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The Creationist Controversy

Creationists have long complained about being ignored by the academic establishment. Such may have been the case a decade or two ago, but certainly not today. A recent inventory lists thirty-two books critical of creationism-all written or edited within the past couple of years. (Two of these were reviewed in a recent issue of Isis, 1984, 75:580-581.) The overwhelming majority of these works, including the three anticreationist books under review here, seek to expose the fallacies of creationism rather than to illuminate the reasons why creationists believe what they do. And nearly all focus on the present rather than the past. David B. Wilson's well-planned and -edited collection of essays, most of which appear in print for the first time, owes its existence to the recent "creationist commotion" at Iowa State University. Almost all of the contributors are from Iowa, and, as the editor notes, all are "decidedly proevolution." In chapters aimed at interested laypeople, they attack creationism from numerous angles: philosophical, astronomical, physical, theological, and pedagogical-but not historical. Although Wilson, a historian of science, contributes a useful essay, "Science and Religion in the Age of Darwin," the book virtually ignores the history of creationism in the present age. Rather than tracing the historical development of creationism, Wilson's authors seek to show that "scientific creationism is not science" (p. 35) or at least that it is "bad science"-so "terrible," writes Wilson, "that it certainly should be kept out of science courses" (p. xxii). Just how one distinguishes bad science from nonscience is not clear, although two contributors, predictably geologists, insist that real scientists "are committed to the principle of multiple working hypotheses" (p. 56, emphasis in original), a method advocated by the geologist T. C. Chamberlin (who, as Susan F. Schultz has shown, used the principle more rhetorically than practically). Readers also get mixed messages regarding the