ABSTRACT
For the past 20 years, I have been in the heat of the battle between science and religion, fighting in the trenches to defend the scientific theory of evolution against the attack by Christian fundamentalists: creationists. I first became aware of the creationist challenge to evolution in 1977, when I was asked to participate in a debate with another evolutionist, in Chicago, against Henry Morris and Duane T. Gish. Although English-bom and educated, even as a child I had known that there had been Americans who took the Bible absolutely literally; but, if I had been asked, I suppose I would have said that this belonged back in the time of five cent cigars and silent movies. The invitation was my first intimation that ‘fundamentalism’ was still a force with which one should reckon - although then, as indeed now, I kept having this strange feeling that I had walked into the middle of an anthropological experiment recreating the lost past. In this day and age, can any of this, really be serious? When I tell them about it, my European friends still think that I am making most of it up. (For details of the 1970s Creationist case, see Gish 1973; Morris et al. 1974.)
My first debate was but a trailer for what was to come. Three or four years later I was right in an ongoing battle. I wrote a book in defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (that which makes natural selection the central mechanism) and I took the opportunity to attack creationism (Ruse 1982); then, at the end of 1981 I appeared as a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union, when it objected successfully to a law in the State of Arkansas - a law which mandated ‘balanced treatment’ in the teaching of evolution and creationism (now known as ‘scientific creationism’) in the publicly supported schools of that state (Ruse 1984). I was asked because of my philosophical and historical expertise, and I think it fair to say that the judge relied heavily on my testimony in ruling that creation science is not genuine science but evangelical religion (Overton 1982).
