The New House Speaker--Mike Johnson--Is a Young-Earth Creationist. Can He Solve the Problem of the Holy Spirit?

                       The Holy Spirit Depicted as a Dove in the Apse of Saint Peter's Basilica

Over the years, I have written many posts on Ken Ham's Young Earth Creationism--the idea that a literal reading of the Bible shows that the world was created by God in six days about 6,000 years ago, and therefore that the Darwinian science of evolution is false.  Most recently, I wrote about my visits to Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky, which replicate God's creation of the world and Noah's Ark.

Many of my friends have questioned me about why anyone should take Young Earth Creationism so seriously.  Well, now I have a quick answer:  Have you noticed that on Wednesday the House of Representatives chose their new Speaker of the House--Mike Johnson--who has been one of the leading proponents of Ken Ham's Young Earth Creationism?  Yesterday, the Huffington Post published an article about Johnson's active support for Ham's work.

Johnson is an attorney with a constitutional law legal firm--Freedom Guard--that provides legal representation for Christian organizations like Ham's Answers in Genesis.  In particular, Johnson defended Ham's legal right to ask for sales tax refund incentives under the Kentucky Tourism Development Act for the Ark Encounter.  When the yearly sales tax revenue at the Ark Encounter exceeds a specified amount, a certain portion is refunded to Ham's organization, which provides subsidies of millions of dollars a year.  In the courts, Johnson has argued that this does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because it conforms to Supreme Court opinions that have held that as long as a state law confers benefits in a neutral manner, religious organizations that qualify under the law can receive those benefits, because the state is not officially endorsing any religious teaching.  Moreover, Johnson has argued that in promoting Young Earth Creationism, Ham's organizations are exercising their rights to freedom of speech and religious liberty under the First Amendment.  Johnson has also defended in federal courts the right of Ham's organizations to require that those hired to work for them must sign a statement of Christian faith.  The prohibition of discriminatory hiring in the Civil Rights Law of 1964 does not prohibit this because there is an exemption for religious organizations.

But I am wondering if Johnson can resolve the fundamental theological and philosophical problem in Ham's position, which I call the problem of the Holy Spirit.  Johnson has said: "The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events."  How does he know that this reading of the Bible is "the truth"?  Traditionally, Christians have assumed that God sends the Holy Spirit to guide Christians to the correct interpretation of Revelation in the Bible.  Jesus promised that God would send the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth to guide Christians to the truth (John 14:15-16:15).  But since the most pious Christians disagree about how exactly the Bible should be applied to the creation/evolution debate (as well as many other issues), the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to the truth of Revelation.

The "Starting Points" exhibit at the Creation Museum states the fundamental claim underlying both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter:  creationists and evolutionists observe the same evidence in the natural world, but they reach different conclusions from that evidence because they start with two different worldviews--the naturalistic evolutionist worldview and the biblical creationist worldview.  The evolutionist assumes that everything in the world emerged through a natural process of evolution, and then he interprets the evidence as supporting that conclusion.  The creationist assumes that the Bible is a divinely revealed teaching that tells the truth about God's creation of the world according to the literal history of creation in Genesis, and then he interprets the evidence as supporting that conclusion.

According to AiG, there is no way to scientifically prove which worldview is true because of the distinction between observational science and historical science.  "Observational science deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present.  Chemistry experiments in a laboratory and the ongoing study of a medicine's effectiveness in treating a particular disease are examples of observational science.  Historical science involves the interpretation of evidence from the past that now exists in the present.  A paleontologist's narrative of a fossilized creature's habits and an astronomer's explanation of a star's formation are examples of historical science."  The "interpretation of evidence from the past" in historical science depends on one's choice of a worldview, which cannot be tested or verified through observational science.

Anyone who carefully studies the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter will see that they implicitly admit that the distinction between the two worldviews is a false dichotomy, because it falsely assumes that there is one and only one naturalistic evolutionist worldview and one and only one Biblical creationist worldview, and that there is no evolutionary creationist worldview.

Some of the exhibits recognize that "many Christians" have rejected Young Earth creationism in favor of Old Earth creationism or Theistic Evolution as more compatible with the Bible.  Ken Ham has even said that "most of the church" denies Young Earth creationism.  Now, of course, Ham and AiG say that these Christians are mistaken in their interpretation of the Bible.  But that's just the point: the Bible is open to different interpretations in the dispute over creation and evolution; and therefore, there are different Biblical creationist worldviews, and some of them support evolutionary science.

Can the new Speaker of the House explain how we resolve this problem, so that the Holy Spirit will guide all Christians to "the truth" of Young Earth Creationism?

And if he can do this, will this support Young Earth Creationism as a Biblical foundation for MAGA Republicanism and a new American Christian Nationalism?

Remarkably, in his first speech as Speaker of the House, Johnson suggested that his becoming Speaker was ordained by God:  "I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you. All of us. And I believe that God has allowed and ordained each and every one of us to be here at this specific moment. This is my belief."  Is this the work of the Holy Spirit?

The Creation Museum

As a Southern Baptist kid growing up in Texas, I was taught that every good Baptist should read through the entire Bible at least once a year. So I methodically added up all the chapters in the Bible and divided by 365 to see how many chapters I had to read each day. For three years, I began each New Year's Day by reading the opening chapters of Genesis, and I began each December 31st by reading the last chapters of Revelation. Of course, I read only the King James Translation, because Southern Baptists knew that this was the only divinely inspired English translation of the Bible.

I remember one New Year's Day noticing the date at the top of the first page of my Bible: "4004 B.C." I wondered where this came from, because I couldn't see this date given anywhere in the Biblical text. Years later, I learned that this date was set by James Ussher, who was an Anglican Archbishop in 17th century Ireland. In his book "Annals of the Old Testament," he had used chronological evidence from the Bible and from ancient historical texts to infer an exact chronology of the history of the world that began with the Creation of the world in 4,004 B.C.

I have been reminded of this by the news stories about the opening of the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky built by the "Answers in Genesis" organization directed by Ken Ham. Two good articles can be found
here and here. The website for "Answers in Genesis" can be found here. A good article on Ussher's chronology by Stephen Jay Gould can be found here.

Ken Ham is a leader of the Biblical literalists who read the book of Genesis as a science textbook that proves that Darwinian science must be false. Following Ussher's chronology, Ham believes this Biblical science shows how everything was created in 4004 B.C. and how almost all of the fossil record and the geology of the earth was shaped by the catastrophe of Noah's flood in 2348 B.C. So all of the scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old must be false. And since human beings were created on the same day as the animals, all of the scientific evidence for species existing before the emergence of human beings must be false. So, for example, human beings must have coexisted with dinasaurs. Ham's museum presents this story in dramatic ways. Although I have not seen the museum, I have seen Ham present his vision at a convention for Illinois homeschooling parents meeting at my university a few summers ago. In fact, much of the homeschooling movement is motivated by the desire of parents to teach Biblical creation science as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

The reasoning of people like Ham is often remarkably clever. For example, one has to be impressed by how carefully he has thought about how Noah's ark could hold a pair of each "kind" of animal, including dinasaurs.

Although I could say a lot about this, I will only briefly make three points. The first point is that in the popular debate over evolution, people often confuse "creation science" with "intelligent design theory." Actually, Ham denounces the idea of "intelligent design," because its proponents don't rely on a literal reading of the Genesis Creation story. So, as far as Ham is concerned, the folks at the Discovery Institute are actually promoting disrespect for the truth of the Bible. And yet almost all of the proponents of intelligent design are motivated by Biblical religious beliefs, and some of them are "young earth creationists" who see "intelligent design" as pointing to the truth of the Genesis Creation story. This was evident at the Dover, Pennsylvania, trial in the fall of 2005. Initially, the public school board members challenging the teaching of evolution wanted creationism taught. But when they were told this would be rejected by the courts as an unconstitutional establishment of religion, they turned to "intelligent design theory" as a way of promoting creationism without explicitly bringing up the Bible. At the trial, this deception became so obvious that they lost their case.

My second point is that this Creation Museum and the whole "creation science" movement violates the content and spirit of the Bible. That date of "4004 B.C." at the beginning of my old King James Bible was not found in any Bibles until 50 years after the death of Ussher. This dating scheme came not from the text of the Bible but from Ussher's chronology. Ken Ham's organization has published a beautiful new edition of Ussher's ANNALS OF THE WORLD. I encourage you to order a copy and study Ussher's meticulous scholarship. You will notice, however, that most of Ussher's evidence for his chronology comes from outside the Bible--from classical authors like Xenophon and Herodotus, for example. The Bible manifests little concern for such a chronology. If God wanted to reveal a scientific chronology of the world, why is the Bible written so as to force Ussher to go outside the Bible--to pagan authors like Xenophon and Herodotus--to try to piece together this chronology? Trying to pull a scientific chronology out of the Bible denies the real purpose of the Bible, which is to say something about the spiritual condition of humanity under God. For this purpose, there is no need to interpret the story of Creation as a literal process of 6 days of Creation. In fact, most Biblical believers don't read Genesis as a literal, science textbook.

My third point is that the real issue here is not scientific but moral and religious. As the stories about Ham's museum indicate, the ultimate message is that doubting his Biblical science and accepting Darwinian evolution will promote atheism while destroying morality and destroying the traditional family. Visitors at the museum look into the house of the American family under the influence of Darwinian science, and what they see is a boy at his computer staring at pornography. It's all Darwin's fault!

As is clear from many of my posts on this blog, I disagree. Although Darwinian science cannot decide the theological truth of Biblical religion, Darwinism is compatible with religious belief, and this is the position taken by many theistic evolutionists (Mitt Romney and others). And insofar as Darwinian science supports the idea of a natural moral sense rooted in the evolved nature of human beings, Darwinism provides a natural ground of morality, while recognizing that religious belief can reinforce that natural morality.

The complexity of the debate among Christians over the Creation story is evident in the hundreds of comments on a recent post on the Touchstone magazine blog, which can be found here.

The Nye/Ham Evolution/Creation Debate

Recently, Bill Nye ("the science guy") and Ken Ham debated evolution and creationism at Ham's "Creation Museum" in Kentucky.  The question for the debate was "Is Creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?"  Nye answered no.  Ham answered yes.

This debate was streamed live on February 4th, and it's available for viewing online, although I'm not sure how long it will be online.

This debate is 2 hours and 45 minutes long.  It's well worth the time to watch it.  It's one of the best debates on creationism versus evolution that I have ever observed.  I will offer some comments here on what was said.

But first I must point to two important questions that were not discussed in the debate.  If I had been a questioner at the debate, I would have directed two questions to Ham.  First, where exactly does the Bible say that the universe is only 6,000 years old?  Second, why do you reject intelligent design theory as contrary to Biblical Christianity?

Although Nye often questioned whether we should accept Ham's interpretation of the Bible, Nye never challenged Ham's assumption that the Bible clearly teaches that the universe was created by God in 4004 BC.  In fact, the Bible never gives any date for God's original creation of the universe.  The dating of Creation as 6,000 years ago comes not from the Bible but from Archbishop James Ussher's book Annals of the World, which was published early in the seventeenth century.  Ham's organization ("Answers in Genesis") sells copies of this book.  Ussher claimed that if we count up the lifetimes of the people in the Bible and follow the genealogies, we can date the day of Creation. 

At one point in the debate, but without identifying Ussher, Ham said that "when we add up those dates in the Bible, we get 6,000 years."  But what Ham did not say is that Ussher found it impossible to "add up the dates" without going to historical evidence of chronology outside the Bible, because the Bible never lays out the whole chronology.  If you look at Ussher's book, you will see over 12,000 footnotes citing secular sources (like Xenophon and Herodotus).  The fact that the Bible never clearly lays out a chronology and never clearly teaches that the universe was created exactly 6,000 years ago indicates that this is not important for the purposes of the Bible.  The Bible is a book of salvational history not a book of natural history.  And thus, contrary to what Ham and the creationists assert, the Bible was never intended to be a science textbook.  This is important because it suggests that the Bible need not come into conflict with Darwinian evolutionary science.  It's surprising that Nye did not make this point.  I have written previous posts on this here and here.

My second question would be about Ham's opposition to intelligent design theory.  At one point, Nye criticized intelligent design theory, as if Ham's creationism was a form of intelligent design theory.  In fact, Ham has scornfully rejected intelligent design as contrary to the Bible.  And the proponents of intelligent design (like the folks at the Discovery Institute) have stressed that intelligent design theory is not based on the Bible, because they do not rely on the Bible as a science textbook.  But people seem to have a hard time recognizing this, because they don't see that for creationists like Ham, intelligent design theory is an attack on the literal meaning of Genesis.

So now let me turn to some of the points that were discussed in the debate.

Ham stressed the contrast between observational science (based on what we can all see in the present) and historical science (based on what we can only speculate happened in the past).  His claim is that absolute proof is possible in observational science, but not in historical science, because in historical science, our conclusions depend on the fundamental assumptions of our "worldview."  This allows Ham to contrast the Biblical worldview and the naturalist worldview, and to argue that both are faith commitments that cannot be absolutely proven, because the deep historical past cannot be directly observed.

Nye's response to this was to play down the historical/observational distinction and to insist that natural laws apply across the present and the history.  To suggest, as Ham does, that the laws of nature were different in the past from what they are today suggests a "magical" change in natural laws that is unscientific.

I agree with Ham that a historical science is not as absolutely demonstrative as a non-historical science.  Indeed, Darwinian scientists like Ernst Mayr have made this point.  But still the Darwinian scientist will assume a uniformity in natural laws across time as the ground for inferring the past from the present.

If we push back in the past to the very beginning, we might reach the Big Bang.  Nye summarized the evidence for the Big Bang.  But he was asked, What was there before the Big Bang?  His answered: It's a big mystery!  Ham answered: God!

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Ham would say that God created everything out of nothing.  But the Bible doesn't say this, and it implies that God worked upon some preexisting formless matter.  In any case, the whole question of why nothing rather than something seems to me to be nonsensical.  First, it's an absurd question because since we have never experienced absolute nothingness, we can't know what we're talking about when we talk about the possibility of absolute nothingness.  Second, the principle of sufficient reason--that there must be a cause for everything--applies properly to everything within the universe but not to the universe as a whole.  We face the problem of ultimate explanation.  Ultimately, all explanation must be based on some unexplained first cause--we must start with either God or nature as the uncaused cause of everything.  I have written about this in another post here.

If you start with God as the uncaused cause of everything, then the question is how exactly does God exercise his causality?  Does God have to create everything at every moment of its existence, so that there is no enduring natural order independent of God's will?  Or does he create some general natural order at the beginning that can then unfold without His having to intervene miraculously throughout time?

Ham seemed to say that God has allowed a natural history of evolution of species to occur, but within the limits of the original "kinds" that He created at the beginning.  Ham's example was the finches in the Galapagos--"Darwin's finches."  Ham conceded that the various species that have evolved in the Galapagos do show the evolution of new species, which is what Peter and Rosemary Grant have argued.  But for Ham, this is consistent with the idea that God created finches as a "kind," while allowing diverse species of finches to evolve naturally.  So if one considers the hierarchy of taxonomical levels--species-genus-family-order-class-phylum-kingdom--"kinds" correspond to the level of "family."  God created the "family" of finches, while allowing the various "species" of finches to diverge by natural evolution.  What Ham denies is that new families can emerge by natural evolution without God's creative activity.  And, of course, he denies that there is any evolution "from molecules to man."  I have written about this previously here.

Human beings as a "kind" had to be specially created by God in his image, Ham insisted, so that they would have the mind or soul that is uniquely human and that cannot evolve naturally from matter.  Nye was asked, How did consciousness arise from matter?  He answered, Don't know!  It's another big mystery that needs to be investigated.  I agree that this is a big mystery, but I would say that the general answer is that the soul emerges from the evolution of the primate brain so that distinctive human consciousness arises after passing over a critical threshold in the size and complexity of the primate brain (particularly in the prefrontal cortex).  We can infer this--as a historical science of the brain--by looking at fossil skulls and comparing primate brains today.  There might always be some mystery about this insofar as we have direct access to consciousness only in our introspective experience.  In any case, why couldn't we say that God chose to use the natural evolution of the primate brain to create human consciousness?  Could God as primary cause have used the secondary causality of natural evolution?  That was Darwin's suggestion.  I have written about this here, which includes links to other posts.  I have written about dual causality here.

If Ham is right about "kinds" corresponding to "families" in modern taxonomical classification, then God created the family of Hominidae, which includes bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans.  The human species could have evolved naturally from some common ancestor shared with bonobos and chimpanzees, the two living primate species genetically closest to humans.  Intelligent design proponents like Michael Behe accept the evidence for this.  But it's not clear that Ham would accept this.

For me, the most interesting moment in the debate came when Ham was asked, What if anything would ever change your mind?  He showed confusion and uncertainty as to how to answer this question.  But he finally answered that it would be impossible for anything to change his mind, because no one was ever going to convince him that the Bible was not the true science textbook.  Actually, one of Ham's persistent claims was that both scientific naturalism and Biblical religion are ultimately worldviews based on faith--faith in secular naturalism or faith in Biblical supernaturalism.

This points to the difficulty of resolving the reason-revelation debate.  To refute revelation, the proponents of natural reason would have to have such absolute and complete knowledge as to show the impossibility of miracles.  To refute reason, the proponents of supernatural religion would have to prove the reality of miracles even to the skeptics (perhaps by answering the one million dollar challenge of the late James Randi to prove something to be really a miracle rather than a magic trick or a delusion).

Finally, one should notice how Ham in the debate warns about the morally corrupting effects of Darwinian science.  This shows the true motivation for Ham and other creation scientists.  Their primary concern is not the truth or falsity of the science but its moral consequences.  One can see that in an essay that Ham wrote a few years ago for Forbes.com.  I also wrote an essay for Forbes.com arguing that Darwinian science actually supports morality.

Some of my other posts on the creation/evolution debate and the evidence for evolution can be found here and here.

My Debate with Ken Ham: Darwinian Morality or Biblical Morality?

When I toured the Creation Museum, I was reminded of the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye at the Creation Museum in 2014, which was the subject of a post.  I was also reminded that I had once debated Ham in 2009--not in person but on the online website of Forbes magazine.  February 12, 2009, was the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth.  An editor at Forbes invited a number of people to write essays for the occasion.  I wrote an essay entitled "We Are the Moral Animals," in which I argued that Darwin had explained the natural grounding of morality in evolved human nature.  Ham wrote an essay entitled "Darwinian Dangers," in which he argued, on the contrary, that Darwin had destroyed the grounding of morality in Christianity by denying the moral uniqueness of human beings as created in God's image.  This shows the true motivation for Ham and other creationist scientists.  Their primary concern is not the truth or falsity of the science but its moral consequences: we should accept Biblical science because it supports morality, and we should reject Darwinian science because it corrupts morality.

At the Creation Museum, Ham begins his attack on evolution's moral dangers in the "Starting Points" exhibit.  Are Human "Races" Equal? is the question for one display (CMS, 15).  For the "Naturalistic Evolutionist Worldview," the answer is: "While most evolutionists reject racism, their philosophy is inherently racist."  To support this, the display quotes Stephen Jay Gould saying that "biological arguments for racism" have been common.  The same quotation appears in Ham's Forbes.com essay.

For the "Biblical Creationist Worldview," the answer is: "All human beings are made in God's image and are descendants of Adam, so there is no basis for racism from a biblical perspective."

Although there have been "biological arguments for racism," they have never been properly rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science and evolutionary moral psychology.  As I have pointed out, Darwin was a vehement opponent of slavery who wrote The Descent of Man to show that all human beings were equally human as members of the human species.  Ham and the Creation Museum are silent about this.

They are also silent about the fact that wherever the Bible speaks about slavery, it endorses it.  The Ark Encounter does have one display with the question, Was the Bible Used to Promote Racism?  The answer is: "Sadly, some professing Christians have misused passages of the Bible to spread racist ideas, such as slavery based on a person's skin tone or the notion that 'interracial' marriage is sinful" (AE, 101).  "But what does the Bible really teach on these matters?"  They answer with four verses about all of us being created in God's image, all one race, and all loved by God.

But they cannot cite any Biblical passage that directly condemns slavery.  And they are silent about the many passages that endorse it.  As I have indicated, those who defended the Biblical basis of slavery (like Fred Ross) wrote meticulous studies of the Bible to show that it consistently supported slavery.  To the claim that God's creating men in His image makes all men equal, Ross responded by pointing out that the "image of God" teaching is compatible with a divinely ordained hierarchy among human beings.  

For example: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:27).  Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind.  God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man.  For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7).   Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5).  Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.  

Ham and the Creation Museum make no attempt to refute this scriptural argument for slavery.  Instead, they have silently corrected the Bible by reading it through the lens of their natural moral sense, which Darwin explains as a product of human evolution.  Their knowledge that slavery is wrong comes from that natural moral sense not from their reading of the Bible.

They also silently correct the Bible's moral mistakes by refusing to even mention those many places where the Bible endorses immoral violence.  For example, in a display on "God's Promise to the Nations," they reproduce Rembrandt's painting of Abraham preparing to kill his son Isaac; but they do not explain that this murder of a child was commanded by God (Gen. 22).

Similarly, while they refer to the Israelites being commanded by God to fight against the Canaanites (CMS, 55), they are silent about God ordering a "curse of destruction," in which the Israelites would slaughter everyone, including women and children, but keep alive the young virgins so that the Israelite men could rape them (Deu. 20:10-18; Numbers 31:7-20).  Previously, I have written about how Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have condemned this religious violence in the Bible as immoral.  Ham and the Creation Museum do not do this, because in doing so, they would have to admit that the Bible's moral mistakes need to be corrected by our natural moral sense.

Revelation Cannot Resolve the Creation/Evolution Debate

Unlike  the atheistic religiosity of Romantic conservatives like Roger Scruton, the theistic religiosity of evangelical Christians is grounded in their faith in the supreme authority of God's revelation--the special revelation of the Bible and the general revelation of nature, the "two books" in which God's revelation can be read by human beings.  Remarkably, however, neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution. 

This becomes evident if one reads the new book edited by J. B. Stump--Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan, 2017).  Four positions in the creation/evolution debate are represented by four leading proponents: Young Earth creationism (Ken Ham), Old Earth creationism (Hugh Ross), evolutionary creation (Deborah Haarsma), and intelligent design (Stephen Meyer).  This is the first time that these four people have engaged one another directly.  Each of the four has written a chapter, followed by responses from the other three, and then a rejoinder by the chapter's author.

In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.  In Stump's "Introduction" to Four Views, he says that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his "Conclusion" to the book, he laments that this has not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of revelation.  So we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no revelation about origins, or the revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.

Like the other three authors, Ken Ham (the young earth creationist) sees God's revelation both in Scripture and in nature.  But he thinks the biblical revelation is clearer and more truthful than natural revelation, because after Adam's Fall, God cursed creation, and so "the creation gives a confusing message about the Creator" (19).  The creation reveals the Creator to all people, but it does not teach us how and when God created.  For that, we must go to the Bible (101).

Ham insists that the "clear teaching" of the Bible, particularly in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, is that God created everything over six literal days about 6,000 years ago; and therefore the claim of evolutionary science that life and the universe evolved naturally over billions of years is false.  But Ham is silent about the fact that the dating of Creation at 6,000 years ago is not in the Bible.  This date was inferred by Bishop James Ussher, who relied not just on the Bible but also on non-biblical documents.  So this is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.  Moreover, Ham admits that "most Christians" or "many Christians" do not agree with his interpretation (24, 28, 31, 34, 38, 44, 46).

Ham also claims that the Bible is clear in declaring that God created all the forms of plant and animal life by creating distinct "kinds" (Hebrew min), and that these created kinds correspond to what in modern taxonomic classification would be called the family (not species or genus) (41, 105).  Thus, new species can arise by natural evolution, but this evolutionary change is within the boundary of a "kind" or "family."  Ham is silent, however, about how, prior to Darwin, "kinds" were interpreted as species.  Once Darwin had shown how species can emerge by natural evolution, some creationists, beginning with Frank Marsh in 1941, began to argue that the Hebrew min was an "imprecise term," and that it should be interpreted not as species but as family.  (I have written about this here.)  Ham has adopted this interpretation without acknowledging that it is an interpretation that is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.  (I have written a post on Ham's debate with Bill Nye in 2014.)

Thus, Ham is silent about there being a fifth form of biblical creationism--the creationist theory of God's special creation of fixed species that Darwin refuted in The Origin of Species.  This form of creationism is not represented in Stump's book, although it was the most common form of biblical creationism before the publication of Darwin's Origin in 1859.

Against Ham, Hugh Ross (the old earth creationist) insists that the Bible clearly teaches that the six days of creation in Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour days but "ages"--long expanses of time that correspond to the billions of years for the creation of the universe, the earth, and life that has been confirmed by modern science.  And yet, while disagreeing with Ham about dating, Ross agrees with Ham in reading the Genesis story literally.  So, for example, he agrees with Ham that the human species was originally created with God's creation of Adam and Eve; and he predicts that genetic models will eventually show an initial human ancestral population of 2.  The creation narrative in Genesis is "in perfect accord--both descriptively and chronologically--with the established scientific record" (83).  The Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature are in concord.

Ross believes that the evolutionary history of the universe and life show gaps that cannot be explained by purely natural evolutionary processes, because these gaps arise from God's miraculous intervention. For example, there is an unbridgeable gap between human beings and all other animals, because the creation of Adam and Eve was a miraculous work of the Creator.  Similarly, mass extinction and mass speciation events show God's interventions into natural history.

Unlike both Ham and Ross, Deborah Haarsma (the evolutionary creationist) does not see the creation story in Genesis as a literal history of nature's origins, and she does not see gaps in evolutionary history that require miraculous interventions by God to create what cannot arise by natural evolution.  She writes: "Evolutionary creation is the view that God created the universe, earth, and life over billions of years, and that the gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of all life on earth. Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes" (125).

Compared with the other three positions, Haarsma's evolutionary creation is closest to Darwin's idea of "dual causality": Darwin speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  I have written about this here and here.

Haarsma has carefully chosen the term "evolutionary creation" as an alternative to the term "theistic evolution," because the later term often suggests a deism in which the divine First Cause lacks the personal and providential traits of the Biblical God.  Haarsma's Creator chooses to act through the evolutionary laws of nature rather than miraculous interventions, which distinguishes her position from that of Ham and Ross.  But her Creator does engage in those miraculous acts that are necessary for human salvation--such as the incarnation and resurrection of Christ.  Her Creator hears and answers prayers.  Her Creator really is the Biblical God and not just Meyer's Intelligent Designer.  (As I have indicated in another post, Darwin would have disagreed with Haarsma on this point, because he did not see any clear evidence that the Bible was a divine revelation.)

According to Haarsma, Genesis does not answer the how and when questions of science, but it does answer the who and why questions (131).  Much of the Genesis story repeats the creation stories of the ancient Near East that the Israelites would have known.  God accommodated his teaching to these beliefs.  He could have corrected this cosmology, Haarsma observes, but he chose not to do that.  God's only concern was to teach that there is only one God who is the sovereign creator of all, which departed from the ancient origin stories (128-30).  In this interpretation, Haarsma follows the lead of John Walton, who argues that the Bible was written first to the peoples living in the ancient Near East, and therefore we should not expect that the cosmological teachings should correspond with a modern scientific understanding. (I have written about this here.)

But as Ham points out, this "accuses God of using error to teach truth" (156).  If God had corrected the errors of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, wouldn't this have confirmed God's revelation as truth that was beyond human understanding prior to modern science?  If there is no correction of ancient cosmology, does this imply that this is not really a revelation of a truth beyond the human beliefs of that time?

Haarsma might respond that we can see this was a true revelation because it corrects ancient theology in teaching a monotheistic religion of a creator God that was new.  But if we're going to read the Bible within its cultural setting, then we might notice that parts of the Bible seem to accept the polytheistic idea that different peoples have different gods (for example Judges 11:24).  We might then wonder whether Yahweh was originally one of many gods who at some point was elevated to be the one universal and transcendent god of Israel, which is the argument of Thomas Romer in The Invention of God (Harvard, 2015).  So why isn't God a cultural invention?  To deny this, it would help to have a revelation in the Bible of cosmological truths that correct traditional cosmologies in ways that people of the ancient Near East could not have understood, but which might be confirmed by modern science.

To all of this, Stephen Meyer (the intelligent design theorist) responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an intelligent designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.  He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an intelligent designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.

There are, however, as I will indicate in my next post, some serious problems with Meyer's argument.

Here, I only want to make the point that the disagreement over origins among these four faithful Christians who have carefully studied both the Bible and science suggests that there has been no divine revelation that clearly resolves the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution.

So what?  What difference does this make for orthodox believing Christians?  Sometimes the authors in this book say the debate over origins is only a "secondary issue" for Christians, because one can be a believing Christian without resolving this debate (44-45, 60).  But then Ham contends that the literal truth of Genesis 1-11 is the "foundation" of all the other doctrines of Christianity--it is "the foundation of the whole rest of the Bible" (18).  If this is so, then those who disagree with Ham's interpretation of Genesis are destroying Christianity.

Ham refers to the famous case of Anthony Flew, the British philosopher who argued for philosophic atheism until he was persuaded to accept the argument for intelligent  design, and he became a deist.  Ham observes that since Flew never accepted the clear revelation in the Bible of God as Creator and Jesus as Savior, he died "as a Christ-rejecting sinner who sadly will spend eternity in Hell" (210).  So those who fail to receive the correct revelation of Biblical creationism will go to Hell!  (My posts on Flew can be found here, here, and here.)

Even if they don't go to Hell, professors at Christian schools who don't receive the correct revelation of creationism might lose their jobs.  For example, the editor of Four Views--Jim Stump--was for many years a respected professor of philosophy at Bethel College in Indiana.  But then the College adopted this declaration as part of their statement of  faith: "We believe that the first man, Adam, was created by an immediate act of God and not by a process of evolution."  Since Stump is a proponent of evolutionary creation, who works for Haarsma's BioLogos, the organization promoting evolutionary creation, he believes that Adam was indeed created by God through a natural process of evolution.  Consequently, he was forced to resign from Bethel College.  (I have written about the Adam controversy here.)

So why are faithful Christians unable to reach any agreement about this question of creation, evolution, and ultimate origins?  If the revelation of God's teaching in the Bible or in nature about origins is untrustworthy or unclear, why should we believe that there has been any revelation at all?

Has the Holy Spirit failed us, because the obscurity of revelation makes it impossible for us to agree on the meaning of that revelation?

A Majority of Americans Now Accept the Evolution of Humans from Earlier Forms of Life. The Bible Versus Darwin?

An article recently published in the journal Public Understanding of Science reports that 54% of Americans today agree with the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" (Miller et al. 2021).  This is a remarkable increase from 2005, when only 40% of Americans agreed with that statement (Miller et al. 2006). 

In 2005, as compared with 34 countries, the United States had the second lowest public acceptance of human evolution.  Only Turkey was lower.  Today, despite the increase in American acceptance of evolution, it is still lower than in the European countries and in many other countries around the world.

This research suggests many questions.  Why does the U.S. still lag behind many other countries in the public acceptance of evolution? Is there some feature of American moral, religious, or political culture that creates a resistance to Darwinian evolution?  Why has the acceptance of evolution increased in America over the past 15 years?   And is there any way to improve the teaching of the American public about evolutionary science to make it more acceptable?

In their study of the public opinion surveys of Americans on the issue of human evolution, Jon Miller and his colleagues identify six factors that predict the acceptance or rejection of evolution.  The second most important factor is "civic scientific literacy": those who show a lot of knowledge of science tend to accept evolution.  The third most important factor is college science courses: those who have taken many such courses are more likely to accept evolution.  The fourth ranked factor is education: those with advanced educational degrees usually accept evolution.  The fifth ranked factor is age:  younger people are more inclined than older people to accept evolution.  The sixth ranked factor is ideological partisanship:  liberal Democrats are more inclined than conservative Republicans to accept evolution. 

But the most influential factor by far is American religious fundamentalism: religious fundamentalists usually reject evolution.  "Religious fundamentalism" is measured by how people answer five questions.  (1) They agree that "There is a personal God that hears the prayers of individuals."  (2) They agree that "The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally."  (3) They report that they usually attend at least one religious service in a typical week.  (4) They report that they pray at least once in a typical week.  (5) And they agree that "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith."

Presumably, religious fundamentalists reject the Darwinian idea of human evolution from earlier species of animals because they believe this contradicts what the Bible says about God creating everything, including human beings, and about God as a Personal Deity who hears prayers and demands faithful obedience.  They think the Bible as God's Revelation contradicts Darwin's naturalistic science of evolution.

There is another influential feature of American fundamentalist religion that is not considered by Miller and his colleagues:  American fundamentalists often see biblical creationism in the Declaration of Independence, which claims "that all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," and that this Creator is the source of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," and also "the Supreme Judge of the World" who exercises "divine Providence."  Therefore if Darwinian evolution denies biblical creationism, it denies a fundamental principle of the American creed: that human beings have a unique moral dignity as created in the image of God, and as subject to His laws, His judgment, and His providence.  In the history of the American fundamentalist attacks on evolution, William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s was the first one to charge that Darwinian evolution denied the imago Dei teaching of the Declaration of Independence.

Here I will challenge both of these reasons for the fundamentalist rejection of Darwinian evolution.  First, I will argue that there has been no biblical revelation that clearly resolves the debate over creation and evolution.  Second, I will argue that there is no good reason to believe that the Declaration of Independence requires a biblical creationism that denies Darwinian evolution.

I will be drawing from some previous writing here, here, and here.

REVELATION HAS NOT RESOLVED THE CREATION/EVOLUTION DEBATE

The theistic religiosity of evangelical Christians is grounded in their faith in the supreme authority of God's revelation--the special revelation of the Bible and the general revelation of nature, the "two books" in which God's revelation can be read by human beings.  Remarkably, however, neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution. 

This becomes evident if one reads a book edited by J. B. Stump--Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan, 2017).  Four positions in the creation/evolution debate are represented by four leading proponents: Young Earth creationism (Ken Ham), Old Earth creationism (Hugh Ross), evolutionary creation (Deborah Haarsma), and intelligent design (Stephen Meyer).  This is the first time that these four people have engaged one another directly.  Each of the four has written a chapter, followed by responses from the other three, and then a rejoinder by the chapter's author.

In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.  In Stump's "Introduction" to Four Views, he says that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his "Conclusion" to the book, he laments that this has not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of revelation.  So we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no revelation about origins, or the revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.

Like the other three authors, Ken Ham (the young earth creationist) sees God's revelation both in Scripture and in nature.  But he thinks the biblical revelation is clearer and more truthful than natural revelation, because after Adam's Fall, God cursed creation, and so "the creation gives a confusing message about the Creator" (19).  The creation reveals the Creator to all people, but it does not teach us how and when God created.  For that, we must go to the Bible (101).

Ham insists that the "clear teaching" of the Bible, particularly in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, is that God created everything over six literal days about 6,000 years ago; and therefore the claim of evolutionary science that life and the universe evolved naturally over billions of years is false.  But Ham is silent about the fact that the dating of Creation at 6,000 years ago is not in the Bible.  This date was inferred by Bishop James Ussher, who relied not just on the Bible but also on non-biblical documents.  So this is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.  Moreover, Ham admits that "most Christians" or "many Christians" do not agree with his interpretation (24, 28, 31, 34, 38, 44, 46).

Ham also claims that the Bible is clear in declaring that God created all the forms of plant and animal life by creating distinct "kinds" (Hebrew min), and that these created kinds correspond to what in modern taxonomic classification would be called the family (not species or genus) (41, 105).  Thus, new species can arise by natural evolution, but this evolutionary change is within the boundary of a "kind" or "family."  Ham is silent, however, about how, prior to Darwin, "kinds" were interpreted as species.  Once Darwin had shown how species can emerge by natural evolution, some creationists, beginning with Frank Marsh in 1941, began to argue that the Hebrew min was an "imprecise term," and that it should be interpreted not as species but as family.  (I have written about this here.)  Ham has adopted this interpretation without acknowledging that it is an interpretation that is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.  (I have written a post on Ham's debate with Bill Nye in 2014.

Thus, Ham is silent about there being a fifth form of biblical creationism--the creationist theory of God's special creation of fixed species that Darwin refuted in The Origin of Species.  This form of creationism is not represented in Stump's book, although it was the most common form of biblical creationism before the publication of Darwin's Origin in 1859.

Against Ham, Hugh Ross (the old earth creationist) insists that the Bible clearly teaches that the six days of creation in Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour days but "ages"--long expanses of time that correspond to the billions of years for the creation of the universe, the earth, and life that has been confirmed by modern science.  And yet, while disagreeing with Ham about dating, Ross agrees with Ham in reading the Genesis story literally.  So, for example, he agrees with Ham that the human species was originally created with God's creation of Adam and Eve; and he predicts that genetic models will eventually show an initial human ancestral population of 2.  The creation narrative in Genesis is "in perfect accord--both descriptively and chronologically--with the established scientific record" (83).  The Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature are in concord.

Ross believes that the evolutionary history of the universe and life show gaps that cannot be explained by purely natural evolutionary processes, because these gaps arise from God's miraculous intervention. For example, there is an unbridgeable gap between human beings and all other animals, because the creation of Adam and Eve was a miraculous work of the Creator.  Similarly, mass extinction and mass speciation events show God's interventions into natural history.

Unlike both Ham and Ross, Deborah Haarsma (the evolutionary creationist) does not see the creation story in Genesis as a literal history of nature's origins, and she does not see gaps in evolutionary history that require miraculous interventions by God to create what cannot arise by natural evolution.  She writes: "Evolutionary creation is the view that God created the universe, earth, and life over billions of years, and that the gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of all life on earth. Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes" (125).

Compared with the other three positions, Haarsma's evolutionary creation is closest to Darwin's idea of "dual causality": Darwin speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  I have written about this here and here.

Haarsma has carefully chosen the term "evolutionary creation" as an alternative to the term "theistic evolution," because the later term often suggests a deism in which the divine First Cause lacks the personal and providential traits of the Biblical God.  Haarsma's Creator chooses to act through the evolutionary laws of nature rather than miraculous interventions, which distinguishes her position from that of Ham and Ross.  But her Creator does engage in those miraculous acts that are necessary for human salvation--such as the incarnation and resurrection of Christ.  Her Creator hears and answers prayers.  Her Creator really is the Biblical God and not just Meyer's Intelligent Designer.  (As I have indicated in another post, Darwin would have disagreed with Haarsma on this point, because he did not see any clear evidence that the Bible was a divine revelation.)

According to Haarsma, Genesis does not answer the how and when questions of science, but it does answer the who and why questions (131).  Much of the Genesis story repeats the creation stories of the ancient Near East that the Israelites would have known.  God accommodated his teaching to these beliefs.  He could have corrected this cosmology, Haarsma observes, but he chose not to do that.  God's only concern was to teach that there is only one God who is the sovereign creator of all, which departed from the ancient origin stories (128-30).  In this interpretation, Haarsma follows the lead of John Walton, who argues that the Bible was written first to the peoples living in the ancient Near East, and therefore we should not expect that the cosmological teachings should correspond with a modern scientific understanding. (I have written about this here.)

But as Ham points out, this "accuses God of using error to teach truth" (156).  If God had corrected the errors of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, wouldn't this have confirmed God's revelation as truth that was beyond human understanding prior to modern science?  If there is no correction of ancient cosmology, does this imply that this is not really a revelation of a truth beyond the human beliefs of that time?

Haarsma might respond that we can see this was a true revelation because it corrects ancient theology in teaching a monotheistic religion of a creator God that was new.  But if we're going to read the Bible within its cultural setting, then we might notice that parts of the Bible seem to accept the polytheistic idea that different peoples have different gods (for example Judges 11:24).  We might then wonder whether Yahweh was originally one of many gods who at some point was elevated to be the one universal and transcendent god of Israel, which is the argument of Thomas Romer in The Invention of God (Harvard, 2015).  So why isn't God a cultural invention?  To deny this, it would help to have a revelation in the Bible of cosmological truths that correct traditional cosmologies in ways that people of the ancient Near East could not have understood, but which might be confirmed by modern science.

To all of this, Stephen Meyer (the intelligent design theorist) responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an intelligent designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.  He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an intelligent designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.

I have argued in another post that Meyer's reasoning is dishonest and sophistical.

Here, I only want to make the point that the disagreement over origins among these four faithful Christians who have carefully studied both the Bible and science suggests that there has been no divine revelation that clearly resolves the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution.

So what?  What difference does this make for orthodox believing Christians?  Sometimes the authors in this book say the debate over origins is only a "secondary issue" for Christians, because one can be a believing Christian without resolving this debate (44-45, 60).  But then Ham contends that the literal truth of Genesis 1-11 is the "foundation" of all the other doctrines of Christianity--it is "the foundation of the whole rest of the Bible" (18).  If this is so, then those who disagree with Ham's interpretation of Genesis are destroying Christianity.

Ham refers to the famous case of Anthony Flew, the British philosopher who argued for philosophic atheism until he was persuaded to accept the argument for intelligent  design, and he became a deist.  Ham observes that since Flew never accepted the clear revelation in the Bible of God as Creator and Jesus as Savior, he died "as a Christ-rejecting sinner who sadly will spend eternity in Hell" (210).  So those who fail to receive the correct revelation of Biblical creationism will go to Hell!  (My posts on Flew can be found here, here, and here.)

Even if they don't go to Hell, professors at Christian schools who don't receive the correct revelation of creationism might lose their jobs.  For example, the editor of Four Views--Jim Stump--was for many years a respected professor of philosophy at Bethel College in Indiana.  But then the College adopted this declaration as part of their statement of  faith: "We believe that the first man, Adam, was created by an immediate act of God and not by a process of evolution."  Since Stump is a proponent of evolutionary creation, who works for Haarsma's BioLogos, the organization promoting evolutionary creation, he believes that Adam was indeed created by God through a natural process of evolution.  Consequently, he was forced to resign from Bethel College.  (I have written about the Adam controversy here.)

So why are faithful Christians unable to reach any agreement about this question of creation, evolution, and ultimate origins?  If the revelation of God's teaching in the Bible or in nature about origins is untrustworthy or unclear, why should they believe that there has been any revelation at all?

It seems that the Holy Spirit failed them.

NATURE'S GOD

It is often claimed that a Darwinian science of human evolution denies the political theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence by denying the Declaration's appeal to God as the Creator who has endowed human beings with unalienable rights.  Darwin seemed to clearly deny this when he wrote: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity, more humble, and I believe true, to consider him created from animals" (1987, 300).  If human beings have been "created from animals," it might seem that they have not been specially created by God in His image and thus endowed with that moral dignity that sets them apart from other animals.

For this reason, William Jennings Bryan (1922, 1924) warned that Darwinian evolution was an assault on the American political theology of the Declaration, which was one of his reasons for joining the prosecution in the famous Scopes trial in 1925, where John Scopes, a public school teacher, was charged with teaching that human beings evolved from a lower animals, in violation of a Tennessee law prohibiting such teaching.

As an alternative to teaching Darwinian evolution, Bryan and his followers have argued for teaching "creation science" or "intelligent design theory."  Proponents of intelligent design have been motivated by their belief that Darwinian evolution promotes a culturally degrading materialism that denies the creationist theology that is foundational not only for American life but for Western civilization in general.  The Discovery Institute, the leading organization promoting intelligent design theory, made this point clear in 1998 in the founding document for its "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture," which has a reproduction of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" painting on its cover, and which begins:

"The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.  Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences."

Thus, the Darwinian denial of the creationist theology of the Declaration of Independence can be seen as a general denial of the whole idea of human rights.  Theorists of human rights like Michael Perry (1998, 2007) have contended that international norms of human rights must be founded on the principle of the sacredness of human life as created in God's image (the subject of a previous post).

Against my argument for "Darwinian liberalism," Adam Seagrave (2011) and many others (Dilley et al. 2013), including the Straussians, have insisted that the Lockean liberal conception of natural rights depends on Locke's creationist anthropology, which is contrary to Darwin's evolutionary science (the subject of posts here and here).

Similarly, Carl Becker in his classic study in 1922 of the Declaration of Independence concluded that modern Darwinian science had refuted the Declaration's recourse to "God or the Transcendent Idea." After all, Becker explained, Darwin had shown how all forms of life could be explained as the result of purely natural material causes:

"When so much the greater part of the universe showed itself amenable to the reign of a purely material natural law, it was difficult to suppose that man (a creature in many respects astonishingly like the higher forms of apes) could have been permitted to live under a special dispensation.  it was much simpler to assume one origin for all life and one law for all growth; simpler to assume that man was only the most highly organized of the creatures (the missing link would doubtless shortly be found), and to think of his history accordingly, as only a more subtly negotiated struggle for existence and survival" (Becker 1941, 274-75).

This dispute over whether Darwinism contradicts the theology of the Declaration depends on how one identifies the God of the Declaration. If one interprets the Declaration's deity as a transcendent creative agent working against the laws of nature in  miraculously endowing human beings with a supernatural soul, that would contradict the Darwinian account of natural human evolution.  But if one interprets the Declaration's deity as an immanent creative power working through the laws of nature for the emergent evolution of human beings, that would be compatible with Darwinian science.  In this case, we could see the appeal in the first sentence of the Declaration to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as implying that God and Nature are two ways of talking about the same thing.  Nature's God is the God of the deists, the God of Spinoza, a way of talking about God without invoking the supernatural God.

One of the first of America's revolutionaries to declare his belief in "Nature's God" was Thomas Young.  In 1770, three years before he would become the instigator of the Boston Tea Party, Young responded to a sermon by the revivalist George Whitefield denouncing American Deists as Satanic atheists.  In the Boston Evening Post (August 27, 1770), Young proudly professed his deist faith in the God who could be known by reasoning about nature rather than from biblical revelation: "That the religion of Nature, more properly stiled the Religion of Nature's God, in latin call'd Deus, hence Deism, is truth, I now boldly defy thee to contest."

To better understand this "Religion of Nature's God," Young recommended "[Alexander] Pope's little Essay on Man, confessedly deduced from the inspiration of Lord Bolingbroke, and perhaps every sentence adopted by me."  Indeed, the first appearance of the term "Nature's God" in English was in Pope's Essay on Man, a philosophical poem published in 1734, where in explaining how "Virtue alone is Happiness below," he observes:

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,

"But looks thro' Nature, up to Nature's God" (4.331-32)

Echoing the monistic naturalism of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza, Pope speaks of Nature and God interchangeably, in denying sectarian religion in favor of a natural religion in which "true piety," as Lucretius declared, is not to bow before the gods, but to contemplate nature's wondrous order (On the Nature of Things, 5.1197-1203).

Pope's Essay on Man also shows the first published use of the phrase "science of Human Nature" (Pope 2016, lv, 4).

Pope's book was dedicated to Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), who became notorious for his posthumously published Philosophical Works that attacked Christianity and promoted an Epicurean and Spinozist atheism or natural religion.  "The law of nature is the law of God," he explained, and therefore the laws of the Bible that contradict nature cannot truly be God's laws.  As a young man, Thomas Jefferson copied this and many other passages from Bolingbroke into his Literary Commonplace Book (sec. 36).

In his private correspondence, Jefferson affirmed his Epicurean materialism: "I too am an Epicurean" (letter to William Short, October 31, 1819).  In his correspondence with John Adams, he rejected the "spiritualism" of traditional Christianity and defended a monistic conception of human nature in which mind is an activity of the physical brain.  (I have written about that here.)  He thought that Jesus was originally a great teacher of natural morality, but then his moral teaching was corrupted by a tradition of Christian miracle-working spiritualism.  He edited his own personal version of the New Testament in which he cut out all of the stories of miracles and of the divinity of Jesus.

Although Jefferson kept all of this private during his lifetime, his published writing--and particularly his Notes on the State of Virginia (written in 1781 and published in 1787)--provided enough evidence for him to be generally identified as an "infidel."  In the presidential election of 1800, ministers published sermons warning Christians not to vote for this "open infidel."  John Mitchell Mason (1991 [originally 1800]) quoted one of the most infamous passages in the Notes on Virginia: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  Mason identified this as a clear statement of infidelity or atheism, because it affirmed that a society could be founded in atheism, and that religion was not necessary for social order.

Remarkably, Mason said that many Christians in 1800 were saying that "there is no prospect of obtaining a real Christian, and we had better choose an infidel than a hypocrite" (1991, 1468).  His reply was to argue that it was better to vote for hypocrites like George Washington and John Adams--who hide their infidelity behind their professions of religion--than to vote for an open infidel like Jefferson, because at least hypocrites show public respect for religion.  The fact that the Constitution of the United States never mentions God makes it even more imperative, Mason observes, for Christians to elect either Christians or hypocrites rather than open infidels, if there is to be any chance of slowing America's decline into atheism.

But even if Jefferson was infected with the Epicurean infidelity of Lucretius, Spinoza, Bolingbroke, and Pope, one might assume that the political theology of the Declaration of Independence echoes the Christian creationism of John Locke.  But many of Locke's Christian critics--including Bishop Stillingfleet, Leibniz, and William Carroll--accused Locke of hiding his Epicurean and Spinozist infidelity behind his pretensions of orthodox Christianity.  Carroll argued that Locke had advanced a "double View, double Design, intended to fool the pious while promoting Spinozism."  After all, a careful reading of Locke shows his slippery language--sliding between "the laws of God," "the laws of Nature," or "the laws of God and Nature," and moving from "God has designed" to "Nature has designed"--so that his deity looks like Spinoza's: "God or Nature" (see The Second Treatise of Government, secs. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.9.12, 2.10.3).  (For a meticulous account of how Epicurean naturalism was transmitted through Lucretius, Spinoza, and Locke to the American founders, see Matthew Stewart's book Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.)

How one interprets the theology of the Declaration of Independence is connected with one's interpretation of its Lockean morality of natural rights.  A transcendent conception of the Declaration's deity will support a transcendent conception of its morality, so that its Lockean morality will depend upon the supernatural authority of God's commands as revealed in the Bible.  Consequently, infidelity or atheism will deny that morality.  By contrast, an immanent conception of the Declaration's deity will support an immanent conception if its morality, so that its Lockean morality will depend upon human reason's grasp of a natural moral law known by human experience without any need for supernatural revelation.

The Declaration is open to both interpretations.  The openness to a transcendent deity was enhanced by the changes made to Jefferson's first draft.  In that first draft, "Nature's God" was Jefferson's only reference to a deity.  Later, other members of the Congress added three more references to deity: "they are endowed by their Creator" in the second sentence; "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intensions" in the penultimate sentence; and "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" in the last sentence.  God as Creator, as Supreme Judge, and as Providential Caregiver does suggest a divine agency above or beyond the natural world that might intervene miraculously in the natural world against natural law to serve His purposes, and thus enforcing a transcendent morality.  (On the drafting of the Declaration, see Becker's book.)

So, for example, as I indicated in my previous posts, some American charismatic evangelicals can appeal to "the protection of divine Providence" in their belief that God intervened in the presidential election of 2016 to give Donald Trump a miraculous victory in response to prayers from Christians asking for His aid.

But if one interprets "Nature's God" as the immanent creative power of nature itself, one could affirm a natural Lockean morality rooted in human nature and reason.  That was Jefferson's position in arguing for a natural moral sense that did not necessarily depend on believing in a transcendent God of the Bible who enforced morality with supernatural rewards and punishments.  Darwin agreed with this, and it has been reinforced by recent developments in the evolutionary psychology of morality.

When Jefferson and Adams resumed their correspondence in 1812, after it had broken off during their period of being political opponents, much of what they wrote over the next 15 years was about their hope that Nature's God of the scientific Enlightenment would finally prevail over the priestly superstition enforcing tyranny over the human mind.  In his letter of September 14, 1813, Adams wrote to Jefferson saying that he would be happy to hear that the British Parliament had passed a bill to repeal the provisions of the Toleration Act of 1689 that made it illegal to deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity; and he declared:

"The human Understanding is a revelation from its Maker which can never be disputed or doubted.  There can be no Scepticism, Pyrrhonism or Incredulity or Infidelity here.  No Prophecies, no Miracles are necessary to prove this celestial communication.  This revelation has made it certain that  two and one make three; and that one is not three; nor can three be one.  We can never be so certain of any Prophecy, or the fulfillment of any Prophecy; or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle as We are, from the revelation of nature i.e. nature's God that two and two are equal to four.  Miracles or Prophecies might fright Us out of our Wits; might scare us to death; might induce Us to lie; to say that We believe that 2 and 2 make 5. But We should not believe it. We should know the contrary" (Cappon, 1987, p. 373).

Clearly then, Nature's God is not three (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), but one with Nature itself; and Nature's God is known not by faith in miracles but by human understanding of the natural order of things.

Some of these points are elaborated in posts here, here, here, and here.

THE DARWINIAN SCIENCE OF THE CREATOR IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Here is the beginning of the second sentence in Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable."

Here is that same passage as it appears in the final version: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Although the first version conveys the idea of human beings as created equal and deriving rights from that equal creation, the addition of "by their Creator" in the final version makes it clearer that the agent of creation is the divine Creator.

Here is the last sentence in the first edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

In the second edition of this book, Darwin added the phrase "by the Creator" after the word "breathed."  Darwin's language here about creation through "breathing" echoes the language of the King James translation of Genesis 2:7--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."  As in the revision of the Declaration, Darwin's addition of "the Creator" makes the implication clear that there's a divine agent at work in the origin of life.

In the Biblical story of Creation, there seems to be something special about God's creation of human beings, and that human specialness is emphasized by the Bible's declaration that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27).  There is also a suggestion of human specialness in the Declaration's claim that human beings are endowed by their Creator with rights.

In Darwin's text, however, the powers of life were originally breathed by the Creator "into a few forms or into one," implying that human beings were not specially created but rather evolved from lower forms of life.  And, in fact, Darwin explicitly rejects the "theory of special creation"--the theory that the Creator had to miraculously create each species of life separately--in affirming "the theory of natural selection"--Darwin's theory that all living species of life have naturally evolved over millions of years from one or a few primordial forms of life.

The exact dating of creation is not clear either in the Bible or in the Declaration.  "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).  But Genesis does not give us a date for "the beginning." God's acts of creation are said to be spread out over six days, and yet it's not clear whether these are meant to be literal 24-hour days.  In the seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher tried to calculate the chronology of Biblical history, and he estimated that the "beginning" of creation was 4,004 years before the birth of Christ; so that the whole world was no older than 6,000 years.  But the Bible does not clearly state this.  And the Declaration takes no position on this dating.

Although it was impossible for Darwin to date the history of life precisely, he saw that the natural evolution of all forms of life would require at least hundreds of millions of years.  One of the achievements of geology in the first half of the nineteenth century was reaching a general agreement that the Earth was surely much older than 6,000 years.  Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there were some "young-Earth creationists" who defended Ussher's dating, although the "old-Earth creationists" were willing to concede that the geological evidence was against Ussher, and that the "days" of creation in Genesis should be interpreted as "ages" much longer than 24 hours.  William Jennings Bryan, for example, was an old-Earth creationist.

So is the Darwinian science of human evolution compatible with what the Declaration says about the creation of human beings by the Creator?  Well, it depends on what one means by "creation" and "the Creator."  As I have already indicated, there are different kinds of creationism, and while some kinds clearly contradict Darwin's science, some do not--as suggested by Darwin himself in his reference to "the Creator."  A Creator whose creative activity is always against the laws of nature denies Darwin's science.  But a Creator whose creative activity works through the laws of nature--who acts as Nature's God--is compatible with Darwin's science.

There are six kinds of creationism--the theory of special creation, young-Earth creationism, old-Earth creationism, intelligent-design creationism, evolutionary creationism, and Spinozistic creationism.  Spinozistic creationism is completely compatible with Darwinian science, and evolutionary creationism is largely so.

Most scientific creationists today concede that Darwin refuted the "theory of special creation"--the idea that the Creator had to miraculously create every plant and animal species separately.  The Bible speaks of God as creating the "kinds" of life, but these "kinds" are not necessarily all the "species" of life.  Some creation scientists claim that "created kinds" correspond not to "species" but to groups of plants or animals at a taxonomic level higher than species, perhaps at or near the taxonomic rank of family.  So, for example, Todd Wood concedes that Peter and Rosemary Grant have presented convincing evidence for the evolution of diverse species of "Darwin's finches" on the Galapagos Islands as adaptations to the environment of the Galapagos.  But still, Wood argues, all of these species of finches belong to a single "kind" created by God.

Wood also concedes that the human species might have evolved from ancestral primate species, so that human beings and apes might belong to some "kind" that was originally created by God with the genetic potential for evolving into all of the primate species.

Unlike the young-Earth creationists (like Wood), the old-Earth creationists (like Hugh Ross) concede that the universe is billions of years old, and so Ussher's dating of 6,000 years is false.  But over those billions of years of cosmic history, Ross argues, God had to miraculously intervene at critical points for supernatural creative activity that cannot be reduced to natural evolution.

The evolutionary creationists (or theistic evolutionists) like Francis Collins and Deborah Haarsma believe that God could have acted as First Cause in originally creating the general laws of nature, but then He could have allowed natural evolutionary history to unfold just as evolutionary scientists have explained it, without any need for God to miraculously disrupt the natural order of things.

Darwin introduces the idea of dual causality into The Origin of Species: God's establishment of general laws constitutes the primary causes of the universe, while the natural scientist studies the secondary causes that govern the observable world. (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were familiar with a similar conception of dual causality in Isaac Newton's version of deistic religion.  The universe is a "machine" governed by the mathematical laws of nature.  But God is the "Maker" of the machine.

This Newtonian conception of the "clockmaker God" creates a dilemma, however, for anyone who wants to see God as a transcendent being beyond the immanent order of nature.  As Gottfried Leibniz pointed out in his debate with Samuel Clark, either God must intervene regularly to rewind or repair the clock, which shows that God is an incompetent clockmaker; or the clock works fine all by itself, and God the clockmaker is indistinguishable from God the clock.  If it's the latter, then Newton's God is Spinoza's God, who is the same as Nature.

In one of the most influential statements of Lockean political philosophy in the eighteenth century--Cato's Letters--John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon resolved this debate in favor of Spinoza.  In their essay on how to dispel "superstitious fears" by recognizing that what appear to be miraculous events are probably works of natural causes, they argue:

"The works of Almighty God are as infinite as is his power to do them.  And 'tis paying greater deference to him, and having higher conceptions of his omnipotence, to suppose that he  saw all things which have been, are, or ever shall be, at one view, and formed the whole system of nature with such exquisite contrivance and infinite wisdom, as by its own energy and intrinsick power, to promote all the effects and operations which we daily see, feel, and admire; than to believe him to be often interposing to alter and amend his own work, which was undoubtedly perfect at first" (no. 77, Liberty Fund edition, 2:565).

This same Spinozistic idea of identifying God and Nature was adopted by Darwin.  After reading one of the first copies of The Origin of Species, Charles Kingsley--a prominent clergyman of the Church of England and a friend of Darwin--wrote a letter to Darwin, which included this remark:

"I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made."

Darwin wrote to John Murray, his publisher, that Kingsley's "capital sentence" should be inserted into the second edition of Origin, "in answer to anyone who may, as many will, say that my Book is irreligious."  This sentence was introduced into the concluding section of Origin as showing that there is "no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one" (Origin of Species, Modern Library/Random House, 1936, pp. 367-68).

But can the creation of human beings "in the image of God" arise by purely natural evolution without any miraculous intervention by God?  Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis--and Catholics generally--have embraced theistic evolution in conceding that Darwin's theory of evolution has been verified.  But they have also declared that the creation of the human soul requires an "ontological leap" through a miraculous divine act that transcends natural evolution.  (I have written about that here.)

Darwin suggests, however, that even the creation of the soul might be explained by natural evolution. Here is the last sentence of The Descent of Man:

"I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

Darwin's reference to the "god-like intellect" of human beings suggests that there might be some truth in the biblical idea that human beings bear the image of God.  But still, Darwin argues, all of the "noble qualities" of humanity can be explained as products of a natural evolution from lower animals.

To support this conclusion, Darwin offered evidence of the anatomical, behavioral, and mental similarities between human beings and other animals.  But he also saw that human beings were unique in their capacities for language, self-conscious reflection, and the moral sense.  Now, recent research in evolutionary neuroscience allows us to explain the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain, which includes the human mind's capacity for moral judgment, which allows us to recognize our natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Jefferson foresaw this, because he studied some of the earliest neurological experiments showing how mental activity was correlated with the stimulation of the brain, which Jefferson took as evidence of how mind arises naturally from the material brain.  This came up in his correspondence with John Adams: "Why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure? as that of magnetism is to the Needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel?" (letter to Adams, March 14, 1820).  (I have written about this here.)

So, if I am right about this, two of the major arguments against Darwinian evolution made by American fundamentalists are unjustified.  There is no clear biblical revelation denying Darwinian evolution.  And there is no reason to believe that the Declaration of Independence requires a creationist theology that contradicts Darwinian science.

REFERENCES

Becker, Carl. 1942. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of  Political Ideas. New York: Random House.

Bryan, William Jennings. 1922. In His Image. New York: Fleming H. Revell.

Bryan, William Jennings. 1924. Seven Questions in Dispute. New York: Fleming H. Revell.

Cappon, Lester J., ed. 1987. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Darwin, Charles. 1987. Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844. Ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Dilley, Stephen, ed. 2013. Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1989. Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book. Ed. Douglas L. Wilson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mason, John Mitchell. 1991 (orig. 1800). "The Voice of Warning to Christians." In Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1447-1476. Ed. Ellis Sandoz. Indianapolis: Liberty Press.

Miller, Jon D., Eugenie Scott, and Shinji Okamoto. 2006. "Public Acceptance of Evolution," Science 313: 765-766.

Miller, Jon D., et al. 2021. "Public Acceptance of Evolution in the United States, 1985-2020." Public Understanding of Science, 1-16.

Perry, Michael. 1998. The Idea of Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.

Perry, Michael. 2007. Toward a Theory of Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pope, Alexander. 2016. An Essay on Man. Edited and with an Introduction by Tom Jones. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seagrave. S. Adam. 2011. "Darwin and the Declaration." Politics and the Life Sciences 30: 2-16.

Stewart, Matthew. 2014. Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. New York: Norton.

Stump, James B., ed.  2017. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.