Evolution vs. Creation

This article discusses the legal issues surrounding the teaching of creationism and evolution in public school science classrooms in the United States. Since the early 20th century, parents, teachers, and politicians have often been embroiled in contentious debates regarding freedom of religion as applied to the role of religious interpretations of science in the public school science curriculum. Religious fundamentalists view evolution as both unscientific and amoral and advocate its replacement with a faith-based account of the origin of man. Others accept that evolution is fundamental to science and therefore important for students to study. The courts have consistently ruled that creationism and, later, Intelligent Design are not science and therefore do not belong in the public school science classroom.

Keywords Creationism; Darwinism; Evolution; Intelligent Design (ID); Freedom of Religion; Religious Fundamentalists; Scopes Trial; Separation of Church & State

Education & the Law > Evolution vs. Creation

Overview

History

Encompassing science, religion, philosophy, and especially politics, the debate between creationism and evolution in the United States has been anything but boring. The legal controversy has spilled over into America's public school science classrooms a number of times-first in the Scopes Trial of 1925 to Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) and ongoing debate among the members of the Texas Board of Education about the inclusion of both debate of evolutionary theories and information regarding Intelligent Design.

The traditional battle lines in the creation/evolution debate have been clear enough. On one side are creationists, those who believe that God created the entire universe less than 10,000 years ago. On the other side are evolutionists, many of them professional scientists, who believe that the universe has unfolded over billions of years through an unguided, natural process, called evolution. Evolutionists in America are often known as Darwinists, after the British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who proposed in The Origin of Species (1859) that all life on earth evolved through evolution by natural selection-an unguided process that "selects" as the fittest those individuals that leave the most offspring.

Most would agree that the real sparks fly when the contemporary creation/evolution debate in the United States moves into the realm of biology, particularly the area of human origins. Creationists, who interpret the Bible's book of Genesis literally, believe that human beings are the special, divine creation of an almighty God, and therefore fundamentally distinct from all other creatures on earth. Evolutionists believe that humans are big-brained mammals who not only share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but are related organically to all other life forms on the planet.

In the early 1990s, a group of creationists who supported the scientifically determined age of the universe diverged from traditional creationism and founded a movement called Intelligent Design (ID). Supporters of Intelligent Design have been less dogmatic than old-line creationists about the nature of the Designer, but they agree with creationists that human beings are not the end product of a solely naturalistic process of evolution.

The debate between creation and evolution takes place within a fiercely religious cultural context. The United States has always been a religious nation. Polls consistently indicate that over 90 percent of the American people believe in God, including a 2011 Gallup poll in which 92 percent answered yes to the question “Do you believe in God?” (Newport, 2011). Church attendance in America is high compared to other industrialized nations. Though America does not have an established church, there is a widespread belief that the preservation of religion-in whatever form it takes-is essential to the continued health of the country.

From the founding of the United States through the nineteenth century, most education was provided by parents and churches. Beginning with the Puritans, many Americans accepted the statement in the Old Testament that parents were to be the primary educators of their children. The idea was that parents would instill the moral and ethical values necessary for the happiness of the individual and the health of the nation. However, with the industrial revolution of the 19th century requiring more men and women to join the workforce, the education of Americans was increasingly left to public schools and state boards of education.

However, this did not imply that parents and pastors wanted their children to be taught in an amoral environment. For example, in early twentieth-century Tennessee-which would take center stage in America's first major nationwide creation/evolution debate-the influential evangelical Christian churches grew increasingly supportive of public schools because they viewed them as a bulwark against creeping secularism (Israel, 2004).

In practice, however, the symbiotic relationship between parents, churches, and public schools was more an ideal than reality. First, the long-established doctrine of the separation of church and state, which was implicit in the First Amendment and then articulated by Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, required that public schools not become proxy churches. Impartiality was the intent, and teaching any one religiously based viewpoint was suspect, if not unconstitutional. Second, even though a viewpoint was held by a majority of parents and pastors did not necessarily mean that it represented a scholarly consensus on the topic. While some parents and pastors were college-educated, many were not, and those who did attend school often had little more than a few years of formal schooling. Along these same lines, there was a growing sentiment among American intellectuals that majority rule was a clear and present danger to the civil liberties of those with minority political and religious viewpoints. In the view of many educated Americans, these minorities should enjoy full and equal protection under the law (Larson, 1997).

Given these factors, perhaps it was not very surprising that in some regions of the country, particularly in the South and the Midwest, the educational authorities ran afoul of public opinion. With tension growing between majority rule and individual rights, the teaching of evolution became a flash point. Beginning in the early twentieth century, there were numerous attempts made by anti-evolutionists (later known as creationists) to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. Under pressure from these constituents, state legislatures in 15 states were considering bans on the teaching of evolution by 1925.

Some creationists opposed evolution on scientific grounds, charging that it was more theory than fact, while others insisted that evolution-often called Darwinism-undermined the authority of the Bible, thus putting the nation's moral health in peril. For this latter group it was time to get back to religious fundamentals, and an influential book series by that title ("The Fundamentals," 1910-1915) gave the world a new term: fundamentalism. In addition to Roman Catholicism, socialism, and higher biblical criticism, the authors of "The Fundamentals" included Darwinism as a menace to all that was good and holy (Numbers, 2006).

This anti-Darwinian sentiment was made even stronger by the events of World War I. Americans struggled to make sense of the fact that Germany, the most scientifically and intellectually advanced nation in the world, could draw the world into a global conflict. The answer given in popular books such as Vernon Kellogg's "Headquarters Nights" (1917) and Benjamin Kidd's "Science of Power" (1918) was that German militarism was directly linked to the German leadership's support of Darwinism. For many religious Americans who had lost sons and fathers on the killing fields of Europe, this was proof enough that the scourge of Darwinism must not be exported to the United States.

Prominent Court Cases

Soon the battle over creationism and evolution in the public schools became a subject for litigation. In 1925, the state legislature in Tennessee passed the Butler Act, a law banning the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. The pertinent section of the Act forbid the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been founded in 1920 to defend the civil rights of minorities, took up the case of Dayton, Tennessee, football coach John T. Scopes, who was charged with violating the Butler Act by teaching Darwinism on the day he was a substitute high school biology teacher. The ACLU recruited famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes and challenge the law. Darrow was opposed in the courtroom by three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a well-known orator who supported the right of the majority to mandate what public schools taught. Bryan had pushed for the passage of the Butler Act because he believed that Darwinism led to immorality by sanctioning the domination of the strong over the weak (Larson, 1997).

Scopes v. Tennessee-or the "Scopes Monkey Trial," as it has become known to history-was an instant media sensation. Broadcast live to the nation on radio, the trial brought to the surface many of the central themes of American democracy-majority rule, minority rights, separation of church and state, and concern for the moral fiber of the nation. In the end, Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a misdemeanor, and was fined $100. The Butler Act was not repealed until 1967, but Scopes was hired again the next year.

In the 1930s the creationists shifted their focus from state education boards and had substantial success in influencing local school boards to either ban or water down the teaching of evolution in various school districts. Public school teachers who taught evolution ran the risk of breaking the law and losing their jobs. The problem of intellectual freedom became more and more acute, and for about forty years many Southern states banned the teaching of evolution.

After World War II, the legal winds began to shift. First, in 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Everson v. Board of Education that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, through the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, applied to states as well as the federal government. One implication of this decision was that the federal government now had legal jurisdiction in creation/evolution cases. Second, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby ushering in an era of federal judicial activism in which many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were applied to the states.

The only substantial creation/evolution case decided by the Warren court was Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968. At issue was the constitutionality of a 1928 law passed by the Arkansas legislature to ban the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. Little Rock high school teacher Susan Epperson asked the state courts for a ruling on the legality of the law, and the case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Speaking for the majority of the court, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas ruled, "The law's effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read. Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution" (cited in NCSE, 2005).

In the wake of Epperson, creationists suffered an unbroken series of losses in state and federal courts throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston ruled in Wright v. Houston Independent School District that mandating the teaching of evolution does not violate the Establishment Clause or students' freedom or religion. Anticipating a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, in 1975 the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Daniel v. Waters that giving "equal time" to the teaching of evolution and creationism in the public school classroom violated the Establishment Clause. In 1977, in Hendren v. Campbell, an Indiana state superior court used similar reasoning to rule that a young-earth creationist textbook could not be used in the state's public schools.

After the Epperson decision, Arkansas legislators adjusted state law so that creationism would be taught alongside evolution. Despite the ruling in Daniel v. Waters that "equal time" measures were unconstitutional, the state persisted. In McLean v. Arkansas (1982), Judge William Overton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas struck down the law (NCSE 2005).

The U.S. Supreme Court didn't weigh in on the constitutionality of "equal time" laws until five years later. In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the nation's highest court struck down a Louisiana law that required "alternative theories" of creation to be taught alongside evolution. Echoing a line of reasoning going back to Everson, the justices declared that the law did violate the Establishment Clause (NCSE 2005).

Even though they struck down "equal time" laws, the Supreme Court left one possible loophole for creationists: the justices ruled in Aguillard that only "scientific theories" of origins could be taught in public schools. In an attempt to fit through the legal loophole, some creationists who supported an old earth theory banded together under the banner of Intelligent Design (ID). Led by a coterie of intellectuals with doctoral degrees in the arts and sciences, ID advocates argued that their brand of creationism could pass muster as a legitimate scientific theory, on par with Darwinian evolution. Prominent ID leaders such as law professor Philip Johnson, mathematician William Dembski, and biochemist Michael Behe began arguing that the structures of living organisms, to say nothing of the universe itself, could not have arisen through a slow, step-by-step process of evolution. There must, they argued, be a designer-though not necessarily the God of the Bible-behind the development of life.

The issue came to a head in 2004 when the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania voted that 9th grade biology students must be read a statement about ID. The school board and its supporters argued that the Aguillard "loophole" meant the reference to ID was constitutional. Some parents brought suit against the school board, and in December 2005 - a month after all the anti-evolution members of the school board were voted out of office - federal judge John E. Jones ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that ID was not science and therefore was not entitled to inclusion in the public school science curriculum. "In making this determination," Jones wrote, "we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents" (Jones, 2005, p. 136; NCSE, 2005)

Creationists have also suffered legal defeats in the area of science textbook disclaimers. They lost Selman v. Cobb County School District, a case brought in 2002 by six parents in Cobb County, Georgia, who sued to have a sticker on public school science textbooks removed. The sticker read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." In December 2006, after four years of legal wrangling, the Cobb County school board reached a legal settlement with the ACLU in which the stickers would be removed in exchange for the parents halting all litigation against the board. Other states, such as Alabama, continue to place similar stickers on their public school science textbooks. In 2008, Florida revised its science textbook standards to endorse the teaching of evolution. In 2009, the Texas Board of Education voted overwhelmingly that Intelligent Design must be taught alongside evolution, but in 2013, the board reversed its course, adopting “mainstream” curriculum, deciding not to include the theory of Intelligent Design in its science textbooks (Forsyth, 2013).

In the immediate aftermath of the Dover verdict William Dembski, a leading supporter of ID, pledged that he and other supporters of ID will not let the teaching of evolution in public schools go unchallenged:

… The [Dover] ruling is not a Waterloo for the intelligent design side. Certainly it will put a damper on school boards interested in promoting intelligent design. But this is not a Supreme Court decision. Nor is it likely this decision will be appealed since the Dover school board that caused all the trouble was voted out and replaced this November [2005]. Thus we can expect agitation for ID and against evolution to continue. School boards and state legislators may tread more cautiously, but tread on evolution they will - the culture war demands it! (Dembski, 2006, Para. 3)

Dembski infers that the status of ID within public school science classrooms will be decided by a future U.S. Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, in many private religious schools across the United States, the teaching of ID or creationism continues unchallenged.

Further Insights

Creationism

Within the context of the creation/evolution debate, creationists are those who believe that the world was created by a Supreme Being, whom they typically equate with the God of the Bible. Young-earth creationists, who take the early chapters of the book of Genesis literally, believe that the entire universe, including the earth, is between 6,000-10,000 years old. They dispute the scientific evidence, coming from many disciplines, that the universe is 13-15 billion years old. Old-earth creationists interpret Genesis more metaphorically, with each "day" in Genesis 1 representing an indefinite period of time, and thus they agree with scientists about the age of the universe. Both young-earth and old-earth creationists accept what they describe as microevolution, or changes within a given biological species (a Biblical kind), but they reject macroevolution, which they typically describe as one species evolving into two separate species that cannot interbreed (Ruse 2003; Numbers 2006). While Christian creationists predominate in the United States, it is important to note that many Muslims also describe themselves as creationists, though these views have not yet influenced the creation/evolution debate in America.

Intelligent Design

Intelligent design is the theory that some aspects of the natural world are too complex to have resulted from evolutionary processes alone. Supporters aim to steer a middle course between creationism (the belief that evolution is entirely false) and materialism (the belief that the supernatural does not exist). Biochemist Michael Behe, in his influential book "Darwin's Black Box" (1996), argued that the creation of various "molecular machines" (such as the bacterial flagellum) require the infusion of intelligent information. Hearkening back to design arguments found in the writings of Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and William Paley, supporters of ID argue that some of the complex features of the world are presumptive evidence of intelligent design, which they contrast with the unplanned design of evolution through natural selection. Some ID supporters are practicing Christians who believe the God of the Bible designed certain features of the natural world, while others are agnostic about the identity of the designer. The theory of ID is almost universally opposed by the scientific community-Darwinists such as philosopher of science Michael Ruse call it "creationism lite" (Ruse 2006), and a statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science said "the lack of scientific warrant for so-called 'intelligent design theory' makes it improper to include as a part of science education" (AAAS 2002). Young-earth creationists also oppose ID, pointing out that ID supporters tend to be too open-minded about certain aspects of Darwinian evolution, including natural selection and descent with modification. Indeed, Behe and other leading supporters of ID have publicly admitted that Darwin's theory of common descent is at least partially correct (Behe 29 Oct 1996). Arguments for and against the teaching of ID received a thorough hearing in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005).

Microevolution / Macroevolution

Many of the creation/evolution debates have been portrayed as creationists on one side and evolutionists on the other. In point of fact, all creationists accept microevolution, or what they describe as variation within a kind, a reference to the term used repeatedly in Genesis 1. While there is no agreement among biblical scholars on how kind should be defined, most creationists define it as a biological species, though some expand the meaning to include a genus or a family. All creationists agree, however, that the definition of microevolution cannot be stretched to the point where humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. 16th century German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther found microevolution to be a powerful argument for the existence of God:

'Tis a good argument, and has often moved me much, where [Cicero] proves there is a God, in that living creatures, beasts, and mankind engender their own likeness. A cow always produces a cow; a horse, a horse, etc. Therefore it follows that some being exists which rules everything (Luther, n.d.).

through entirely natural processes, is opposed by all creationists, many of them describing it as tantamount to materialism or atheism. On the other hand, some of the leading supporters of ID accept Darwinian concepts such as common descent and natural selection, but argue that they needed to be "supplemented" by intelligent intervention.

Viewpoints

"Teach the Controversy"

After a series of stinging legal rebukes from state and federal courts in the 1970s and 1980s, creationists searched for new ways to gain access to public school science classrooms. They hit upon the slogan "teach the controversy" to argue that there was a real debate within the scientific community regarding the validity of evolution, and therefore that students should be exposed to the arguments on both sides. Upon learning of this new approach, prominent scientists and leading scientific organizations challenged the premise that there were any serious scientific contenders to evolution. While readily admitting that a vigorous debate is taking place regarding the mechanisms of evolution and their relative importance in the evolutionary process, none disagree with the fundamental Darwinian conclusion that all life on earth can be traced back to one common ancestor. In the twenty-first century, and most notably in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), courts have generally agreed with the scientific community that there is no controversy in science about whether evolution happened.

World Religions on Creation / Evolution

Historically, only the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have had internal debates regarding creation and evolution. This is because all three accept the Old Testament's account of a God who created and sustains the universe. Since the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, many Jews, Christians, and Muslims have interpreted the Genesis creation account as metaphor or myth, but some members of each religion continue to take the account more literally, thus earning the name fundamentalists or creationists. In recent decades many Jewish and Christian sects have spoken out against creationism and ID, thereby allying themselves with the mainstream scientific community. Other major world religions, such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have creation myths without a single creator God, and thus they can much more easily accommodate Darwinian evolution.

Science & Religion

The dialog between science and religion has been a recurring theme in Western culture, but as this article shows, it has taken on a distinct hue in the United States. Charles Bleckmann surveyed 120 years of reporting on the debate as it appeared in Science, the leading American scientific journal, and he detected several patterns:

Scientists often believed that religious opposition to evolution was declining only to find resurgence. Critics of evolution have failed, or refused, to understand either the basic facts or the intellectual underpinnings of evolution. Scientists have consistently called for better education of the public as the solution; however, there is little evidence that education, as it has been practiced, has helped. (A reviewer of this manuscript suggested that there is little evidence that education has actually been tried.) Literalist, fundamentalist religious leaders have initiated attacks on science; however, reconciliations of religion and science have resulted in the modification of theology, not science (Bleckmann, 2006, p. 158).

Not all will agree with Bleckmann's assessment, and it is indeed the case that religious belief continues to flourish across the United States. Through the patronage of billion-dollar philanthropic foundations such as the Templeton Foundation, it seems certain that the dialog between science and religion, two of the most important cultural forces in America, will continue for the foreseeable future.

Terms & Concepts

Creationism: In its broadest sense, the belief that the universe was created by a Supreme Being; in common usage, the belief that all life on earth is not descended from a common ancestor.

Darwinism: Often used interchangeably with evolution, it refers to the specific views of British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) regarding the mechanisms of evolution, specifically concepts such as descent with modification, natural selection, and sexual selection.

Equal Protection Clause: A clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states "No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Establishment Clause: A clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Evolution: In common usage, the belief that the present state of the universe, including life on earth, emerged through a gradual process of change that took place over billions of years. Creationists often distinguish between microevolution and macroevolution, though most scientists charge that the distinction is largely artificial.

Freedom of Religion: The right of the individual to practice (or not practice) any form of religious expression as he or she sees fit, free from government interference.

Intelligent Design (ID): The belief that at least some aspects of nature show evidence of intelligent, often supernatural, design.

Kind: A term used in the book of Genesis in the Bible to describe the way in which God created life on earth. Biblical scholars are uncertain of the meaning in the original Hebrew.

Separation of Church and State: The American democratic view that religion and government operate in two separate spheres and should not interfere with each other.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Barbour, I. (1997). Religion and science: Historical and contemporary issues. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco.

Behe, M (1996). Darwin's black box. New York: Free Press.

God vs Darwin: The war between evolution and creationism in the classroom. (2011). Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 31, 9. Retrieved December 4, 2013 from EBSCO online database, Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=60678868&site=ehost-live

Hewlett, M. and T. Peters (2006). Evolution in our schools: What should we teach? Dialog: A Journal of Theology. Vol. 45 , 106-109. Retrieved March 31, 2007 from EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=19683123&site=ehost-live

Justice, B. (2005). The war that wasn't: Religious conflict and compromise in the common schools of New York State, 1865-1900. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Larson, E.J. (2003). Trial & error: The American controversy over creation & evolution. Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

National Academy of Sciences (1999). Science and creationism: A view from the National Academy of Sciences. Second edition. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Retrieved March 31, 2007 from the National Academy of Sciences. http://books.nap.edu/html/creationism/

Numbers, R. (5 Nov 1982). Creationism in 20th-century America. Science, 218: 538-544. Retrieved March 31, 2007 from the Virginia Tech History Department. http://www.history.vt.edu/Barrow/Hist3706/readings/numbers.html

Pennock, R. (1998). Tower of Babel: Scientific evidence and the new creationism. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Pigliucci, M. (2005). Science and fundamentalism: A strategy on how to deal with anti-science fundamentalism. EMBO reports 6 , 1106-1109. Retrieved March 31, 2007 from the European Molecular Biology Organization. http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v6/n12/full/7400589.html

Ruse, M., ed. (1988). But is it science? The philosophical question in the creation/evolution controversy. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗ (2005). The creation-evolution struggle. Cambridge, Ma. and London: Harvard University Press.

Sober, E. (March 2007). What is wrong with intelligent design? Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 82 , 3-8. Retrieved March 31, 2007 from http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/what's%20wrong%20with%20id%20qrb%202007.pdf

Whitcomb, J.C. & H.R. Morris (1961). The Genesis flood: The biblical record and its scientific implications. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company.