Neanderthals in the Classroom

Elizabeth Watts

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351106030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Biologia cellulare

Neanderthals in the Classroom examines the ongoing battle surrounding evolution from a cultural and historical perspective and then puts Theodosius Dobzhansky's claim that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" to the ultimate test by exploring the potential evolutionary roots of this societal and educational clash over human origins. In examining the biological roots of the conflict, Watts demonstrates how understanding our inner Neanderthal allows us to consciously choose more highly evolved forms of communication as a means of alleviating societal division and creating space for more effective science education.

Key Features:

• Introduces readers to the multifaceted world of evolution education.
• Describes the complex interplay between religious beliefs and science as well as the clash of false information and formal education.
• Offers an overview of the transformation of public opinion of evolution and science over time in the United States due to the perceived conflict between science and religion.
• Examines students' misconceptions about the theory of evolution and the general nature of scientific discovery due to the contradictory messages that they receive in popular culture.
• Offers potential means to amend misconceptions so that students and other individuals can integrate evolutionary theory into their worldviews, regardless of their religious background.

Part I
Fight or Flight

Oxford Dictionary:

fight or flight: The instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation, which readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away.

Wikipedia:

The fight-or-flight response (also called hyperarousal, or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. It was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon. His theory states that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, preparing the animal for fighting or fleeing.

Chapter 1

Religion Meets Science

Abstracts

Religion has played a major role in American culture since the first colonists arrived over 500 years ago. The earliest settlers brought with them the idea of creating a Christian nation and this idea has been passed down through hundreds of years of American history. This chapter examines how societal, political and cultural developments in the 1800s stirred up a new emotional element of American religiosity that was characterized by a close and personal relationship with God. As the history of the nation continued, religiosity became coupled with political activism. By the 20th century, there was a major focus on organizing evangelical activity to create political change and this grassroots activism soon focused on creating policy changes that would influence how evolution was taught in American public schools.

A recent question on ‘Research Gate’ caught my attention. One researcher asked, “Is it possible me to be a scientist and still maintain my religious views and belief in God?” The question received a myriad of answers, often contradictory. The answer to the question seemed simple enough to me. I grew up in a predominantly Catholic community on the border to Mexico, where many of my teachers and professors at university as well as my own mom were simultaneously scientists as well as devote Catholics. But this compatibility between religious beliefs and scientific careers is not so self-evident for many individuals who adhere to more fundamentalist belief systems. Here I will examine this general question to see what conflict, if any, exists between religion and science and whether this conflict is inherent or artificially constructed. Is it possible for religion to co-exist with science? Does an individual have to choose between their God and their interest in science? In this Section I will discuss the current research in these areas and offer insights by comparing various religions stance on evolution and take a specific look at the differences between traditional mainline Christianity and evangelical Christianity to determine how these differences affect adherents’ ability to understand and accept scientific tenets.

Christianity and the Fundamentals

The question of whether it possible for a person to believe in God and to accept the theory of evolution or are they mutually exclusive is not a novel question and has already been addressed many times by scientists and religious leaders alike. Science philosopher, Michael Ruse explicitly stated that this struggle is more legend than truth (Ruse 2001), while Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, has also vehemently proclaimed that there is an absolute lack of conflict due to the two very different realms of religions and science (1997). Even Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor Pope John-Paul II have both praised the role of science in the development of humanity and acknowledged the strength of the theory of evolution, which has freed Catholics from seeing any conflict between their belief system and scientific progress (Numbers 1998).

Yet, there are those who see a clear and threatening conflict between their religious views and the theory of evolution and who continue to vehemently oppose the teaching of evolution. The driving force behind this opposition to evolution is the idea that evolution contradicts the biblical account of special creation in Genesis and that this contradiction can cause a loss of faith (Ham 2012; Morris 1989). It cannot be denied that evolution conflicts with the literal account of the Genesis story. But the question then becomes—was the Genesis story ever meant to be read literally? Was it ever meant to act as a how-to book on the creation of the world? Or was it perhaps meant for something else—such as a means of describing the nature of God and people’s relationship to him?

The importance of discussing whether or not the Bible was written in order to be interpreted literally is important because this idea has been at the center of all creationist accusations against the teaching of evolution. According to Ken Ham,² Genesis forms the foundation of Christianity and if Genesis were to be lost, Christianity would tumble (2012). Yet, if we look back in the time to the point in history when Christianity was on its way to becoming a major world religion, we find St. Augustine³ who argued against the literal interpretation of biblical texts. As St. Augustine explained, the Bible was written in a language that should be understood by relatively uneducated people since this was the characteristic of the mass population at the time that the Bible was revealed to human kind (Dixon 2008). This idea is known as the principle of accommodation or condescension and according to this theological principle, God still maintains His divine nature, yet it is acknowledged that His message has been related to humanity at the original audience’s general language and education level so that humans can easily understand it (McGrath 1998). According to this theological principle Genesis does not need to be read as a literal account of the creation of the Earth for it to provide a foundation of the Judeo-Christian belief system that revolves around the concept of a single, almighty, omniscient God. When Genesis is read in this manner, it no longer conflicts with evolutionary theory, and it becomes much easier for religious individuals to maintain their faith while simultaneously embracing science.

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² Ken Ham is founder of the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. He is also president of Answers in Genesis (AiG).

³ Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) was one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity due to his work during the Patristic Era.

Conrad Hyers takes this idea one step further and proposes that the original purpose of the Genesis account was allegorical. According to Hyers the Israelites used Genesis as a means of describing the true, all-powerful nature of the Hebrew God and to declare that their God was superior to the summation of gods worshipped by the Egyptians or Babylonians. According to this allegorical interpretation, each day of creation dismisses a group of gods or deities, for example, the statement “And God said ‘Let there be light’… . And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night” (Genesis 1:3) was a means of saying that their God of Abraham was higher (more powerful/more real) than all of the pagan gods of light and darkness (Hyers 1984). In the same way, when “God made the firmament, and divided the waters…” (Genesis 1:7) the Hebrew’s God displaced the pagan gods of the sky and the seas. This pattern then continues throughout the rest of the week of creation, vanquishing the pagan gods while their God was established as superior to the sun, the moon and the stars. By placing their God over the gods of the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Hebrews were also able to call the divinity of the kings and pharaohs into question.

The beauty of the allegorical nature of the Bible is that it allows for the compatibility of religion, faith and science as described by Pope John Paul II. According to Pope John Paul II, who was declared a saint by the Vatican in 2014, the crux of the biblical account of creation does not lie in the details of the literal interpretation of the creation of the universe but instead in the understanding of the relationship between man, God and the universe as he said in his 1981 address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, “The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its makeup, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to reach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer.” Pope Benedict XVI made a very similar statement, explaining that “The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are… . And vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments… . To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities (Ratzinger 1995).” These types of statements made by the leaders of the Catholic church have prevented Catholics from having to choose between their faith and scientific fact, as H.L. Mencken stated “[The advantage of Catholics] lies in the simple fact that they do not have to decide either for Evolution or against it. Authority has spoken on the subject; hence it puts no burden upon conscience, and may be discussed realistically and without prejudice (1925).”

According to Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, while most Catholics and liberal Protestants are easily able to reconcile their faith and science in their acceptance of either a theistic (guided by God) or naturalistic (unguided) view of biological evolution, the majority of evangelical Protestants continue to believe in the literal truth of the stories of creation found in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Scriptures—interpreting the Hebrew word ‘Yom’ as meaning that creation took six actual 24-hour days. Current promoters of a literal interpretation of the Bible continue to purport that these texts should be interpreted as a verbatim account of God’s exact actions in the creation of the universe (Ham 2012, 2013; Morris 1961, 1974). According to Hemminger, this insistence on a literal interpretation of biblical accounts is the root of the strife between religious and scientific communities (2009).

In order to ameliorate this problem, clergy members and rabbis across America have banded together to help spread their pro-science message in the form of an open letter (see theclergyletterproject.org). The open letter has already been signed by almost 15,000 American clergy members (as of December 2018) from different Christian denominations affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution (Figure 2). A similarly-worded letter has also been written and signed by Rabbis, Buddhist leaders and Unitarian Universalists.

Figure 2: The Christian clergy letter from the Clergy Letter Project aimed at countering the myth of conflict between religion and science.

In reading the letter from the American clergy, we can see two things: (1) teachers and scientists are not the only ones who are concerned about the creationism being taught as science, and (2) the impetus for battle between faith and science has not come from the church, theologians or the clergy, but was instead born outside of mainstream religion within a branch of Christianity known as conservative evangelicalism or fundamentalist Christianity.

American Fundamentalism

According to George Marsden, “…an American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with ‘secular humanism’.” In Understanding Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism, Marsden also points out that although the term ‘fundamentalist’ is often used today to describe any militantly traditionalist religion, such as Islamic fundamentalism, the term ‘fundamentalist’ was actually invented in the US in the 1920s to describe militant evangelicals who wanted to return Christianity to its fundamental teachings. This is reflected in the current definition of fundamentalism from the Oxford dictionary:

Fundamentalism: (noun) 1. A form of a religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture: Modern Christian fundamentalism arose from American millenarian sects of the 19th century, and has become associated with reaction against social and political liberalism and rejection of the theory of evolution.

In looking at the origins of Christian fundamentalism we see that it began as a systematic theology by the 1920s within the Protestant churches. American fundamentalists started the publication of a series of appropriately entitled booklets called The Fundamentals. If one looks at an essay from these booklets, such as A Testimony to the Truth, we see that the point of the essay is aimed at defending Protestant orthodoxy while attacking such topics as (1) higher criticism,⁴ (2) liberal theology, (3) socialism, (4) modern philosophy, (5) atheism, (6) Catholicism and (7) evolutionism.

Social changes of the early twentieth century also fed the flames of fundamentalism as “Fundamentalists felt displaced by the waves of non-Protestant immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooding America’s cities. They believed they had been betrayed by American statesmen who led the nation into an unresolved war with Germany, the cradle of destructive biblical criticism. They deplored the teaching of evolution in public schools, which they paid for with their taxes, and resented the elitism of professional educators who seemed often to scorn the values of traditional Christian families (Wacker 2000).”

The ideas of an inerrant and infallible Bible that should be read as a literal account also arose during this time as a part of the fundamentalist reaction to liberalism and rationalist thought. Benjamin B. Warfield, one of the authors of The Fundamentals, is credited with the advancement of the concept of biblical inerrancy (Orr et al. 1910) as stated in blurb on the 2008 reprint of Warfield’s 1927 essays: “B.B. Warfield’s volume on divine revelation and biblical inspiration defined the parameters of the twentieth century understanding of biblical infallibility, inerrancy, and the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture.”

This idea of an infallible Bible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Fight or Flight
• Part II: Tend and Befriend
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Appendices
• References
• Index
• Color Plate Section