Darwin vs. the Bible

"Creation science"goes on trial in Arkansas

All 70 seats reserved for the press were full, and so were the 175 places for spectators. A lonely demonstrator wandered in and out of the courthouse in a monkey suit. But U.S. Marshal Charles Gray was not impressed by the hubbub. "When this is all over," he reflected, "it won't have changed anyone's mind." Gray surely has it right. The federal trial that began last week in Little Rock, Ark., will lead to a legal ruling on whether "creation science" (secular evidence for, among other things, the supernatural origin of the universe) may be required in public schools where the theory of evolution is taught. But after all the lawyers and experts have finished, after the press has gone, the old Bible Belt battle between Darwin and the Good Book will go right on.

This new case, coming 56 years after the Scopes "monkey trial," was testimony of that. But this time around, claim Fundamentalists, opponents of the new law are the ones guilty of censorship. When the Arkansas legislature overwhelmingly passed the Balanced Treatment Act last March, the American Civil Liberties Union went on red alert. Though the act explicitly says it is nonreligious, its origins are indisputably Fundamentalist. Such "neutral" bills, requiring that creation science be taught side by side with evolution, have been promoted for years by California's Institute for Creation Research, one of many such groups lobbying against Darwinism. To the A.C.L.U., along with alarmed educators, the local Roman Catholic bishop and an assortment of Protestants and Jews, the law was an unconstitutional state effort to push a religious belief.

At the trial, a phalanx of heavyweight civil liberties lawyers, prepped by 60 scientific consultants, faced a far less-experienced Arkansas legal team. Last week the A.C.L.U. rolled out its case and it was crushing. The lead-off witness, United Methodist Bishop Kenneth Hicks, termed the bill a clear-cut "transgression of the First Amendment." University of Chicago Theologian Langdon Gilkey was unimpressed by the fact that the state law carefully did not mention God by name. Said he: "A creator is certainly a god if he brings the universe into existence from nothing."

Next came the scientists. G. Brent Dalrymple of the U.S. Geological Survey attacked creation science at its weakest point: the contention that the earth is some 10,000 years old. It is more like 4.5 billion years, said Dalrymple, who scorned the creation contingent as flat-earthers. Francisco Ayala of the University of California at Davis, an ex-priest turned geneticist, ran a brief seminar on amino acids to show that man and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, but conceded that God could be behind the whole process.

The bulk of the state's case will be presented this week. Its lawyers are arguing that evolution is fully as religious (or nonreligious) as creation science, and that evolution cannot meet the strict definition of science any better than creation science can. "You shouldn't reject creationism just because it comes from the Bible; you test it scientifically," says one state witness, Dr. Norman Geisler of Dallas Theological Seminary. Several scientists will testify that the odds are improbably high that all species arose from a primordial cell through natural selection.

The case inevitably will go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the A.C.L.U. is challenging Louisiana's virtually identical law, and creation lobbyists are at work with more than 15 state legislatures as well as textbook publishers and local school boards across the nation. So whatever Federal Judge William Overton rules, perhaps late this week, little will be settled.

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