Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Scottish professors. Rejecting the distinction between external objects and our ideas of
such objects, they maintained that we could perceive the real objects as they actually
existed. It was self-evident to them that our sense perceptions and memories constituted
direct knowledge of the external objects and events themselves. They explicitly appealed
to Baconian inductivism as a means of constructing necessarily true scientific principles
free of metaphysical interpositions.
This Scottish Common Sense philosophy became the dominant tradition in
America for the next century. Its first major exponent in this country was John
Witherspoon, 1 who came from Scotland to become the president of Princeton in 1768.
James McCosh, president of Princeton in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was
one of its last major academic advocates, outside of lay and fundamentalist circles where
it still flourishes (McCosh became an effective advocate of Christian evolutionism,
arguing in works such as Christianity and Positivism [1871] that the Bible taught a form
of evolution).
The Common Sense Realism attitude was espoused by most fundamentalist antievolutionists,
both in their approach to the Bible and to science. F. Bettex, for instance,
in Science and Christianity (1901:3), wrote:
This book does not pretend to be a learned work for learned men. I address myself to simple souls thirsting
after truth, that I may speak to them of great yet simple truths, which at the present day are too often stifled.
I desire to express my profound conviction that the living and personal God of the Bible is the necessary
center of a rational universe; that the Creator and his creation in no wise contradict one another; and that all
the discoveries of science have been, and ever will be, powerless to prove that his Word deceives mankind.
I wish to make clear to my readers how little real science is hidden behind the fine phrases and sounding
words of the infidel, and how little he himself understands of the material creation which he affirms to be
the only one. [1901:3]
“What is, then, the reason why so many Christians hold themselves aloof from
modern science, and regard it with undisguised suspicion?” From ignorance of scientific
methods, says Bettex, and fear of its technical terms and jargon. However, “a knowledge
of the great questions which interest humanity is within the grasp of almost every one”
(1901:112).
In studying science, then, the principal thing is to learn to discriminate between fact and explanation, to
revere the positive fact, to test the explanation given. Where a reasonable, probable explanation, covering
as far as possible (for none ever does so entirely) all the facts, is offered, accept it thankfully; but beware of
the present craze for explaining everything. Why not when asked, “How do you explain that?” answer
candidly: “I do not explain it at all. I study the facts, and wait.” [1901:137-8]
Philip Mauro, a New York lawyer who contributed to The Fundamentals (1910),
the booklet series largely responsible for giving the fundamentalist movement its name,
wrote in his later book Evolution at the Bar (1922) that its purpose was to “set forth the
main features of the theory of Evolution in such away as to make it easy to be understood
by the unlearned.” Mauro continued:
1 Witherspoon was recently eulogized by Attorney General Edwin Meese, and is praised by other Christian
Reconstructionists (see later) for his Calvinist views on church-state relations.