Belief in creation is a way of acknowledging that the fact of existence is not self-explanatory. That anything exists at all is an ultimate and unfathomable mystery, and it is this mystery at the point where explanations come to an end that religions have usually identified as God. This can claim to be a rational belief, not vulnerable to scientific refutation, since all assertions about the objectivity and truth of science must themselves depend on belief in some form of reality which is simply “given”.

Creationism is much more specific and much less plausible. Its central claim is that the precise mode of creation has been revealed in the Bible, and follows the pattern set out in the first chapter of Genesis. In thus identifying God’s action with a particular series of events and a particular timetable, rather than as the ultimate mystery underlying all reality, it lays itself open to the possibility of direct conflict with alternative scientific explanations. The main motive for risking this potential conflict has been to uphold belief in the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, and the literal interpretation of its statements about creation, which most mainstream theologians and biblical scholars have long read as myth, or poetry, or doctrine, rather than as history.

What later developed as Creationism can thus be seen in part as a reaction against nineteenth-century biblical criticism, and in part as a rejection of those branches of science, notably geology and evolutionary biology, that clearly contradicted literalistic belief in the biblical creation story. Its seedbed was among the fundamentalist Protestant Churches in the Southern States of the USA. Ronald L. Numbers’s massively well-documented history traces in detail how it grew into a worldwide phenomenon.

Its beginnings were unpropitious. When little was known about the Earth’s origins or the development of life, it seemed reasonable to cling to biblical stories which most Christians had hitherto regarded as reliable history. There was some freedom of interpretation, but little agreement about how it was to be exercised. The “days” of creation in Genesis, for example, could be treated metaphorically as ages of unknown duration, thus leaving plenty of room for geological and biological development between them. This, however, was not acceptable to Seventh-Day Adventists, whose distinctive beliefs were tied to a literal interpretation of the seventh day.

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An alternative device for extending the time available for the creative process was to identify a gap between the first and second verses of Genesis 1. Aeons of geological development could thus be accommodated, before the final rushed job was completed in a mere six days. The third, and eventually the most popular, theory relied on the story of Noah’s flood as evidence for a period of geological stratification and fossilization, which was presumed to have taken place after the creation of human beings. This, it was claimed, could explain away awkward geological discoveries which wrongly implied that the Earth was immensely old. An ingenious, but false, interpretation of some famous fossil-bearing strata in Alberta lent plausibility to what might otherwise seem an unlikely tale.

The story of the rivalry between these three attempts to reconcile geology and Genesis is told in great detail. The Creationists is packed with mini-biographies of the main participants, and mini-histories of organizations set up to provide counter-arguments to the scientists, with increasing emphasis on the dangers of Darwinism, as the theory of evolution gained more widespread acceptance. It is a remarkable story of passionate believers with, at the start, few scientific qualifications, barnstorming their way into popular consciousness, on the basis of ideas which were at best perversely ingenious, and frequently based on very dubious evidence. There were fierce battles between protagonists of the three different ways of interpreting Genesis. The surprising popularity, and ultimate dominance, of the theory of a six-day creation followed by a catastrophic and worldwide flood, was an interesting echo of themes dominating much late eighteenth-century geo-history, which likewise made extensive use of Noah’s flood. The Deluge Geological Society, founded in 1938, actively promoted the theory, and The Genesis Flood, published in 1961, is now a Creationist classic. It was Darwinism, though, rather than geology, that in the mid-twentieth century became the main focus of attention.

Lest all this should seem a ludicrous storm in a teacup among ignorant religious eccentrics, it may be useful to recount a personal experience. In the mid-1950s, as a research student in Cambridge, I lodged for two years with a chemistry lecturer and author, who was highly critical of Darwinism. He was an intelligent and open-minded man, with a wide knowledge of other sciences in addition to chemistry. He was convinced, however, that evolution could not possibly work as Darwin supposed, because to do so would violate the second law of thermodynamics, whereby order decays into disorder rather than vice versa. He was a conservative Evangelical, a commitment that undoubtedly motivated him, but the detailed arguments we frequently had were based on science rather than theology. I was surprised to find several pages about him in Numbers’s book, where he is identified as having been a leading British Creationist. I cite him as a warning not to underrate the intelligence and persuasive power of those who, maybe for personal religious reasons, find themselves driven to reject current scientific orthodoxy. Persuading such people that they are wrong is not helped by those, such as Richard Dawkins, who, for essentially anti-religious reasons, assert that the evidence for evolution must necessarily be, and be paraded as, the enemy of religion.

In short, there are clever people who try to make a plausible case against some aspects of modern science in the mistaken belief that this is necessary for the defence of their faith. Numbers’s remarkably comprehensive book provides a detailed history of how it is done, and how a small minority of determined publicists have managed to capture worldwide attention, and in some countries to gain a following which poses a serious threat to scientific orthodoxy, particularly in the field of biology.

Outside the ranks of the most extreme biblical literalists, the concept of Intelligent Design has now become the main battleground between Creationists and orthodox scientists. It feeds on a residual suspicion of evolutionary theory by employing the notion of “irreducible complexity” in some of the more awkward evolutionary transitions, not least in the origin of life itself. Objections to it have come both from scientists and theologians. To introduce a supernatural agency at certain points in what is being studied as a scientifically explicable process, is in effect to abandon science. It also presupposes a God whose creative activity is so inefficient that it requires constant readjustment. If science and theology are to live together in this contentious area, both need to be treated as comprehensive. If God is the ground and basis of all existence, this is the best possible reason for believing that even the most unlikely events can have a rational explanation.

Ronald Numbers has given us what must surely be the definitive study of the rise and growth of a cluster of well-meaning, but irrational, theories over a period of some 160 years. The Creationists is an expanded version of an earlier edition published in 1991. During the interval, the proportion of Americans who favour some form of Creationism has risen from 47 per cent to 65.5 per cent and the phenomenon has spread worldwide. It seems churlish to ask for more but, given that the basis of many people’s distrust of orthodox science is a rather simplistic biblical literalism, it would have been helpful to have had some reference to the kind of exchanges taking place between European biblical scholars and scientists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a period when many fruitful adjustments in traditional thinking were occurring, without giving rise to the extremism that later characterized some shades of American Protestantism. The fact that such extremism has now become global should worry theologians as well as scientists.

The Christian faith, outside its more sectarian Evangelical manifestations, claims to be rational, and therefore has as much vested interest in scientific integrity as in the historical and philosophical integrity of belief. Fundamentalism tends to discount the significance of historical development in the biblical narratives, preferring to treat each revealed word as a relevant expression of God’s truth. This encourages a concentration on supposedly infallible statements, detached from their historical context and from the intentions of those who wrote them, thus paradoxically imitating those sciences in which statements of fact can be treated as objectively precise. Conflict with science is the inevitable result. The “fact” of God’s design, for instance, has to be defended in ways that are incompatible with the “fact” of natural selection. A greater awareness that reality is often more subtle and elusive than this, and that different perspectives may need each other, might encourage fundamentalists to be less literalistic, and some scientists to be more conscious and critical of their own materialistic assumptions. If this were to happen, the issues raised by Intelligent Design might be worth some attention, even though the theory muddies the distinction between science and religion. At present, it merely reinforces the impression of inevitable conflict, which a few protagonists on both sides are only too happy to exacerbate.

Ronald L. Numbers
THE CREATIONISTS
From scientific creationism to Intelligent Design
577pp. Harvard University Press. Paperback, £14.95 (US $21.95).
978 0 674 02339 0

John Habgood was formerly Archbishop of York. His books include Church and Nation in a Secular Age, 1983, Being a Person: Where faith and science meet, 1998, and The Concept of Nature, 2002.

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