Evolution, the great debate [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The scientist and author Isaac Asimov is a worried man. The rise of 'creation science' in the United States appears to him to threaten the whole edifice of science. Creationists believe that God made the world in just six days, as a literal reading of the opening chapter of the Bible demands. Asimov writes: 'With creation in the saddle American science will widier. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses. We will inevitably recede into the backwaters of civilization.' But his opponents are not, anyway, impressed with our late twentieth-century civilization. Darwin's evolution, they claim, has sapped our moral strength, and made us question the existence of God. America is no longer beautiful. And the poisonous ivy is evolution which Ms at its roots,' according to the creationist leader Henry Morris, 'the anti-God conspiracy of Satan himself.' This book is not about the rights and wrongs of evolution or creation science. There is no detailed comparing of fossils, calculating of probabilities, or checking the validity of one theory against another. For there is a much more fascinating story to be told: the history of the idea of evolution itself and in its wake the troubled waters of religious argument. And here we will find not just religion, but the flotsam of political and social creeds, and the deep human craving for an understanding of our origins. Here, too, we will meet science. And we will encounter scientists. Hopefully we will learn to tell the difference. 'Which would you prefer to have happened?' quizzed a Christian minister as we concluded a talk on the issues underlying the evolution-creation debate. We had tried not to come down strongly on either side (for our brief was simply to discuss the issues), but the pastor would not let us slip away that easily. He wanted to know which of the two options we preferred. Prefer is an interesting word. As we pointed out to him, it matters not a jot what we prefer. For someone with religious faith the search is to discover what God has actually done. Has he created by a sudden miracle or by the mechanism of evolution.^ Do the fossils witness to gradual development or to creation in six days.' Our own wishes on the matter are as irrelevant as whether we prefer strawberry jam to blackberry jam. But by talking of preferences we had entered onto new territory. We had left behind the simple understanding of science as making decisions based on a catalogue of facts. We were acting as human beings who judge the validity of one fact or another according to whether it fits in with our cherished ideas. Perhaps that is a bit harsh and too dismissive of the noble search for scientific truth. But our friend thought that God was somehow more powerful if he worked through sudden miracles rather than by slow evolution. It was as though he needed a bigger God, and so he read his science expecting, and almost hoping for, miracles. For him the fossils confirmed he was right. On many scientific issues a neutral stance is possible. Unbiased research is expected.