AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion

Thematic Areas: Evolution: Perspectives

A Critical-Historical Perspective on the Argument about Evolution and Creation
JOHN DURANT

REPRINTED WITH KIND PERMISSION FROM AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS: DURANT, JOHN. "A CRITICAL-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE ARGUMENTS ABOUT EVOLUTION AND CREATION," FROM EVOLUTION AND CREATION: A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE, SVEND ANDERSON AND ARTHUR PEACOCKE, EDS. AARHUS, DENMARK: AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS, PP. 12-26.

Creation versus Evolution?

Just a few weeks before the convening of the first European Conference on Science and Religion, the University of Oxford's undergraduate debating society, the Oxford Union, saw fit to consider the subject of evolution and religion. Representing religion on this occasion were A.E. Wilder-Smith, a pharmacologist and a consultant based in Geneva; and Edgar Andrews, a Professor of Materials Science in the University of London. These men are prominent spokesmen in the English-speaking world for what has come to be known as "scientific creationism"; and for more than two hours they defended the motion "That the doctrine of creation evolution is more valid than the theory of evolution" against two prominent British evolutionary biologists, Dr. Richard Dawkins, and Professor John Maynard Smith.

There is a great deal of historical irony in this event. For it was in the Oxford University Museum, and as long ago as 1860, that Charles Darwin's young supporter Thomas Henry Huxley clashed with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce over the very same question. On that occasion, less than a year after the publication of the Origin of Species, Huxley condemned the Bishop of Oxford for attempting to defeat Darwinism with nothing more than ignorant contempt. 126 years later, Oxford University's undergraduate body finally gave its verdict on the issue. After due consideration, it came down cautiously on Huxley's side: on 14 February 1986, the motion "That the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution" was defeated by 198 votes to 115.

At first glance, we may be inclined to suppose that Huxley would have been pleased at this outcome. A master debater himself, he knew the importance of winning crucial public engagements of this kind. On reflection, however, we may wonder instead whether Huxley would not have been both amazed and disappointed at this second Oxford debate: amazed that religiously-motivated anti-evolutionary sentiment is still so strong that it can command the support of no less than 115 undergraduates at one of Europe's foremost universities; and disappointed that the scientific community still has to spend its time defending ground that was supposedly won for it more than a century ago.

Over the past 10-20 years, religiously-motivated anti-evolutionism has grown to the point where today it constitutes a significant threat to the teaching and practise of evolutionary biology in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Europe as well. For the first time since the early-nineteenth century, significant numbers of Protestant evangelicals are today attempting to develop a non-evolutionary view of origins, a so-called "creation science"; and in pursuit of this aim, they are writing articles, publishing textbooks, rounding colleges, and entering into political battles with evolutionary biologists in the media, in local school boards and colleges, and even in the lawcourts (for reviews and analysis see Durant ed. 1985, Godfrey ed. 1983, Kitchef 1982, Montagu ed. 1984, Nelkin 1982).

The single crucial assumption which underlies the so-called creation science movement is that the theological doctrine of creation is fundamentally incompatible with the scientific theory of evolution. The scientific creationists believe that people must choose between creation and evolution; they believe that as the Oxford Union motion put it, the one must be "more valid" than the other. Professor Edgar Andrews, who was one of the Oxford speakers, is President of the British Biblical Creation Society, an organization with several hundred members whose purpose is "to demonstrate the importance of the Biblical teaching on Creation, and its incompatibility with the general theory of organic evolution" (Biblical Creation 2, 1980). Though rather different in emphasis, this society shares with the much larger and more explicitly fundamentalist American Creation Research Society the belief that evolution is inherently and profoundly anti-Christian. Indeed, leading American scientific creationists have equated evolution with atheism, materialism, and immorality at a personal level; as well as with anarchism, liberalism and communism at a political level (Morris ed. 1974). For them, Darwinism is not just wrong; it is of the devil.

Extravagant claims such as these are but one, albeit extreme, reflection of what is a long-standing and widespread sense of unease in the Christian community about evolutionary theory. Many even among those who accept that evolution is true do so rather reluctantly, almost as if by making this admission they were giving house-room to an unwelcome guest. Some theologians, for example, who are happy for the most part to take on trust the conclusions of theoretical science, stumble when they are confronted by tile Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection (see, for example, Montefiore 1985); and innumerable ordinary Christian folk, who take no particular interest in science, nonetheless feel obliged to "have a view" on this matter. Far beyond the circles of the scientific creationists, there is a conviction that evolution theory presents special problems or difficulties for Christian faith. Indeed, this is surely implied by the fact that "The Argument about Evolution and Creation" was chosen as the topic for the first European Conference on Science and Religion.

The Historical Perspective

Faced with this widespread religious unease about evolution, it can be helpful to look back to the past. History does not, of course, teach us any simple or straightforward lessons; and by itself, it cannot solve any of the great scientific or theological problems in which we may be interested. However, history can give us a better sense of perspective on these problems. In particular, it can help us to shake free from the particular prejudices of our day, both by suggesting new ways of thinking about our problems, and by revealing a wider range of possible solutions to these problems than may have been apparent at first sight.

In reviewing the history of discussions of evolution and creation, however, it is important to bear in mind that the past is another place, in which things were often done differently. For example, from an historical point of view it is not possible to make a clear distinction between scientific and theological discussions of evolution. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, which is the period in which modern evolutionary theory first arose, much biology was deeply religious ,red much religion was profoundly biological. At that time science as a whole was far less insular and far less secular than it is today; and this means that in dealing with our subject we must inevitably move rather freely between science and theology.

Precisely because many early workers failed to make a clear distinction between science and theology, they often argued from the one to the other as if such arguments were free of all philosophical difficulty. Even Charles Darwin, that most cautious of nineteenth-century evolutionary biologists, occasionally drew theological conclusions from what were essentially scientific premises. It is a major theme of this chapter that we are to a large extent the unwitting victims of a persistent conflation or confusion between science and theology which has occurred throughout the history of debates about evolution and creation. If today we continue to be worried about the relationship between Darwinism and Christian belief, more often than not it is because we are faced either with science masquerading as theology or with theology masquerading as science. Only history can show us the full extent of the damage that is done by such pretence.

There have been many different ideas and speculations about organic origins; but in the modern period there has been only one really successful scientific theory of organic origins, and that is Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russell Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin and Wallace 1958, Darwin 1859). The great achievement of the Darwin-Wallace theory is to show how in principle new species may arise from ancestor species by a process of descent with modification. The theory is entirely typical of great discoveries in science in that it invokes some relatively familiar features of the living world (the principles of inheritance, genetic variation, and over-reproduction), but draws an entirely unexpected consequence from them: namely, natural selection, or the differential survival and reproduction of favourable over unfavourable variations in the struggle for existence.

Darwin's bold claim was that natural selection has been the principal (though not the sole) agent of organic evolution. This claim has always been controversial, of course; but it is impossible to dispute the fact that natural selection remains to this day the centre-piece of evolutionary biology. Undergirded by modern population genetics, and applied in countless detailed studies of the evolution of both physical and behavioural traits, natural selection is the only half-way adequate theory of evolution that has ever been proposed (Dawkins 1986). For this reason alone, it is to the history of Darwinism and its relations with religious belief that the bulk of this paper is devoted. As a first step in considering the impact of Darwinism on religious belief, however, it is necessary to begin with the earlier view of organic origins that it was intended to replace.

The Theory of Special Creation

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, the study of life was intimately intertwined with religious, and more particularly, with Christian beliefs about the inter-relationships between God, nature, human nature, and human society. In this period, there was fashioned a broad synthesis of natural history and religion which, albeit in many different forms, was every bit as powerful as the synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology in the medieval period. This synthesis is to be found in embryo in the work of the seventeenth century English naturalist John Ray, in vigorous youth in the ideas of the eighteenth-century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus, in subtle maturity in the writings of the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier and the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and in advanced and somewhat decrepit old age in the publications of the Swiss-American palaeontologist Louis Agassiz and the English comparative anatomist Richard Owen (for a competent historical review, see Bowler 1984).

The synthesis which may be discerned in the work of all these and many more naturalists represented the coming together of three great intellectual traditions. In order of age, these were: Greek philosophy, and particularly Plato's idealist doctrine of specific forms and Aristotle's teleological doctrine of final causes; Christian theology, and particularly the doctrine of divine creation; and classical natural history, and more particularly the establishment of a comprehensive natural classification of plants and animals. It will be useful to summarize the contributions of each of these traditions in turn, and then to present a brief description of the resulting synthesis.

From classical Greece the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took two key notions, among many others. First, there was Plato's doctrine that true reality is not the mundane world of varied and varying sense experience, but rather the transcendent world of pure and immutable forms. On this view, the objects we see around us are the flickering and temporary images of ideal types to which they are at best only crude approximations -- in Plato's famous allegory in the Republic, they are mere shadows cast by the eternal light on the walls of the cave. There have been many different versions of Platonic idealism, including specifically theological ones in which the pure forms are interpreted as ideas in the mind of God. In one version or another, however, Plato's doctrine of forms has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western philosophy and science.

The same is true of a second Greek idea which is attributable to Plato's pupil Aristotle. Aristotle was a good deal more interested than Plato had been in studying the real world, including the world of life; and in pursuing a combination of philosophical wisdom and empirical ("scientific") knowledge, he modified and added to his master's ideas in many ways. For example, Aristotle took over Plato's doctrine of form, but emphasized the immanence of form within the physical world. Moreover, he complemented Plato's interest in form with a concern for function. According to Aristotle, an essential part of explaining anything consisted in giving an account of the end or purpose for which that thing exists (its "final cause"); and, once again in myriad different ways, this teleological approach shaped centuries of scientific thought to come.

Here, then, in rude outline are two key Greek contributions to seventeenth and eighteenth century ideas about the living world. In contrast, the key Christian contribution was a doctrine concerned primarily not with the explanation of the forms and functions of particular things, but rather with the explanation of why there are any things at all. In the doctrine of creation, Christianity portrayed the universe as the dependent and strictly temporal handiwork of God. This doctrine of creation was quite distinct from (though it was often confused with) Greek notions of origins; for where the one envisaged a free creation ex nihilo by a transcendent and omnipotent God, the other envisaged a constrained forming of pre-existent unformed matter by a demiurge. In one form or another, the Christian doctrine of creation has been a major influence on western thought, and more especially on western science.

The third and final ingredient of our synthesis is classical natural history, and particularly classical taxonomy. Taxonomy is the science of classification of living organisms. Aristotle himself had been interested in classification, and he had distinguished many different "natural kinds" of animals within a roughly linear series, the scale of nature or scala naturae. The notion of a linear "chain of being" was enormously influential in the 17th and 18th centuries (Lovejoy 1936), particularly as classification moved to centre stage in the study of natural history. The guiding principle in the work of most naturalists at this time was the attempt to construct a systematic and orderly arrangement of species or other natural kinds. Some adopted the principle nature, while others went for hierarchical schemes involving nested sets of related groups. Either way, however, the search was on for general principles by which organic species could be classified on the basis of observed structural similarities and differences of form and function.

It is not difficult to see how the three traditions of Greek philosophy, Christian theology and classical natural history many be combined. By identifying the Platonic demiurge with the Christian, and giving this creator the task of fashioning out of unformed matter a formal array of exquisitely adapted species, it is possible to arrive at an idealistic synthesis according to which each species (or other chosen natural kind) of plant or animal is the embodiment of a transcendent idea in the mind of the creator, or, with a little more subtlety, perhaps, to arrive at a synthesis in which each species is seen as an individually tailored variation upon a far smaller set of transcendental themes. On this view, the living world is portrayed as a static array of diverse forms, each of which is primitively distinct from all others by virtue of its unique divine origin. For want of a better term, we may refer to this view as the "special creation theory" of organic origins.

It would be wrong to suggest that there was anything like complete agreement among those who supported this way of looking at the living world. For example, and most important of all, there was a persistent tension between the Platonic or idealist and the Aristotelian or teleological elements within the theory. Thus, in early-nineteenth century England two partially separate special-creationist traditions flourished alongside one another, the one concerned primarily with the idealist explanation of organic form in terms transcendent "Archetypes', and the other concerned primarily with the teleological explanation of organic function in terms of divine design (Bowler 1977, 1984, Ospovat 1978, 198 l). The idealist anatomist Richard Owen put his finger on the crucial difference between these Two Traditions by distinguishing between homologies (cases in which the same basic structure serves different functions) and analogies (cases in which quite difference structures serve the same basic function; see Owen 1848). Owen insisted that adequate biological analysis required the investigation of both homologies and analogies; and this claim was part of a campaign to effect a compromise between the idealist and the teleological traditions of special creationism.

From our point of view, these details are of little concern. What really matters is the simple fact that for a very long period of time theoretical explanations of organic origins were dominated by a synthesis in which the Christian doctrine of creation was tied to a very particular set of philosophical and scientific beliefs about the natural world. As we have seen, the philosophical beliefs were overwhelmingly idealist and teleological; and they were used to support the scientific notion that species (or other natural kinds) are primitively distinct. As Owen himself put it in connection with the vertebrate skeleton (quoted in Aulie 1972):

The Divine mind which planned the Archetype also foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh, under diverse such manifestations, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it.

From Special Creation to Natural Selection

From as early as the 1830s, when he first began to think seriously about the problem of origins, Charles Darwin firmly rejected the idealist elements within the theory of special creation. however, he did not reject the teleological elements within it anything like so easily. In fact, Darwin was greatly influenced by the Anglican clergyman William Paley, the greatest exponent of teleological special creationism in the early nineteenth century. Paley, of course, had emphasized function at the expense of form, for he had virtually identified the doctrine of creation with the fact of the overwhelming adaptedness of living organisms. In his Natural Theology (1802), Paley presented the innumerable contrivances of life as a cumulative argument from design for the existence of God. Paley's God was a craftsman, he was a superlative mechanic who had thrown together not merely cunningly contrived machines but machines so cunningly contrived that they were capable of reproducing themselves indefinitely without external assistance.

Darwin took this view extremely seriously. In fact, for several years he appears entirely to have accepted Paley's version of the argument from design. Throughout his life, Darwin never for an instant questioned Paley's assumption that what required explanation above all else was organic adaptation. For both men it was true that, as Darwin himself once put it, "the whole universe is full of adaptations;" but from about 1837 Darwin added to "this conviction the non-Paleyan belief that these adaptations were "only direct consequences of still higher laws" (Gruber and Barrett 1974). Here again Darwin was following the lead of the special creationists, who had already offered innumerable transcendental laws as putative explanations of organic form and function. The only difference between Darwin and the special creationists was that Darwin would have nothing to do with the esoteric principles of transcendentalism, which he regarded as simply absurd. When he went in search of a "higher law" regulating the production of organic adaptations, what he sought was not a transcendental principle but rather a mundane process capable of simulating intelligent design.

Discovered by Darwin in 1838, the principle of natural selection represented the unexpected fulfillment of the promise of the theory of special creation. It was unexpected, of course, in the sense that it replaced the idea of species as individually crafted products of a Platonic demiurge with the radical idea of species as historical products of the differential survival and reproduction of favourable over unfavourable variant individuals in the struggle for existence; but it was the fulfillment of the promise of the theory of special creation, in the sense that it accounted for the observed pattern of organic form and function with the aid of but a single overarching theoretical principle.

The idea that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection represents the fulfillment of the special-creationist tradition is still not widely acknowledged. This is a little surprising, for Darwin himself made it abundantly clear in his own writings. The frontispiece of the first edition of the Origin of Species, for example, contained two quotations, one from Francis Bacon on the "two books of divine revelation", and the other from the Reverend William Whewell, an English natural theologian, who had observed that "with regard to the material world...we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws." Together, these passages gave notice to Darwin's readers that his book fell squarely within the conventions of natural theology; and Darwin further underlined this point towards the end of the Origin where he stated that, "To my mind, it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed upon matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual" (Darwin 1859). Thus, Darwin explicitly invited his readers to see evolution by natural selection as the means adopted by the creator to populate the earth with a diversity of well-adapted species.

Of course, things were not really quite as simple as this. Until well after the publication of the Origin, Darwin continued to present his theory in the orthodox language of the doctrine of divine creation; and throughout his life he insisted that there was nothing either anti-religious or atheistic in his work. Privately, however, he was increasingly troubled and perplexed by these matters. For example in the course of a long and rather inconclusive correspondence about the theological implications of natural selection with his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray, he once wrote: "You say that you are in a haze; I am in thick mud; the orthodox would say in fetid, abominable mud; yet I cannot keep out of the question" (Darwin ed. 1887). To see exactly what the "fetid, abominable mud" was, and why he was stuck fast in it, we must review briefly Darwin's changing views on religion.

Darwin was a "quite orthodox" Christian at the time he traveled aboard the H M S Beagle in the early 1830s. Indeed, he describes how he was "heartily laughed at by several of the officers...for quoting the bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality" (Barlow ed. 1958). In the late 1830s, however, Darwin gradually abandoned Christianity, first for what may be termed deism (the belief in an impersonal divine author of the universe), and then for a rather uneasy agnosticism. As he himself once put it, "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind" (Darwin ed. 1887).

In a recent study, the historian John Hedley Brooke has re-examined the causes of Darwin's changing religious views (Brooke 1985). Certainly, he suggests, there were scientific elements in Darwin's abandonment of religious belief: for example, he was greatly impressed by the universality of natural law as an objection to the possibility of miracles; and he appears to have found the arbitrariness, the contingency and the radical purposelessness of evolution by natural selection a real source of difficulty. Yet this was far from being the whole story. For Darwin's loss of faith was also bound up with that moral revolt against Christianity which historians have seen as such a significant part of the decline of orthodox belief in the Victorian period.

Thus in his autobiography, having describes his orthodoxy at the time of the Beagle voyage, Darwin moved immediately into a discussion of the causes of his growing unbelief. Significantly, this discussion is not taken up principally with scientific matters. Instead, Darwin records that, "I had gradually come...to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world...and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian" (Barlow ed. 1958). Darwin was struck as much by the moral and intellectual parochialism of Christianity as he was by its supposed conflict with the findings of science. He detested the doctrine of eternal damnation, and he found the problem of both animal and human suffering a major objection to religious belief - "I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us," he wrote to Asa Gray, "There seems to me too much misery in the world." (Darwin ed. 1887). As Brooke notes, these factors point not so much to Darwin's science as to the resonance between his science and the wider culture as the source of his growing unbelief.

The Divorce of Science from Theology

This brief historical sketch of the emergence of Darwinism, and of Darwin's own views on religion, provides the context for a critical re-assessment of the relationship between evolution and creation. Such a re-assessment undermines all naïve notions of any necessary conflict between the two ideas, and in this sense it radically undercuts the position of the so-called "scientific creationists." At the same time, however, it lends support to the idea that the Darwinian revolution did indeed have profound implications for the relationship between science and religious belief. That these implications are not necessarily the ones most commonly associated with the name of Charles Darwin today serves only to reinforce the importance of the historical perspective in contemporary debates about evolution and creation.

We have seen that the theory of evolution by natural selection fulfilled the promise of the special creationist tradition; but it also destroyed that tradition by undermining the particular alliance of philosophy, theology, and natural science upon which it rested. In a Darwinian universe, there was no place for Platonic idealism and no place for Aristotelian teleology; above all, there was no place for special creation. By showing convincingly how in principle new species might arise in nature, Darwin made redundant centuries of
philosophizing and theologizing about organic origins. What is vitally important to notice, however, is that neither in aim nor in effect did he undermine the Christian doctrine of creation itself. Rather, by separating that doctrine from its two-centuries-long marriage of convenience with Greek philosophy and classical natural history, Darwin forced the radical re-examination of the relationship between theology and natural science.

Out of this process of re-examination there emerged in the late-nineteenth century a whole array of different "solutions" to the problem of the "relationship between science and theology, evolution and creation. To the English biologist, Thomas Huxley, for example, Darwinism was a vindication of an agnostic and liberal scientific world-view that would free humankind altogether from the shackles of theology; to Ernst Haeckel, it was a proof of the truth of "Monism", a secular philosophy in which matter and mind were regarded as but two aspects of the same universal and progressively developing substance; and to Karl Marx, it was the basis in natural history for an atheistic, dialectical, and historically materialist view of human nature and society. Here, then, were a variety of anti-Christian reformulations of the relationship between science and theology in a Darwinian universe.

Yet before we jump to the conclusion that Darwinism was inherently anti-Christian, we shall do well to recall an equally wide range of pro-Christian reformulations of the science-theology relationship which were produced in response to Darwinism in the late-nineteenth century. Thus, to the close friend of Thomas Huxley, the Anglican clergyman, naturalist, and novelist Charles Kingsley, Darwinism entailed a "loftier" view of God's work in creation than that which had been contained in the older, creationist synthesis (Darwin ed. 1887); to the close friend of Darwin, the American Presbyterian Asa Gray, Darwinism afforded "higher and more comprehensive, and perhaps worthier, as well as more consistent, views of design in Nature than heretofore" (quoted in Moore 1979); and to the close friend of the Darwinian biologists E.B. Poulton and G.J. Romanes, the Oxford Anglo-Catholic Aubrey Moore, Darwinism was "infinitely more Christian than the theory of special creation" because it implied "the immanence of God in nature, and the omnipresence of his creative power" (Moore 1889).

Quite clearly, a very great variety of views of the evolution-creation relationship was on offer in the late-nineteenth century. To a very considerable extent, Darwinism appears to have become all things to all men (virtually without exception those involved were, of course, all men); and it was precisely this pluralism that was its greatest influence on debates about science and theology. For any theory of origins that is capable of sustaining an indefinitely large number of different philosophical and religious interpretations is profoundly secularizing in its effects. The greatest tangible result of the Darwinian revolution in the domain of science and theology was not the triumph of any single view within either domain but rather the growing realization that these were indeed two domains, and not (as the theory of special creation had implied) one.

A particularly stark illustration of the dawning of this new realization is provided by an intriguing Victorian institution known as the Metaphysical Society. Founded in 1869 by no less than 62 eminent scientists, theologians, and literary figures, this society met regularly for a period of around 11 years in order to try to find a new foundation for an integrated understanding of the interrelationships between God, nature, humankind, and society. It failed, of course; and this failure has been represented by the historian Robert Young as symptomatic of a profound fragmentation of intellectual culture that took place in the mid-Victorian period. According to William Gladstone, for example, there was a simple lesson to be learnt from the proceedings of the Metaphysical Society: "Let the scientific men stick to their science, and leave philosophy and religion to poets, philosophers, and theologians" (quoted in Young 1985).

The Myth and the Reality of Secular Science

Gladstone's view is the official myth by which we live today. Over the past century science in general and evolutionary biology in particular, have seen themselves as essentially secular endeavours, entirely divorced from the domains of poetry, philosophy, and theology. Officially, at least, contemporary evolutionary biology is precisely what Darwin himself intended it to be: an entirely naturalistic body of knowledge which makes no direct contact of any kind with matters theological. Individual scientists are generally regarded as being free to hold any personal views they like on matters of philosophy and religion; but as soon as they are tempted to claim scientific authority for these views, they are seen as stepping beyond the domain of evolutionary biology and into that larger field that Gladstone wished to leave to the poets, the philosophers, and the theologians.

This, then is the official myth of twentieth century secular science. The unofficial reality, however, is somewhat different. For despite the Darwinian revolution, scientists and others have continued to try to construct coherent world-views embracing philosophy, theology, and evolutionary biology. Among the founders of the modern, so-called "synthetic" theory of evolution by natural selection, for example, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, and Julian Huxley stand out as men who wished to integrate their science with larger views concerning the nature and significance of life in the universe. That both Dobzhansky and Huxley should have drawn inspiration from the theological writings of the Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin (1959) simply underlines the extent to which the official boundaries between science and theology have remained blurred in the post-Darwinian era (for further discussion of this issue, see Greene 1981).

Despite the complexity of the current scene, however, it remains true that we have come a long way from the days when philosophical, religious and scientific discussions of origins were dominated by the theory of special creation. Today, it is at least possible to distinguish between conventional Darwinian evolutionary biology and that larger evolutionary world-view constructing enterprise that is represented by men like Huxley and Teilhard. For the plain fact is that those who accept the essentially secular terms of Darwinism are free to select amongst a variety of alternative world-views according to their own particular philosophical or religious preferences. In exercising this freedom, of course, people are not making a scientific choice. For Darwinism as such rests upon no distinctive metaphysical or religious propositions; and it offers no distinctive support to any particular world-view, be it pro-Christian, anti-Christian or merely neutral. Rightly conceived, theological questions must be decided on theological grounds, and not upon the territory of the paleontologist or the population geneticist.

Conclusion

I have suggested that much of the argument about evolution and creation arises from the belief that, since these two things are opposed to one another, we must choose between them. This belief is simply false. The theory of evolution by natural selection is not atheistic but rather secular, and there is no necessity for it to be in conflict with, or indeed to make any sort of contact with, the theological doctrine of creation. Historical analysis, however, tells us why the idea that there is conflict between evolution and creation has persisted for so long. For just as in medieval times Christian theology was fused with classical cosmology, so in the 17th and 18th centuries Christian theology was fused with classical philosophy and classical natural history; and just as the Copernican astronomers found themselves confronting the Church, when really they should have been confronting only Aristotle and Ptolemy, so the Darwinists found themselves confronting the representatives of Christianity, when really they should have been confronting only Plato and Paley.

Of course, in one sense to confront Paley was to confront Christianity, since Paley was a representative of Christian natural theology; my point is that precisely that was the problem. For Paley and the special creationists attached the credibility of the Christian doctrine of creation to a particular set of philosophical and scientific beliefs about species with which it need never have been directly associated; and Christendom today is still paying the price for this historic association. The so-called scientific creationists of contemporary America portray themselves as defenders of time-honoured Christian orthodoxy. What they are really doing, however, is reviving the old 17th and 18th century theory of special creation, with all of its idealist and classical, as well as Christian, overtones. Thus, for example, in the creationist textbook Biology, A Search for Order in Complexity (Moore and Slusher 1970), we find an interpretation of vertebrate homologies that would have delighted Richard Owen:

Creationists believe that when God created the vertebrates, He used a single blueprint for the body plan but varied the plan so that each "kind" would be perfectly equipped to take its place in the wonderful world He created for them.

In connection with this kind of thing, which abounds in creationist writings, those Christians who find themselves troubled by Darwinism may care to ask the following questions: where are the specifically Christian grounds for the notions of "blueprints" and "body plans"? and where are the specifically Christian grounds for supposing that special creation according to a small number of demiurgic archetypes was the divine method of creation? Unless and until they receive adequate replies to these questions, those Christians who are troubled by Darwinism are entitled to conclude that the so-called scientific creationists are not the defenders of time-honoured Christian or Biblical orthodoxy, after all, but rather the hopelessly stranded representatives of the outmoded scientific hypotheses of the past.

This, at any rate, was the view of the matter that was held by that most perceptive of commentators upon the Darwinian scene, the late-Victorian Oxford Anglo-Catholic Aubrey Moore. "The dead hand of an exploded scientific theory", Moore once wrote, "rests upon theology.... Christians in all good faith set to work to defend a view which has neither Biblical, nor patristic, nor mediaeval authority.... If the theory of "special creation" existed in the Bible or in Christian antiquity", he went on, "we might bravely try and do battle for it. But it came to us some two centuries ago from the side of science, with the imprimatur of a Puritan poet [the reference is, of course, to Milton]". Thus, Moore concluded, "It is difficult...to see how the question [of evolution versus creation], except by a confusion, becomes a religious question at all" (Moore 1889). The confusion that Moore identified almost exactly a century ago is with us still; and it serves the true interests neither of science nor of religion.

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