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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The evidence for the ancestry of the human species among the apes is overwhelming. But the facts are never "just" facts. Human evolution has always been a value-laden scientific theory and, as anthropology makes clear, the ancestors are always sacred. They may be ghosts, or corpses, or fossils, or a naked couple in a garden, but the idea that you are part of a lineage is a powerful and universal one. Meaning and morals are at play, which most certainly transcend science and its quest for maximum accuracy. With clarity and wit, Jonathan Marks shows that the creation/evolution debate is not science versus religion. After all, modern anti-evolutionists reject humanistic scholarship about the Bible even more fundamentally than they reject the science of our simian ancestry. Widening horizons on both sides of the debate, Marks makes clear that creationism is a theological, not a scientific, debate and that thinking perceptively about values and meanings should not be an alternative to thinking about science - it should be a key part of it.
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Seitenzahl: 212
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes
1 Introducing the Ancestors
Rethinking Species and Scriptures
Theology and Evolution
Ancestry and Relatedness
Notes
2 Scientific Stories of Our Ancestors
Human Ancestry as the Dental and the Mental
The Revolution in Communicating, Interacting, and Thinking
The Evolution of Inequality
Notes
3 Attacking Evolution
Germans Against Darwinism
The Scopes Trial
Science Has Its Story, and I’ve Got Mine
Intelligent Design: Old Wine in New Bottles
Notes
4 Biblical Literalism and Rationalism
Biblical Bibliographies, Geometry, and Figures of Speech
Cultural Evolution and the Bible
Notes
5 Myths of Science and Religion
Why Are There Savages?
Science and Religion
Anti-Anti-Science
Science and the Moral Realm
Notes
6 Sacred Ancestry
The Power of Ancestry
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Why Are There Still Creationists?
Human Evolution and the Ancestors
Jonathan Marks
polity
Copyright © Jonathan Marks 2021
The right of Jonathan Marks to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4748-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
This book was way too much fun to write. It was completed while I was a Director’s Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. I am very grateful to Brad Gregory, Meghan Sullivan, Don Stelluto, Carolyn Sherman, Kristian Olsen, and the rest of the NDIAS, for their support and collegiality. Parts of this book were presented in seminar there, and for participating in the stimulating and helpful discussion that followed, I thank Ani Aprahamian, Dylan Belton, Eileen Hunt Botting, Eric Bugyis, Fr. Terrence Ehrman, David Bentley Hart, Faisal Husain, Robert Latiff, Yulia Minets, Cara Ocobock, Matt Ravosa, Phillip Sloan, and Joshua Stuchlik.
For their especially valuable comments on the manuscript I thank Thomas Bolin, Neil Arner, and Sarah Morice Brubaker.
At UNC Charlotte I have benefitted from the wisdom of my co-instructor Joanne Maguire and my colleague Gregg Starrett. The lunchtime discussions with Mark Pizzato, Trevor Pearce, Bill Chu, Ron Lunsford, and Mike Corwin were also both fun and useful in shaping this book.
It has been a pleasure to interact with biblical scholars and theologians over the past few years, and I am particularly intellectually indebted to Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes and the other participants in their stimulating conference, “Humility, Wisdom, and Grace in Deep Time” back in 2017, which resulted in a wonderful volume called Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology. Thanks to my editor at Polity, Jonathan Skerrett, for seeing the manuscript through from beginning to end. Thanks to Karen Strier for decades of insights. For their encouraging notes and comments I thank the reviewers, especially Reviewer #1.
And as always, I am grateful for the support of my wife, Peta Katz, through the creative process and beyond.
Preface
There is a joke that goes, “What’s the difference between a biblical literalist and a kleptomaniac?” – “The biblical literalist takes things literally, and the kleptomaniac takes things, literally.”
The biblical literalist, however, also rejects what science says about where we came from, whereas the kleptomaniac, or at least the educated kleptomaniac, acknowledges that our bodies and genes are very similar to those of apes, and that a couple of million years ago in Africa, there were no people, but there were apes that had some key human features. The key features were small canine teeth, long thumbs, and a lower body that provided a range of movements like a human’s; that is to say, standing up, walking, and running.
A creationist is someone who accepts a literalist reading of the beginning of the Bible in lieu of the scientific narrative that our species has descended from other, earlier species over the course of hundreds of millions of years.1 There are of course many scholars who understand evolution, and science more generally, to refer to a set of secondary causes and processes, while simultaneously maintaining faith in a transcendent primary cause, who is in essence God-the-Evolver.2 Or, as theologian Sarah Coakley puts is, “God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all.”3 Whether life is ultimately meaningful is an interesting question, but not a scientific one – since science concerns itself with empirically based inferences, not with spiritual or moral propositions. At issue here is simply whether the origin of people involves apes as ancestors a few million years ago, as the comparative anatomical, genetic, and fossil evidence strongly seems to indicate.
Every generation of evolutionists, however, also inscribes their values into their science. That is not an adulteration of the science, but simply a consequence of being a cogitating social animal. Sometimes those values are sexist (see Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 1871), racist (see Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation, 1876), cooperative (see Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, 1902), xenophobic (see Charles Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1911), colonialist (see William J. Sollas’s Ancient Hunters, 1911), egalitarian (see Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Mankind Evolving, 1961), hereditarian (see E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975), or reductive (see Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, 1976).
Some scientists try to link their evolution to their atheism. That troubles me, because it makes a positive assertion – “God does not exist” – in the absence of appropriate scientific evidence and inference. Although that assertion is a reasonable hypothesis, I don’t think it is mandated by science.
So let me position myself. I am agnostic about God. I capitalize Him out of politeness and custom. But I do not know whether supernatural beings of any sort exist. If they do, that would be nice; and if they don’t, that also works. I find it difficult to believe that if they do exist, they would care whether or not I believe that they exist, when it would actually be very easy to convince me, if they really did exist and care. The only beings that I am aware of interacting with are the ones inhabiting the natural realm, not the supernatural.
I sometimes invoke God, but generally situationally and transiently; for example, towards the waning moments of a Carolina Panthers football game. Usually it doesn’t help.
I have no quarrel with people who believe in God, or are generally religious, as long as they don’t (1) maintain that their position is validated by science; or (2) try and wheedle me into adopting their beliefs. That directly parallels how I feel about atheists.
I don’t think it is “human nature” to believe in God, but I do think it is human nature to think symbolically and imaginatively, rather than resolutely materially.
With that out of the way, let me briefly answer the question posed in the title of this book. There aren’t “still” creationists at all. There have always been people who are uncomfortable with the idea that our species is the product of a naturalistic descent from ape ancestors. Christian fundamentalism, which dates to the early twentieth century, mandated a biblical literalist theology, but modern-day opposition to human evolution is actually the product of a reactionary descent from 1960s pseudoscience. In particular, it descends from The Genesis Flood, a book first published in 1961, and devoted to the proposition that everything you know about geology and earth history is wrong. Instead, there really was a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago in which Noah and his family and pairs of all the animals were the only survivors. And incidentally, evolution is wrong, because God had created all species ex nihilo not long before that.
The intellectual and cultural context of that book is worth considering. As we will note in Chapter 3, just a decade earlier the scientific community had been scandalized by a book that denied and rewrote not biology, but astronomy. It was published in 1950 and called Worlds in Collision. Its author was a Russian-born psychoanalyst named Immanuel Velikovsky.
Velikovsky took a classic question from outdated biblical criticism: Falsely assuming that stories are just poorly remembered histories, then what natural phenomena might have been mis-remembered in the Bible as miracles? He then combined his pseudo-biblical musings with his readings of other mythological corpora to arrive at a stunning conclusion: The Hebrew Exodus from Egypt under Moses was accompanied by the planet Venus shooting out of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, veering close to Earth and causing the biblical Ten Plagues, then careening into Mars, before both planets eventually settled into their now-familiar orbits. Of course, the science of astronomy would have to be refitted to accommodate this bizarre theory.
Needless to say, the scientific community didn’t take that at all well, although the astronomers did a famously bad job of trying to engage with and refute Worlds in Collision. Their arguments were properly dismissive, necessarily technical, sometimes ad hominem, and occasionally incoherent.4 And although Velikovsky’s ideas eventually receded from public consciousness, there were significant parallels between Worlds in Collision and The Genesis Flood scarcely a decade later. Both prominently cast themselves against science, and in favor of their particular interpretations of the Bible. One bluntly opposed astronomy, the other geology. Yet the biblical text figures prominently in both, as misunderstood “history” in the colliding planets narrative, and as properly understood “history” in creationist narratives.
We have engaged most commonly with biblical literalist creationism as a false theory of biology,5 or as an archaic remnant of older modes of thought;6 but it is modern, not primitive,7 and treating it as a false story simply replicates the astronomers’ frustrating engagement with Worlds in Collision. It will always prove unsuccessful to engage with creationism in terms of “our story is true and yours is false” – since, at the very least, many aspects of any story of human evolution are debatable or downright inaccurate. Indeed, both evolutionist and creationist narratives of human origins have at times freely incorporated racist elements.
The thesis of this book is that modern creationism is not part of a vast conspiracy of stupid. It indeed opposes the normative views of science, but that opposition is different from the economic roots of climate-change denial, the misguided yet still unbiblical sincerity of the anti-vaccinators, or the sheer perversity of the flat-earthers. Of these popular modern “anti-science” positions, only creationism is religiously motivated. It is consequently a special kind of anti-science. To grapple effectively with creationism, then, the scholar of human origins and the scholar of religion are natural allies.
Happily, those two scholarly endeavors converge in anthropology.
This book will adopt two positions about religion and science, or more specifically about evolution and creationism, which seem unfortunately uncommon but are nevertheless rather straightforward and true. First, one can take the Bible seriously (as sacred writings, as literature, as a glimpse of ancient life, as ancient wisdom) without taking it literally. Second, most Catholics, Jews, and even Protestants aren’t literalists. Consequently, to the extent that this is a scientific and a religious issue, it isn’t science vs. religion. It is religion vs. religion about science. By implication, then, the argument between evolution and creationism is ultimately a sectarian theological dispute within Protestantism (even Islamic creationism is derived from the Protestant literature), and consequently the appropriate battleground is not science at all, but theology. Science, especially biology, is marginal to the question of whether the Bible should be taken literally.
Notes
1.
The word “literalist” can be problematic. Many pious Christians thoughtfully interpret and understand the words of the Bible literally, without imagining it to be a science text. I am using the term more narrowly, to refer specifically to people who reject evolution on the basis of what it says in the Bible. Their theology is actually quite selectively literalist, however, as they tend to ignore or reinterpret other biblical passages (see
Chapter 5
). Another term often used in this context is “biblical inerrantism.”
2.
Traditionally, this position is known as theistic evolution, but there is some classificatory confusion. For a notable example, BioLogos.org, founded by Francis Collins, the current head of the National Institutes of Health, proposes that evolution and creation constitute a false dichotomy, and stakes out a position of “evolutionary creationism”. In the present context, however, I am using “creationism” more narrowly, working within the framework of the dichotomy as it is generally recognized, and I classify theistic evolutionists as evolutionists. While I am generally in favor of calling people what they want to be called, for the present purposes I do not regard them as creationists.
3.
S. Coakley, ‘God and Evolution: A New Solution’,
Harvard Divinity School Bulletin
, Spring/Summer 2007, p. 10.
4.
“For example, it appears to be inherently impossible for Mars to collide with Venus at some point outside the earth’s orbit, as Velikovsky proposes, with the consequence that Venus is knocked into a nearly circular orbit well within the earth’s orbit, and Mars remains in a nearly circular orbit outside the earth’s orbit. This seems to be the case for the same kind of reason that you cannot pour two quarts of water into a one-quart jar; the world, as far as we can tell, simply isn’t built that way.” H. Margolis, ‘From Washington: Velikovsky Rides Again’,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, 20:39, 1964.
5.
E. C. Scott,
Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. M. Ruse,
The Creation-Evolution Struggle
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. R. T. Pennock,
Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
6.
J. Coyne,
Why Evolution is True
. New York: Viking Penguin, 2009. R. Dawkins,
The Greatest Show on Earth
. New York: Free Press, 2010.
7.
R. Numbers,
The Creationists
. New York: Knopf, 1992. L. A. Witham,
Where Darwin Meets the Bible: Creationists and Evolutionists in America
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
1Introducing the Ancestors
It is not a secret that about half of Americans are morons. Were the journalist H. L. Mencken alive today, he would very likely regard that as a considerable understatement. They eschew vaccinations. They take right-wing provocateurs seriously. They vote against their rational interests. They can’t distinguish between gut feelings and informed thoughts, and privilege the former over the latter when they can. And they aren’t all necessarily even the same people.
There is a veritable industry of aggrieved social critics condemning the stupidity of ostensibly modern citizens who reject science. But of course nobody totally rejects science, and maybe they have some reasons for rejecting some particular science. After all, not all science is good. Back in the 1920s, when the science of the age called for solving social problems by sterilizing the poor and restricting the immigration of genetically feebleminded Italian and Jewish immigrants, the people who were anti-science were actually in the right.
We all make decisions about what science to accept, what science to ignore, and what science to reject. You probably don’t give much thought to helminthology, the science of parasitic worms, generally found in feces. Perhaps, like me, you don’t give much thought or credence to exobiology, the science of non-existent extraterrestrial life. You may never even have heard of quantum electrodynamics, but it sure sounds scientific.
This book is about the rejection of evolution, a science more real than exobiology, more familiar than quantum electrodynamics, and more decorous than helminthology. Evolution is the science of where we come from, a question so basic to human existence that all peoples have stories to answer it. It is about ancestry, and the framework of this book rests upon an anthropological truism: The ancestors are always sacred.
Confronting this cultural fact will help explain not only the popular rejection of human evolution, but the often bizarre and vituperative disputes within the science itself. In the 1980s, for example, scholars working on Homo habilis in Kenya fought bitterly with scholars working on Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia over whose fossils were more important to the reconstruction of human prehistory. Today the Kenyan and Ethiopian fossils are reconciled and have joined forces against the upstart fossils from South Africa (Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi). Regardless of the zoological reality of these species, they are the subjects of mythology and nationalism, not to mention fame – which is why zoological realities and paleoanthropological realities don’t necessarily map on to one another well. The fossils are national treasures, and the species they represent are, in the broadest sense, sacred ancestors.
Consequently, when scholars reject “Australopithecus prometheus” or “Homo rudolfensis” as unreal, what they mean is that the fossils allocated to them ought to be called something else. Making scientific sense of the ancestors is no small undertaking.
Neither is making unscientific sense of the ancestors. When evangelical entrepreneurs build Noah’s ark in Kentucky, they must still struggle to reconcile biogeography and adaptation, as did serious scholars two centuries before them. If God made animals to fit where they live – polar bears to the arctic, bison to the Great Plains, koalas to eucalyptus forests – then it seems unlikely that they could have gotten there from Mount Ararat before going extinct, without some other ad hoc miraculous intervention. The problem actually arises from juxtaposing two different ancient sources. The Bible talks about Noah’s ark, but not about adaptation; that is from Aristotle. Moreover, if God made birds to fly, then it is hard to explain ostriches and penguins. Those are the kinds of facts that led scholars 200 years ago to begin to seek explanations in history, rather than in miracle.
It doesn’t matter whether you call the animal-saver Noah, or Deucalion, or Utnapishtim – as the stories from various ancient sources had it – he still had an impossible job of dropping off the various animals in their respective habitats around the world. He must be tasked with dropping the lemurs off in Madagascar, anacondas in the Amazon, armadillos in America, gibbons in Southeast Asia, kangaroos in Australia, reindeer in northern Europe – or else another story needs to be composed and related about how they got there. And that story is necessarily non-biblical – because the Bible doesn’t say anything about it, which in turn undermines the assumption that the Bible is giving us a complete and accurate account of adaptation and biogeography. In fact it undermines the assumption that what the Bible says is even relevant to understanding the facts of prehistory. Early scientists 200 years ago recognized the problems here.
Fossils made the problems with Noah’s ark as a scientific explanation for the patterns of life even more acute. Some ancient animals seemed to cross-cut categories – large swimming and flying reptiles, for example – while others seemed to confuse familiar patterns. Elephants, after all, were only known to be from hot climates, so why were there woolly elephants in Siberia long ago? Certainly being woolly helps you survive in Siberia, but these were elephants, so what was their relationship to the normal elephants of Africa and South Asia? And what happened to them? Was God’s gift of woolliness somehow insufficient for them? And why didn’t the same thing happen to the non-woolly elephants of the tropics? The science of the early 1800s was discovering that the world of the past was a different place than the world of the present, and the Bible afforded no guide to understanding it.
Were there pteranodons and iguanodons in Eden? If not, then how did they get into the fossil record? And if so, then why doesn’t the Bible mention them? The Bible implies quite directly that Eden was populated by familiar creatures. As a character in The Sopranos articulated it many years later, “No way! T. rex in the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve would be running all the time, scared shitless. But the Bible says it was paradise.” And clearly, if you imagined them as somehow uninterested in consuming Adam and Eve, those T. rexes would have had to be the world’s worst adapted herbivores, about as suited to vegetarianism as great white sharks.
It is no coincidence that biblical scholarship and biological scholarship matured together. The coevolution of information and explanation had been a long-term process. Scholars in ancient times had envisioned the relationship between God and His creation as analogous to that of a king and his subjects. He ruled by decree, and could reverse or abrogate his decisions more or less capriciously. For example, God devotes a chunk of space in Leviticus and Deuteronomy to explaining what foods are clean and unclean for His followers. But in Mark 7:19, Jesus peremptorily declares “all foods clean.” In practical terms, that certainly made it easier to be a Christian than a Jew, but it also reveals a God who seems not to be able to make up His mind.
Could the sea part for His followers and swallow up their enemies? Maybe. Could a man live for three days in the belly of a fish? Maybe. Could the sun stand still in the sky for twelve hours? Maybe. Can the dead be raised? Maybe.
By the eighteenth century, however, the image of God as a sort of cosmic despot was being gradually supplanted by the image of God as a sort of cosmic engineer, building stable things that work a certain way, always. The universe now was seen to run according to natural laws, which were inviolable by their very virtue of being divine, which in turn gave less leeway to suspend their operation, for that would plunge the universe into chaos, which was precisely what the Creation had transcended.
To a large extent, this was a consequence of the discoveries of physics and astronomy, which had shown convincingly that the earth moves, that it is a planet like others, that it revolves around the sun, and that it does so because of gravity, which is also what keeps the moon revolving around the earth and reciprocally causes the tides upon the earth. And just as laws keep the moon circling the earth and earth circling the sun, so too do laws keep blood circling through the body. Laws were there in physiology as well as in physics.
