Creationists will describe evolution as a "dark theology," a view of life as a meaningless process driven by death and extinction. To what extent do evolutionists themselves agree with that?

There are those who think just that. It's not just Dawkins. The idea that life is driven basically by chance and necessity is a fairly popular refrain. Not all of them come across that way. Someone like Edward O. Wilson, who has no more theological belief than Dawkins, nevertheless sets out to present a very optimistic, humanist position. It's like Christians: You know, Calvinists present one hell of a dark picture. On the other hand, you have a few drinks with Martin Luther and you go home pissed as a newt and with a lot of funny, dirty stories.

You do your best, considering you don't agree with creationism at all, to argue that it has a coherent intellectual history, that it possesses some integrity. Is that fair?

That's a good way of putting it. Do I think that? "Coherent intellectual integrity"? At some level, if you're very careful about how you use those words. I think it's certainly got a deeper and more consistent philosophy or metaphysics than simply just ad-hoc making it up as you go along. Whether I think it's a good position or not, I think it's a deeply rooted premillennial view of life.

"The Evolution-Creation Struggle"

By Michael Ruse

Harvard University Press

336 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

That distinction, between premillennial and postmillennial thinking, is very important in your book. Can you break that down a little?

It's a question of how you read Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. It says there's going to be a millennium, a thousand-year period, and then the Last Judgment will happen. From way back when, there have been three readings of this. The Augustinian position is to say, "I don't want to get into any of this speculation." You're eschewing eschatology. You're not too worried about the question of where we're going, you deal with where we are now. Generally that has been the Catholic position.

You've got two other positions. One is premillennial, which says Jesus is going to come before the millennium. This was tarted up in the 19th century by people who argued we were going to have the Rapture and all that; that's where you find the roots of today's fundamentalism. The premillennialist believes that Jesus is coming in the not too distant future, and he's going to make a heavy-duty judgment between those who are saved and those who are not. We should focus on personal purity and evangelical work, bringing in as many souls as possible. You do not get involved in grand plans for the future. Apart from the fact that these are probably seductions of the Antichrist, they're pointless.

The more liberal interpretation is the postmillennialist position: We don't want to get into this whole business of a thousand years, a thousand days, whatever it is. Yes, Jesus is coming -- we're Christians. But that's not the point. What we've got to do is, as in William Blake's poem, we've got to build Jerusalem "among these dark Satanic mills." Does that mean that Blake thought, and the British Labor Party thinks, that you've got to build a model of Jerusalem near Huddersfield or something? Of course not. What they mean is, we've got to strive to make a better world now.

What I've found is that your evolutionists, whether secular or spiritual, are to a person postmillennialist. From Holmes Rolston to Conway Morris to Ed Wilson -- nobody could be more of a postmillennialist than Ed. He says, "No, I'm not into that," but what he means is that he's not into the whole Jesus Christ thing. But I also know that he grew up in an Alabama Baptist family, where eschatology and end things are absolutely vital. What one must do throughout life is say, not "What am I doing here and now?" but "What does this presage for the future?"

That brings us back to where we came in. These two sides distort each other like bendy mirrors at the fairground. They're both worried about the future. The question is, what should we do to prepare for the future? This is the whole thesis of my book: Evolutionism and creationism really are siblings.

So what's the most compelling aspect of the creationist case? If they take their best shot at you, what is it?

Look, I want to make it absolutely clear that I want to understand creationism, not endorse it. It's important for us evolutionists to understand what is motivating creationists. Why do people hold these prima facie lunatic views? Which I think they are. I'm a university professor; my job is to influence people. I'm certainly not going to influence any of my students if I just go in there and laugh at them for being Genesis freaks. I might get somewhere if I can talk to them a little bit about eschatology. I'm not going to convince everybody, but I might get one or two of them to think, "Oh, there's more to it than I thought."

But you've already put your finger on it: The most interesting thing that the creationists are doing is pointing, as Matthew says, at the beams in the eyes of the evolutionists. Meaning that we all too often get into evolutionism and link up our evolutionary positions with social prescriptions and with atheism.

I'm all in favor of social prescriptions, and I'm not knocking anybody for being an atheist. I call myself a skeptic, but that's a hell of a lot closer to atheism than it is to Christianity. But I want to see what grounds you have for saying that, and whether or not your positions follow from one another. If they do, maybe you should ask yourself, "Am I not being a hypocrite in teaching evolutionary biology in American schools?" Given the fact that it's clearly illegal. You're not allowed to teach religion in biology class.

I can't understand why I can't get through people's thick skulls on this one. If in fact Darwinian evolutionary theory implies atheism, then you ought not to be teaching it in schools! It's not good enough to say, "Well, I'm a National Socialist. But the fact that that meant a lot of Jews were hauled off to Auschwitz, that's not my worry!" It bloody is! If your theory leads to 6 million Jews being made into soap, not only is there something deeply troubling about your theory, but you've got a moral obligation to face up to its implications. If this theory leads to atheism, then it's got religious implications.

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