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What Should Politicians Say about Evolution?

on March 21, 2015

Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, author, and a prominent proponent of intelligent design, discussed what politicians should say when questioned about evolution by an anti-creationist news media at a Faith and Law presentation on Friday, March 13, on Capitol Hill. Meyer observed that the news media considers that there are two acceptable responses from politicians to a question as to whether or not evolution is true. First, an affirmation of materialism (that matter is all that there is, and so life must have emerged from matter), and compartmentalism (religion has its proper place, but supernaturalism is excluded as a scientific explanation, and so evolution must be postulated as unguided). Meyer observed that Republicans are given a harder time, and are put on the defensive in responding to the question. The issue is complicated by the fact that the word “evolution” has no unequivocal meaning. It can mean: 1) Change over time, 2) Common descent, and 3) Natural selection. Darwin claimed all three, and “his core idea is that nature can do the work of the Creator.” Public school students today are taught all three meanings. Nevertheless, Meyer said that natural selection as the mechanism of evolution is increasingly questioned by evolutionary biologists.

The problem is exacerbated by the false perception of the scientific consensus. There is, Meyer said, “a huge disparity in the presentation of evolution.” Scientific associations insist on Neo-Darwinism, the doctrine that natural selection acts by genetic mutation, as the indisputable cause of evolution, and thus of the apparent biological order. But the rejection of criticism is unscientific, he said. Just as a computer requires new code to perform a new function, so a species requires new genetic information for an improved function, which cannot reasonably be developed by the transmission of errors in the gene sequence. Peer reviewed journals by evolutionary biologists therefore doubt natural selection, he said. They believe that in the course of natural history species changed over time, but are skeptical about unguided evolution being adequate to explain this.

The issue is critically important, because evolution is the creation story of materialism. “Evolution is a surrogate for world view issues,” according to Meyer. There are enormous consequences of accepting naturalism as a basis for law and public policy. Naturalistic ethicist Peter Singer of Princeton University holds that human babies are worth less than pigs. Singer maintains that in placing humans on par with the worth of animals, we are “catching up the Darwin.” Evolution is a likely indicator of world view. Meyer pointed to the Leopold and Loeb case (1924), in which students of a professor who was advancing Nietzsche’s philosophy of acting outside of Christian morality heeded the professor’s call to act out Nietzsche’s philosophy, and chose to murder a boy as a way of doing this. Clarence Darrow, who served as the ACLU’s defense attorney at the Scopes trial the following year, argued that though clearly guilty of the crime, they were not really responsible, and their sentence should be mitigated, because of the unguided evolutionary process that ultimately caused their existence. This, Meyer said, shows the potential of Darwinian ethics in law.

Belief in special creation on the other hand is conducive to creativity. Meyer noted that George Guilder of the Discovery Institute holds that much of contemporary western economics is materialistic in a philosophical sense. It assumes that there is a finite amount of wealth to be divided from the material riches of the earth, whereas in fact wealth is continuously produced by human creativity.

Meyer said that part of the problem politicians have is in a miscalculation of where the advantage lies. There are reasonable answers to questions the press asks about evolution that the public will support. A public figure does need to be prepared for follow-up questions about whether he or she believes in old or young earth creation, Meyer said, but one can effectively make the point that in the contemporary arguments among conventional, non-creationist scientists, the purposeless, unguided mechanism proposed by Neo-Darwinism is not a settled issue, but is seriously questioned in peer discussion. Additionally, the general public is supportive of an educational policy of “teaching the controversy.” This should cause politicians, especially conservative politicians supported by a conservative base, to be less evasive and apologetic about what they believe concerning creation and evolution.

  1. Comment by MarcoPolo on March 21, 2015 at 12:45 pm

    I’ve read this article three times now, and still cannot quite get the gist of it’s intent.
    Somebody please help me?

    Is “Evolution” still a stumbling block for politicians?
    Is “Creationism” still a consideration for any rational mind?

    Is this topic as combustible as ‘Global Warming’ with some politicians?

  2. Comment by RickPlasterer on March 23, 2015 at 8:40 pm

    Today at 2:52 PM
    Marco (and brookspj),

    I tried to convey Stephen Meyer’s concern that conservative and/or Republican politicians do not know how to respond when a hostile news media confronts them with the “gotcha” question of whether or not they believe in evolution. He pointed out that answering “no” or being doubtful is considered intellectually unrespectable. My understanding of his message is that a politician can point out that mainstream scientists are currently doubting the adequacy of natural selection in peer reviewed journals.

    He did use the expression “unguided,” in reference to natural selection, which seems to me perfectly reasonable, since modern science considers that nature has no intention, and is thus no guide.

    Rick Plasterer

  3. Comment by MarcoPolo on March 23, 2015 at 11:42 pm

    Thank you RickPlasterer.
    You cleared that up for me after re-reading again.
    Sorry, sometimes my brain is older than I am.

    Quite a topical and flammable subject….
    Good luck!

  4. Comment by Namyriah on March 21, 2015 at 12:59 pm

    Sitting on my desk are two volumes containing The Fundamentals, the Christian pamphlets published 1910-1915, defending orthodox Christianity, and the source of the label “Fundamentalist.” Here’s a shocker, folks: those original Fundamentalists who touched on the subject of evolution were OK with it. James Orr, the Scotch scholar who contributed the essay “The Early Narratives of Genesis,” wrote that “The language used was not that of modern science, but under divine guidance the sacred writer gives a broad, general picture which conveys a true idea of the order of the divine working in creation. . . . Man’s origin can only be explained through an exercise of direct creative activity, whatever subordinate factors evolution may have contributed.” Another contributor, George Frederick Writer, a professor at Oberlin, observed that “the world was not made in an instant, or even in one day (whatever period ‘day’ may signify) but in six days. Throughout the whole process there was an orderly progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life.” So, you see, the first Fundamentalists were not the backwoodsy, primitive literalists that the religion-bashers love to mock.

    Incidentally, William Jennings Bryan, famed for his defenseof the Bible in the 1925 “monkey trial,” admitted that he did not believe the six days of creation in Genesis were literal 24-hour days.

  5. Comment by Valerie Hurst on March 21, 2015 at 1:06 pm

    My niece is attending Lee University, an ultra-conservative college operated by the Church of God. She is majoring in biology. The college has a statement of faith that students must assent to, but it is purely theological, and says nothing whatever about science. I wish people on both left and right would please stop trying to tag religious people as “anti-science.” Every Christian college in America has science departments, and those departments teach the same scientific principles as secular colleges. The periodic table of the elements is the same everywhere.

  6. Comment by Trevor Thomas on March 21, 2015 at 5:11 pm

    I’ve dealt with this myself. (See: “Answering the Evolution Question”: http://www.trevorgrantthomas.com/2015/02/answering-evolution-question.html) The evolution question really isn’t about evolution. What reporters are really attempting to get at are a politician’s position in the “Moral Wars,” and his/her views on the nature of man. For liberalism to prosper, any notion of God or absolute truth to which man is ultimately accountable must at least be compromised, if not completely rejected.
    This is why evolution—or, better put, Darwinian evolution (D.E.)—is deeply embedded in the foundation of liberalism.

  7. Comment by yolo on March 22, 2015 at 1:56 am

    It’s also why it’s fundamental to Marxism. The part about economics gets right at the premise of Marxism, that materialism is limited not created. That is why every Marxist rejects the free market in favor of central planning. That’s why they are Malthusian and will invent famine where none exists (Ukraine).

  8. Comment by MarcoPolo on March 23, 2015 at 8:10 am

    I beg to differ, yolo!
    I think your example using free markets, points directly to the Creationist theory.
    If free markets are continually being created, versus being recycled or reorientated, that tends to divert the premise away from a ‘central planning’, which could be considered more of a parallel to there being a God created existence.

    Personally, I think Nature is as close as we can come to ‘seeing’ and appreciating God’s creation!

    I don’t see the conflict that some are concerned about. But then, I tend to be a rationalist.

  9. Comment by Kangaroo52 on March 21, 2015 at 6:17 pm

    Speaking of evolution and politicians, the fascists and communists were all huge fans of Darwinism, as if justified elimination of the “unfit.” Do away with the belief in a soul and in the image of God in every human being, and all sorts of horrible things happen. Karl Marx intended to designated his book Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin politely declined.

  10. Comment by brookspj on March 23, 2015 at 11:33 am

    And the Inquisition were fans of the Pope. The KKK were fans of Protestant Christianity. And the Nazis were at least vaguely familiar enough with Luther to know he shared their hatred of Jews and use that to their advantage. I’ve heard the “guilt by association” argument before, which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual science behind evolution. What else you got?

  11. Comment by JustNTyme on March 24, 2015 at 8:59 am

    Darwin also inspired the polygenists, the racists who taught that blacks and whites had different ancestry, and that blacks were a different and inferior species.

  12. Comment by yolo on March 22, 2015 at 1:47 am

    What Republican candidates should be doing is making Democrat candidates that are pro-abort Darwinian own eugenics. This is in Rules for Radicals. That’s where Democrats and their lapdogs picked it up at. Republicans should designate as keynote speakers survivors of abortion and regretting children of homosexual marriage. The Democrats should own the seeds that they sow.

  13. Comment by brookspj on March 23, 2015 at 11:13 am

    “The issue is complicated by the fact that the word “evolution” has no unequivocal meaning.” The same can be said of intelligent design. In fact advocates like Meyers can never seem to decide what their position or agenda really is: 1. Are they trying to provide evidence of a legitimate counter theory of the development of life from evolution, 2. Simply argue that a process such as evolution would require the direction of an intelligent agent, or 3. Support the teaching of Christian creationism in the classroom. Every time someone claims ID is really just creationism by another name, the ID advocates cry foul point one or two people on their board whose Jewish or agnostic, then turn around and argue for teaching Genesis in science class. Then when asked why not teach creation stories of other religions, they say no because that’s indoctrination. Make up your mind already.

  14. Comment by brookspj on March 23, 2015 at 11:28 am

    “They believe that in the course of natural history species changed over time, but are skeptical about unguided evolution being adequate to explain this.”
    Except it’s not unguided. Natural selection means nature is the arbitrator here between which mutations prosper and which don’t based upon which species is best suited for the environment. If you’re a Christian or a theist of any persuasion then you would simply have to acknowledge that if God is guiding the process He is uses nature in his process to determine the course of evolution. If you are a scientist who doesn’t believe in natural selection, but does believe in God, then the burden lies with you to find an instance in which nature does not determine which species prospers. Can you do that?
    The author’s line of argument is contradictory. First, he’s calling into question the scientific data for evolution, which is at least a scientific way of arguing. But then, he completely rolls over this method of critique by arguing instead not from the basis of which idea is scientifically true or closest to the truth, but instead what the worst case scenario of holding one idea over the other might be. This is not scientific. Scientists are compelled to pursue objective truth to all ends and damn the consequences. States and institutions should have the power to set boundaries on scientific experimentation itself based upon the morality of the times, but not on the sharing of scientific data or the teaching of objective truth based on science.

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