I recently read an article by Ronald Numbers on the history of Creationism in my native New Zealand.
This got me thinking about historical religious resistance to evolution, and to science more generally.
The first challenge to a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis came in the form of Uniformitarian Geology in the late 18th century. Although there was a degree of religious resistance, in the form of Scriptural geologists, this seems to have died out by the middle of the 19th century.
Because of this, initial resistance to evolution was largely of an Old Earth character. It was only about a century after the publication of Origins, and after much (most?) of the Christian scientific community had abandoned even the mildest form of OEC, Progressive Creationism, for Theistic Evolution, that YEC became the dominant form of Creationism.
This resistance, unlike that to Uniformitarian Geology, has not died out (yet). This longevity, and the long-delayed ascendancy of YEC, implies, at least to me, that there is something about evolution that causes far deeper resistance than abandonment of the literal Genesis YE account. This in turn suggests that attempts to harmonise science with elements of that account, be they Adam and Eve, the Noahic Flood, etc, may be of limited utility in improving acceptance of evolution.
Where does this hypothesised deeper resistance lie? I would suspect in the Common Descent of humanity with the rest of life on this planet.
I think we might go straight to Biblical Authority. YEC tend to react badly to anything that casts shade on thr Bible as ultimate authority.
Evolution has always been a stalking horse. Itās easy to confuse people about what evolution means, and there are few short term consequences for being wrong. YEC has far greater problems with the Laws of Physics, but we rarely hear them complain about physics. There are more immediate and serious consequences for being wrong about physics.
Then why did resistance to Uniformitarian Geology fade so much faster than resistance to evolution?
Wouldnāt this imply that it is Young Earth/attachment to Genesis that is the āstalking horseā, and that the real problem is a non-OE aspect of evolution?
YEC do not accept Uniformitarian Geology, but this is a revival of resistance sparked by The Genesis Flood (Whitcomb and Morris, 1963). Support for Catastrophism died off among scientists, and it is still dead among scientists.
My point was that the century-long delay in the ārevival of resistanceā to Uniformitarian Geology, in spite of the fact that there had been ongoing resistance to evolution throughout, is an indication that there is some strong point of religious resistance to evolution that appears unrelated to evolutionās perceived incompatibility with a literal reading of the Genesis account.
If I was unclear in explaining this, then I apologise.
There is also something to be said about the (perceived?) accessibility of biology compared to physics.
There is scarcely a second week of a genuine physics course one can get by in without a basic competency in calculus. There is no āgetting the gistā of physics without the maths. Thatās not to say one cannot grasp any physical problem and solution one might possibly face without it, but there is that reputation physics has, shared by only very few other academic disciplines. Indeed, this is what flat-earthers complain about regarding physics. They view the formalism as an obfuscation, designed to effect compliancy of the public they presume (not entirely incorrectly) to be roughly as ill-equipped to sit at that proverbial table as they are themselves.
Evolution, by contrast, is at least basically written in plain English. Of course it soon becomes apparent that biology, too, is a hard science, and particularly without statistics there arenāt many places one can go. But the public perception ā maybe in part due to the way it is communicated ā of biology appears to me for better or for worse partly to be that one can have some basic idea of it without an intense study of its formal aspects.
People might be more comfortable to say to one another, and to admit to themselves, that they donāt know the first thing about an area of physics than they are to say the same of biology.
I think the best answer for the different response (regarding geological vs evolutionary theories) is that geology is not easily transferred into moral termsā¦ while Evolution strikes at original sin and moral judgements regarding non-human animals.
St Auggy didnt talk about graniteās original sin!