Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

experiencing evolution 221

began to question first the feasibility and then the desirability of an

effort to refute the total evolutionary concept, and finally he became

impressed by its impossibility on the basis of existing data. This has

been a heart-rending, soul-searching experience for the committed

Christian as he has seen what he had long considered theraison

d’eˆtreof God’s call for his life endeavor fade away, and he has strug-

gled to release strongly held convictions as to the close limitations of

Creationism.

The distress suffered by Cassel and his liberal friends elicited little sym-
pathy from conservatives within the ASA, who thought the affiliation had, in
the colorful phrase of one member, “gone to the apes.” In the opinion of the
latter, the drift toward evolution was motivated not by intellectual honesty but
by “the malignant influence of ‘that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,
which deceiveth the whole world’ (Revelation 12:9).”^49
On occasion, Darwinism resolved, as well as induced, spiritual crises. A
good example of this is the experience of the psychologist William James, who
suffered through a protracted crisis, accompanied by such debilitating depres-
sion that it pushed him to “the continual verge of suicide” and briefly through
the doors of an insane asylum. Then he discovered in Darwinism what he
interpreted as evidence that “mind acted irrespectively of material coercion.”
This realization, the historian Robert Richards has suggested, “helped heal his
emotional sickness.”^50
The life stories I have presented, whether representative or not, show the
historical poverty and incompleteness of a purely intellectual account of science
and religion. Feelings count—often more than facts. That is why even today
we have so many varieties of evolutionists and why the majority of Americans
still prefer to consider themselves “creationists” rather than “evolutionists”
(with nearly half of them believing that “God created human beings pretty
much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so).”^51

notes

I wish to thank Stephen Wald for his research assistance and his insightful observa-
tions and Jon H. Roberts and Lester D. Stephens for their critical reading of the man-
uscript.

1. Sigmund Freud,Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A Course of Twenty-
   Eight Lectures Delivered at the University of Vienna, trans. Joan Riviere (London: George
   Allen and Unwin, 1922), 240–241.


2. Edward Grant,Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687(Cam-
   bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 239–243.See alsoDennis R. Danielson,
   “The Great Copernican Cliche ́,”American Journal of Physics69 (2001): 1029–1035.


3. Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex(London:
   John Murray, 1871), 2: 389; P. R. Russel, “Darwinism Examined,”Advent Review and
   Sabbath Herald, May 18, 1876, 153. For similar rhetoric, see H. L. Hastings,Was Moses