Creationism - National Center for Science Education

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