Science, religion and the origins of life

stretch and challenge

Science, religion and the origins of life

In the first of three ‘Stretch and challenge’ columns on the origins of life, Peter Manning compares natural selection with intelligent design

How old is the Earth? Most of us assume the answer is millions of years — in part we have come to know that through documentaries on dinosaurs and seeing their skeletons and fossils in museums. Common scientific estimates using radioactive dating techniques put the answer at about 4.5 billion years.

In contrast to this modern belief are claims made by James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh (in Ireland) in 1650. Ussher looked to use the Bible to determine the age of creation. By counting the genealogies in the Bible along with the ages of the various prophets in the Old Testament, he arrived at the date of 23 October 4004 BCE. That such a precise date is given says something about the way knowledge was viewed. It has to be precise and certain for it is these qualities that allow us to know we are dealing with a fact. Such a view of the Bible is often described as biblical literalism.

Natural history

The biblical fact of a young Earth stood in stark contrast to the discoveries of Charles Lyell, described in his book Principles of Geology (1830). Lyell argued that the forces of nature created the wonders of rock formations over millions of years. The typography of the Earth with its hills and valleys was formed over eons by processes in the natural world. Alongside such developments in geology Robert Chambers argued in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1843) that the fossil record could only make sense if animal life had developed and changed over an immense period of time.

The work of Lyell and Chambers formed the conceptual background through which Charles Darwin was to propose an explanation for the development of animal life. Between 1831 and 1836 he had been on a voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific on HMS Beagle. The drawings and observations he made of plant and animal life became a rich resource for his later reflections. He was convinced from what he saw of the diversity of life that evolution was a reality but could not explain it. The natural histories of such evolution are almost impossible to deny given the abundant fossil records of species now extinct but often similar to living species. Likewise, the similarity between living species — fish, birds, reptiles, mammals — speaks of a common ancestry.

Natural selection

In 1838 Darwin read a book by Thomas Malthus called An Essay on the Principles of Population which allowed his mind to settle on the idea of natural selection as an explanation for the development of life on Earth. This was finally published in 1859 in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Once he had published the book he discovered 34 other people who had been thinking along similar lines, as he acknowledges in the third edition of the book. Patrick Matthew had even used the term ‘the natural law of selection’ in 1831 in published but not well-known writings, and William Wells had been reflecting on comparable thoughts as early as 1818. In short, natural selection was an idea that had come of age. Darwin’s book gave detailed systematic and academic expression to the idea.

The best fit

Darwin summed up his theory in On the Origin of Species with the words ‘Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.’ While we may substitute the word ‘fit’ for ‘strongest’, as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer did in 1864, the intended meaning is the same. Animals struggle for survival in their environment and those less suited to it die earlier and have less offspring than those who live longer. The hereditary traits of the survivors are passed on to following generations at a higher frequency and thus become widespread within the population. Species therefore change gradually over time to make a better ‘fit’ with the environment they exist within. This is their environmental niche.

That different members of a species may adapt differently opens up different avenues for the development of future and more diverse species out of these ancestors. The external environment, on this account, is the main driver of evolution as it imposes survival challenges on biological organisms. In response biological organisms evolve to make a best possible fit to their environment. Human beings were put within such a framework in Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man.

Science and the image of God

The belief that humanity was the central act of creation by God was already under pressure since Galileo observed craters on the Moon and Sun spots. The heavens were not fixed or unchanging. The philosopher Kant had suggested the idea of a multigalaxy universe in his 1755 work The Universal Natural History and Theories of the Heavens. The work of Lyell, Chambers and Darwin brought to Earth the implications of such work. Reality was a far more dynamic and bigger place than we could ever have imagined. While cosmology taught us the Earth was not at the centre of the cosmos, geology and evolution displaced humanity from the centre of creation on Earth.

Yet the Bible declares in Genesis 1:27 that ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.’ Humanity is created on the sixth day as the crowning act of creation and given dominion over the Earth as God’s stewards. However the words ‘in God’s image’ are understood, they bestow importance on humanity. Yet evolution reduces humanity to a mere animal, a product of natural processes rather than some miraculous creating act of an all-powerful God. How does Jesus as God Incarnate, God in human flesh, sit within such a naturalised humanity? Are we that special after all? Can the Bible be trusted any more? If we are an animal and there is no God then by what values shall we live with no God to cherish and guide us? What about death and the afterlife?

Religious response to evolution

T. H. Huxley, who doubted the existence of God, engaged in a famous public discussion with the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, in 1860. In evolution Wilberforce saw a threat to the dignity of man, the authority of the Bible, and the credibility of the Church. That evolution struggles to explain human free will and therefore cannot be correct was, in part, the line of response Wilberforce took. Huxley, by all accounts, focused on the evidence of evolution and that if this meant humanity descended from an ape then this should be accepted against religious sophistry. If that was bad news for the Bible then so be it.

Evolution challenged the claim in Genesis 1 that creation ‘was good’. Life as ‘red in tooth and claw’ seems more the order of the day in a natural evolutionary process that is a constant struggle for survival.

The fundamentalists

While debates about evolution and how the Church might respond to it rumbled on, a group of American scholars connected with the Protestant Presbyterian Church developed a new approach to cope with its challenges.

This was published in 1910 through a series of essays, each supporting the importance and basis of what was seen as an essential Christian belief. This collection of essays was called ‘The Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910’ (a.k.a. ‘The Five Fundamentals’) and proponents became known as fundamentalists. The term ‘fundamentalist’ today has a connected but wider meaning. The major focus of debate was, however, the Bible and its truthfulness, as without that as a trustworthy source of revelation of God the basis upon which to believe in Jesus as God, life after death, and the day of judgement becomes questionable.

Within modern science these fundamentalist scholars perceived that modern knowledge required certainty of belief within an unquestionable foundation in a secure method of knowing. Scientific method provided this for our knowledge of the natural world. They developed an approach to the Bible called Inerrancy of scripture, in which the Bible is seen as without error. Part of the justification for such a belief comes from the Bible itself when in the New Testament letter of 2 Timothy it says in Chapter 3 Verse 16 that ‘All Scripture is given by the breath of God’.

For these Christian fundamentalists the means of God revealing the word of God to the writers of the Bible removes the possibility of error and hence provides a secure method to truth and certainty in knowledge. In treating knowledge this way they are responding to the problem of knowledge within the modernist frame of thought that was dominant at the time about the nature of facts equalling certainty. To be credible the Bible needs this too. Fundamentalists went on to argue that the fossil record scientific methods clearly supported was created by God to test the faith of humanity in God. In fundamentalist writings, which are committed to the idea of a young Earth, a distinction is made between the ‘apparent’ and ‘actual’ age of the Earth.

Creationism and intelligent design

Philip E. Johnson, a law professor from Berkeley University in the USA, has been an influential thinker in the development of creation science and its intelligent design arguments. Rather than focusing on the issue of the age of the Earth, in his book Darwin on Trial (1991) he attacks the whole idea of natural selection. He accepts microevolution (development within species). Indeed, it is impossible to deny this, as the so-called ‘Darwin’s finches’ example portrayed in David Lack’s 1947 book makes clear. The finches on the Galapagos Islands have developed different beaks depending on the environmental challenges of each island and the food sources available. Microevolution can also be produced under experimental conditions.

However, Johnson argues that evolution’s reliance on natural selection and adaptation as providing the means for development between species of animal (macroevolution) is not proved beyond doubt. As a lawyer Johnson applies a criminal justice level of judgement, beyond reasonable doubt. He argues that atheists assume a materialistic worldview in which evolution must provide the answer to the diversity of life on Earth as there is no God to do it. But the truth of atheism is itself not beyond reasonable doubt. Within this context the creation of animals in their species by God is argued for by Johnson. It is upon this foundation that limited microevolution takes place.

Evidence for evolution

In creationist books arguments abound over the failure of the fossil record to show transitional series. While the task is difficult because the fossil record is fragmentary due to its nature, we are able to say something about the development between groups of species. The well-known Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx, discovered in Bavaria in 1861, is an animal with features intermediate between reptiles and birds. We now have ten fossil finds of this creature, which lived around 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic period.

The discovery in 2004 of the species Tiktaalik with the fossil dated to around 375 million years ago, forms an example of a possible bridge, as the middle fossil between four other species, linking fish to tetrapod like fish. Essentially some of the fin-like structures are replaced by bones providing rudimentary feet, to varying degrees, in this series of fossils of different species that otherwise look anatomically similar. This provides evidence for the beginning of the transition of fish to amphibians and later to all land-living vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). The oldest known fossils of mammals are of rodent-like creatures that lived 160 million years ago. That we see whole groups of animals ceasing to exist in the ancient past supports the idea that life evolved in the oceans and adapted over time towards life on land.

Common ancestry

The anatomical similarity between the arm and hand structure in humans and that in a wide range of species including frogs, lizards, birds, cats, bats and even whales speaks of a common ancestry. Left to a designer creating each species from scratch a bird wing could be better engineered. But birds evolved from the forms their evolutionary ancestors already had. The larvae of grasshoppers, spiders and centipedes are also anatomically similar despite the obvious differences these species have as adults. Evolution is not a biological adaptive free-for-all. It has its limitations and the similarity in the form of those limitations between species gives witness to a natural process rather than acts of specially designed creation.

Intelligent design and God’s failings

Apart from arguments over the science of evolution and the validity of how transitional fossils are interpreted and dated, the intelligent design approach fails to do justice to belief in God as creator. The human eye is not perfect as we have a blind spot caused by the optic nerve crossing the retina. This is an imperfection in design not present in the eyes of squids and octopuses.

It has been estimated that across the world there are 20 million spontaneous human miscarriages every year. Pregnancy is not perfect. Either God directly created this imperfection or you have to argue the fall in some way corrupted the natural world and our very natures. To believe this about the fall brings us to a literal belief in the existence of Adam and Eve and the moral corruption and physical degradation of humanity caused by that fall. This is not just about the pain of childbirth mentioned in the poem of Genesis 3:16 — miscarriages go beyond that. The eye remains imperfect and it is not the only imperfection in human design. In short, the human body looks like the product of an evolving process rather than a manufactured ideal.

Creationism in science education

Should schools teach religious views of creation? In the USA there is a split between the private world of beliefs and the public world of education. Religion is seen as a private belief and the state education system excludes religion as a subject from its curriculum content. This has not always been the case. In the state of Tennessee in 1925 there was a famous trial, known today as the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. John Scopes was a teacher accused of teaching evolution when a law called the Butler Act forbade its teaching in state schools. While the immediate aftermath of the trial meant that evolution was passed over in many school textbooks in the 1920s and 1930s, this changed with the 1958 National Defense Education Act. The Act secured the place of evolution within the USA school science curriculum.

In 1968 creationism and references to Genesis were excluded from the school curriculum by a US Supreme Court decision. Since the 1970s there have been repeated attempts by fundamentalist Christians to portray creationism as an alternative science and get religion back into public education. In 2005 a federal court in Pennsylvania ruled against the inclusion of intelligent design alongside the teaching of evolution by the Dover Area School Board of Directors.

Education continues to be a battle ground between religion and science in the USA. This is despite the overwhelming majority of scientists, whether they be atheist, agnostic or theistic, seeing creationist and intelligent design arguments as pseudoscience.

Peter Manning is head of psychology at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and was previously head of religious studies at various schools.