The Jeanie and the Bottle: The Eternal Debate That Won't Go Away!

Two hundred years ago, on February 12th, the antichrist was born. Robert and Susannah Darwin probably didn’t realize when their son, Charles, was brought into the world that he would go on to become such an ignoble figure in the hearts and minds of millions of conservative Christians. But, when he went on to write his seminal treatise, “The Origin of Species,” he did more than just begin an intellectual discussion on a subject that had here-to-fore not been seriously broached, he brought about a schism between the scientific and religious communities that to this day is as hotly contested as any issue since the dawn of man.

Where do we come from? It is a question that has preoccupied and consumed us since the days of Moses. And for thousands of years, the answer – the biblical account in Genesis - was unequivocally and undisputedly accepted as fact. And while there had been a few forays into variations on the answer, among them William Paley’s “Natural Theology,” Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s “Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics,” and Robert Chambers’ “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” not until 1859 was there finally an authoritative analysis that not only proffered a contrary opinion to the answer, but also at its heart challenged long-standing precepts and assumptions that had been instilled in the collective conscious of society. The fallout of Darwin’s work has been the focal point of a never-ending dispute between academicians and some biblical scholars ever since.

The book’s full title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” Not until its 6th edition in 1872 was the title changed to “The Origin of Species.” It introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. Darwin's book contained a wealth of evidence that the diversity of life arose through a branching pattern of evolution and common descent – evidence which he had accumulated on the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s and expanded through research, correspondence, and experiments after his return.

Darwin's theory is based on key observations and inferences drawn from them:

1. Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce themselves population growth would result.
2. Yet populations remain roughly the same size, with small changes.
3. Resources such as food are limited, and are relatively stable over time.
4. A struggle for survival ensues.
5. In sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are identical.
6. Some of these variations directly affect the ability of an individual to survive in a given environment.
7. Much of this variation is inheritable, what Darwin referred to as pangenesis.
8. Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce, while individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce.
9. The individuals that survive are most likely to leave their inheritable traits to future generations, again pangenesis.
10. This slowly effected process results in populations that adapt to the environment over time, and ultimately, after interminable generations, these variations accumulate to form new varieties, and ultimately, new species, which Darwin called natural selection.


Darwin was not without his critics, both in the scientific and religious communities. While most scientists agreed that evolution had occurred, some disputed Darwin’s natural selection hypothesis. Subsequent theories to explain evolution sprang up, such as Saltationism, which is the belief that new species arise as a result of large mutations; Orthogenesis, which said that life had the innate tendency to change in an unilinear fashion towards ever-greater perfection; Theistic Evolution, which argued that a God intervened in the process of evolution to guide it in such a way as to be considered designed; and Neo-Lamarckism, which proposed that characteristics acquired during the course of an organism's life, such as changes caused by the use or disuse of a particular organ, could be inherited by the next generation. Natural selection was not generally accepted as the main driving force of evolution by scientists until the 1930s when the work of a number of biologists and statisticians (especially R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J.B.S. Haldane) merged Darwinian selection theory with sophisticated statistical understandings of Mendelian genetics as part of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Darwin’s heredity hypothesis (pangenesis) has also been challenged by scientists as being deeply flawed. A migration of hereditary material from all parts of the body to the sexual organs and the subsequent inheritance to the offspring, had already been refuted during Darwin's lifetime. Additionally, Darwin was wrong to believe that acquired characteristics, for example changes in organs caused by use and disuse, are heritable.

But, while the scientific community may have picked at Darwin’s theory, the religious community’s response was mixed. Darwin’s old Cambridge tutors Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow dismissed the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity." In 1860, the publication of “Essays and Reviews” by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin, with its ideas including higher criticism attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued that miracles broke God’s laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and praised “Mr. Darwin’s masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.” Asa Gray discussed teleology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Gray’s pamphlet on theistic evolution, “Natural Selection is not inconsistent with Natural Theology.”

“Origins” contradicted widely held religious beliefs that held that God ordained not only the laws of nature but also directly created kinds. The idea of supernatural design in nature served two purposes; one scientific, and the other religious. Design made nature orderly, and hence made science possible. Supernatural design also gave sanction to "the moral and religious endeavours of man." Religious controversy was fuelled in part by one of Darwin's most vigorous defenders, Thomas Henry Huxley, who opposed church control over science and coined the term Darwinism in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review and hailed the book as, "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism", promoting scientific naturalism over theology and praising the usefulness of Darwin's ideas while expressing professional reservations about Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new species, Huxley compared Darwin's achievement to that of Nicolaus Copernicus in explaining planetary motion.

In "What is Darwinism?" the theologian Charles Hodge argued that Darwin's theories were tantamount to atheism. This is an argument that had been made by many almost immediately after Darwin's first publication. As Hodge pointed out, evolution does not seem to originate from a divine source, and some viewed God as a less powerful force in the universe. In a legendary confrontation at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin's explanation. In the ensuing debate Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxley established himself as “Darwin’s bulldog”. Both sides came away feeling victorious, with Huxley claiming that on being asked by Wilberforce whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side, Huxley muttered: “The Lord has delivered him into my hands” and replied that he “would rather be descended from an ape than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood.”

A version of evolution loosely related to Darwin's ideas was popularized among the middle classes of Europe and United States by people such as Herbert Spencer, much later given the pejorative label of Social Darwinists, who promoted the virtues of social competition in fields outside biology. While few religious controversies continue to this day, some scientific and religious thinkers dismiss apparent contradictions by simply rationalizing that not all questions that can be asked have answers "in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present." Other modern day opinions have instead integrated the theory into their religion. This can be seen in the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII addressed the topic in an Encyclical in 1950, where he stated that “the Teaching authority does not forbid that in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquired into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existence and living matter- … faith obliges us to hold that souls were immediately created by God.”

Many of the debates, however, did not center around Darwin's specifically proposed mechanism for evolution — natural selection — but rather on the concept of evolution in general. Though Darwin was too sickly to defend his work in public, four of his close scientific friends took up the cause of promoting Darwin's work and defending it against critics. Chief among these were Huxley, who argued for the evidence of evolution in anatomical morphology, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the Royal botanist at Kew Gardens. In the United States, Asa Gray helped to facilitate American publication of the book and worked in close correspondence with Darwin to assure the theory's spread, despite the opposition of one of the most prominent scientists in the country at the time, geologist and anatomist Louis Agassiz, who held that human races were separately created species.

Today, the most vocal opponents of Darwin’s work are not scientists, nor even the Catholic Church. They are fundamentalist Christian groups who consider evolution as a threat to their belief systems. Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is the religious belief that the Heavens, Earth, and life on Earth were created by direct acts of God during a short period, sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Its adherents are those Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days, taking the Hebrew text of Genesis as a literal account. Though the movement declined in the 18th century with the development of the scientific revolution, it saw a revival in the 20th century.

YEC is normally characterized as opposing evolution, though it also opposes many claims and theories in the fields of physics and chemistry (especially absolute dating methods), geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and any other fields of science that have developed theories or made claims incompatible with the Young Earth version of world history. (See creation science, flood geology, creation geophysics and objections to evolution for details of disagreements.) YECs are fundamentally opposed to any explanation for the origins of anything which replaces God as the universal creator as stated in the Bible, whether it be the origins of biological diversity, the origins of life or the origins of the universe itself. This has led some YECs to criticize intelligent design, a proposal which some see as an alternative form of creationism, for not taking a stand on the age of the Earth, special creation, or even the identity of the designer. Some YECs see this as too compromising.

YECs regard the Bible as a historically accurate, factually inerrant record of natural history. They accept its authority as the central organizing text for human life — the sole indisputable source of knowledge on every topic with which it deals. As Henry Morris, a leading YEC, explained it, Christians who flirt with less-than-literal readings of biblical texts are also flirting with theological disaster. For the vast majority of YECs, an allegorical reading of the Genesis accounts of Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel would undermine core Christian doctrines like the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to Morris, Christians must "either ... believe God's Word all the way, or not at all." Therefore, YECs take the account of Genesis to be a historical account of the origin of the Earth and life. The consequence is that many YECs regard Christians who do not regard Genesis as historically accurate as being inconsistent.

YEC was abandoned as a mainstream scientific concept around the start of the 19th century. Many scientists see it as a faith position, and regard attempts to prove it scientifically as being little more than religiously motivated pseudoscience. In 1997, a poll by the Gallup organization showed that 5% of US adults with professional degrees in science took a YEC view. In the aforementioned poll 40% of the same group said that they believed that life, including humans, had evolved over millions of years, but that God guided this process; a view described as theistic evolution, while 55% held a view of "naturalistic evolution" in which God took no part in this process. Some scientists who believe in creationism are known to subscribe to other forms such as Old Earth Creationism which posits an act of creation that took place millions or billions of years ago, with variations on the timing of the creation of mankind.

In the United States, more than in the rest of the world, creationism, be it young earth, old earth or gap, has become centered in the political controversy over creation and evolution in public education, and whether teaching creationism in science classes conflicts with the separation of church and state. Currently, the controversy comes in the form of whether advocates of the Intelligent Design movement who wish to "Teach the Controversy" in science classes have conflated science with religion.

Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God that avoids specifying the nature or identity of the designer. The idea was developed by a group of American creationists who reformulated their argument in the creation-evolution controversy to circumvent court rulings that prohibit the teaching of creationism as science. Intelligent design's leading proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank, believe the designer to be the God of Christianity. Advocates of intelligent design argue that it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations. Many evangelicals who do not accept typical creationism explanations, but who are predisposed against evolution, consider Intelligent Design a viable solution.

"Intelligent design" originated in response to the 1987 United States Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard ruling involving separation of church and state. Its first significant published use was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes. Several additional books on "intelligent design" were published in the 1990s. By the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents had begun clustering around the Discovery Institute and more publicly advocating the inclusion of intelligent design in public school curricula. With the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture serving a central role in planning and funding, the "intelligent design movement" grew increasingly visible in the late 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the 2005 "Dover trial" which challenged the intended use of intelligent design in public school science classes. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a group of parents of high-school students challenged a public school district requirement for teachers to present intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative "explanation of the origin of life". U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and that the school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The most infamous trial in American history involving evolution occured in 1925. "The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes," or what has often been referred to as the "Scopes Monkey Trial" was a case that tested the Butler Act, which made it unlawful, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, "to teach 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." This is often interpreted as meaning that the law forbade the teaching of any aspect of the theory of evolution. The case was a critical turning point in the United States' creation-evolution controversy. The trial pitted two of the preeminent legal minds of the time against one another; three-time presidential candidate, Congressman and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan headed up the prosecution and prominent trial attorney Clarence Darrow spoke for the defense. Scopes lost the trial, as well as his appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, but the Court set aside the verdict because of a technicality. It found that the judge had imposed the fine, instead of the jury, which was not allowed at that time.

Attorney General L.D. Smith immediately announced that he would not seek a retrial, while Scopes' lawyers offered angry comments on the stunning decision. In 1968, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas 393 U.S. 97 (1968) that such bans contravene the Establishment Clause because their primary purpose is religious. Tennessee had repealed the Butler Act the previous year.

The phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus definition. William Dembski, for example, has written that "Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature". The characteristics of intelligence are assumed by intelligent design proponents to be observable without specifying what the criteria for the measurement of intelligence should be. Dembski, instead, asserts that "in special sciences ranging from forensics to archaeology to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), appeal to a designing intelligence is indispensable." How this appeal is made and what this implies as to the definition of intelligence are topics left largely unaddressed. Seth Shostak, a researcher with the SETI Institute, refuted Dembski's comparison of SETI and intelligent design, saying that intelligent design advocates base their inference of design on complexity—the argument being that some biological systems are too complex to have been made by natural processes—while SETI researchers are looking primarily for artificiality.

Eugenie Scott, along with Glenn Branch and other critics, has argued that many points raised by intelligent design proponents are arguments from ignorance. In the argument from ignorance, a lack of evidence for one view is erroneously argued to constitute proof of the correctness of another view. Scott and Branch say that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance because it relies on a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: lacking a natural explanation for certain specific aspects of evolution, we assume intelligent cause. They contend most scientists would reply that the unexplained is not unexplainable, and that "we don't know yet" is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside science. Particularly, Michael Behe's demands for ever more detailed explanations of the historical evolution of molecular systems seem to assume a false dichotomy, where either evolution or design is the proper explanation, and any perceived failure of evolution becomes a victory for design. In scientific terms, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" for naturalistic explanations of observed traits of living organisms. Scott and Branch also contend that the supposedly novel contributions proposed by intelligent design proponents have not served as the basis for any productive scientific research.

But not all the criticism for intelligent design or creationism comes from the scientific community. As far back as 415AD, St. Augustine wrote in his book titled, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis,”

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Augustine is clearly calling for a more literary interpretation of Genesis, as opposed to the more orthodox, literalist interpretation that biblical scholars and theologians have held for centuries. In so doing he leaves matters of creation to that which is unseen and unobservable and instead chooses to focus on matters of faith and the Christian life, which is observable in all of us.

Centuries later, the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant Christian faith, is saying that Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christian faith. Organizers of a special conference to mark the 150th Anniversary of Darwin's “Origin of Species,” hosted by Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University from March 3rd to the 7th, said at a press conference last September to announce the event that supporters of creationism and its alter-ego, intelligent design (ID), would not be invited. Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc of the Gregorian University said at the time that arguments "that cannot be critically defined as being science or philosophy or theology did not seem feasible to include in a dialogue at this level."

In "Intelligent Design as a Theological Problem," George Murphy argues against the view that life on Earth in all its forms is direct evidence of God's act of creation (Murphy quotes Phillip Johnson's claim that he is speaking "of a God who acted openly and left his fingerprints on all the evidence."). Murphy argues that this view of God is incompatible with the Christian understanding of God as "the one revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus." The basis of this theology is Isaiah 45:15, "Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior." This verse inspired Blaise Pascal to write, "What meets our eyes denotes neither a total absence nor a manifest presence of the divine, but the presence of a God who conceals himself." In the “Heidelberg Disputation,” Martin Luther referred to the same Biblical verse to propose his "theology of the cross": "That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened ... He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross."

In conclusion, the debate goes on. The lines that were drawn and, some would say, etched in stone 150 years ago have not been erased. Proponents on both sides have not abated in their sentiments. It would be simple to say that the differences between science and creationism or Intelligent Design can be summed up by saying that science asks what conclusions can be drawn from the facts and creationism or Intelligent Design asks what facts can be found to support the conclusion, and that would be accurate. It would also be irrelevant. The basic questions of who we are and where we came from, by their very nature, provoke answers that cannot help but stir the pot of volatile emotions. For it is not the seen and easily measurable things in life that consume us; it is the unseen and inestimable things that preoccupy our national discourse. Neither side seems willing to yield or give ground, and we have Darwin to thank for it. So, happy birthday, Charles. Many happy returns.


All links taken from Wikipedia.