The evidence for the ancestry of the human species among the apes is overwhelming. But the facts are never “just” facts. Human evolution has always been a value-laden scientific theory and, as anthropology makes clear, the ancestors are always sacred. They may be ghosts, or corpses, or fossils, or a naked couple in a garden, but the idea that you are part of a lineage is a powerful and universal one. Meaning and morals are at play, which most certainly transcend science and its quest for maximum accuracy. With clarity and wit, Jonathan Marks shows that the creation/evolution debate is not science versus religion. After all, modern anti-evolutionists reject humanistic scholarship about the Bible even more fundamentally than they reject the science of our simian ancestry. Widening horizons on both sides of the debate, Marks makes clear that creationism is a theological, not a scientific, debate and that thinking perceptively about values and meanings should not be an alternative to thinking about science – it should be a key part of it.
Оглавление
Jonathan Marks. Why Are There Still Creationists?
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Why Are There Still Creationists? Human Evolution and the Ancestors
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes
1 Introducing the Ancestors
Rethinking Species and Scriptures
Theology and Evolution
Ancestry and Relatedness
Notes
2 Scientific Stories of Our Ancestors
Human Ancestry as the Dental and the Mental
The Revolution in Communicating, Interacting, and Thinking
The Evolution of Inequality
Notes
3 Attacking Evolution
Germans Against Darwinism
The Scopes Trial
Science Has Its Story, and I’ve Got Mine
Intelligent Design: Old Wine in New Bottles11
Notes
4 Biblical Literalism and Rationalism
Biblical Bibliographies, Geometry, and Figures of Speech
Cultural Evolution and the Bible
Notes
5 Myths of Science and Religion
Why Are There Savages?
Science and Religion
Anti-Anti-Science
Science and the Moral Realm
Notes
6 Sacred Ancestry
The Power of Ancestry
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index. A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
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Jonathan Marks
For their especially valuable comments on the manuscript I thank Thomas Bolin, Neil Arner, and Sarah Morice Brubaker.
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Both the natural theology and the natural history questions were ultimately resolved in the same year, 1859, with Charles Lyell’s address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September, which publicly acknowledged the coexistence of stone tools and archaic animals, and with the release of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in November, which theorized the beginnings of species. The following year, a group of liberal theologians published a runaway bestseller called Essays and Reviews, which brought modern critical biblical scholarship to the reading public, and passingly referenced Darwin.
All of which is to say that the theological and biological revolutions were closely intertwined. Indeed, just four years later three influential books came out: Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, the first book on human evolution; Ernest Renan’s immensely popular Life of Jesus, which represented Jesus as a smart blond guy, not as the miracle-working Mediterranean demigod that readers had grown up with; and Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man, which reviewed the evidence for primitive people in an ancient world, full of extinct and unfamiliar species. If we could no longer distinguish the archaic, pre-modern earth clearly from the modern earth, and the modern earth appeared to be an outgrowth, or an “evolution,” from the pre-modern earth, then Eden may well have been populated by archaic species and even by archaic people. In fact, it might not even have been a garden at all, but a glacier or tundra or savanna.
