Creationism - National Center for Science Education

eality, nor is it intended to be. (In the “intellectualist” approach, religious theories are
protected against falsification by various means—but this is more or less true of any
belief system, including even modern science, though science, ideally, seeks to minimize
barriers to falsifiability.)
In terms of this debate, the fundamentalist attitude, which is obviously more
“literalist,” follows the “intellectualist” approach, while more liberal religious views
resemble more the “symbolist” approach. Fundamentalists see the Bible as consisting of
statements about the real world as well as the spiritual realm, from which can be derived
laws, moral as well as physical, which, if obeyed, will yield certain results. (The notion
of “grace”—God’s freely-given mercy to undeserving, sinful man—admittedly
complicates this scheme.) The Calvinist doctrine of ‘providences” was an attempt to
account for the often mysterious relationship between the natural and the moral order.
For the disposition to see prodigies, omens and portents, sprang from a coherent view of the world as a
moral order reflecting God’s purposes and physically sensitive to the moral conduct of human beings.
Such an attitude was not necessarily ‘unscientific’. The search for correlations between disparate events is
a valid form of inquiry and the analysis of God’s portents was often conducted in a highly meticulous
manner. [Thomas 1971:91]
In the intellectualist view, religion—like science—seeks explanations of agencies
and causes of events and conditions. Man can then attempt to predict and influence these
events and conditions by means of prayer and ritual. The symbolist view does not
maintain that religion cannot ‘do” anything, but says that what it “does”—the actions it
takes and the ends it achieves—are in the social rather than the natural realm. Many
rituals, for example, result .n a change of social status; this change is effected by
ritualized and symbolic social statements. The change in social status is real, but real in
the social, not the natural, world. The religious practitioners, however, tend not to realize
that this apparent cause-and-effect pattern of their (social and symbolic) ritual action is
not ‘natural,” and they are therefore prone to believe that similar symbolic statements and
manipulations will similarly lave effect upon the natural world.
The concept of “law” presents a case in which the “social” and “natural” domains
are often confused. In a model of the world based on the social order, “law” is
prescriptive, and emanates from social (even though supernatural) beings. Such law tells
humans what they ought to do, or not to do. In a naturalist world-view, scientific law is
descriptive. It may address causes, but these causes are not social; they do not emanate
from the will or desire of any beings, and they have no bearing on our moral behavior.
Another concept which tends to confuse the issue is “teleology.” Purpose is
required in the religious view. Assuming that God created the world, and man, He must
have done so for some purpose. Since God made man in His image, it is reasonable to
infer that man and God are in some senses similar, and thus to suppose that God exercises
desire and will similar to ours in relation to His creation. Fundamentalists especially
suppose that God created the world especially for man. These kinds of confusions
between social and natural law seem also to have prevented many religious believers
from understanding “natural selection” the way positivist scientists did. “Selection”
implied there had to be some being doing the selecting. That it was “natural” selection
did not prevent this confusion, since, in the religious world-view we are dealing with,
God is a necessary and active part of nature.