Science in Christian Perspective

Introduction--the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, 1

As an evangelical, raised in a fundamentalist home, supporting church work all my life (not incidentally including two sojourns abroad for that purpose, in biology teaching), and a life-long political conservative, I am much aware of how troublesome evolution is for multitudes of well-meaning though often misled church-goers.

I've noticed that intelligent design is gaining a strong following of non-biologists among academics and opinion-makers outside the academy. Intelligent design is thought to be a respectable way to oppose evolution.

The view is widespread in academic circles, I've noticed, that evangelicals and political conservatives are by definition arrayed against evolution.

Be all that as it might, my apprehension about intelligent design springs from two related concerns: for the integrity of high school biology, and for the integrity of theism. We must defend high school biology, because it's integral to modern science education.

My regard for science education began with the founding of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which re-introduced evolution into high school biology. As a high school biology teacher just starting out, I had the honor of being invited to participate in early meetings of the Steering Committee, when the reforms that would shape the new texts were hammered out; and to participate in the first two summer writing sessions. I wrote history of biology materials for the blue version, which emphasized biochemistry.(1)

Happily unaware of the coming storm, we worked at producing the best possible texts and laboratory manuals.(2) Mindful of the revolution of 1859, we thought that evolution was an obvious, certainly not a premature theme, because we agreed with geneticist Hermann J. Muller that "one hundred years without Darwinism are enough."(3)

Notwithstanding the BSCS reforms, prudence now requires that we anticipate the consequences should intelligent design continue to gain public favor. A historical and theological perspective is indispensable. Concepts we cherish or resent today are rooted deeply in the past. I offer three points for your consideration.

My first point deals with the origin of the idea of evolution. "Creation" is usually pitted against "evolution" in the public mind and in the academic community. But scholarship has brought out the pivotal role played by the Christian view of creation in the origin of modern science.(4) I'd like to expand this view by crediting all three followers of the religion of Abraham, indeed for making possible the idea of evolution.

THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN-ISLAMIC DOCTRINE OF CREATION WAS THE NECESSARY, ALTHOUGH NOT SUFFICIENT, CONDITION FOR THE ORIGIN OF SCIENCE IN THE RENAISSANCE, AND FOR EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

When the ancient Hebrews declared that God created the world from nothing--it's in II Maccabees 7.28, not in Genesis--they began an innovative stream of thought that led to the Renaissance origin of science, and to the year 1859.

Belief in creation from nothing promptly brought the Hebrews into conflict with the prevailing contemporary culture.

For Aristotle and Plato, the world was eternal, true reality lay beyond the world, time was cyclical, not linear, species were fixed, and nothing new could arise. Because evolution deals with origins and novelty, the very idea of evolution was inconceivable in an eternal world in which events repeated themselves; Aristotle never anticipated evolution.

Creation from nothing became the familiar creatio ex nihilo, which focused a conflict that outlasted a millennium.

Isaac Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants.(5) Modern biology stands on the shoulders of many giants, including long forgotten philosophers and theologians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Mediterranean world of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and naturalists of the European Renaissance.

Long before the origin of science, learned monotheists, to distinguish themselves from the Stagirite, attributed to nature those characteristics now unconsciously assumed by modern science, in contrast with Greek science. I name five:

linear time,

a material nature,

contingency,

chance, and

the disavowal of final causes.

Of course, the learned wrote for their own generation, not for their future. Yet in retrospect, their ideas helped lay the foundation of modern science, including evolution.

One of those savants was John Philoponus, in sixth century Alexandria. God created time, he declared.(6) This meant that time was not cyclical, but linear. Nature was no longer divine, but material.(7) Creation, Philoponus said, abolished the Aristotelian distinction between the stars and the earth.

In ninth century Baghdad, talented Nestorian Christians, paid handsomely by the Arab caliphs, translated Greek manuscripts into Arabic, including Aristotle's Parts of Animals, Plato's Republic, and many others.(8) Translations stimulated further scholarship, producing further modifications of the Aristotelian view of nature. Learned Jews, Christians, and Muslims were dazzled by Aristotle. Studying his works in Arabic, along with their Bibles and their Qur'an, they recognized, however, that Aristotle's Prime Mover certainly was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In Aristotle's eternal world, events were fixed from eternity, and God had no will. But in the created world, there could be new events because God exercised His will.Two giants of the Middle Ages expressly understood what a created world meant. One was the greatest theologian of Islam, Muhammad al-Ghazali, in eleventh-century Baghdad (9) The other, a century later, in Cairo, was the celebrated Jewish sage, Maimonides (10).

They were Aristotelians. Yet they chose God's will and rejected Aristotelian necessity. God could have created a different kind of world, they said; the world was dependent on God, and one could understand how its parts worked together. The created world they saw was contingent, not necessary. Their modifications of the Aristotelian view of nature became implanted indelibly, however invisibly, in the foundation of modern science.

When the enlightened Arabs of the Mediterranean world bequeathed ancient learning to the Latin West, they gave modern biology a pedigree: Jewish and Arab pharmacy, Arab medicine and surgery, Nestorian translations of Greek biology, Muslim and Hebrew scholarship; and, not least, crucial assumptions that made science possible.

Thomas Aquinas built his theology on this Arabic heritage. Today, whenever I hear, it's either design or chance, I think of Aquinas' declaration: "it would also be contrary to the character of divine providence if nothing were a matter of chance."(11) Concepts of linear time and a material nature, of contingency and chance, entered the scientific revolution.(12)

The Renaissance Christian naturalists assumed that because nature was created, it was material, devoid of Aristotelian non-material agents; and that every empirical event was determined by a material antecedent.(13) Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes denied that final causes explain how nature works, and Robert Boyle was skeptical. Nevertheless they all believed that final causes exist in nature.(14) Today, an unconscious premise of biology is the denial of final causes. We do not teach high school biology students that a blood clot is the cause of the chemical reactions that precede it. In the hands of the savants of western Christendom, the "how" began to replace the "why."

Platonism and Aristotelianism continued to flourish in the pre-Darwinian concept of the special creation of species, which was a blend of natural history, Greek biology, and Christian theology.(15) Special creation codified Platonic ideas and Aristotelian fixity, provided an explanation for the design that clergyman William Paley in the eighteenth century found everywhere in nature, and to this day is mistakenly derived from Genesis.

Darwin's primary achievement lay in breaking the Platonic-Aristotelian hold on biology.(16) Therein lay the revolution. He did not reject Biblical creation; he rejected the non-Biblical special creation.(17) Nor did he reject the presence of design; he rejected Paley's explanation of it. By liberating the origin of species from non-Christian ideas derived from Plato and Aristotle, Darwin became an unwitting friend of Christian theism. This does not mean that, special creation having been vanquished, a Christian view of the origin of species became a substitute, because no such view exists; natural selection is neither theistic nor anti-theistic. By the way, I have no idea whether evolution is God's method of creation. We do not know God's thoughts. At least, I do not.(18)

James R. Moore, in his book, Post-Darwinian Controversies, brings out the consonance of conservative theology with evolutionary theory.(19) He will have a prominent part in the four-part evolution series on public TV this fall.

It can be no surprise that Western culture, long accustomed to the idea of the creation, with its derivative concepts of linear time, material nature, and non-repeatable change, should be the milieu in which the idea of evolution should take root, with its attendant concepts of origin, novelty, probability, and material adaptations. In this respect, Darwin was not a pioneer, but an heir.(20)

WHEN INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS PROMOTED AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO EVOLUTION, THE PRE-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION OF VARIABILITY, DERIVED FROM PLATO AND ARISTOTLE, IS THE INEVITABLE RESULT; NO OTHER OPTION IS AVAILABLE, THERE BEING NO BIBLICAL EXPLANATION OF VARIABILITY.

The design theorists are certainly clear about their objective: they want intelligent design to replace evolution in high school biology.(21) To them, intelligent design is a powerful means of confronting what many of us would agree is the decline of moral values, which they regard as the ill effects of Darwin's theory. In their view, any dilution of evolution would benefit society as a whole.

High school biology teachers tend to ignore intelligent design. They are busy people; with five classes a day, five days a week, they have no time to sort through these troublesome issues. But it is becoming clear, even by a casual perusal of the Internet, that the design theorists are finding support where it counts--at the grassroots, among church-goers and schoolboard members, among the media, elected representatives, and among university students. Indeed, they employ the Internet with impressive acumen in making their views known world-wide.

We should be clear, therefore, on what biology would be like should the design theorists have their way, which is by no means impossible. We can get an idea from the very attractive book, Of Pandas and People, which promotes intelligent design. In my Internet analysis of Pandas, I show that any alternative to evolution reveals unmistakable reminders of Plato and Aristotle.(22) I invite you to consider my contention. Three disabling reminders of antiquity, manifest in Pandas, would alter high school biology:

(a) Pandas uses the terms "types," "distinct gaps," "forms," and "blueprints" to describe species and vertebrate similarities. This is the terminology of non-Biblical Platonic concepts that were overthrown by Darwin.(23)

(b) Pandas employs Aristotelian teleological reasoning to explain needs and purposes, such as blood clotting and circulation in the giraffe.(24)

Pandas does not distinguish purpose, which is a future condition, from function, which relates two present conditions.

"Needs" and "purposes" mean that a future, unfulfilled condition, such as a blood clot, is both cause and effect; it means that the consequent precedes the antecedent. How would you explain that to teen-agers? Aristotle's finalism was central in the design argument; it was embraced by Christian thought until the time of Darwin, and now enjoys a renaissance of sorts.

(c) The most telling feature of intelligent design, theologically, is the curious new lexicon--terms like "an intelligent agent" or "an immaterial cause."(25) They are not synonyms for God, but apparently they act in nature in the place of God, rather like proxies. Are they conscious entities? Were they created, or are they eternal? What is the Biblical warrant for this language?

I'd like to hear someone define an "intelligent agent" to a classroom of recalcitrant teen-agers, with a couple of disruptive kids in the back!

These terms suggest Aristotelian non-material agencies, like vis essentialis and élan vital, that were made unnecessary long ago by chemistry. Of melancholy importance, they compromise the First Commandment and the Nicene and Apostle's Creeds.(26)

Design theorists maintain that evolutionary theory is a denial of theism because it is fatally infected with naturalism. We might all agree that naturalism does rule out God because it declares that nature is all there is. The design people see themselves as pioneers in establishing the new scientific paradigm of design to replace what they regard as moribund naturalism and atheistic evolution.

We should scrutinize intelligent design for its theological implications.

First, design theorists admire William Paley's pre-Darwinian Natural Theology, with its famous metaphor of the clock requiring a clockmaker.(27) Paley saw evidence of design everywhere in nature.(28) But intelligent design applies only to particular sub-cellular segments of nature.(29) Is there no design elsewhere?

Second, Design theorists distinguish between ordinary natural causes, studied by the ordinary scientific method, and intelligent causes, which they say explain the origin of life and of complex biochemical systems.(30)

We are entitled to infer from this distinction between natural and intelligent causes that God created two kinds of nature, one kind under the purview of the scientific method, the other at the core of the intelligent design strategy.

This distinction implies that at the creation God left a "gap" in the fabric of nature requiring special attention no one noticed until now. That's what a "gap" means--that biology lacks the analytical techniques for a particular segment of nature.(31)

Like Paley's Natural Theology, intelligent design is a quasi-scientific certification of a particular religious interpretation of origins, which not all Christians, Jews, and Muslims can be expected to endorse. It almost certainly will fail in the courts.

We are told that high school teachers should "teach the controversy."(32) That's not a bright idea. The result would be to question the legitimacy of evolution.(33) We should not ignore the reality of classroom stresses the teachers face: children coming from chaos at home, no fathers, drugs and guns, child mothers, the hip-hop culture, an excess of mandatory testing. Now comes news that oral herpes and pharyngeal gonorrhea are appearing among teen-agers. Did you know that? No, biology teachers do not stand in need of having the controversy foisted on them. They can best serve science education by being left alone to do their work.(34)

Disillusionment awaits well-meaning church-goers who think that intelligent design is a Biblical alternative to evolution. Intelligent design poses theological problems for the consistent theist, and displays the folly of supposing that eliminating evolution would strengthen theism.

Three. THE MISUSE OF SCIENCE

A DISQUIETING FEATURE OF THE EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY IS THE PROMOTION BY HIGH-PROFILE EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGISTS OF EVOLUTION AS A CARRIER OF SECULAR VALUES. IN CONSEQUENCE, CHURCH-GOERS ARE GIVEN REASON TO CONSIDER EVOLUTION AS A THREAT TO THEIR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN GARNERS CREDIBILITY.

Two facts stand out. Biologists worldwide do not argue about whether evolution has occurred, inasmuch as the evidence is far more abundant now than in Darwin's day. Yet, almost a century and a half after Darwin published his famous book, large segments of the church-going public fear that evolution is against Christianity.

Complex reasons explain this public distaste for evolution: the rise of fundamentalism in the 1920s, entrepreneurial character of American religion, abandonment of theism by the social and academic élite, disputes about moral authority, secularization of the academy, and mockery of piety in popular culture. All this is important, and tell us that more is going on than disputes about origins.The reason that should concern us here, however, is to be found at the doorsteps of evolutionary biologists. Much of the activism of creationism and the intelligent design movement springs from a sense of moral indignation at what is regarded as the effrontery of those biologists who promote secular values as though they were the findings of science, which they are not. I offer you two examples (see Appendix).

The first is by the well-known biologist Garrett Hardin:

"A scientist cannot accept the orientation of the first sentence of the book of John: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'...If I were charged with altering Scripture to conform with science I would say: 'In the beginning was the World, which everywhere and forever envelops us; against this external reality all human words must be measured,'"

Hardin did not learn that from biology. His statement trivializes a profound theological insight and grants supremacy to science over the Bible, to form a secular creed of materialism. Church-goers properly resent the encroachment into public life, by public figures ensconced in public institutions, of a secular creed that pronounces nature the only reality and science the only guide to the good life.

My second example is by Richard Dawkins, from the final paragraph of his article in the November 1995 Scientific American:

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

We can imagine the clamor that would erupt in the scientific community if Scientific American had published an editorial caveat:

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, divine creation, with abundant evidence of design, purpose, good, and nothing but the love of God.

Now, what principle of logic, pray, renders Dawkins' statement scientific, but not mine? His is "politically correct," mine is not. So much for disinterested science. In the Appendix, I have easily assembled statements from nine other evolutionary biologists. Those statements and others do not arise from science, but from secular assumptions freely and previously chosen, and are therefore quite biographical. Unbelief, like belief, is a matter of choice.

A religious vision of a wholly secular character is offered by these statements. They display for our contemplation the confusion in the household of biology concerning the limitations of science. For many today, evolution is a religion.(35)

Church-goers, instead of being branded with pejorative labels, such as fundamentalist or right-wing conservative, ought to be commended for recognizing misuse of science.  The views I have assembled are nothing new in the history of science. Of course, atheism has an ancient pedigree.(36) Nature replaced Providence among the elite long before Darwin. Even so, I invite you to consider whether such extravagant views as I have identified, audaciously promulgated, picked up and passed on by evangelical opinion-makers and eliciting predictable reactions at the grassroots, do not constitute a threat to the integrity of high school biology. So far, such views do not appear in high school biology texts, at least, not in the ones that I examine. But students of the aforesaid evolutionary biologists are the textbook writers of tomorrow. Vigilance must therefore be exercised. I do not see any efforts in the scientific community to allay the reasonable fears of church-goers, nor any recognition that a problem exists.(37)

We need a strategy for reaching church-goers with the news that biological evolution says nothing about values. It would help if the AAAS, the AIBS, the NAS, and others would publicly agree, in effect, disavowing the non-scientific views I have identified. Is that likely? When I discover in the September 1999 Scientific American, page 90, that "acute disbelief" is at the apex of American science, I don't think so.(38) This is a major reason why the evolution controversy will continue.

The famous meeting between Napoleon and Laplace, in 1802, is pertinent. When Napoleon asked the great astronomer-mathematician why he said nothing about God in his new book, Système du Monde, Laplace is reported to have said: "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."(39)

Laplace answered correctly. In at least six different passages in his book where he approached a metaphysical question, he did not hesitate to express ignorance, with phrases such as "always unknown" ("sera toujours inconnue)."(40) I do not find Laplace's caution in either present-day camp, certainly not among evolutionary biologists who twist evolution into a religion, actually, a pseudo-religion, nor among the design theorists, who tell us of intelligent agents that no one observe.

Church-goers should not be expected to distinguish between evolution as science and evolution as religion when their academic critics do not.(41) It is not useful to emphasize the scientific shortcomings of intelligent design, which are manifold, while ignoring the secular worldview to which it is a reaction.(42) Defenders of high school biology have a double task: to insist that biological evolution is neutral about values, and to oppose intelligent design because it portends pre-Darwinian biology.

I began with grateful memories of the BSCS. I close with reflections on present-day high school biology texts, which insofar as they incorporate the reforms introduced by the BSCS, and most of them do, are descendants of the BSCS.(43) They illuminate the statement of Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Christian, that "nothing makes sense in biology without evolution."(44) The BSCS blue version, that I worked on years ago, is now in its eighth edition.(45)

What are today's biology textbooks, if they do not represent the outcome of the revolution that began in 1859. They represent, do they not, a logical, I will not say inevitable, outcome, of the resourceful stream of thought that began when the ancient Hebrews declared that God created the world from nothing.

Today's high school biology texts deserve to be protected, assuredly from those who would return biology to its pre-Darwinian state, no less from those who make of evolution a religion. Those who fear that evolution is against the Bible and yearn for a Biblical alternative are bound to be disappointed. Evolution is scarcely against the Bible; it presupposes a worldview derived from the Bible. The only option available is that pre-Darwinian view invented by those two illustrious non-theists of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle. Intelligent design presupposes a worldview derived from Greek antiquity.

Today's biology texts bid us acknowledge our debt to the past: our first teachers the Greeks, who laid the foundation; the ancient Hebrews, whose genius gave the world monotheism; the cosmopolitan Arabs, who assimilated and transmitted ancient learning; the Christians of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, who learned from their Greek, Jewish, and Muslim forebears. From creatio ex nihilo came evolution.

In the sixth century John Philoponus, with astonishing prescience, declared that creation abolished the Aristotelian distinction between the stars and the Earth. Today we know that we are composed of the ashes of dead stars and that we are descended from the Hominid fossils.(46) We are created imago dei and offered the promise of redemption and eternal life. That is part of what it means to be a theist in a world wrought by Charles Darwin.

NOTES and NON-NOTES

1. For the BSCS Blue version, I wrote on the scientific method of William Harvey, on Pasteur, on Swammmerdam (in those days I had it in my head that 9th grade kids ought surely to know what Swammerdam did for biology); and the Miller-Urey demonstration (Two of my bright high school students had successfully repeated it for a state science fair in Springfield, IL; they even made their own Tesla coil. I told them their project fitted Genesis just fine. See Bibliography for Harper, Dennis and Jerry Levy). I wrote several lab experiments, which I've now forgotten, probably one on digestion, and learned the knack of doing experiments according to BSCS "inquiry." We read each other's stuff, including the drafts on evolution, which looked good to me.

2. Having read George E Webb's account of the anti-evolution initiatives that erupted as a reaction to the BSCS (in his excellent 1994, Evolution Controversy in America, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, p 136-137, 140-143, and 178-179); and having admitted to having been present in the BSCS at its beginning, I must now own up to my complicity.

3. In 1964 George Gaylord Simpson quoted Muller's statement, with a slight change, as the title of a chapter, "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough," on page 26 of This View of Life, The World of an Evolutionist, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Ordinarily Simpson quoting Muller would be a good enough citation for me, but he would have made me happy if he had given a citation and quoted Muller without mishap. The almost correct citation given by Edward J. Larson in his valuable study, in 1985, Trial and Error, The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution, New York: Oxford University Press, p 86, 193 #135, sent me to the correct source: Muller, Hermann J., April 1959, "One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough," School Science and Mathematics, vol. 59, no. 4, p 304-316; the text of his address in Indianapolis 28 November 1958 to the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers." Muller is also cited in Webb 1994, p 130, 176.

Actually, Muller stretched the truth to make his point. Larson in his chapter one points out that biology texts did have considerable amounts of evolution in the decades prior to about 1921; although some of it was not Darwinian but Lamarckian (the neo-Darwinian synthesis came later). P 22: "...evolutionary concepts appeared in many high-school science text-books throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries."

Simpson thought that none of the three BSCS texts was (p 41) "oriented primarily on evolution and imbued with that principle throughout." Well, we certainly tried, and to a large extent we certainly succeeded, inserting far more evolution content than in the texts then on the market. Larson surveys the decline of evolution content in the pre-BSCS biology texts in about 1920-1960; op., cit., Chapter 2.

4. Beginning, I think, with the salient article by Michael B. Foster in 1934. Variants of this view are the excellent treatments by Gilkey 1965, Kaiser, Klaaren, and Overman. The first and much-quoted statement might have been by Alfred North Whitehead in 1925; in 1959 (1925), Science and the Modern World, New York: Mentor Books, p 19: "It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher...My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology."

While Foster's analysis is masterful, his prose is unnecessarily dense. And he was comfortably oblivious of Islam, leaping blithely from antiquity to the Renaissance. It is gratifying that Whitehead noticed the Middle Ages, but he, too, forgot the Arabs and the Jews, possibly because translations were not available when he wrote that passage in 1925. We no longer have that excuse.

5. "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of giants." Isaac Newton casually dropped this pithy aphorism into a letter to Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1675[6]; in: Turnbull, H. W., editor, 1959, Correspondence of Isaac Newton (7 vols.), Cambridge University Press, vol. 1, p 416.

Giants, Dwarfs, Progress, and Evolution

The whole world now knows that Newton did not think up that quotable aphorism. I know that the world knows because I found it on the Internet. In 1935 George Sarton, in a query in Isis, vol. 24, p 107-109, concerning this simile said that Newton wished to convey the idea of scientific progress, and traced the simile to the twelfth century cleric Bernard of Chartres, whose pupil John of Salisbury said (Metalogicon, bk 3, ch 4): "Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre..." ("Bernard of Chartes said that we are all dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more and farther than they..."); and wondered whether seeds of the idea of progress, obvious in this passage, occurred before Bernard. The next year, replying to the Sarton query, Raymond Klibansky confirmed the Bernard priority for the giants/dwarf simile, and found a view of progress in the sixth-century grammarian Priscian, who was a writer of grammar texts in Constantinople and who said that young people see farther, and whose work Bernard knew; Isis, 1936, vol. 26, p 147-149.

In Newton's day, many venerated the classical period to the extent even of supposing that the world was in a state of decay; some quoted 2 Esdras 14.10; Isaiah 51.6; and Hebrews 1.11 to warn that the world's best days were over and bad times lay just around the corner. That's the theme I believe of Richard A. Jones, in his 1965 (1961), Ancients and Moderns, A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sarton said that the idea of progress had to compete with "an antagonistic idea ... of a primordial age"; op. cit., p 109.

Following Sarton and Klibansky, Robert K. Merton established the pre-Newton giants/dwarf pedigree, in his curious book: 1993 (1965), On the Shoulders of Giants, A Shandean Postscript [With a Foreword by Umberto Eco, an Afterword by Denis Donaghue, and a Preface and Postface by the author), University of Chicago Press. Merton traced the aphorism from Newton back through twenty-six dwarfs who climbed up on shoulders and who then wrote learnedly about it, a good deal of it in Latin (p 268), to Bernard (p 209, 268), and then to Priscian.

Who were Newton's giants on whom he climbed up? Did he mean Hooke and Descartes? Or maybe Leibniz? Considering that he quarrelled with both Hooke and Leibniz, was he being humble or proud? The idea of progress had not yet taken hold; a century or so later, there would be no such humility, if indeed Newton was in a humble mode. Besides, he didn't actually say he saw farther.

Francis Bacon, Progress, and the Bible

In my duties as a dwarf, I can't leave you stranded in this footnote without reminding you that Francis Bacon reversed the whole thing in a way that also casts light on intelligent design, just as Newton's admiration of the past perhaps does. It's called the "Baconian Paradox," and in the marvellous Bacon prose we see him forsaking the past and gazing wistfully into the coming age of science. The Internet and Merton (1965, p 81) say it's in the Advancement of Learning, but I've not yet looked; where else would it be?

"'Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi.' These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient."

Old people are full of wisdom and knowledge, and young people aren't. Bacon said so, in his Novum Organum (I, 84). Likewise, he continued, his day was far more advanced than antiquity. He did not deny the genius of the ancients, but opposed their method of obtaining knowledge, especially, in his view, the method of the wretched Aristotle, who was to blame for the lack of progress. Bacon extolled the new method then emerging (Jones, p 44, 45).

Merton said (1965, p 81) the Baconian Paradox is in the Novum Organum (I, 84). But I see that in marking the passage on the meaning for progress Bacon saw in the discovery of the New World I quite missed the gem there in the preceding paragraph:

"For the old age of the world is to be accounted the true antiquity; and this is the attribute of our own times, not of that earlier age of the world in which the ancients lived...as we look for greater knowledge of human beings and a riper judgment in the old man than in the young...so in like manner from our age...much more might fairly be expected than from the ancient times."

The exuberance and the idea of progress in that passage certainly didn't come from reading Aristotle, whom Bacon scorned. There's little question that the Bible was a major factor in the development of his thought. His works are replete with Biblical references; the Geneva Bible of 1560 was available, and he hobnobbed with the translators of the KJV (1611). (See the chapter entitled, "Out with Aristotle and in with the Bible," in Benjamin Farrington's Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 1966 [1964], Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press.)

Inspired by the Bible, Bacon marked out the rational methods of inquiry that would characterize the coming age of science, and in the Advancement of Learning we find him declaring that studying nature would benefit both religious worship and the public good (Book I, V,11):

"...a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."

One observes with melancholy that all anti-evolution initiatives stand outside this strong Biblical tradition of progress, expressed so eloquently by the Christian Francis Bacon, that has come to us from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In looking for inspiration to pre-Darwinian natural theology, with its roots in Greek antiquity, intelligent design sets its face against the future and against the idea of progress with its identifiable Biblical roots, thereby becoming an obstacle to biology education.

I wonder if Galileo's famous "Eppur si muove" might also have a pedigree, maybe going back to Aristarchus. Someone might want to look into that and publish an article in Isis.

6. Wildberg, Christian, translator, 1987, Philoponus: Against Aristotle, on the Eternity of the World, p 20, 24, 130. Sorabji, Richard, editor, 1987, Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Davidson, H. A., 1969, "John Philoponus as a Source of Medieval Islamic and Jewish proofs of creation," Journal of the American Oriental Society, p 89, 357-391.

I skip Augustine, of the fourth century. One can see what he had to say about the will of God and creation, in his Confessions, XI, passim; and what I did with him in my long 1983 piece and on his Genesi ad Literam, p 435-438.

7. It is interesting to notice the emphasis on "matter" appearing as early as the sixth century, whereas matter is less prominent in Aristotelian thought. In the Renaissance, matter and motion were paired to supersede Aristotle's form and matter couplet, as part of the Renaissance choice of the mechanization metaphor. Yes, the idea of matter even has a history; useful here is McMullin, Ernan, editor, 1978 (1963), The Concept of Matter in Modern Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Press. Said Robert Boyle: "... the local motion of one part of matter hitting against another..." (Works, Birch, 1772, III, p 15, 42) I have more to say about this matter business in Part Three of my Internet analysis of Pandas.

8. Meyerhof, Max, 1936, "New Light on Hunain ibn Ishaq and his period," Isis, 8: p 685-724. Sarton, 1927, Introduction, vol. I, passim.

There's a large literature on those remarkable Nestorian Christians, and on the magnanimous Caliph al-'Mamun, who paid them handsome salaries. I have numerous references in my 1994 and 1998 articles. One can't go wrong by starting with Sarton and Meyerhof. The remarkable Hunain wrote a large book on ophthalmology. Rising to wealth and prominence were four generations of the Christian Bukht Yishu' (Syrian: Jesus hath delivered) family who served seventeen successive caliphs as pharmacists, physicians, and translators. Nestorian Christians of the ninth century became the link between Hellenism and Islam, and because of their expertise Greek science passed to the West. They shared with Jews in the cultural and economic prosperity of Baghdad during the "Golden Age" of Arab history.

A fine summary of Arab culture in the Middle Ages is Chapter 4, "The Gift of Islam," in the excellent survey by Thomas Goldstein, 1988, Dawn of Modern Science, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. A timeless collection is by: Arnold, Thomas, and Alfred Guillaume, editors, 1931, The Legacy of Islam, Oxford U Press. Another fine account is by Cyril Elgood, 1951, A Medical History of Persia: and the Eastern Caliphate, Cambridge U Press, with lots on that Bukht Yishu family. That's enough for now.

9. See my article on al-Ghazali, 1994 (see Bibliography). Van den Bergh, Simon, translator, 1978 (reprint of 1969, 1954), Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), London: Luzac. Contains major sections of al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), about A.D. 1095, to which Averroes replied in about A.D. 1180.

P 83. Also, p 4: "the world has been created by an eternal will." P 19: "The world exists, in the way it exists, in its time, with its qualities, and in its space, by the Divine Will and will is a quality which has the faculty of differentiating one thing from another." P 39: "Time is generated and created..."

Looking at the night sky, al-Ghazali was sure that Allah could have chosen different locations for the celestial poles, the ecliptic, and the spheres; they were not "necessary," that is, not fixed from eternity; p 24. P 25: "...differentiation must rest on a decision by God, or on a quality whose nature consists in differntiating between two similars." He was saying that Aristotle's Prime Mover had no choice.

Remarkably, he also said: "there are new things happening in the world and they have causes"; p 32. Now, how did he figure that out? that there could be novelty on this Earth? Did he learn it from Aristotle?

Ibn Rushd (Averroës, in Spain and Morocco) later often disagreed with al-Ghazali, but here he agreed, and was even more explicit, p 25: "...philosophers must acknowledge that there is a quality in the Creator of the world which differentiates between two similars, for it seems that the world might have had another shape and another quantity than it actually has, for it might have been bigger or smaller."

Here, two Muslim theologians of the Middle Ages, al-Ghazali and ibn Rushd (Averroës), though in many ways Aristotelian, state that the will of God means that God could have created another kind of world; in this, they rejected Aristotelian necessity, that the world is the only kind of world possible.

Almost inevitably it occurred to someone that creation means that in order to find out what kind of world God had created one had to go out and investigate, which meant doing science. Brooke and Cantor (1998, p 20) report that the seventeenth-century Catholic natural philosopher, Marin Marsenne, said just that.

10. See my article on Maimonides, 1998 (see Bibliography). Friedländer, M., translator 1956 (1904), The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, New York: Dover.

Maimonides was skeptical about the Ptolemaic epicycles and eccentrics, p 196, 197; and thought the back and forth movements of the wandering stars (no one knew that they were planets) and the irregular distribution of the stars surely meant that God chose those arrangements at the creation; p 184, 186, 188.

P 75: Regarding Genesis 1.31 and Exodus 33.13, 19 Maimonides said, with quite remarkable prescience: "when I say 'to show him the whole creation,' I mean to imply that God promised to make him comprehend the nature of all things, their relation to each other, and the way they are governed by God both in reference to the universe as a whole and to each creature in particular."

This was another break from Aristotelian necessity, this time a shift to Biblical contingency. A remarkable book, the Guide.

Albert Einstein was once reported to have said: "What interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Quoted in the New York Times Book Review Section for September 5, 1971, p 20; from a review by Gerald Holton of Ronald W. Clark, 1972 (1971), Einstein, New York: Avon Books. I think that al-Ghazali and Maimonides would have relished the Einstein quote; they would have known what he meant, and then disagreed. On page 174 of his book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen W. Hawking in 1988 (New York: Bantam Books) also seemed to say that, in view of the known physical constants, our world is the only possible world. If Einstein and Hocking are correct, then we are back in company with Aristotle. However, I go with al-Ghazali and Maimonides. Or was Aristotle right, after all? Are we living in the only possible world?

11. Bourke, Vernon J., translator, 1975 (1956, ca. A.D. 1263), SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Contra Gentiles, from Book III, Providence, Part One, University of Notre Dame Press; p 247, in Chapter 24.

Although Aquinas saw to it that Aristotle would be no threat to Christian theism, he invoked Providence instead of Aristotle's Prime Mover, and in long passages on how God acts in the world called on chance, contingency, and secondary causation in place of Aristotelian necessity.

12. I am over-simplifying here, of course. Greek thought also contributed to our unconscious assumptions about nature. See Gilkey, 1965, Chapter 5, "Creation and the Intelligibility of the World."

For the scientific revolution a good start is with the Herbert Butterfield, 1997 (1965, 1957), The Origins of Modern Science, one of the first books I read in the history of science; the first might have been the Dampier-Whetham. For what I call the postponed revolution in biology, the Michael T. Ghiselin, 1972 (1969), The Triumph of the Darwinian Biology, has been a frequent reference. Then one could go on to Bernard I. Cohen, 1985, Revolution in Biology and Chapter 19, "The Darwinian Revolution." And one dare not overlook Edwin A. Burtt, 1980 (1924), Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science.

13. I am far from saying that creatio ex nihilo caused the origin of modern science in the Renaissance, nor even that Christianity was the principal cause. Other factors in this complex phenomenon were the decline of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, discovery of the New World, the printing press, and new translations of the Bible, and other factors that you might think of. Creatio ex nihilo was not a sufficient cause.

14. (a) Bacon, 1605, Advancement of Learning, Book 2, VII, 7: "For the handling of final causes...hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes; 1620, Novum Organum, Book II, 1, 2; "final cause...is so far from being beneficial, that it even corrupts the sciences."

(b) Descartes, 1627, Principles of Philosophy, 28: "That we must not inquire into the final, but only into the efficient causes of created things. We will entirely reject from our philosophy the search of final causes..."

(c) Boyle, 1688, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, Birch, Works, V, p 443: "The naturalist should not suffer the search, or the discovery of a Final Cause of Nature's works, to make him undervalue or neglect the studious indagation (investigation) of their efficient causes...cannot be attained by the bare knowledge of the final causes of things...the neglect of efficient causes would render physiology useless."

15. The non-Biblical origin of this old, pre-Darwinian doctrine of special creation was explained years ago in two articles by a certain Richard P. Aulie: in 1972, on why its present-day renaissance is rather like the old wine of Platonism and Aristotelianism in questionable new wineskins; and in a long article in 1983, in the section, "Origin of the Idea of Special Creation," on how special creation began, not in the Bible, but in the work of John Ray and Carolus Linneaus. And for good measure there's an analysis of Augustine's De Genesi ad Literam. See bibliography.

16. Not until 1888 did Darwin obtain a copy of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. It was a gift from the translator, William Ogle, prompting Darwin to exclaim, in gratitude: "Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, but they are mere school boys beside old Aristotle." Darwin, Francis, editor, 1888, (1887), Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, New York: D. Appleton, vol. 2, p 427. See also Darwin's footnote, p xiii, in the sixth edition of the Origin (1872) regarding Aristotle's Physicae Auscultationes, which was a translation of the Physics by a certain Clair Grece, who pointed out a passage to Darwin about the rain (in Book II, 8, 2).

You should not think I have anything against old Aristotle. I'm not like Francis Bacon, who had it in for him. (In his De Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623, iii,5, Bacon taunted Aristotle concerning teleology with a not-nice remark: "tanquam virgo Deo consecrata, nihil parit," which might better be left in Latin.) Anyway, one can dip profitably at random into Aristotle's History and Parts of Animals, or his Generation and Corruption, and wherever one dips one will find that he already thought out the questions that are taken up in today's cumbersome biology texts. There's no fundamental question of biology today that Aristotle didn't think of first and work out an answer.

"First and foremost a biologist," said D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, p 65 in his "On Aristotle as a Biologist," p 58-81 in: Palter, Robert M., editor, 1961, Toward Modern Science, Studies in Ancient and Medieval Science, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; and then Thompson added: "Till Cuvier there was none so good, and Cuvier lacked knowledge that Aristotle possessed" (p 72). But no, Aristotle's works are no substitute for a decent biology text. That began with Darwin.

17. Darwin referred to creation and the Creator in the 1859 edition of his Origin on pp 167, 186, 188, 189, 413 (2), 435, 484, and 488; and he said that special creation is not an explanation, on p 186 and 435. If you ask me, all of this does not add up to being against Genesis, or divine creation, or design, or God, or against the Bible.

18. (a) Isaiah 55.8 CEV: "The Lord says My thoughts and my ways are not like yours."

(b) Maimonides, Guide, p 83: "...there is no possibility of obtaining a knowledge of the true essence of God."

(c) Descartes, Principles, 1637, #28: "We ought not to presume that we are sharers in the councils of deity."

(d) Origin, 1859, p 188: "Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?"

One can say that evolution, like all of nature, is subservient to Providence, as we are informed in Colossians 1:16,17, and elsewhere. But that's not the same as saying that a discovery conceived in a human mind corresponds to a "thought" in the "mind" of God. For that reason I eschew the term "theistic evolution."

Louis Agassiz, Zoologist at Harvard University, who didn't much care for the way his colleague, Botanist Asa Gray, promoted Darwin's theory, had it figured out that scientists thought the thoughts of God; "those systems...translations into human language of the thoughts of the Creator...we become instinctively...the translators of the thoughts of God"; Lurie, Edward, editor, 1962 (1859, London), Essay on Classification, by Louis Agassiz, Belknap, Harvard University Press, p 9. Which goes to show that God is a Platonist.

19. Moore 1979, p ix-ix. "...it is argued that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection could be accepted in substance only by those whose theology was distinctly orthodox; that this was so because the theory itself presupposed a cosmology and a causality which, owing much to orthodox doctrines of creation and providence, could be made consonant a priori with orthodox theistic beliefs; and that, conversely, other theories of evolution, rationalistic and immechanical alike, were embraced by those whose theology was notably liberal because such theories, themselves the product of heterodox theologies of nature, promised to secure theistic beliefs which Darwinism seemed bound to offend."

20. I have more to say on this topic in my 1983 article.

21. Internet: (a) "Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook"--"...the exclusion of design theory from public school science curricula may (sic) constitute a form of viewpoint discrimination..."(b) "The Wedge Strategy--Five Year Stratetic Plan Summary"--"We will pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula."

(c) Stephen C. Meyer, "Testimony to the US Commission on Civil Rights Concerning the Teaching of Biological Origins," (Seattle, 8/21/98) "...an egregious form of viewpoint discrimination in American public science instruction at both the high school and collegel level" (concerning exclusion of intelligent design).

(d) "Darwin Design and Democracy II: Teaching the Evidence in Science Education," Second Annual National Conference on Intelligent Design, Rockhurst High School, Kansas City, MO, 29-30 June 2001.

22. My three essays on Of Pandas and People, analyzing this attractive book in the context of theology and the history of science, are on the Internet, where you can read them for free, at:

www.nabt.org/sub/evolution/panda1.asp. or: enter my full name, or at: "Richard P. Aulie," at www.asa3.org; at "Apologetics"

23. Examples of Platonic language in Pandas are: "type," 19, 65, 73, 75(2), 98; "distinct gaps" 40; "distinct and stable," 88; within limits, 67, 98; "forms," 133; "a blueprint, a plan, a pattern," 14; "limited range," etc., 20, 75, 78, 85; "common biochemical base," 36; "common design," 32-33; natural selection preserves, 85, 67, 76.

24. Here's some Aristotelian teleological language in Pandas: "protein machine is on standby," 144; "final result," 145; the giraffe rete mirabile, 12-13, 69-71; "adaptational package" at the beginning, 13, 23, 71-72, 103; "engineering requirements," 71; "purpose ... form a clot," 144.

It will be objected, oh, they don't really believe that a future condition causes the present. Then how does one explain the above choice of language; what shall I make of this passage in Pandas (p 144)? "...the purpose of the blood clotting system is to quickly form a clot..." Isn't that Aristotle talking? Does the clot before it exists set in motion the "blood clotting system"? It is possible that in some of the above examples the authors mean "function," but don't think so.

To brush up on Platonic and Aristotelian influences in pre-Darwinian biology, I consulted Ghiselin, # 11 supra, Chapter 4, "Taxonomy," especially p 81-83. And Mayr, 1982, on the species concept, p 270-273; and on Plato and Aristotle, p 304-306. Etienne Gilson (1984, 1971) and Paul Janet (1878) were especially enlightening on the subject of Aristotelian "purpose."

This sort of Aristotelian language also springs from a passage by Jonathan Wells, 1998, "Unseating Naturalism," p 51-70 in Dembski, William A., editor, Mere Creation, Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, p 61: "...it is possible to regard development as an end-directed process...If organisms are designed ...then in some sense their final form precedes their embryonic development...the development ball is attracted to its final resting place...."

How's that again? "... end-directed" ... "final form precedes"...? How can can a purpose, not yet in existence, direct a previous process? And what is this "form" doing here, anyway? And how does a "final resting place" attract a developing organism?

I have a good deal to say about this vintage Aristotelian "form" (which occurs in maybe fifty times in Aristotle's writings, also as "Eidos,") in Part Three of my Internet analysis of Pandas; see # 22 supra; and of how it was done in by the Christian savants of the Renaissance, particularly by Robert Boyle, in his Forms and Final Causes (1667). Janet, 1878, discussed at length what it means in biology "by the determination of the present by the future"; p 41.

While it is difficult to get through a week without mixing up "function" and "purpose" in hectic discussions in a biology classroom, on the whole one should be wary of teleological language. If it is now deemed efficacious and chic, then one can fear for the future of biology. One should resolve to bar it from high school biology. But the intelligent design movement seems to have other ideas.

25. The Of Pandas and People has about fourteen terms like "an intelligent agent."

I'm curious about the provenance of this lexicon. Where the present use began I don't know. Possibly it began with Phillip E. Johnson. I stumbled over a similar term, "intelligent cause," in the 19th-century volume by Janet, p 340. (See Bibliography) The earliest use of the term "intelligent agent" that I know of is in Isaac Newton's Optics, in Query 31, in the 4th edition, 1730 (Dover, 1952, p 402): "...all material Things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid Particles...in the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order." From the context one does not think that Newton had a proxy in mind; he was writing about "God."

26. In order to assume the color of religious neutrality, design theorists go out of their way to avoid uttering the name God. Here's an example from the Internet: At the close of a hearing before the US Commission on Civil Rights, 21 August 1998, in Seattle, a Commissioner asked whether God was responsible for "intelligent design," eliciting this equivocation by Stephen C. Meyer: "I think the best explanation is that God is the designer, but it could be different."

William A. Dembski writes, in his 1999, Intelligent Design, The Bridge Between Science and Theology, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p 277: "The ontological status of that intelligent cause does not arise in the analysis."

Dembski's exceptionally well-written book provides the philosophical and theoretical context and framework of the intelligent design movement, and is an essential guide to understanding its objectives.

There was no equivocation among the Christian savants of the Renaissance, no hesitation in uttering the name God, no denial of purpose in nature, only skepticism about its efficacy in science.

27. Dembski, 1999, op. cit., p 16: "The intelligent design movement is linked both conceptually and historically to British natural theology." And Chapter 3, p 70-93, 284-287, "The Demise of British Natural Theology."

28. Gillespie, Neil C., 1990, "Divine Design and the Industrial Revolution: William Paley's Abortive Reform of Natural Theology," Isis, vol. 81, p 214-229.

This article helps one discern the affinities between intelligent design and Paley's thought. Paley, enamored by the new technology of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, likened God to a mechanic or an artisan Who constructed the complex mechanical features of the human body.

Intelligent design, at home in the information age, dwells on the complexities of information networks in protein and DNA molecules, and in fact sees information as a fundamental category in nature. See Dembski, 1999, op. cit., Chapter 6, "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information." Is God likened to a computer programer?

Gillespie points out why Paley's ambitious vision failed to gain sufficient traction to acquire roots; "...hardly anyone who came after him shared his mechanical outlook" (p 227).

Why does intelligent design now seem to be gaining traction? Because it's against evolution? That, yes, but might it also be because it employs symbols, models, and language drawn from the information age with which people are familiar? If so, is that enough to gain permanence?

As for Paley's watch, it was preceded by Boyle's clock. Robert Boyle was fascinated by the large clock on the town square at Strasbourg, although I don't know whether he ever visited Strasbourg. He invoked the Strasbourg clock as a metaphor in explaining God's action in the world. In his Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, in the Birch Works, 1772, vol. 2, p 39; and in Final Causes of Natural Things, Birch, 5, p 443. "The world being once constituted by the great Author of things as it now is, I look upon the phenonmena of nature to be caused by the local motion of one part of matter hitting against another...," in Birch, Works, III, p 42.

29. Dembski, 1999, takes up two features of design required for its detection, complexity and specificity, in his Chapter 5, "Reinstating Design With Science," and Chapter 6, Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information."

30. For instance, in Dembski, 1999, p 105: "The proper contrast is between natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other. Intelligent causes can do things that natural causes cannot." And p 223: "(1) Intelligent agency is logically prior to natural causation and cannot be reduced to it. (2) Intelligent agency is fully capable of making itself known against the backdrop of natural causes."

In contending or implying that God employed special means for the creation of life, the intelligent design movement at once becomes subject to the charge of deism. If God was more active at the creation of life than elsewhere, that means God is less present elsewhere. Such theology is not satisfying.

"Almost as if there were only natural causes" ("Iuxta physicas rationes tantum"), declared Thierry, bishop and chancellor of the cathedral at Chartres in the twelfth century; the Latin quoted on page 80 of Goldstein, op. cit., #8 supra.

How God acted at the creation is an old question: by special means, or natural? It was at the Chartres cathedral in the twelfth century where western thought was imprinted with the concept that natural causes were sufficient to explain all empirical phenomena; that concept, we should not forget, was derived from Biblical precepts. I have more to say on this in my 1983 article.

31. Design theorists object to the charge of so-called "God of the gaps" reasoning, whereby one says "God did it" when a natural explanation is unknown. It amounts to semi-deism: if God is present in a special way, then God is less present at other times. Dembski is sensitive to the charge; this objection is the first of the nine "Objections to Design" that he examines (1999, p 237-279); he objects to the charge that "Design substitutes extraordinary explanations where ordinary explanations will do..." (p 237). According to this reasoning, as science advances, the need for God retreats, and there really is no "gap."

If this is the sort of "gap" which Dembsky and his colleagues deny, then they have reason to object. They are not exempt from this particular charge, since, for example, it is possible that "ordinary explanations" for protein complexity might be found. But their belief system does imply that there is a second "gap," that it really does exist out there in nature because God created nature with the "gap" in place, and it can be bridged only by some sort of intelligent agent. Phillip E Johnson also does not like to be charged with the "'God of the gaps' fallacy" (Reason in the Balance, 1995, The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education, Downers Grove: IL: InterVarsity Press; p 105.

32. Internet: (a) DeWolf, David K., Stephen C. Meyer, and Mark E. DeForrest, 2000, "Teaching the Origins Controversy: Science, Or Religion, or Speech?" In Utah Law Review, vol. 39, p 1-72.

(b) "Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook," passim.

33. The legal strategy that seems to be developing is to charge that denying a place for intelligent design in high school biology amounts to "viewpoint discrimination." The design theorists would be victims of discrimination if intelligent design is not taught in biology. See especially #21c and #32 supra.

34. One person who disagreed with my never humble opinion is the editor of a well-known evangelical publishing house, with whom I remonstrated concerning the theology implied by intelligent design. In his reply, he wrote: "...we feel it is important to 'teach the controversy' and not let the argument be just one-sided." I'm ready to think the gentleman has little or no experience of teaching in a high school classroom.

35. Midgeley, Mary, 1987, "Evolution as a Religion: A Comparison of Prophecies," Zygon, 22: p 179-184. Midgeley, Mary, Chapter 6, "The Religion of Evolution," in Durant 1985.

Thomas Henry Huxley seems to have been aware that graven images are not the only objects of idolatry; his comment on the subject managed to be an inadvertent exegesis of Ezekiel 14.3,4. Huxley wrote: "Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions 'Force,' ''Gravity,' 'Vitality,' which our own brains have created," in: Huxley, Leonard, 1910, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, New York: D. Appleton (2 vols.), vol. 2, p 72.

36. See Buckley, 1987.

37. As Muller did (# 3 supra), I am bending things a bit to make my point. Kenneth R. Miller, in his 1999 Finding Darwin's God, Chapter 6, "The Gods of Disbelief"; and Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education and Publisher of Reports NCSE have spoken out unequivocally against the bizarre views I have identified. So have John C. Greene (see #42 infra) and Langdon Gilkey for years. There might be others in print who have not bowed the knee to Baal.

Notwithstanding, with the exception of the NABT (which incurred static on the Internet), to my knowledge not one of the American science organizations, such as the AIBS, AAAS, or the NAS has made any public statement against said views. Instead, the most they do is to multiply the evidence in favor of evolution in order to show that creationism is wrong, all true, all important, and all beside the point.

38. Larson, Edward J. and Larry Witham, "Scientists and Religion in America," Scientific American, September 1999, p 89-93.

39. The famous exchange was witnessed by English astronomer William Herschel, who wrote the only eyewitness account (that I know of), but he did not record the much-quoted words that numerous writers since then have put into Laplace's mouth. Herschel wrote that, while they all stood around, chatting amiably about the stars, Napoleon asked of Laplace, '"and who is the author of all this,"' and then Herschel added, '"M. de LaPlace wished to shew that a chain of natural causes would account for the construction and preservation of the wonderful system"; which is good enough. Dreyer, John Louis Emil, editor, 1912, The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel, London Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 1, p lxii.

The earliest published record (that I know of) of the words famously attributed to Laplace, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse," is dated August 20, 1864, in the Athenaeum, number 1921, page 247, by a certain Augustus De Morgan, some 37 years after Laplace's death. I am sure there'll always be writers with flexible scholarship who will have Laplace utter those quotable words.

For more on how all this has a bearing on the evolution controversy, see also Hahn, Roger, "Laplace and the Vanishing Role of God in the Physical Universe," p 85-95 in Woolf, Harry, editor, 1981, The Analytic Spirit, Essays in the History of Science in Honor of Henry Guerlac, Cornell University Press; which enabled me to track down this bit of interest.

40. I trust you will not charge me with sloth for not combing all 14 volumes of the Oeuvres completes de Laplace (1873-1912), which nestle quietly in the mathematics library at Northwestern University, in search of a statement or two of an ontological character, when Napoleon referred only to the one volume, Système du Monde (1835, 1798), which is volume 6.

Unlike what is to be found in both camps of the evolution controversy, I found quite non-ontological and non-metaphysical statements in the Système du Monde: on the nature of gravity: p 152, "sera toujours inconnue"; p 343, "Ici l'ignorance ou sommes"; p 470, "une loi primordiale de la nature,...ou d'une cause inconnue." About molecular configuration: p 392, "l'impossibilité de connaitre." Searching for truth about nature: "à jamais inaccessibles." On final causes, p 480: "Elles ne sont donne aux yeus du philosophe que l'expression de l'ignorance ou nous sommes des véritables causes."

Laplace showed that apparent irregularities in planetary orbits were periodic and not cumulative, thus establishing the stability of the solar system. He was charged by some with atheism, while others, possibly oblivious to what Aquinas said concerning Providence (#11 supra), were glad that he eliminated chance from the operations of the solar system. See Numbers, Ronald L., 1977, Creation by Natural Law, Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis in Ameican Thought.

I have no opinion as to Laplace's state of grace. At any rate, would that a little of Laplace's "toujours inconnue" were to be found in the evolution controversy!

41. Yes, we are told all the time that science does not oppose religion, and so it does not. But is it the religion of Abraham which evolution does not oppose? And is it the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who is the object of worship? Or is it the religion of evolution, or maybe of the New Age. One must agree with Phillip E. Johnson's strong reasoning in 1995, op. cit. (# 31 supra), p pp 187-192; and in his 1993 (1991), Darwin on Trial, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, Chapter 10, "Darwinist Religion."

42. For a number of years, historian of science John C. Greene, an Episcopalian, conducted an exchange of correspondence with geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and with evolution specialist Ernst Mayr on the question of whether evolution should be applied widely in ethics and theology, Greene saying no, and which he published in 1999, in his Debating Darwin, Adventures of a Scholar, a volume that is pertinent to the issue at hand. Langdon Gilkey for years has also spoken and written against the misuse of evolutionary theory, as in his book on the Arkansas trial, in 1985.

43. Those reforms included the incorporation of evolution, of course, and also these themes: adaptation, behavior, diversity, genetics, history, regulation, science as inquiry, and structure and function. All these themes are discussed admirably in today's texts, except for "science as inquiry," which is the most difficult of the BSCS innovations to be achieved.Both college and high school biology texts have grown monstrous with the huge quantities of knowledge, required no doubt to display the expertise of the author. But is it science? In my non-scientific anecdotal survey of college and university biology teachers who teach the teachers to be, I wonder if they know what "inquiry" is all about. A BSCS veteran would. So would Robert Boyle who expressed the spirit of inquiry characterized by the BSCS: "...make discoveries of fresh things worthy to be admired: as in an infinite series..."; in Notion of Nature, in Birch, Works, V, p 153. And they had no biology education in those days. All right, you say, what is BSCS "inquiry"? Here's a clue: it's the opposite of Aristotelian necessity.

44. Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 1973, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, 35: p 125-129.

45. The eighth edition of BSCS BIOLOGY A Molecular Approach is published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. The scientific method of William Harvey is still there, so are Pasteur and the Miller-Urey demonstration, but, alas, Swammerdam has vanished.

46. Does that mean that God employed one way for molecules to interact in the stars and another way at the origin of life? ... that natural explanations will do for the stars, but not for the origin of life? That's what the design theorists would have high school biologists teach, and many evangelicals, alas, agree. I think not. That would savor of deism and a touch of Platonism, both of which are not to my liking. Etienne Gilson, the great medieval scholar who knew his Bible, his Aquinas, and his classics, wrote an interesting passage that pertains to this sort of question (1984, p 108): "The notion of 'life' is Platonist, not Aristotelian. Assuredly, Aristotle often speaks of zoe and of the operations of life, but it is for him simply the proper action of living beings, that is to say, of beings which have in themselves the principle of their own movement."

What Gilson was trying to say is that "life" is not some sort of ineffable or vitalistic principle, but the result of the molecules interacting in such and such a way. Which is what I've been telling students all these years. According to Gilson, that would make me something of an Aristotelian. I'll have to think about that. Which shows again how good a biologist Aristotle was, and a thinker Gilson was. And no, I have no idea where in the Hominid line the religious sense began to appear. That's not a question for biology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Aulie, Richard P., 1998, "Intelligent Design Revisited--A Reader's Guide to Of Pandas and People," in three parts: I, "What Intelligent Design Means"; II, "The Design Argument"; III, "Creation Science and the Origin of Modern Science."

An extended analysis of this high school text-centerpiece of the intelligent design movement, bringing out the inevitable Platonism and Aristotelianism in all anti-evolution initiatives. On the Internet, at the web site of the National Association of Biology Teachers, at: www.nabt.org/sub/evolution/panda1.asp and www.asa3.org at "Apologetics"

Aulie, Richard P., March 1994, "Al-Ghazali Against Aristotle: An Unintended Overture to Science in Eleventh-Century Baghdad," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith March 1994, vl. 45, no. 1, p 26-46. Creation overcoming Aristotelian necessity.

Aulie, Richard P., June 1998, "Guide for the Perplexed: An Unforeseen Overture to Science in Twelfth-Century Cairo," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, June 1998, vol. 50, no. 2, p 122-134. An analysis of Maimonides' reaction to Aristotle in this timeless book.

Aulie, Richard P., December 1983, "Evolution and Creation: Historical Aspects of the Controversy, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 127, no. 6, p 418-462. An analysis of two articles by creationist lawyer Wendell R. Bird in the Yale Law Journal (1978) and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (1979), bringing out the historical and theological infirmities of creationism. How creatio ex nihilo led to evolution, Greek philosophy to special creation. Why creationism is outside the evangelical mainstream.

Aulie, Richard P., 1982, "'The Post-Darwinian Controversies,'--An Extended Book Review Essay," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (March, June, Sept, Dec). How Darwinian evolution was promoted by orthodox theologians and shunned by liberal theologians.

Aulie, Richard P., "The Origin of the Idea of the Mammal-Like Reptile," American Biology Teacher, November, December 1974; January 1975. A critique of creationist view that there are no transition fossils; Karroo fossils of South Africa, etc.

Aulie, Richard P., "The Doctrine of Special Creation," American Biology Teacher, April, May 1972. A critique of the creationist biology text: Moore, John N., and Harold S. Slusher, editors, 1970, Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Company, produced by the Creation Research Society; showing that its creationist discussion of catastrophism, diluvial geology, molluscs, finches, vertebrates, the lot, is rife with Platonism and Aristotelianism. As far as I know the text is no longer in print.

Aulie, Richard P., "An American Contribution to Darwin's Origin of Species," American Biology Teacher, February 1970. On the Asa Gray-Charles Darwin correspondence and friendship; on botanical information, on geographical distribution, Gray gave Darwin.

Aulie, Richard P., December 1968, "Darwinism and Contemporary Thought," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, p 123-125.

Aulie, Richard P., October 1961. See Harper, Dennis, and Jerry Levy (students).

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Buckley, Michael J., 1988, "The Newtonian Settlement and the Origins of Atheism," in Russell, et al.

Burrell, David G., 1986, Knowing the Unknowable God, Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas, University of Notre Dame Press.

Burrell, David G., 1993, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, University of Notre Dame Press. (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

Burtt, Edwin A., 1980 (1954, 1952, 1932, 1924), The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Butterfield, Herbert, 1997 (1965, 1957), The Origins of Modern Science, New York: Free Press.

Carter, Stephen L., December 1987, "Evolutionism, Creationism, and Treating Religion as a Hobby," Duke Law Journal, p 977-996.

Chadwick, Owen, 1977 (1975), The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, R. J., 1988, "Creation in the Hebrew Bible," in Russell, et al.

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Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore, 1991, Darwin, London: Michael Joseph.

Durant, John, "A Critical-Historical Perspective on the Argument about Evolution and Creation," p 12-26 in: Andersen, Svend, and Arthur Peacocke, editors, 1987, Evolution and Creation, A European Perspective, Aarhus University Press.

Durant, John, editor, 1985, Darwin and Divinity, Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Chapter 6, "The Religion of Evolution" (by Mary Midgley).

Foster, Michael B., 1979 (1972), "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science," p 294-315 in: Russell, Colin A., editor, 1979 (1972), Scince and Religious Belief, A Selection of Recent Historical Studies, Guildford, Surrey: Open U Press; reprinted from: 1934, Mind, 43, p 446-468. Reprinted in Wybrow, C., 1992, Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster, Lampeter.

Ghiselin, Michael T., 1972 (1969), The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilkey, Langdon, 1965 (1959), Maker of Heaven and Earth, The Christian Doctrine of Creation in the Light of Modern Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.

Gilkey, Langdon, 1985, Creationism on Trial, Evolution and God at Little Rock, San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Gillespie, Neal C., 1977, "Divine Design and the Industrial Revolution: William Paley's abortive Reform of Natural Theology," Isis, 81, p 214-229.

Gilson, Etienne, 1984, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Greene, John C., 1999, Debating Darwin, Adventures of a Scholar, Claremont, CA: Regina Books.

Harper, Dennis, and Jerry Levy, October 1961, "On the Origin of Organic Compounds," American Biology Teacher, vol. 23, p 348-351. (Repetition of Miller-Urey synthesis)

Hooykaas, Reijer, 1972, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Janet, Paul, 1878, Final Causes, Edinburgh: T & T Clark (Translated from the French, William Affleck).

Kaiser, Christopher, 1991, Creation and the History of Science, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Klaaren, Eugene M., 1985 (1977), Religious Origins of Modern Science, Belief in Creation in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (1977, Wm B. Eerdmans)

Larson, Edward J., 1985, Trial and Error, The American Controversy OVer Creation and Evolution, New York: Oxford University Press.

Livingstone, David N., 1987, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders, The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Marsden, George M., 1994, The Soul of the American University, From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, Oxford University Press.

Mayr, Ernst, 1982, The Growth of Biological Thought, Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Belknap, Harvard University Press.

McMullin, Ernan, editor, 1985, Evolution and Creation, University of Notre Dame Press.

Miller, Kenneth R., 1999, Finding Darwin's God, A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, New York: HarperCollins (Cliff Street Books).

Moore, James, 1991, The Darwin Legend, Foreword by Mark A. Noll, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

Moore, James, 1991. See Desmond and Moore.

Moore, James R., editor, 1989, History, Humanity and Evolution, Essays for John C. Greene, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Moore, James R., 1979, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, A study of the Protestant struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900, Cambridge University Press.

Nord, Warren A., 1996, Religion & American Education, Rethinking A National Dilemma, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Numbers, Ronald L., 1993 (1992), The Creationists, The Evolution of Scientific Cretionism, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Overman, Richard M., 1962, Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Evolution, A Whiteheadian Interpretation, Philadelphia: Westminster.

Peacocke, Arthur, 1986, God and the New Biology, San Francisco, Harper & Row.

Russell, Robert J., William R. Stoeger, S.J., and George V. Coyne, S. J., editors, 1988, Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, Vatican Observatory, University of Notre Dame Press. Pertinent articles by McMullin, Buckley, and Hesse.

Webb, George E., 1994, The Evolution Controversy in America, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

What Darwin did not say, what science does not say:

Dawkins, Richard, 1995, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American, November, p 80-85.

P 85: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

Dennett, Daniel E., 1991, Darwin's Danger Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life, New York: Simon & Schuster. Dennett has numerous juicy sentences to embellish his idea of Darwin's idea, of which the following are samples.

P 21: "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law." (Did Darwin say that?)

P 515, 516: "...I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism...Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means."

P 519: "What, then, of all the glories of our religious traditions? They should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more and more being seen as second-class havens for endangered species, but at least they are havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable."

Futuyma, Douglas J., 1979, Evolutionary Biology, Sundenlane, MA: Sinauer Associates.

P 4: "By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin hewed the final planks of the platform of mechanism and materialism--of much of science, in short--that has since been the stage of Western thought.

Hardin, Garrett, 1990, "An Ecological View of Ethics," p 345-355 in: Miller, James B., and Kenneth E. McCall, The Church and Contemporary Cosmology, Proceedings of a consultation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press.

P 345: "A scientist cannot accept the orientation of the first sentence of the book of John: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' No doubt this statement can be interpreted in terms of symbols, parables or myths, but all such substitutes for real propositions are ambiguous. Scientists are more attracted to the motto of the Royal Society of London: Nullius in verba. If I were charged with altering Scripture to conform with science I would say: 'In the beginning was the World, which everywhere and forever envelops us; against this external reality all human words must be measured.'" This, with the imprimatur of a major Protestant denomination.

Hull, David L., August 1991, "The God of the Galápagos," Nature, vol. 352 p 485-486 (A review of Phillip E. Johnson, 1991, Darwin on Trial, Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway.)

P 486: "Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may (sic) be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galápagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray."Here we have a bit of home-made theology.

Lewontin, Richard, quoted and criticized in Kenneth R. Miller, 1999, Finding Darwin's God, p 186; from Lewontin's review of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, 1995, in New York Review of Books for 9 January 1997:

"...the primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of...Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.

"...we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uniniated. Moreover, the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." One is always grateful for candor.

Martin, Larry D., 1 February 2001, "An Iconclast for Evolution?" On the Internet, in Martin's review of Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution, 2000.

P 2: "Either there is a Creator who operates according to the old motto 'if at first you don't succeed, try again' or there is some mechanism, like evolution, to replace lost diversity." This quotation demonstrates why there is so much opposition to evolution. The thoughtful church-goer, told that these are the alternatives, will choose creation, to the detriment of science education.

Mayr, Ernst, July 2000, "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific American, p 79-83.

P 81: "First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically. It no longer requires God as creator or designer (although one is certainly still free to believe in God even if one accepts evolution)...Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day." One is gratified that Mayr gives one permission to believe in God. For a thoughtful and extended reply to Mayr's point-of-view, see the correspondence between Greeke and Mayr, in John C. Greene, 1999, Debating Darwin, which includes Greene's articles on this topic.

Provine, William, 1988, "Evolution and the Foundation of Ethics," MBI, Science 2, p 132-133. (Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole, MA).

Quoted in Miller, op. cit., p 170-171: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society...We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us...Finally, free will as it is traditionally conceived--the freedom to make uncoerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action--simply does not exist...There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truely free to make moral choices. Now, Bill did not discover this from studying fossils or populations of fruitflies.

Sagan, Carl, 1980, Cosmos, New York: Random House.

P 4: "THE COSMOS IS ALL THERE IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE." Here we have a succinct statement of the secular creed that is widely-believed these days, and Sagan chose caps to make sure the reader understands.

Wilson, Edward O., 1978, On Human Nature, Harvard University Press.

P 1: "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. Deity can still be sought in the origin of the ultimate units of matter, in quarks and electron shells (Hans Kung was right to ask atheists why there is something instead of nothing) but not in the origin of species. However much we embellish that stark conclusion with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the last century of scientific research."

P 192: "Most importantly, we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences. As I have tried to show, sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain.

"If this interpretation is correct, the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon."

P 201: "The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic....probablythe best myth we will ever hand."

NOTE: Kenneth R. Miller speaks out informatively and forcefully against extravagant views such as these, including those of Dawkins, Dennett, Lewontin, Provine, and Wilson, in Chapter 6, "The Gods of Disbelief," in his excellent FINDING DARWIN'S GOD, 1999.

I am grateful first of all to the Philadelphia Center for Religion and Science and the Templeton Foundation for the invitation to present my views on the timely question of evolution, for the splendid arrangements they provided at the "Interpreting Evolution" workshop, and for the hospitality at Haverford College.

I am grateful to the following persons for giving a preliminary draft of this essay a good once-over, to see if it might flow without undue mishap for 25 minutes, and for their valuable comments:

James R. Moore, of the Open University in England; and Chicago colleagues in high school education: Patrick Kelley, Ronald Korajczyk, Keith J. Lencho, Eugene Lyman, Frank E. Miller, Brian Rosta, and Anthony Xidis.

James R. Moore also referred me to the Gillespie article (#28). Keith J. Lencho kindly went out of his way to prevent assorted gaffes and lapses in syntax, and in helping me with my translations of Laplace and of my Latin.

My hearty thanks and appreciation go to Kay Acevedo of the National Association of Biology Teachers for presenting my three essays on "Intelligent Design Revisited" on the Internet and in the splendid format in which they appear (www.nabt.org/sub/evolution/pandal.asp). Jack Haas, of the American Scientific Affiliation, also kindly entered the same series on the web site of the American Scientific Affiliation with an attractive format (www.asa3.org, Apologetics).