Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
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MORALITY<br />
“The great end of the study of geology ought to be, a moral, rather than a<br />
scientific one,” declared George Fairholme in 1833. Adam Sedgwick, on receiving<br />
Darwin’s Origin of Species, wrote to him:<br />
‘Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does, through final cause, link material to moral... You<br />
have ignored this link; and, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one or two<br />
pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not), to break it, humanity, in my mind,<br />
would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation<br />
than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history. [Quoted in Gillispie<br />
1951:217]<br />
“If current in society,” Sedgwick had earlier declared of Chambers’s evolutionist scheme<br />
in his Vestiges, such beliefs would lead to “nothing but ruin and confusion... It will<br />
undermine the whole moral and social fabric...” (quoted in Toulmin and Goodfield<br />
1965:224).<br />
This—the moral issue—has always been at the heart of anti-evolutionist<br />
motivation. Fundamentalist creationists insist that morality is necessarily based upon<br />
God-given standards and supernatural sanctions. In a purely natural world, no morality is<br />
possible: there is no possible foundation <strong>for</strong> it, according to fundamentalists. Thus, any<br />
account of “origins” is not merely a concern of science: it is a question of morality, or the<br />
lack of it. For Sedgwick, as <strong>for</strong> creationists today, morality is derived from the order of<br />
nature, since nature is a creation of God’s order and design, and since religion is an<br />
inseparable aspect of science. Evolution, if true, destroys the Bible as God’s inerrant<br />
Word, and thus destroys the only basis <strong>for</strong> morality.<br />
William Jennings Bryan’s central argument against evolution was that since<br />
religion—belief in God—is the “only basis of morality,” and because evolution clearly<br />
contradicted the Bible, the basis of the true Christian religion, evolution is there<strong>for</strong>e<br />
religion’s greatest threat.<br />
Why do we object? Because, when a man thinks he is a descendant of a brute, he looks downward to the<br />
brute <strong>for</strong> interpretations of himself. When he believes he was made by the Almighty in the image of God<br />
and <strong>for</strong> a purpose, he looks upward <strong>for</strong> his inspiration. [Bible or Evolution?, n.d.:24]<br />
Evolution destroys belief in the immortality of the soul, which Bryan felt is the most<br />
important stimulus to righteous living (In His Image, 1922:31-2, 87). In The Bible or<br />
Evolution? (n.d.), he further expounded on this theme of the evil effect of evolution on<br />
morals. In Bryan’s reasoning, since evolution obviously had such an evil effect, it must<br />
necessarily be false.<br />
George McCready Price in his 1902 booklet had denounced evolution because of<br />
its anti-Christian “moral and religious tendencies” as well as its unscientific nature. “The<br />
great mistake of Darwinism,” wrote F. Bettex (1901:133):<br />
is the ignoring of the sacredness of individuality as a fundamental condition and the chief pillar of the<br />
creation. If this individual be but the product of blind influences and natural <strong>for</strong>ces, without a Divine idea<br />
as its immortal diamond kernel, the universe sinks ninety-nine per cent in value.