Why Are There Still Creationists?. Jonathan Marks
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this basis, an Enlightenment savant like Thomas Jefferson could start distinguishing the biblical things that Jesus probably did say and do from the biblical things that Jesus probably didn’t say and do. And by the 1840s, biblical scholars were using history and linguistics to reimagine the gospel story as non-miraculous – controversially at first, but ultimately with irresistible intellectual force. After all, French and Spanish could not have arisen miraculously at the foot of the Tower of Babel if they had been spun off from Vulgar Latin over the past 1,000 years or so.
But of course there was much more going on in European and American intellectual life than the demiraculizing of Scripture. Miracles were being written out of earth history as well, being supplanted by “uniformitarianism,” which held that modern geological processes are generally slow and gradual, and are the processes that are most appropriate to apply to try and understand the earth’s past. And when you performed that application, the earth seemed to be far older than the biblical “begats” could allow. The closer you looked at the composition and patterns of geological formations, the more it seemed as though the earth seemed to have “no vestige of a beginning.”1 The remains of ancient life embedded within the geological formations indicated primeval worlds inhabited by only remotely familiar forms of life. Indeed, the history of life was intimately bound up in the history of the earth itself.
Rethinking Species and Scriptures
By the 1840s, then, two large questions loomed over the closely allied fields of natural history (documenting the diversity and history of life) and natural theology (trying to make sense of the diversity and history of life). In natural history, two facts had been well established. First, species have gone extinct. That is to say, the termination of species was acknowledged, although without any biblical justification. Extinction was, after all, what Noah was specifically charged with preventing, and the biblical narrative that we have certainly indicates that he succeeded. Second, different species lived at different times, correlating well with the geological formations in which they were embedded. Reconsidering the extinct and extant animals he had seen in South America, an English naturalist wrote in 1845, “This wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.”2
From the standpoint of natural history, then, if species lived and species ended, then it was only natural to theorize how they might originate. That was the natural history question.
Simultaneous respect for data and Scripture, however, created a problem for mid-nineteenth-century scientists, facing evidence that showed the earth to be old and species to have lived at different times. The transmutation of species itself was not a particularly new and threatening idea in the 1840s. It had been proposed by Enlightenment scholars in England and France, and was now (in 1844) the subject of a bestseller called Vestiges of Creation. But those theories of evolution were theories of progress, in that the change of one species into another was considered to be somehow an improvement. To an age that usually still saw humans atop a line comprising all other earthly species – a Great Chain of Being – this early evolutionary theory essentially involved a short ride on a Great Escalator of Being.
But there was no evident mechanism for such a drive to improve, aside from imagining that all animals deep inside wish they were human. Nor was it clear that all species could be naturally placed in a linear sequence at all – bears, goats, and chipmunks all seemed pretty much equidistant from people.
So the scholar of 1845 had two unsatisfactory theories to explain the origin of species – biblical creation, or evolution via a Great Escalator. But there was a transient third theory, which recognized the age of the earth and the succession of life, yet tried to remain pious by imagining the origin of species at different times in the deep history of life on earth to be miraculous, not naturalistic. This “non-biblical creationism” was in fact a theory of choice for many of the leading biologists of the age. Indeed, although we tend to see Victorian creationism through the lens of modern creationism, it was principally not biblical literalist creationism that pushed back initially against Darwinism, but non-biblical creationism. The leading anti-Darwinians – Richard Owen in England and Louis Agassiz in America – were committed to the age of the earth and the succession of life, but they clung to the origin of species as a series of miracles.3 They certainly didn’t believe in a six-day creation a few thousand years ago as a viable alternative to Darwin’s proposal.
Yet non-biblical creationism had its own baggage. In the first place, it was pious but un-biblical, so what really was the point of the piety? And second, where biblical creationism invoked one great miracle as the source of all species, this set of theories invoked lots of little miracles throughout earth history. Yet favoring a theory that invokes many miracles over just one is a hard sell, for miracles are supposed to be rare. That’s why we call them miracles.
What non-biblical creationism did, though, was to preserve a critical part of the Christian Genesis story – the Fall of Man and the need for redemption from sin. That was indeed the point of the non-biblical piety. Perhaps the bit about sin and redemption could be retained if we just imagined the Garden of Eden to have existed not near the beginning of time, but near the beginning of history. Traditionally, Eden was considered to have been inhabited by modern kinds of creatures, which were all that the classical writers knew. But now there was clearly a long period of time when there were pre-modern creatures – wherever they came from – on a pre-modern earth, yet all known evidence of humans was still of a more-or-less modern form. The Garden of Eden, then, might have been the stratigraphic frosting that God slathered upon the top of the geological layer cake, so to speak – the last literal bit of His creation. This would preserve the most meaningful parts of the story – about sin, death, and the need for redemption – while taking most of the biblical creation narrative figuratively, and yet would still permit biblical piety and its companion, biblical morality, to coexist and persevere along with the progress of science. That is, unless incontrovertible evidence arose showing that people – or the tools they left behind, since who else makes stone tools? – coexisted along with extinct animals. Not necessarily with T. rexes, but with anything that was big and scary and no longer around, like woolly mammoths, or sabertoothed tigers, or giant European cave bears. For that would indicate that there was no break at all between the ancient and modern worlds, that the two bleed into one another, and that there could be no place for a literal Garden of Eden.
And yet this was precisely the evidence that continued to mount throughout the 1840s: Some kind of ancient people lived alongside some kind of extinct animals a long time ago. The big question for natural theology, then, concerned the occupation of Eden, the last remaining part of the Genesis story, once you have acknowledged the age of the earth and the succession of life.
Both the natural theology and the natural history questions were ultimately resolved in the same year, 1859, with Charles Lyell’s address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September, which publicly acknowledged the coexistence of stone tools and archaic animals, and with the release of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in November, which theorized the beginnings of species. The following year, a group of liberal theologians published a runaway bestseller called Essays and Reviews, which brought modern critical biblical scholarship to the reading public, and passingly referenced Darwin.
All of which is to say that the theological and biological revolutions were closely intertwined. Indeed, just four years later three influential books came out: Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, the first book on human evolution; Ernest Renan’s immensely popular Life of Jesus, which represented Jesus as a smart blond guy, not as the miracle-working Mediterranean demigod that readers had grown up with; and Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man, which reviewed the evidence for primitive people in an ancient world, full of extinct and unfamiliar species. If we could no longer distinguish the archaic, pre-modern earth clearly from the modern earth, and the modern earth appeared to be an outgrowth, or an “evolution,” from the pre-modern earth, then