, insisted that some elements of the creation stories should be read metaphorically. For example, Origen observed that the day and night in Genesis 1 can't be read literally, since "lights in the vault of the sky [Sun and Moon] to separate the day from the night" were only created on the fourth day. If those lights were only created on Day 4, how can we make literal sense of "And there was evening, and there was morning" in the previous days? Augustine seemed pretty exasperated at the nonsense some of his fellow Christians declaim (a feeling that seems to echo with some people today)

    Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [nonbeliever] to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

    Also, as Mark Harris has recently pointed out in The nature of creation - a point that has been rarely acknowledged – even the staunchest Young Earth Creationist doesn't read the Bible literally in its entirety. For example, they don't literally think that the sky we observe is a vault (canopy) that separates the water from above from the water from below (Genesis 1: 6-8), even though it seems plausible that the author of Genesis 1 thought there was literally a vault. So why do they insist the days of creation should be understood literally, but not the vault? Also, the Bible has several other passages that have creation narratives (e.g., Job), which cannot be easily harmonized with Genesis 1 and 2. Indeed, even harmonizing Genesis 1 and 2 is a notably difficult exercise.

    I find it ironic that it is mainly Evangelical Protestant churches who are pushing their reading of the Bible on believers, yet Protestants insist that individual believers can read and interpret the Bible as they feel it speaks to them personally. If every believer has authority to interpret the Bible, why willingly accept all the extra interpretation as offered by Ken Ham and his ilk? It is not without some schadenfreude that I read a review of the evangelical blockbuster God isn't Dead in Answers in Genesis (a creationist website), where the author laments:

    In other instances, the Christians endorsing the movie are happy to accept the big bang and biological evolution as proof of God’s work in the universe. In fact, the number of Christians insisting on that explanation is growing rapidly, and this film may serve to cause an inflation in those numbers. Regardless, this movie may cause people to think about God, but it will lead them away from the foundational truths of Genesis because of its unbiblical foundation.

    So perhaps we need to press harder on the diversity that exists within Christian communities, and stress the personal autonomy to read and interpret the Bible, rather than listen to pundits like Ken Ham (ironically, people who follow Ham and others uncritically think they are being critical). 

    Aristotle already observed in his work on rhetoric that people aren't just convinced by evidence and arguments, although these certainly play a role. Emotions and trust in the speaker also play a role. By just emphasizing the evidence, proponents of evolutionary theory present an uncompelling and one-sided picture. Worse, some of them alienate religious believers or agnostics who genuinely doubt and wonder what to believe by discounting their beliefs as ridiculous. I thus concur with Roberta Millstein that theist scientists and philosophers, like Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins, or Francisco Ayala are great potential allies. They not only show that is is possible to be a Christian and endorse (and produce novel scientific results in) evolutionary theory. They are also effective communicators that reduce the polarization that affects such debates and elicit trust that self-avowed atheists cannot gain easily. 

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    11 responses to “Fighting creationism through debate is pointless; how then can we do it?”

    1. Kelly James Clark Avatar
      Kelly James Clark

      Great post, Helen. In my forthcoming book, Religion and the Sciences of Origins, I deal with both Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and Augustine’s On the Literal Interpretation to warm people up for a proper understanding of the early chapters of Genesis. I work pretty hard to make the case that Genesis, understood in its literal context, cannot be read as fundamentalists read it. In fact, I try really hard not to talk about the literal understanding of Genesis ! since, literally, it resists being understood as seven literal days. I, too, am concerned with how to communicate with people who are the extreme ends of these things (fundamentalists like Dawkins and Ken Ham).

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    2. Yan Avatar
      Yan

      I do agree that attempting to “press harder on the diversity that exists within Christian communities” maybe be beneficial in the fight against creationism. A lot of my students are devout Christians but have very little knowledge or experience of its history or the diverse views held across various Christian traditions. One crucial difficulty here is that the most adamant creationists belong to a distinct and narrow version of Protestantism that doesn’t even acknowledge many Protestant denominations as “Christian,” much less Catholic traditions. So pointing out the history of non-literal readings of the Bible is somewhat of a dead end, since these types won’t consider the historical examples to “really” be Christian.
      I’d also add that I don’t get the sense that the standard middle-American creationist believes “individual believers can read and interpret the Bible as they feel it speaks to them personally” so I’m not sure there’s an inconsistency there as you suggest.
      On the contrary, the form of protestantism that the creationists I’ve known hold is one in which the Bible is treated as a transparent text not in need of interpretation. Individuals can interpret it for themselves because there’s no intermediary work for priests or scholars to do: God wouldn’t trick us, so we should all reach the same interpretation (conveniently, if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong). So there is no sense, among such believers, that the content is nuanced, multiple or uncertain. In this way, their dogmatism goes hand in hand with their anti-authoritarianism: no one can tell me what’s true except God, not a priest, or a scientist, etc. Of course this is entirely in bad faith: the transparent text just so happens to tell them what their church or community or prejudices tells them, by amazing coincidence.

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    3. dmf Avatar
      dmf

      we need to win local elections (like the fundamentalists have)on school boards, text-book boards, etc, and make sure that the people who are appointing judges share our views.

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    4. ajkreider Avatar
      ajkreider

      I’m not as worried by the creep. In fact I’m not sure it is a creep, as opposed to an expected pushback when people’s deeply held religious beliefs are threatened. The fact that creationism exists at all seems to be evidence that believers think evolution is to be taken seriously. This appears in stark contrast to, say, my grandparents’ generation – who, if they’d heard of evolution at all, would have thought it so ludicrous as to not be seriously considered.
      There seems a natural progression here. Evolution viewed as something approaching the heretical. To it’s being something only silly eggheads believed. To it’s being a challenge to core religious beliefs. To being something part of which can be accepted while still being believers (where we’re headed next), to it’s being widely accepted in total.
      Someone with a better grasp of the history of ideas than I is in a better position to comment, but it seems we’ve seen this show before.

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    5. Alan White Avatar
      Alan White

      I agree with Yan (if I may) that Christians’ general ignorance of the history of Judeo-Christianity submits them to indoctrination of modernist revisionist interpretations. I’m not sanguine about getting them up to speed on that history (though I do in my philosophy of religion courses). The real culprit is from the science side. If we have, as stats tend to show, a populace that to the tune of 40% do not know that the important relative motion of sun and earth producing diurnal and seasonal phenomena is that the earth goes round the sun in two different ways, then convincing them of anything beyond comfortable mythology is a matter of mass education. In the US political forces that wish to defund public education and promote private religious and sectarian education work ultimately against science. The fight that must be won is the political fight for education that is non-religious and non-sectarian. And at local levels the US is losing that fight.

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    6. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Commenting has been down on NewApps. Apologies for delays in response. I’ll here respond to several comments.
      Yan: You are probably right that the Protestants who are the most vocal proponents of creationism aren’t going to be convinced if Catholics like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller speak in favor of evolution (at least, their being Catholic will not especially work in their favor). A greater awareness of the history of Christianity and of the beliefs of other (Christian and non-Christian) traditions might help here.
      However, the idea that the Bible is something that speaks to the believer seems to be something Protestants do (of the white, conservative type, the ones who seem to be most creationist, according to a Pew survey). For instance, they read Scripture when they have a difficult decision to take, or as an inspiration for their married life. They vastly underestimate the need for interpretation, which is why I gave the vault (canopy) example: not even the staunchest literalist reads the passage that the waters above and below are divided by a canopy literally. So the solution seems to be here: education and raising awareness of the complexity and non-straightforward nature of the Bible.
      AjKreider: In my optimistic moments, I try to see the incipient creationism (e.g., now taught in Texan public schools) as a backlash against an intellectual progress. But there is a difference with the more “benign” creationism of your grandparents’ generation. Of course, there was the Monkey Trial in the 1920s, but generally, endorsement of evolution was more hindered by ignorance than by partisanship and deliberate obfuscation by people in bad faith (like Ken Ham). A friend of mine, who used to be a professor at a liberal arts college with a Christian mission, taught students about evolution from the 1980s, and pitted this against the bible narratives. He then went on to examine how accounts like Adam and Eve and the fall could be harmonized with science, and said some of it couldn’t be harmonized. Students were usually unaware. However, in more recent years, he noticed that students would interrupt his class and ask “Were you there” and other such strategies creationists taught. Also, the university became increasingly unhappy with his endorsement of evolution and denial of historical Adam, which directly led to his dismissal ultimately. Another troubling finding (in the Pew survey I link to) is that the partisan divide between Democrats & Republicans is increasingly determining what people believe about evolution: Democrats’ endorsement of evolution is up, Republicans’ is down, and this divide deepens over time. It’s worrisome that the correctness of someone’s scientific beliefs should depend on their political orientation. What both parties need to do is to be more pro-active about scientific literacy. Nevertheless, I hope you are right and that we can see progress on this front.
      Alan: Your comment about the scientists is on target: we should advocate more strongly for scientific literacy, funding of education, educational media (I haven’t forgotten the attack on PBS, which had an excellent series on evolutionary theory). It’s not a matter one’s religious beliefs (this is why I really loathe new atheist rants against religious beliefs, they attempt to sell science & metaphysical naturalism as a package deal), it’s a matter of avoiding a descent into darkness.

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    7. Mark William Westmoreland Avatar
      Mark William Westmoreland

      I certainly share your concern, Helen. The types of Christians that need the most convincing are ones who are already closed off from hearing anything other than the company line. They might say “Well, Mark, what you’re saying just isn’t in the Bible. I don’t see it there. You can’t just make stuff up.” Their view is that they have the proper way of reading the Bible and this way is “just taking the Bible at its word.” In short, they don’t think they have an interpretation. They don’t realize their own thick hermeneutic lens.
      George Hunsinger has a brief but critical discussion of “enclave theology” near the beginning of his book on ecumenism and eucharist. Some sects of Christianity huddle into their own enclave and many adherents, over time, seem to really lose the potential for even entertaining ideas that come from without the enclave (they say “beware of false teachers”). And, while I’d also try showing them how the history of Christianity if full of divergent theologies and how the biblical literalist approach is rather new, I also realize that many literalists will say “there have always been literalists: St.Paul, the early church, the Christians who were literalists but not part of the mainstream and, therefore, are not in our history books.” Truly, I have heard a Baptist say that in the first few centuries C.E. the Christians actually held Baptist doctrine. This was said with a straight face. I have no idea how we respond to that.
      I would certainly support having a better educated citizenry with regard to science. One difficulty, it seems to me, is that many students from the literalist/young earth camp already have a suspicion that teachers are lying to them. There’s already the anti-intellectualism rampant in many low-church sects of Protestantism. On the one hand, they say there is some objective truth out in the world. The Bible, they claim, gives access to this. On the other hand, science is done by fallible human beings who constantly make mistakes. Science itself is always changing so there is no reason to trust its speculations about the origin of life or the age of the earth. So, even if we have better science education, the biblical literalist won’t listen in the first place.
      Just a quick thought: having been reared in a Southern Baptist (and young earth creationism) church, I understand the literalist position as espoused by Ham and others to be that there was indeed a canopy at some point but that the flood changed this.

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    8. Dave2 Avatar
      Dave2

      Helen, I think you’re quite wrong about this: “For example, they don’t literally think that the sky we observe is a vault (canopy) that separates the water from above from the water from below (Genesis 1: 6-8), even though it seems plausible that the author of Genesis 1 thought there was literally a vault.”
      There are lots of young-earth creationists who spend a lot of time working on “canopy theory”. I’ve spent a lot of time with them over the years, they’re easily found via Google, and I’m surprised you think they don’t exist.

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    9. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Dear Dave & Mark: Thanks for the information about canopy theory. I’m aware that there are various theories in YEC that try to make a literal interpretation about every curious description in the Bible, including the canopy. But those theories aren’t straightforward, literalist readings of the text, so my main point remains. I’m quoting Harris here for some context (p. 43):
      “Clearly these ideas [about the canopy] do not tie in with our undestanding of the world at all, and it is interesting to note that even creationists do not read them literally’. Whitcomb & Morris are keen to assert that the narrative is a divinely inspired and inerrant record of the creation event, couched as a “simple, literal truth”. Nevertheless, their treatment of the text is far from literal. For instance, they equate the dome with the expanse of air above the earth, i.e., the earth’s lower atmosphere, which is of course anything but solid. Likewise, they believe that the waters above the dome were not fluid, but were originally a gigantic canopy of water vapour, which eventually precipitated during Noah’s flood…This canopy must have been hugely voluminous compared to our contemporary cloud cover, they claim…And while the surface of the earth was being flooded, enormous geological changes were taking place…In other words, according to Whitcomb and Morris, the earth went through an enormous geological and meteorological transformation at the flood. But the biblical text says nothing of this. In fact, he only suggestion of a potentially new feature is the rainbow.”
      — So I think my point stands that this is far from a literalist reading of the canopy that separates the waters from above with those from below.

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    10. I'd eventually like a job Avatar
      I’d eventually like a job

      Lest one get the impression that young earth creationism was invented relatively recently by Christian fundamentalists:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_calendar

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    11. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      I am well aware, I’d eventually like a job, that the idea of a recent creation (i.e., only 6000 years ago) predates Christian fundamentalism. Indeed, with the information one had at the time, this didn’t seem implausible, but a young earth became increasingly implausible as geological findings were emerging that pointed to a very old earth.
      I am speaking about the roots of the current young earth creationist movement, which are very recent. The difference between creationism pre-19th century and this new movement is that the new movement consciously sets itself against, and responds to, findings in geology (in particular, stratigraphy) and evolutionary theory. One of the key founders of modern YEC, with its alternative geology of Noah’s flood was George McCready Price (1870-1963) a 7th day adventist, who was inspired by “prophetic” utterances of Ellen White (1827-1915). See work by Numbers and Bowler about this.

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