Other Responses to "Darwin on Trial"

We previously mentioned Michael Ruse, the philosopher of science and the most important witness for the opposition to the 1981 Arkansas case we examined a while back (the one over which Judge Overton presided). At the Foundation for Thought and Ethics conference in March 1992 reputable academics from both sides of the evolution controversy gathered. Attention was paid specifically to the metaphysical issues for once. Ruse and Phillip Johnson participated in a debate there over whether theism and Darwinian evolution are compatible. Then at the February 1993 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ruse made some astonishing public admissions. He affirmed the reality of metaphysical assumptions in naturalistic science and urged honesty in dealing with them.

But no good deed goes unpunished. Arthur Shapiro, a zoologist who also attended the 1992 meeting, readily affirmed that "there is an irreducible core of ideological assumptions underlying science," but celebrated the materialistic preference for explaining reality and contrasted it to a primitive viewpoint that essentially ascribes natural phenomena to "the gods." By this Shapiro showed he held an appalling--but all too common--misconception of theism.

The aforementioned William Provine was very harsh in his comments about Johnson's arguments as put forth in Darwin on Trial but admitted that there was one point in common: Both understand the incompatibility of Darwinism and theism and deplore the efforts to cover this up for public relations purposes. Remember, Provine is a very hard core atheist.