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Where Darwin Meets the Bible: Creationists and Evolutionists in America
The conflict between creationists and evolutionists has raged ever since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. And yet, even as generations of Americans have fought and re-fought the same battles, the contours of the debate have in recent years shifted dramatically.
Tracking the dizzying rhetorical heights and opportunistic political lows of this controversy, Larry Witham travels to America's churches, schools, universities, museums, and government agencies to present creationists and evolutionists in their own unfiltered voices. We meet leading creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design such as Michael Behe; evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins; and theistic scientists who describe how they reconcile God and Nature.
Today, Biblical literalism is tempered by the Intelligent Design movement, which finds evidence of God's presence in nature's patterns. The once-dominant "young earth" school has been replaced by a creationism that conscripts the language of science to advance the creationist cause. Meanwhile, evolutionary scientists hesitate to point out gaps in their theories for fear that such self-scrutiny could serve as fodder for anti-evolution propaganda.
In an age marked both by a rising religious tide and daily scientific breakthroughs, Where Darwin Meets the Bible provides the standard account of this lasting conflict.
Tracking the dizzying rhetorical heights and opportunistic political lows of this controversy, Larry Witham travels to America's churches, schools, universities, museums, and government agencies to present creationists and evolutionists in their own unfiltered voices. We meet leading creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design such as Michael Behe; evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins; and theistic scientists who describe how they reconcile God and Nature.
Today, Biblical literalism is tempered by the Intelligent Design movement, which finds evidence of God's presence in nature's patterns. The once-dominant "young earth" school has been replaced by a creationism that conscripts the language of science to advance the creationist cause. Meanwhile, evolutionary scientists hesitate to point out gaps in their theories for fear that such self-scrutiny could serve as fodder for anti-evolution propaganda.
In an age marked both by a rising religious tide and daily scientific breakthroughs, Where Darwin Meets the Bible provides the standard account of this lasting conflict.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
1 person is currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Larry Witham
33 books19 followersLarry Witham is an author, editor, journalist, and artist. His new novel, The Haunted Artist (2025) is the fourth in the Julian Peale Art-Crime Investigator Series. Witham is the author of nineteen books (six of them novels), and was a finalist in the 2015 Pen Literary Awards for biography. He began his writing career as a daily newspaper reporter in Washington D.C. Witham has received several national awards for his newspaper work and books, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper series he co-wrote. He was Project Editor for the ten-volume Templeton Press science-and-religion series. A painter by avocation, his new novel character, Julain Peale, investigates crime and intrigue in the artworld. Witham lives with his wife in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 6, 2017
Very useful read on the on-going conflict between creationist and evolutionist schools of thought in America, highlighted mostly through the biggest names in each fields and their public works, be they books or speeches, in favor of their positions. I obviously side with the evolutionists and believe in the teaching of evolution in all schools everywhere, but it is nonetheless interesting to intellectually engage with the other side's arguments.
February 16, 2025
A HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION/EVOLUTION CONFLICTS IN AMERICA
Journalist Larry Witham wrote in the Preface to this 2002 book, “When I conducted my first interview for this book in 1995, I was thinking of a short journalistic project. The next five years flew by, of course… What results in these pages, I believe, is a story of people, places, events, and ideas that is both pro-science and pro-religion. But its predominant theme is how we, a religiously inclined society, try to understand nature, which is mostly the balliwick of science… This book talks mostly with scientists and science educators, and as to what science is as a whole, they all will have something to say. Theologians are in this conversation as well, but in fewer number… During this project, an occasional concern was that a reporter’s approach, which sometimes quotes the person on the street alongside the Ph.D. in the academy, might wrongly appear to legitimize one view or another… this book is a cultural history. Who can doubt that evolutionists and creationists, for example, are equal forces in American culture?”
He notes, “The great [Theodosius] Dobzhansky, who criticized Bible fundamentalists but never lost his ties to Russian orthodoxy, like Tillich’s religion as ‘ultimate concern,’ but he embraced Teilhard [de Chardin]. He served as president of the Teilhard Society and wrote ‘The Biology of Ultimate Concern.’ By now, his good friend [Ernst] Mayr advised him that ‘Teilhard is a step in the wrong direction,’ and materialists called his spiritualism ‘crazy’ or ‘pious bunk.’ But he was in good company, for no less a pioneer evolutionist than Sewall Wright, the geneticist, became a process biologist. Wright let slip his flight from a purely mechanistic view of life in his 1953 president’s address ‘Gene and Organism’ to the American Society of Naturalists. Not a few of his materialist students thought he had lost his grip. Though Mayr was an atheist, the New Synthesis brought him into close friendships with believers like Dobzhansky and also the British ornithologist David Lack. ‘An absolute true believer,’ Mayr says of the Englishman. In 1947, at the height of his evolutionist fame, Lack had abandoned agnosticism for an Anglican evangelical faith… Yet like the neo-orthodox, Lack preferred to compartmentalize his faith and his science. Unperturbed that a god God could reign over nature’s deadly struggle, he said that ‘man is surely unqualified to judge whether this [natural] ordering is in any way evil, or contrary to divine plan.’” (Pg. 31-32)
He recounts, “Philosopher of science Karl Popper cast … doubts on evolution when, in his 1976 autobiography, he called it more ‘metaphysical research program’ than real science. Only theories that could be ‘falsified’ by a test were scientific, he said, and so the proposition that dinosaurs evolved into birds was outside science. Before he died, in a much-cited letter to the editor from 1980, Popper conceded that evolution was valid on other lines of scientific logic, but his famous doubts are part of science’s cultural history. All of this debate added to the ‘demarcation problem’ that haunts science today. Who has the authority to demarcate what is true science from what is not---especially in the theoretical realms of the evolutionary past? The intellectual fallout of the 1960s gave creationists an important tool.” (Pg, 34-35)
He continues, “What the 1960s gave liberal Protestantism, meanwhile, was the God of evolution and the environmental movement. When physicist -theologian Ian Barbour published his influential ‘Issues in Science and Religion’ (1966), it for the first time laid out a coherent spectrum of science-religion issues. But questioning the validity of evolution was not one of them. If Barbour’s endorsement of process theology further distanced theological liberals from the evolution-creation debate, it meanwhile introduced them to a new one---the immanence of God in nature and what that says about ecology. Thereafter, Christians increasingly viewed ecology as the moral content of evolutionism. When historian and churchgoer Lynn White argued publicly that Saint Francis taught a brotherhood of species, the theme was clearer still.” (Pg. 35)
He notes, “After public education became compulsory in the early 1900s… the second generation of post-Darwinian biologists took over the writing of textbooks. They presented Darwin’s theory with great certainty… The most widely used life science textbook in that era was ‘A Civic Biology,’ the book from which Dayton high school teacher John Thomas Scopes purportedly taught human evolution. His prosecution in 1925 gave publishers their first lesson in the politics of state textbook markets. A year later [a new edition] came out with the word ‘evolution’ expunged…. [B]etween 1900 and 1930, the presentation of Darwinism in biology textbooks ranged from dogmatic certainty to near omission. With every new decade, moreover, textbook treatments might fluctuate…” (Pg. 153)
He reports, “The Darwin Centennial of 1959 had echoed across the United States… A century after ‘The Origin of Species,' universities had clearly become the main repository of Darwin’s legacy in American and key purveyors of the current consensus in evolutionary thought. Higher education could no longer imagine an era like the 1920s, when some college presidents soft-pedaled evolution to avoid fights with a state legislature or powerful trustee… Though university scientists today have bemoaned the new cultural criticism of science, there are no structures on teaching. The greatest complaint from natural scientists might be that, still, some students reject the theory of evolution.” (Pg. 162)
He notes, “Without doubt, the lead debater of the creationist cause was [Henry] Morris’s chief partner, the biochemist Duane Gish. Between 1973 and 1999, Gish would participate in 247 debates, well over half of them at U.S. colleges and universities…. In a team format, Gish and Morris had typically demanded one hour for each side, and then rebuttals… Creationists usually won… but there were reasons. [Gish said] ‘You see, in the early years they came unprepared. They thought, “Oh, we are going to debate a preacher or an empty-headed religious nut.” … creationists like Morris and Gish could stay on script. They had mastered the use of slides and humor, while the evolutionists were neophytes.” (Pg. 216-217)
He continues, “The redundancy eventually made the debate content and strategy easy to quantify; that was first done by … biology professor David H. Milne, who debated Gish in the spring of 1979… [Milne said] ‘it is not easy to make evolution seem plausible to a skeptical lay audience in a one-hour presentation…’ He wrote it down in the now-famous article, ‘How to Debate with Creationists---and Win.’… [Milne noted] ‘creationist debaters do not rely upon tangible evidence in favor of their position… They only attacked evolution.’ To blunt their approach, Milne showed easy-to-understand evolutionary fossils and put the burden on creationism to explain them.” (Pg. 217-218)
He goes on, “[Biologist] Kenneth Miller… was the first to apply the Milnes program… [He recalls] ‘[My students] got me audiotapes of two debates… It was a stunner to listen to the debate… [Ashley] Montagu was destroyed by Gish.’ … To prepare a rebuttal, Miller asked geologists about the measures and read Morris’s book… ‘By his own account, I just flattened Morris,’ says Miller.” (Pg. 218)
He notes, “The opponents in the creationism debates were not always evolutionists. The young-earth creationists had also galvanized opposition from evangelical theistic evolutionists and old-earth creationists… Such an interbeliever debate was on display in 1992, when the young-earth Gish clashed with old-earth Hugh Ross of the ‘Reasons to Believe’ ministry on James Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family’ radio show. Ross had been on this Christian show the year before… it had provoked a thousand supportive letters, a few charges of heresy, and ‘some very emotional reactions.’” (Pg. 219)
He summarizes, “This book has tried to show the many places the argument has unfolded, all of them in some sense places where Darwin meets the Bible. As examples from the year 2000 show, the academic and cultural debate can be as explosive and the legal and political conflicts that typically make the newspaper headlines. But what of the future? Will it get worse and then better, or has science morally and technically already won? Will some form of creationism, on the other hand, gain ground in one of the areas covered by this book ---schools, textbooks, churches, museums, the science profession, public debates, media coverage, or the study of human nature? Reading crystal balls is a risky business. But speculation may be worth a try in three American contexts that might color the future of evolutionists and creationists. First is a new kind of social stratification of America, second the demise of apocalyptic creationism, and third the fall of Darwinism but survival of materialism in biology.” (Pg. 261)
He concludes, “The debate… has never given reason to either side to wave a white flag of surrender… Wherever Darwin meets the Bible---wherever biblical theism meets evolution---this rivalry is a likely product. The polarization seems inevitable and perennial, but one way to surmount it, at least momentarily, is through a shift in perspective… either side can be portrayed as an underdog. Great cultural arguments often produce a perceived underdog. It is a sympathetic status that evolutionists and creationists as causes and as people both may claim---depending on the circumstances.” (Pg. 269)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying creation/evolution issues.
Journalist Larry Witham wrote in the Preface to this 2002 book, “When I conducted my first interview for this book in 1995, I was thinking of a short journalistic project. The next five years flew by, of course… What results in these pages, I believe, is a story of people, places, events, and ideas that is both pro-science and pro-religion. But its predominant theme is how we, a religiously inclined society, try to understand nature, which is mostly the balliwick of science… This book talks mostly with scientists and science educators, and as to what science is as a whole, they all will have something to say. Theologians are in this conversation as well, but in fewer number… During this project, an occasional concern was that a reporter’s approach, which sometimes quotes the person on the street alongside the Ph.D. in the academy, might wrongly appear to legitimize one view or another… this book is a cultural history. Who can doubt that evolutionists and creationists, for example, are equal forces in American culture?”
He notes, “The great [Theodosius] Dobzhansky, who criticized Bible fundamentalists but never lost his ties to Russian orthodoxy, like Tillich’s religion as ‘ultimate concern,’ but he embraced Teilhard [de Chardin]. He served as president of the Teilhard Society and wrote ‘The Biology of Ultimate Concern.’ By now, his good friend [Ernst] Mayr advised him that ‘Teilhard is a step in the wrong direction,’ and materialists called his spiritualism ‘crazy’ or ‘pious bunk.’ But he was in good company, for no less a pioneer evolutionist than Sewall Wright, the geneticist, became a process biologist. Wright let slip his flight from a purely mechanistic view of life in his 1953 president’s address ‘Gene and Organism’ to the American Society of Naturalists. Not a few of his materialist students thought he had lost his grip. Though Mayr was an atheist, the New Synthesis brought him into close friendships with believers like Dobzhansky and also the British ornithologist David Lack. ‘An absolute true believer,’ Mayr says of the Englishman. In 1947, at the height of his evolutionist fame, Lack had abandoned agnosticism for an Anglican evangelical faith… Yet like the neo-orthodox, Lack preferred to compartmentalize his faith and his science. Unperturbed that a god God could reign over nature’s deadly struggle, he said that ‘man is surely unqualified to judge whether this [natural] ordering is in any way evil, or contrary to divine plan.’” (Pg. 31-32)
He recounts, “Philosopher of science Karl Popper cast … doubts on evolution when, in his 1976 autobiography, he called it more ‘metaphysical research program’ than real science. Only theories that could be ‘falsified’ by a test were scientific, he said, and so the proposition that dinosaurs evolved into birds was outside science. Before he died, in a much-cited letter to the editor from 1980, Popper conceded that evolution was valid on other lines of scientific logic, but his famous doubts are part of science’s cultural history. All of this debate added to the ‘demarcation problem’ that haunts science today. Who has the authority to demarcate what is true science from what is not---especially in the theoretical realms of the evolutionary past? The intellectual fallout of the 1960s gave creationists an important tool.” (Pg, 34-35)
He continues, “What the 1960s gave liberal Protestantism, meanwhile, was the God of evolution and the environmental movement. When physicist -theologian Ian Barbour published his influential ‘Issues in Science and Religion’ (1966), it for the first time laid out a coherent spectrum of science-religion issues. But questioning the validity of evolution was not one of them. If Barbour’s endorsement of process theology further distanced theological liberals from the evolution-creation debate, it meanwhile introduced them to a new one---the immanence of God in nature and what that says about ecology. Thereafter, Christians increasingly viewed ecology as the moral content of evolutionism. When historian and churchgoer Lynn White argued publicly that Saint Francis taught a brotherhood of species, the theme was clearer still.” (Pg. 35)
He notes, “After public education became compulsory in the early 1900s… the second generation of post-Darwinian biologists took over the writing of textbooks. They presented Darwin’s theory with great certainty… The most widely used life science textbook in that era was ‘A Civic Biology,’ the book from which Dayton high school teacher John Thomas Scopes purportedly taught human evolution. His prosecution in 1925 gave publishers their first lesson in the politics of state textbook markets. A year later [a new edition] came out with the word ‘evolution’ expunged…. [B]etween 1900 and 1930, the presentation of Darwinism in biology textbooks ranged from dogmatic certainty to near omission. With every new decade, moreover, textbook treatments might fluctuate…” (Pg. 153)
He reports, “The Darwin Centennial of 1959 had echoed across the United States… A century after ‘The Origin of Species,' universities had clearly become the main repository of Darwin’s legacy in American and key purveyors of the current consensus in evolutionary thought. Higher education could no longer imagine an era like the 1920s, when some college presidents soft-pedaled evolution to avoid fights with a state legislature or powerful trustee… Though university scientists today have bemoaned the new cultural criticism of science, there are no structures on teaching. The greatest complaint from natural scientists might be that, still, some students reject the theory of evolution.” (Pg. 162)
He notes, “Without doubt, the lead debater of the creationist cause was [Henry] Morris’s chief partner, the biochemist Duane Gish. Between 1973 and 1999, Gish would participate in 247 debates, well over half of them at U.S. colleges and universities…. In a team format, Gish and Morris had typically demanded one hour for each side, and then rebuttals… Creationists usually won… but there were reasons. [Gish said] ‘You see, in the early years they came unprepared. They thought, “Oh, we are going to debate a preacher or an empty-headed religious nut.” … creationists like Morris and Gish could stay on script. They had mastered the use of slides and humor, while the evolutionists were neophytes.” (Pg. 216-217)
He continues, “The redundancy eventually made the debate content and strategy easy to quantify; that was first done by … biology professor David H. Milne, who debated Gish in the spring of 1979… [Milne said] ‘it is not easy to make evolution seem plausible to a skeptical lay audience in a one-hour presentation…’ He wrote it down in the now-famous article, ‘How to Debate with Creationists---and Win.’… [Milne noted] ‘creationist debaters do not rely upon tangible evidence in favor of their position… They only attacked evolution.’ To blunt their approach, Milne showed easy-to-understand evolutionary fossils and put the burden on creationism to explain them.” (Pg. 217-218)
He goes on, “[Biologist] Kenneth Miller… was the first to apply the Milnes program… [He recalls] ‘[My students] got me audiotapes of two debates… It was a stunner to listen to the debate… [Ashley] Montagu was destroyed by Gish.’ … To prepare a rebuttal, Miller asked geologists about the measures and read Morris’s book… ‘By his own account, I just flattened Morris,’ says Miller.” (Pg. 218)
He notes, “The opponents in the creationism debates were not always evolutionists. The young-earth creationists had also galvanized opposition from evangelical theistic evolutionists and old-earth creationists… Such an interbeliever debate was on display in 1992, when the young-earth Gish clashed with old-earth Hugh Ross of the ‘Reasons to Believe’ ministry on James Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family’ radio show. Ross had been on this Christian show the year before… it had provoked a thousand supportive letters, a few charges of heresy, and ‘some very emotional reactions.’” (Pg. 219)
He summarizes, “This book has tried to show the many places the argument has unfolded, all of them in some sense places where Darwin meets the Bible. As examples from the year 2000 show, the academic and cultural debate can be as explosive and the legal and political conflicts that typically make the newspaper headlines. But what of the future? Will it get worse and then better, or has science morally and technically already won? Will some form of creationism, on the other hand, gain ground in one of the areas covered by this book ---schools, textbooks, churches, museums, the science profession, public debates, media coverage, or the study of human nature? Reading crystal balls is a risky business. But speculation may be worth a try in three American contexts that might color the future of evolutionists and creationists. First is a new kind of social stratification of America, second the demise of apocalyptic creationism, and third the fall of Darwinism but survival of materialism in biology.” (Pg. 261)
He concludes, “The debate… has never given reason to either side to wave a white flag of surrender… Wherever Darwin meets the Bible---wherever biblical theism meets evolution---this rivalry is a likely product. The polarization seems inevitable and perennial, but one way to surmount it, at least momentarily, is through a shift in perspective… either side can be portrayed as an underdog. Great cultural arguments often produce a perceived underdog. It is a sympathetic status that evolutionists and creationists as causes and as people both may claim---depending on the circumstances.” (Pg. 269)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying creation/evolution issues.
October 24, 2022
This is a fantastic summary of the ongoing creation-evolution debate. The conversation is so much more complex on both sides than many people understand. This book gives much of the background that we need to know. The book is about 20 years old and some important things have happened since, but this should be essential reading for anyone interested in this discussion.
May 24, 2012
Look to this Book for History -- Not Answers
Creationism and Evolution have been at loggerheads ever since Darwin's Origin of Species exploded onto the scene in 1859.
Particularly within the United States (which is the prescribed scope of this work,) the contest has been integrated within the political and social weave, especially in terms of education and public policy. Far from diminishing, the battle continues to rage and now the additional wrinkle of Intelligent Design is realigning and redefining the battle.
Witham does a remarkably good job of identifying the major players within the debate and the significant events. He remains remarkably neutral in terms of evaluating the validity of the arguments themselves, and sticks to providing a framework that any reasonable person from either camp, should be able to work through and come away with a better understanding of the issues and how they developed.
This is no small feat given the emotional depth that this argument plums on both sides.
Corallaries exist in terms of defining the arguments on both sides and the interested reader should be able to benefit from the bibliography what they are and where those sources can be found.
If you're approaching this issue in depth for the first time, or even if you already have taken a firm position, you should find this book valuable. You will come away with a better understanding of the history of the conflict and maybe even a better appreciation and understanding of both sides of the argument, if you can maintain enough independence to see it.
Creationism and Evolution have been at loggerheads ever since Darwin's Origin of Species exploded onto the scene in 1859.
Particularly within the United States (which is the prescribed scope of this work,) the contest has been integrated within the political and social weave, especially in terms of education and public policy. Far from diminishing, the battle continues to rage and now the additional wrinkle of Intelligent Design is realigning and redefining the battle.
Witham does a remarkably good job of identifying the major players within the debate and the significant events. He remains remarkably neutral in terms of evaluating the validity of the arguments themselves, and sticks to providing a framework that any reasonable person from either camp, should be able to work through and come away with a better understanding of the issues and how they developed.
This is no small feat given the emotional depth that this argument plums on both sides.
Corallaries exist in terms of defining the arguments on both sides and the interested reader should be able to benefit from the bibliography what they are and where those sources can be found.
If you're approaching this issue in depth for the first time, or even if you already have taken a firm position, you should find this book valuable. You will come away with a better understanding of the history of the conflict and maybe even a better appreciation and understanding of both sides of the argument, if you can maintain enough independence to see it.
June 6, 2008
This book details the fundamental conflicts between that bugaboo "EVOLUTION" and creationism and I.D.iot design.
It is a kind treatment, an understanding treatment of the various conflicts inherent in the conflict between faith and fact. There are some things to remember in this false conflict: 1. Faith trumps for the faithful. 2. For the believing, cognotive dissonance is a spur to belief.
3. Biblical internal conflicts, besides being a reason for a barbacue of the infidels, can and are mentally 'glossed' by the believers. If you believe, there is no conflict in the two Genisis accounts and chronologies. You do not entertain such anti-faith questioning. But any scientist is subjected to the most detailed scrutiny. I seem to recall 'motes and beams' here.
A good book, not a great book.
It is a kind treatment, an understanding treatment of the various conflicts inherent in the conflict between faith and fact. There are some things to remember in this false conflict: 1. Faith trumps for the faithful. 2. For the believing, cognotive dissonance is a spur to belief.
3. Biblical internal conflicts, besides being a reason for a barbacue of the infidels, can and are mentally 'glossed' by the believers. If you believe, there is no conflict in the two Genisis accounts and chronologies. You do not entertain such anti-faith questioning. But any scientist is subjected to the most detailed scrutiny. I seem to recall 'motes and beams' here.
A good book, not a great book.
May 26, 2016
An intriguing book, showing the many sides in the apparently binary creation vs. evolution debate. I could have written it myself, because I thought such a book was necessary, but now I don't have to. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews