advantage in its ‘final’ form, in which all the components work together in perfect harmony. If it cannot have arisen by accident, the eye must therefore have arisen by design, which implies some form of intelligent designer.
The ID movement has attempted to circumvent America’s Church–State separation rules by claiming that ID is a science and does not actually invoke God as the intelligent designer, that is is different from Creationism and should therefore be legal to teach in state-funded schools as an alternative explanation of the origin of life. Opponents of ID argue that this is transparent nonsense. In the 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial, US Judge John E. Jones III ruled that ID is not a science and ‘cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents’.
DAWKINS vs GOD
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who first achieved fame with his books The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which popularized modern Darwinian theory. He has become one of the figureheads of a new breed of assertive atheism, and his 2006 book The God Delusion has sold over 2 million copies. The book’s assault on the dangerous and delusory nature of religion, together with his high-profile public pronouncements on the issues, have led former bishop Lord Harries to describe him as ‘one of the attack dogs of fundamentalist atheism’. Harries, who recently debated with Dawkins at Oxford to mark the anniversary of Darwin’s birth and commemorate the Wilberforce–Huxley clash, points out that ‘The old atheism was content to say that Christianity was untrue. The new attack dogs also say it is dangerous ... That’s fighting talk.’
Dawkins pulls no punches in The God Delusion, describing the God of the Old Testament as ‘arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction’. He dismisses practitioners of what he calls ‘understated, decent, revisionist religion’ as being ‘numerically negligible’, focusing almost entirely on extremists, such as American television evangelists, or, as he puts it, ‘crude rabble-rousing chancers’.
Dawkins’ attack on religion has attracted a blizzard of criticism, most of it centred on what is perceived as his stridency and intolerance, which is often characterized as simply the mirror image of language used by religious fundamentalists. He dismisses criticism of his tone as pleas for exceptionalism on the part of religious belief: ‘The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack.’ More serious criticisms include that he swallows uncritically the myth of enlightened science at constant war with delusional and dishonest religion, that he ignores or is unaware of millennia of theological scholarship, and that by taking aim at only the crudest and most extreme caricature of religion he is prey to the ‘straw man’ fallacy (where an argument seems powerful because it fails to engage with the serious, substantive elements of the opposing view and concentrates only on easily disproved elements). Dawkins and others, such as American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who seek to apply the modern Darwinian philosophy to all areas of human experience, from psychology and spirituality to sociology and history, are also accused of unwarranted ‘empire-building’.
Fighting talk. Spanish version of a global atheistic ad campaign, featuring posters on buses reading, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’ The campaign has drawn fire from all sides – religionist and atheist.
Dawkins rebuts all these criticisms with varying degrees of success. For instance, he insists that ‘Most believers echo Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini,’ and points out, ‘These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.’ Journalist William Rees-Mogg, however, suggests that Dawkins’ approach is fundamentally flawed, and fails to do justice to the legacy of Darwin: ‘His tone is not like that of Charles Darwin himself; thoughtful, reflecting detailed observation, sensitive in the search for truth. It is more like that of Bishop Wilberforce in the Oxford debate of June 1860, in which the bishop attacked Darwinism.’
The legend of this encounter has grown over the years, whereas in reality it was probably little more than a minor skirmish in the protracted battles over evolution that continue to this day. For instance, Huxley’s battle with Richard Owen continued. Owen claimed to have proved that man was not descended from the apes through his studies of brain anatomy, but Huxley marshalled proof to the contrary in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. Wilberforce went to an early grave in 1873, courtesy of head injuries sustained in a fall from a horse, which occasioned Huxley to remark uncharitably that ‘reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.’ Today there are many who resent the supposed moral of the tale of Soapy Sam and the Bulldog – that Christians should stay out of science – which evangelical creationist Edward Coleson calls ‘one of the most damaging pseudo-scientific myths to gain wide credence in the West in the last century or two’.
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COPE
vs
MARSH
FEUDING PARTIES
Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97) – palaeontologist
vs
Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–99) – palaeontologist
DATE
1860s–90s
CAUSE OF FEUD
Priority over discovery of fossils (aka the ‘bone war’)
The ‘bone war’ between Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh was the most notorious and damaging feud of its age, a Greek tragedy of hubris and nemesis, of two men locked together by obsession until one of them, goaded beyond endurance, unleashed the furies of public disgrace, bringing ruin upon both their heads. It was also a clash of personal ideologies that somehow embodied the late 19th-century battle for the soul of America, of individualism vs imperialism, libertarianism vs the establishment, anarchy vs order, a clash that would shape the settlement of the West.
A palaeontological education
Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh both came from money but their backgrounds and education were subtly different. Cope came from a genteel Quaker background and was schooled in the liberal tradition of a bygone age, touring the academic institutions of Europe during the Civil War. Marsh was older but began his schooling and career later, only beginning in earnest when his rich uncle George Peabody started to fund him; his education was more conventional and his career would later reflect this.
The two men had conflicting personalities and personalities suited to conflict. Marsh was not a naturally social creature; a college acquaintance observed that: ‘for most people it was “like running against a pitchfork to get acquainted with him”.’ Meanwhile an acquaintance of Cope’s, palaeontologist E.C. Case, wrote of him: ‘he was essentially a fighting man, expressing his energy in encountering mental, rather than physical difficulties ... He met honest opposition with a vigour honouring his foe, but fraternized cordially
