Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Paleontologist Richard Owen, the first head of the Natural History Department of
the British Museum, was an idealist sympathetic to the German Naturphilosophie who
believed in gradual progressive transformation of species, governed by laws of form,
away from the original Platonic archetypes. Such transformation was always in terms of
a “predetermining Will” and final purpose. An essentialist, he remained implacably
opposed to Darwin’s functional explanation of natural selection, based as it was on
chance, but resented being labeled by Darwin a believer in the immutability of species.
(Owen is widely believed to have coached Bishop Wilberforce in his celebrated 1860
debate with Thomas Huxley, who defended Darwin’s theory.)
The Duke of Argyll, another nomothetic creationist, also rejected miraculous
creation. The creative power is lawful: the Creator works through secondary causes of
development, he argued in his Reign of Law (1867). “Creation has had a History [and
also] a Method”—a method amenable to scientific investigation (Primeval Man [nd]:41).
The adaptation and arrangement of natural forces, which can compass these modifications of animal
structure, in exact proportion to the need of them, is an adaptation and arrangement which is in the nature
of Creation. It can only be due to the working of a power which is in the nature of Creative power.
[Quoted in Gillespie 1979:98]
Argyll later conceded that providential evolution was possible, though he remained
skeptical, and remained committed to the existence of purpose in nature and opposed to
Darwin’s positivist evolution. Religion, he insisted, must remain a necessary aspect of
science.
William Whewell,a Cambridge University mathematician and logician, Anglican
priest, author of a Bridgewater Treatise on astronomy and physics and of the authoritative
History of the Inductive Sciences and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (he coined the
word “scientist,” as well the names of several of the geological epochs) felt that purpose
in nature was self-evident. Natural, secondary causes were not sufficient to explain
origins, and therefore the First Cause, God the Creator, must be appealed to in the end
(Bowler 1984:203-4). However, Whewell and other nomothetic creationists prepared the
way for the relinquishing of the notion of purpose and final cause in nature by later
scientists.
The architects of the demise of teleology were not atheistic materialists but pious men like Herschel,
Whewell, and Mill, who thought they were doing religion good service by limiting the domain of the
accidental and of the miraculous. To them the more the empirical world was shown to be governed by
secondary causes acting according to God-given laws, the more powerful and omniscient God was shown
to be. [Hull 1973:63]
But it was Darwin who insisted that the break be made completely. “When
Sedgwick accused Darwin, on the publication of the Origin of Species, of trying to break
the chains that bound final causes to secondary ones he was right” (Gillespie 1979:15).
In the new positivist conception of science, secondary causes alone, without reference to
final cause or purpose, constituted scientific explanation. “Just as science shifted from a
theological ground to a positive one, so religion—at least among many scientists and
laymen influence by science—shifted from religion as knowledge to religion as faith”
(1979:16).
Paleontologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History, in a
lecture to the systematics group at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981,