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The Battle Has Long Raged Between Science and Religion to Explain the Origin of Mankind. Now There's a Growing Move to Put God Back in the Driving Seat. Guess Which Side George Bush is On?

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

A SIGN in the Natural History Museum proclaims that the dinosaur skeleton in the foyer is a century old. This is odd, because it looks much more ancient. And of course, it is. The 26-metre-long fossil remains of the Diplodocus may have been gifted to Britain in 1904, but the creature - a long-necked, long-tailed vegetarian - lived around 150 million years ago, which is bad news for creationists labouring under the biblical belief that the Earth is just 10,000 years old.

While the planet spins on and the United Nations warns that the great apes will be extinct within a generation, Britain is on the brink of a major ideological battle over whether mankind came down from the trees millions of years ago, or was created by a divine force with a handful of dirt and a spare rib just a few millennia past.

Ever since Galileo was imprisoned for successfully arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the question of man's origins has been a breeding ground for scientific controversy. In the battle of the Bible against science, however, the evolutionists had always won hands down.

Now, however, in America, more than a century of scientific orthodox evolutionary theory is being challenged in an evangelical fight for the souls of the nation's children.

Charles Darwin has had a long reign: the father of evolution, the man on the back of Bank of England GBP10 notes, the king of the apes. Dismissed as "a dangerous idea" on publication more than 150 years ago, his theory of evolution - that natural selection caused gradual biological changes over time, that all species change and none is immutable, that humans and apes share the same ancestor - has withstood the test of time and scientific experiment. Indeed, far from disproving the theory, physicists, geologists, chemists and molecular biologists, have supported, refined and expanded evolutionary theory far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.

Until now.

Darwin himself insisted that his theory had nothing to do with the beginning of primordial "life" itself, but it knocked the legs from under the prevailing Christian belief stated plainly in Genesis 1:27: that "God created man in his own image".

Today, the accepted orthodoxy of Darwinism is being challenged by an idea called "intelligent design", which argues that life on earth is too complicated to be explained by accidental evolution. The movement is powered by sceptical scientists and financed by fundamentalist Christians who detect the hand of a designer in the amazing complexity and diversity of life on earth. And it is ripping America apart.

Although they argue that life is too perfect to be an accident, the ID network is careful not to be categorised with creationists who take literally the Biblical tenet that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The strongest proponents of intelligent design are scientists and Christians such as the network's Kansas-based managing director John Calvert, but they don't push a Christian line. They simply say that there is strong evidence of some kind of purpose in fossils, cell structures and DNA. They point out that fossil records show more evidence of sudden appearances and disappearances than they do of gradual change. They do not deny micro-evolution, changes within species, but argue that the leap from one to another - ape to man, fish to fowl - has never been observed.

At the top of the pile is the theory of "irreducible complexity" proposed by microbiologist Michael Behe. According to Behe, life, with its complex DNA structure, is just too ingenious an entity to be explained with reference to the theories of an out-dated naturalist. It might just be, ID theorists argue, that some sort of designing force - God, perhaps - intervened to give natural selection a hand.

Ranged against them is almost the entire world's scientific community, who are furious at the pseudo-science being pedalled by the ID movement.

Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the professor for the public understanding of science who has championed Darwinism for nearly 20 years, likens the debate to a war between the forces of ignorance and the forces of culture and education, with the forces of ignorance enjoying the advantage of having their man in the White House. In America, where this argument rages rather than smoulders, President Bush has voiced his support for a choice of creationism and evolution to be taught in US schools.

"Intelligent design is not a scientific argument but a religious one, " says Dawkins, who last week took to the pages of The Guardian to bludgeon creationists once again. "It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class, but it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in chemistry class or the stork theory belongs in a sex education class."

There is no research to back ID theory, no peer-reviewed scientific journals, no positive evidence; just holes picked in the deficiences of evolution, which all admit are manifold.

Seated, Lincoln-like in the Natural History Museum cafe, the marble statue of Darwin, with his bulbous nose and elder beard, looks quite benign. Born in Shrewsbury in 1809, Charles Robert Darwin studied medicine in Edinburgh and theology at Cambridge before developing his scientific theories on a voyage of discovery around the South American coast aboard the HMS Beagle.

His observations eventually led to his shattering book, The Origin Of Species, which sold out in one day and remains the leading work on natural philosophy and the history of mankind.

You have to walk past Darwin's sculpture and into the Natural History Museum's GBP30 million Darwin Centre to drink from the well of evolutionary theory.

Although the building's name pays homage to the great man, its mission is simply to bring science to the public in the same understandable fashion as The Origin Of The Species did when it was published in 1859.

The public only come to the first floor but above, flanking a wide atrium, scientists are hard at work on naming, describing and categorising species, plants, minerals: everything that is known to exist. Behind these doors they research parasites, malaria and disease.

The centre has one of the best DNA signaturing facilities in Europe, holding the DNA data of every species, including those which are extinct.

Taxonomist Carmen Thomas leads the way through two sets of airlocked doors and we enter a chilly, dimly-lit, 21st century Noah's ark. Ranged across the centre's seven floors are 22 million samples of the diversity of life on Earth: row upon row of sliding steel cabinets, one of which Thomas opens to reveal jars containing samples of an alien-looking subspecies of starfish. These creatures live at the very bottom of the ocean and are related to starfish but have long, powerful tendrils that pick up debris from the water or prise open mussels and pull out the flesh.

The taxonomic organisation of species is hierarchical. Each species belongs to a genus, each genus belongs to a family, and so on through order, class, phylum, and kingdom. There are about five million species on Earth and there are more here than the taxonomists - who analyse and categorise species - can catch up with. "We know these are prawns but we don't know what type, " says Thomas, cheerfully pointing to a jar-full of anaemic-looking linguoustine-like creatures.

DOWN we go, into the bowels of the museum, past jars of alcohol- bleached sea anemones and sponges, many of whose labels are handwritten (the collection stretches back to a 17th century salamander preserved in wine spirits). Still we descend, past crocodiles and komodo dragons until, in the basement, we come across Thomas's favourite specimen. Set in a thigh-high jar next to a barracuda caught off Cornwall and close to "Stanley", the first sturgeon ever found in British waters, is the famous coelacanth: the fish out of time.

The coelacanth is a living fossil, a fish that was around at the time of the dinosaurs and, like the dinosaurs, it seemed to have disappeared until 1938 when Marjorie Courtney-Latimer found one in South Africa. The discovery was astonishing, not only because the fish ought not to have survived, but because its muscular paired fins - just visible now through the cloudy preservative - strongly resembled the limbs of amphibians.

"People thought this creature could have actually walked on the bottom of the seabed, " says Thomas. "So they believed it could be related to the first rhipidistian creature that came out of the water and walked on land. That was the sensation: they thought it was the missing link. Now we know better: they don't walk, they hover, and there is no relation between this and the first rhipidistian."

There is, it seems, no first rhipidistian among the millions of samples, and, though the Australian lungfish at least offers evidence of the transition from water to land, no species fits the bill exactly. For the natural selection theory, that lack creates a yawning void, into which the anti-evolutionists - such as Philip Bell - are happy to leap.

When he's not shifting office furniture across Leicester - as he is today - Philip Bell will move heaven and Earth to talk about creation. "When I walk around the Natural History Museum I'm always surprised how Darwinism has not moved on, " says Bell. "We see variation, what people call micro-evolution, but no new kinds of plants or animals are involved.

You can get some big changes but they never cross the systematic barriers that have existed since taxonomy was invented."

A trained scientist and former school teacher, Bell is now a full- time worker for Answers In Genesis, an evangelical organisation that tries to provide answers to a "doubting world in a so-called age of science". Bell is having a busy week, moving office and preparing to spend months travelling the country talking to church congregations about evolution.

It was while studying zoology at Swansea University that Bell began to have doubts about the science of evolution. "I was a true believer in science, so when I was told that flying insects evolved from insects without wings, I expected to be presented with examples of things in between. Wings are very complex but there were no examples of anything in transition. I discovered much less evidence for evolution than I thought."

Bell is no Bible-bashing ranter.

Thoughtful and pleasant, he'd rather go round draughty church halls proselytising than follow in the footsteps of those American Christains who exhaustively lobby the government to introduce intelligent design or creationism into the classroom. "I will take every opportunity to go into schools for religious education classes, but I don't believe Christians should be out there lobbying government to force people to teach something they don't believe in. There are other ways."

One of these "other ways" is to start your own school - as Christian millionaire car dealer, Reg Vardy, has done in the north of England, through the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, under the auspices of the government's city academies programme, which allows private investors to influence a school's ethos in exchange for initial sponsorship. Three Emmanuel schools in Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Doncaster have a strong religious ethic and don't hide their attachment to creationism. Critics like Dawkins were outraged by schools inspectorate Ofsted's decision not to pursue inquiries into the inclusion of creationism in biology lessons. The Foundation says the biblical view of creation is taught in RE classes and that the science curriculum follows national guidelines. For now, Nigel McQuoid, director of the Emmanuel Schools Foundation says only that: "We are watching the current debate on intelligent design with interest but do not wish to become involved at this stage."

Elsewhere, there is growing anxiety over the teaching of science and religion in faith schools. Almost half of the government's planned new flagship city schools in England are sponsored by religious organisations, prompting fears that the programme could become a Trojan horse for radical evangelicals. In Scotland, Jack McConnell has signalled that he would like to see the city academy concept tried out and the Emmanuel Schools Foundation has indicated its willingness to come north of the Border.

The "let them discuss it" argument deployed by President Bush is seen as another Trojan horse, a way of getting creationism into schools under the cover of science.

"I think part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, " Bush said recently. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas. The answer is yes." In Richard Dawkins's view, the "teach both sides" argument sounds reasonable until you realise there are no "two sides".

Evolution is science and riven with academic controversy, he says, while intelligent design is bunkum.

The debate over intelligent design is not about two views of science; it's about two ideologies of where we came from. In education, as in life, this has profound implications. These are big questions which all too often we avoid grappling with.

Opponents of intelligent design brand its supporters as back- door creationists, and creationists themselves ask the same question of the movement. The obvious question raised by the argument for intelligent design is: who is the designer?

For the moment, the movement artfully dodges the question of the maker's identity. But eventually, the designer will have to be subjected to scientific scrutiny.

Otherwise, the whole intelligent-designas-science movement will continue to be dismissed as a wedge whose purpose is to crack open US public schools to fundamentalist Christian religious teaching.

The US Constitution keeps the Bible out of the classroom which is why, critics argue, creationism is now masquerading as science. But the intelligent design movement is on the march and it is a powerful lobby. The attempt to de-throne Darwin is levering open classroom doors in states such as Kansas, Georgia and Ohio.

Last month, the Kansas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to allow teaching alternatives to evolution like intelligent design. Kansas is the tip of the iceberg. There are campaigns in 40 of America's 50 states to have creationism in the classroom. Research shows that 45% of Americans believe in the creationist, "recent Earth" view that the planet is only 10,000 years old.

INTELLIGENT design is the bridge to getting the Bible back in the classroom that America's Christians have been praying for since the Supreme Court banned prayer in school in 1963. In Kansas, supporters of intelligent design have a six-to-four majority on the Board of Education and, at a crucial meeting next month, they will undoubtedly vote to allow the theory to be taught in schools within the state.

But the issue is bigger than that. The debate will echo through next year's school board elections and Republican primaries and on into the congressional and presidential elections.

Back in London, my behind-the-scenes tour of the Natural History Museum has reached the genesis of evolution. Here, behind a steel- barred glass cabinet, are some of the 170-year-old specimens that Darwin collected on the voyage of the Beagle. They were donated by his great, great-grandaughter who now works in the museum as a botanist. Confronted by the building blocks of the theory of evolution, where does Carmen Thomas - Italian, Catholic and religious - stand?

Thomas replies that, like many scientists, she feels divided over that most divisive of questions - creation or evolution - and recognises the different spheres in which faith and science hold sway. "It is very difficult. I say to people that they have to make their own minds up but it's wrong to close your mind, " she says. "I believe that, yes, there is evolution but perhaps it is ordained by a higher authority. We have been given the seed by God. I believe in something bigger but evolution is separate from that. I know there are many scientists who believe in God and separate the two issues."

Even here, in this temple to Darwinism, doubt is a possibility.

Source: Sunday Herald

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