LETTER to a CREATIONIST

Seeking the middle ground

by Richard E. Dickerson

ear_____________, My father, Earl S. Dickerson, who is an active 88, is a frequent listener to your programs. He recently sent me an audio cassette and printed transcript of one of your sermons, entitled Creationism: Science or Religion? This talk sets up a radical dichotomy between young-Earth creationism, and a drastically atheistic version of evolutionary biology, implying that each individual has to make a choice between these two extreme positions. The talk also says some very harsh things about modern evolutionary biology. I am the product of both a conservative religious upbringing and a career in evolutionary molecular biology. I have been in this field for 31 years, and for the last six years have been the director of the Molecular Biology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. I have never found even the slightest conflict to exist between modern biology and mainstream religion of any persuasion, and I feel that you do a potential disservice both to religion and to science by implying that such a conflict exists. My father tells me that you are a reasonable man, and that I might appreciate hearing an opinion from the other side. I would be grateful for your thought about the issues raised in this letter, and for your reactions to them. I might add that I am enrolled as a Friend (an associate) of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists (not Christian Scientists) that has been in existence since 1941. I regularly read their quarterly, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. Although many members of the ASA describe themselves as creationists, they are not young-Earth creationists like the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in San Diego, and do not see any inherent clash between religion and science. A clash between religion and science is perceived only by the extreme, young-Earth branch of creationists, who also are

biblical literalists. The two positions that the young-Earth creationists claim we must choose to be can be described as follows: POSITION A The Bible is literally correct on every matter: scientific, technical, historical, as well as spiritual. God created the Earth in six periods of 24 clock hours as we know them, in the order of events described in Genesis 1 and 2... The Earth is no more than 6000 to 10,000 years old. Radioisotope dating that indicates an age of around 4.5 billion years is false. Every kind of living creature was created specifically and separately; evolution never occurred. The fossil record does not indicate a long development on Earth; only the record of animals that were drowned in the world-wide Flood of Noah. And at the very other extreme end of their spectrum: POSITION Z Science has the last word on everything. The Universe is 20 billion years old and came from nothing. Life evolved from non-life without any supernatural intervention. God does not exist, there is no morality; anything goes. There are two problems with this dichotomy: the entire middle ground from B to Y is missing, and Ive yet to meet anyone who is a thorough-going advocate of full position Z. Position A is the point of view only of the young-Earth creationists, and position Z is a straw man. The young-Earth creationists characterize this false Aversus-Z dichotomy and the Two-Model approach, and we make a grave mistake in allowing ourselves to be drawn into a discussion that is limited to these two extreme positions. The view that most mainstream Christian and Jews hold on the subject might be called Position M (moderate or mainstream):

POSITION M God created the universe and everything in it. The first two chapters of Genesis are meant to be taken figuratively and poetically, not literally. After all, they were put there for religious not scientific instruction. To find out how God did bring about His Universe, we must study the Universe itself. This study is called science. The Universe is inherently logical, because it is Gods handiwork. Therefore, what an intelligent and unbiased student finds out from studying the Universe is not likely to be grossly wrong. Where a literal and word-forword reading of the first two Chapters of Genesis seems to contradict the evidence of the senses (radioisotope dating and the fossil record), the prudent person should ask whether the Genesis account is being interpreted correctly. After all, why would God have spoken to the children of Israel 3,000 years ago about radioactive decay and genetic engineering? There would have been no point, ethical or spiritual, and they would not have understood anyway. When Genesis says that God created every living creature after its own kind, this does not necessarily mean that He did it in a flash with a wave of His hand like a magician. Maybe the evolutionary process, taking millions of years, is the way that He chose to do it? I would wager that few people in the religious mainstream would find fault with that statement. The youngEarth creationists, however, call position M theistic evolution and seem to find it nearly as offensive as so-called non-theistic evolution. Most working scientists hold a position somewhere between Position M and position Z, but closer to M than Z. Call this Position P for popular scientific position: POSITION P The issue of God is a private one, with many different opinions, and something that is not directly related to what I do as a scientist from one day to the next. I want to understand as much as I can about how the Universe works. To do this, I must study the Universe itself. This study is

called science. What an intelligent and unbiased student finds out from studying the Universe is not likely to be grossly wrong. So the spectrum of working scientists ranges roughly from Position M to Position P. But Positions M and P and are operationally identical. By this I mean that they lead to the same actions in the laboratory. A scientist who adheres to Position M, and one help to position P, will go into the laboratory, do the very same experiments, and draw the very same conclusions. Individual M will claim I am looking for Gods footprints. His colleague P will warn, But dont get too poetic!

I regard both M and P as the middle ground because they avoid the intolerant extremes of A or Z and because M and P can work together. My uncle, Ralph O. Cooper, was a lifelong devout Methodist and a teacher of biology, zoology, and botany at the high school and junior college level. He was an admirable example of Position P, and would have been incredulous had anyone told him he was holding two mutually irreconcilable positions. He perceived his teaching role as giving the next generation of students the tools with which they could work effectively in science, regardless if their philosophical background along the M-to-P spectrum, and inspiring them to feel that this was an exciting and worthwhile endeavor. My own views are closer to position P. But as long as most Americans hold positions on science and religion somewhere between M and P we are in a healthy condition. Regrettably, the two extremes, A and Z, are both at war with the middle. The young-Earth creationists of Position A declare, A pox on all science, and all works of the intellect. If it doesnt jibe with the literal reading of the scriptures, to hell with it (literally). You just cant talk to such people; they are impervious to reason. And there are a few diehard atheists at Position A who wont hear of anything super-natural. They are just as bad (and boring) as the young-

Earthers. Both are divisive and regrettable extremists in our American society. I urge you, in your position of influence and responsibility, to eschew the extremists of Positions A and Z, and help us build a solid middle ground. I could end this letter at this point and probably would be well advised to do so. However, you may be interested in some reflection on why the young-Earth creationist position just is not logically or scientifically tenable today, and why Scientific Creationism is an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms. For the remainder of this letter, I am going to use Creationist with a capital C, to indicate the young-Earthers of Position A in the classification above. The old-Earth creationists or theistic evolutionists of Position M are entirely within the mainstream of science and religion, and I will not refer to them again. Toward the end of your sermon you throw out the challenge: Creationists are not scientists? Creationists invented science! Without Creationists there wouldnt be and science. You then give a list of several founders of various branches of modern science, all of whom were Creationists. Your statement about Creationists inventing science is quite correct, but not really relevant. Nearly all of the people you list date from a century or more ago, and back in those days, everybody was a Creationist. It was the standard scientific viewpoint. But because of what we have learned in biology during the last 150 years, it is no longer possible for a person to be a Creationist and to be taken seriously as a working scientist. During a recent visit to the Institute of Creation Research, my colleague, Emeritus Zoology Professor Everett C. Olson of UCLA, spoke with a young geology student who was writing a M.S. thesis on a certain group of early mammal-like reptiles. Your field work is impeccable but you dont have a chance in hell of getting your research published in a reputable paleontological journal with the interpretation that you give to it. Those ideas were thrashed out and settled in paleontology 70 years ago, and no editor will allow a green graduate student to bring them up all

over again. You are two generations out of date! This is the root of the problem with Creationism: it is the science of a century and a half ago. As someone once mangled the language, Its dj vu all over again. There are precise analogies to the evolutionary biology situation in the scientific fields of astronomy and physics. Before the time of Nikolai Copernicus, everybody believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, even the most reputable of astronomers. After the Copernican Revolution it became increasingly difficult for a reputable astronomer to hold such an Earth-centered or

I urge you to help us build a solid middle ground.

geocentric position. Sir Isaac Newton provided the coup de grace to geocentrism in his masterwork Principia, by showing how the mechanics of attraction to bodies could be worked out. Heliocenrism (the idea that the Earth rotates around the Sun) replaced geocentrism forever. One could not fault the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy because he believed in geocentrism, but one could fault any astronomer in the years after Copernicus and Newton who still stubbornly refused to accept the heliocentric theory. A physicist colleague of mine, Dr. Lawrence Lerner, put the issue this way: If there were any astronomers who still believed, after the publication of Newtons famous Principia, that the Sun revolved around the Earth, they were no longer respectable scientists, but cranks. The geocentrists had nothing to say to the people who were doing real astronomy. Nor could they understand

the problems that Newtons theory had opened to investigation: the quantative evaluation of the contributions of the Sun and the Moon to oceanic tides, for example, or the perturbation of the orbit of Mars by the gravitational influence of Jupiter. Such problems had no meaning in the old context. As physicist Wolfgang Pauli liked to say, the work of the cranks was not even wrong. Another example can be drawn from physics: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schroedinger, and others revolutionized physics in the first half of the century by introducing quantum mechanics. All of the 19th century physicists whom you cite in your sermon as being Creationists were also classical physicists. That was the science of the time. But today, in the aftermath of the Quantum Revolution it is impossible for a reputable physicist not to be a quantum physicist. A physicist today who said he did not believe in quantum mechanics would be laughed out of the profession. As it is with heliocentrism in astronomy and quantum mechanics in physics, so it is with evolution in biology it is the very framework within which a scientists must work. A biologist who tries to maintain the Creationist position today is as absurd as an astronomer who still maintains that the Sun rotates around the Earth, or a physicist who does not believe in the quantum structure of the atom. The Nobel physicist Ernst Rutherford was quoted saying around 1910, There are only two kinds of science: Physics and Stamp Collecting. What he meant was that no science was worth the name if it merely was satisfied with a collection of facts, without a unifying theory. In 1910 both chemistry and biology could be criticized as being only intellectual forms of stamp collecting. That this is no longer true, for biology today is due entirely to the evolutionary framework within which we all work. Biology without evolution is only natural history, and we havent taught natural history for 100 years. So Position A, that of the young-Earth Creationist, is both unnecessary and wrong. There is no such thing today as "scientific creationism," and there has not been for more than a century. An

intellectually neutral observer, given what we know today in all areas of science, would never arrive spontaneously at a Creationist position, and it is intellectually dishonest for the young-Earthers to maintain otherwise. Creationism's only supporters today are those who bend the scientific evidence at all costs to support a pre-established religious position. This is not only bad pedagogy and bad science, it is bad religion. Position A has a third failing that perhaps is most damaging of all: it is intellectually destructive. It will discourage the next generation of young people from going into mainstream science, and if ever there was time when we needed more wisdom as to how to manage our fragile planet, it's today! A person who is taught everything that he or she sees in studying the natural world must be censored by some other person's literal, word-for-word interpretation of the Bible, will not find science to be an interesting or a challenging profession. We will turn off a generation of science students, and will fail to learn what we need to know about how to live on this planet. Back when populations were small and resources were unlimited, groups could choose to withdraw from the world. Today this is a luxury we cannot afford. The young-Earth Creationists are fond of pretending the Positions A and Z are the only positions that exist, and of talking about their "Two-Model Approach" to science teaching "Equal time for both points of view" they cry, "Let the people (students/voters) decide." But science teachers in our school do not have time to teach every outmoded theory of science and then conduct a plebiscite on whether a majority believe the Sun goes around the Earth or vice-versa. Their job is to prepare students with the best of what we know only. The only proper response is, "No time for either extreme view; let us seek the responsible middle ground." That is what all reasonable scientists advocate, whether they consider themselves religious or not. You can help the moderate position by pointing out the fallacy of the "Two Model" argument, and the need for

responsibility in both science and religion. The fundamental issue is not one of academic freedom, but of intellectual and scientific integrity. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely yours, Richard E. Dickerson