Creationism - National Center for Science Education

“merely by definition”—by means of new-fangled definitions of science which exclude
biblical knowledge: previously the primary source of knowledge.
Science no longer means “knowledge” or “truth” or “facts,” as once we were taught, but “naturalism” or
“materialism,” according to this new article of evolutionary faith. The very possibility of a Creator is
prohibited by majority vote of the scientific priesthood, and one who still wishes to believe in God as
Creator must be excommunicated. [1984:22]
This confronts us with a fundamental issue: Does religion concern the natural
world? Fundamentalist creationists assume that it does. The Bible may be primarily
concerned with religion, spirituality, and morality, but it also speaks of nature, and it is
equally valid and truthful when it does. The typical liberal attitude is that religion and
science concern entirely different realms, and thus by definition cannot be in conflict
even when the biblical account seems to contradict what science says about the world.
Those who take this position—whether scientists or liberal theologians—are in effect
simply saying that the fundamentalists are wrong in their definition of religion. Is this
fair? Fundamentalists may be wrong about evolution, but are liberals correct in telling
them what religion is, and what it can and cannot concern itself with? If the
fundamentalist definition of religion is allowed, then they still have to face the problem
of a major conflict between secular science and their religious knowledge; this is not,
however, in their view Religion versus Science, but a certain definition of religion (which
includes a certain type of science) versus a different, non-biblical science. If the liberal
view is necessarily correct, it is not because they alone know what constitutes religion,
but because science can now be defined so as to exclude supernaturalism and revealed
truth.
Toulmin and Goodfield, referring to initial religious opposition to Darwin’s
theory, make a similar point. The standard twentieth-century view is that Religion and
Science have different aims: science is descriptive, and deals with Things; religion is
normative, and deals with relations between People (and between people and supernatural
beings).
As applied to the mid-nineteenth century, however, such a judgment is both too facile and historically
irrelevant. For the ‘confusion’ in question, of basing the rules of conduct—Sedgwick’s ‘moral order’—on
a particular set of beliefs about the History of Nature and Man’s place in it—the ‘natural order’—had up till
that time been an almost universal element in all systems of religious belief... The majority of men had
always seen Man as occupying a unique and central place in Nature, and found the final justification of
their ethical and religious conceptions in a cosmic history embracing both Nature and Man.
[1965:226-227]
This issue parallels the debate in anthropological theory between the
“intellectualist” and “symbolist” theories regarding the origins of religion (see especially
Skorupski 1983). The “intellectualist” approach (e.g. Tylor, Frazer, much of Evans-
Pritchard, and Horton) is more literalist: it assumes that religious ideas began as theories
attempting to explain the world and to achieve certain rational ends. The “symbolist”
approach (e.g. Durkheim, Leach, Geertz, and Sperber) assumes that religion is primarily
expressive: it consists of rituals or statements expressing the social order—the relations
between men and between man and God (or gods)—and of rationalizations of ritual
behavior (ritual in this view tending to precede the beliefs or myths explaining it). In this
social, “symbolist” approach, no religion can be false; it is not tested against any external