Paranoid Science

The Christian Right's War on Reality

Antony Alumkal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781479856626
• eBook ISBN: 9781479874293
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Explores the Christian Right's fierce opposition to science, explaining how and why its leaders came to see scientific truths as their enemy

For decades, the Christian Right's high-profile clashes with science have made national headlines. From attempts to insert intelligent design creationism into public schools to climate change denial, efforts to "cure" gay people through conversion therapy, and opposition to stem cell research, the Christian Right has battled against science. How did this hostility begin and, more importantly, why has it endured?

Antony Alumkal provides a comprehensive background on the war on science—how it developed and why it will continue to endure. Drawing upon Richard Hofstadter's influential 1965 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Antony Alumkal argues that the Christian Right adopts a similar paranoid style in their approach to science. Alumkal demonstrates that Christian Right leaders see conspiracies within the scientific establishment, with scientists not only peddling fraudulent information, but actively concealing their true motives from the American public and threatening to destroy the moral foundation of society. By rejecting science, Christian Right leaders create their own alternative reality, one that does not challenge their literal reading of the Bible.

While Alumkal recognizes the many evangelicals who oppose the Christian Right's agenda, he also highlights the consequences of the war on reality—both for the evangelical community and the broader American public. A compelling glimpse into the heart of the Christian Right's anti-science agenda, Paranoid Science is a must-read for those who hope to understand the Christian Right's battle against science, and for the scientists and educators who wish to stop it.

1

Fear of a Darwinist Culture

The Intelligent Design Movement

As Republican presidential hopefuls gathered for debates leading up to the 2012 primaries, they focused on the perennial Republican issues of the economy, foreign policy, and abortion, plus the new issue of health care reform. But former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. managed to inject another issue into the debates: science. Huntsman took aim at candidates who rejected the scientific consensus regarding evolution and climate change. At a September 2011 debate at the Reagan Library he declared, “Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”1 This brought sharp responses from other Republican candidates during and after the debate. Former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Texas governor Rick Perry, and Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann all endorsed intelligent design and said that it should have a place in public school curricula.

For Santorum (the eventual winner of the Iowa Caucus) in particular, this was no election-year posturing. He was deeply involved in the intelligent design movement, having introduced an amendment in the Senate that was supportive of the movement and having written the foreword to the intelligent design anthology Darwin’s Nemesis.2 Intelligent design was dismissed by the vast majority of biologists and rebuffed in the courts, but it had clearly gained a foothold in the Republican Party. Why would a failed scientific movement achieve such a significant level of political success? This is a hint that the movement has always been about more than just science.3

The intelligent design movement emerged in the early 1990s and offered a new challenge to evolutionary biology. Earlier fundamentalist and evangelical critics of evolution insisted that the scientific evidence demonstrates the accuracy of a literal reading of the creation account recorded in the book of Genesis.4 Some of these creationists were willing to accept that the Earth is billions of years old, while others, “young-earth creationists,” insisted that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old. All of them rejected the evolutionary account of the development of life, which they dismissed as flawed science.

The intelligent design movement also argued that evolution was flawed science. But instead of focusing on how evolution diverges from the Genesis creation account, leaders of the movement attacked the belief that unguided natural processes are responsible for both the origins of life on Earth and its subsequent development. They insist that the scientific evidence points to life on Earth being the product of a designer. This designer is sometimes identified as the biblical God and at other times left unidentified. To understand the cultural underpinnings of the intelligent design movement, we need to consider the profound effects that Enlightenment science has had on Protestantism broadly and American evangelicalism in particular.

Protestantism and Enlightenment “Faith” in Science

The Enlightenment is the name given by historians to a group of interlocking intellectual movements that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe. One of the principal themes of the Enlightenment was a firm belief in the scientific method as a path to the truth. Some strains of the Enlightenment were hostile to religious belief and tried to pit science against religion, but Protestant theologians in Europe (and later in the United States) attempted to find ways to reconcile their religious beliefs with the Enlightenment commitment to science. These efforts gained momentum in the nineteenth century and continue even now.

Some Protestant theologians believed that advances by modern science required a substantial revision of Christian doctrines. Darwin’s theory of evolution made it impossible to read the book of Genesis literally. Newtonian physics, which described the physical world as orderly and predictable, cast doubt on the existence of miracles.5 Modern methods from the academic discipline of history applied to the study of the Bible, known as historical critical scholarship, cast doubt on the historical reliability of much of the Bible. Those who thought along these lines were known as liberal Protestants. They insisted that Christianity could survive in the modern world only if it abandoned or reinterpreted doctrines that contradicted science.

Predictably, more traditionally minded Protestants condemned liberal Protestantism for abandoning essential elements of the faith, including belief in the Bible as the revealed Word of God rather than a primarily human document. But conservative Protestants eventually absorbed the Enlightenment “faith” in science, which they combined with their faith in the veracity of the Bible. Nowhere was this truer than among American evangelicals. As the historian Theodore Dwight Bozeman discusses in his book Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought, nineteenth-century American evangelicals integrated the scientific perspectives of Francis Bacon (as interpreted by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment) into their theology of scripture.6 Baconian thought involved “a strenuously empiricist approach to all forms of knowledge, a declared greed for the objective fact, and a corresponding distrust for ‘hypotheses,’ of ‘imagination,’ and indeed, of reason itself.”7

Reading the Bible through this Baconian lens, American evangelicals came to see the Bible as a source of objective facts (as opposed to subjective interpretations) not only about God but also about history, geography, and science. Furthermore, American evangelicals frequently used findings from scientific research to construct apologetic arguments, claiming that empirical data prove that the Bible is true. To sum up the difference between liberal and evangelical Protestants: liberal Protestants believed that knowledge generated by science “trumped” the Bible, and American evangelicals believed that science and the Bible formed one truth. If scientists offered ideas that contradicted the Bible, evangelicals saw this as a sign that those particular scientists practiced flawed science; they were certain that properly executed science would eventually come along and correct the error.8

Contrary to popular belief, American evangelicals weren’t unanimous in rejecting evolution when the theory emerged. Some managed to reconcile the biblical account with evolution, suggesting, for example, that God’s “days” described in Genesis were extremely long periods of time rather than the twenty-four-hour days of humans. However, over time anti-evolution sentiments grew. In the 1960s a prominent new movement known as creation science claimed scientific confirmation of a literal reading of Genesis. Creation science didn’t originate in American evangelicalism, but evangelicals enthusiastically embraced its ideas.9

Supporters of creation science made repeated attempts to get their views taught in public schools alongside evolution. By the early 1990s, however, creation science was at a legal dead end, its proponents having lost in the U.S. Supreme Court. Many evangelical academics subscribed to forms of theistic evolution (the belief that God created life through evolution), but there was potential demand for a new evangelical approach. Intelligent design quickly capitalized on the demand.

Intelligent Design Takes Flight

Intelligent design proponents like to point out that the idea that life on Earth is the product of design has a long history stretching back to the ancient Greeks. As the historian Ronald L. Numbers describes, the intellectual foundation for the contemporary intelligent design movement can be found in three books published in the 1980s: The Mystery of Life’s Origin, by Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olson; Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton; and Of Pandas and People, by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon.10 Soon afterward, intelligent design transformed into a full-fledged social movement, thanks to Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley.

In an interview with Insight magazine, Johnson traces the personal journey that led him to spearhead intelligent design.11 He was raised as a nominal Christian, eventually became an agnostic, and at age seventeen went off to Harvard, where he decided to adopt the thinking of people he perceived to be the leading intellectuals of American culture. He found great success in his academic pursuits: he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Chicago Law School, served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and became a professor at Berkeley’s Boalt Law School.

All of this changed for Johnson following a divorce and a personal crisis in his thirties that led to a conversion to evangelical Christianity:

The experience of having marriage and family life crash under me, and of achieving a certain amount of academic success and seeing the meaninglessness of it, made me listen and give myself to Christ at the advanced age of 38. And that aroused a particular level of intellectual interest in the question of why the intellectual world is so dominated by naturalistic and agnostic thinking.12

About a decade later, in 1987–1988, Johnson was on sabbatical in London. He happened to come across a scientific bookstore promoting The Blind Watchmaker by the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins. He bought the book and became fascinated with the topic of evolution—and alarmed that it threatened Christianity. Further reading convinced him that evolution was a flawed theory.

Johnson presented his critique of evolutionary biology in his 1991 book Darwin on Trial.13 His main point was that the beliefs of modern “Darwinist” scientists aren’t supported by empirical evidence, but rather by the philosophy of naturalism, which rules out the possibility of action by a divine creator. Johnson also contends that Darwinism is antagonistic to genuine religious belief and that it has corrupted the educational system.

Evangelicals had mixed reactions to the book. Young-earth creationists attacked it because it didn’t endorse their view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old. Evangelical academics who supported theistic evolution asserted that Johnson misrepresented the religious implications of evolution. Nonetheless, Johnson quickly attracted supporters, some of whom became co-leaders of the intelligent design movement. Among these was the Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe. Since Johnson lacked scientific credentials, gaining the support of a respected scientist was a big boost for the movement (although Johnson insisted that his lack of scientific background was irrelevant, since Darwinism was based on philosophy rather than empirical evidence). Other emerging co-leaders included the mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski, the philosophers of science Stephen C. Meyer and Paul A. Nelson, and the biochemist Jonathan Wells.

Most of those who became active in the intelligent design movement can be described as evangelical Protestants, but Behe is a Roman Catholic, and Wells is a member of the Unification Church. It’s significant that the core leaders of the movement include both young-earth creationists and those who believe that the Earth is billions of years old. Johnson has pursued a “big tent” strategy, conceding that movement leaders can agree to disagree on the age of the Earth until after the naturalists have been defeated.

The movement gained valuable institutional structure when the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank based in Seattle, invited intelligent design supporters to create a unit that was called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (later changed to the Center for Science and Culture), which began its work in 1996. The list of fellows on the CSC website contains nearly everyone of significance in the intelligent design movement. Additional institutional support for the movement came from InterVarsity Press, which picked up Darwin on Trial from the smaller Regnery Gateway and subsequently became the primary publisher of books on intelligent design. Given that InterVarsity Press is the most prominent publisher associated with the evangelical center, this gave the movement considerable legitimacy in the evangelical world. Eventually, institutions associated with the evangelical right, such as Focus on the Family, also began promoting the movement. The evangelical left, however, has never warmed to it.14 Intelligent design’s primary support comes from a center-right evangelical coalition.

Phillip E. Johnson’s Paranoid Vision

Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others made important contributions to intelligent design, but the central vision of the movement was crafted by Phillip E. Johnson. His decision to attack evolution is not itself an example of the paranoid style. Even if we can demonstrate that his critique of evolution is highly flawed, this merely shows that he’s ignorant of scientific matters. Other factors establish that Johnson—and by extension the intelligent design movement—operates in a paranoid style: (1) the belief that Darwinism is part of a vast atheist conspiracy, (2) the belief that Darwinism has undermined the moral foundation of American society and threatens to do further damage, and (3) a Manichean mentality that rejects all attempts at compromise with the opposing camp of Darwinist scientists.

Like other “highbrow” paranoid movements, intelligent design isn’t entirely devoid of verifiable facts or logical arguments. But there are enough falsehoods and flawed arguments to keep the movement’s description of the world at odds with reality. At the heart of the movement’s ideology is a false choice fallacy: Christianity and evolution are mutually incompatible belief systems, and only a fool would attempt to embrace both. To ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Fear of a Darwinist Culture: The Intelligent Design Movement
• 2. Sex, Sin, and Science: The Persistence of the Ex-Gay Movement
• 3. “Our Way or a Brave New World”: Christian Right Bioethics
• 4. Seeing Red over Green Evangelicals: The Crusade against Environmentalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author