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Garry Wills begins his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics, as follows: "The learned have their superstitions, prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Since science has explained the world in secular terms, there is no more need for religion, which will wither away. Granted, it has been slow to die in America." If there is a recurring lesson in each episode of the creation/evolution controversy, it is that neither creationism nor evolutionism ever dies in America. This controversy does not go away -- no matter how convinced one side is that truth has won out and the other side, that error has prevailed. Wills could have been speaking of the creationists when he reminds his readers that "in a time of reviving fundamentalisms [around the world], some Americans have rediscovered our native fundamentalists (a recurring, rather than cumulative experience for the learned). It seems careless for scholars to keep misplacing such a large body of people."

This large body of people is not convinced of the truth of evolution, nor do they plan to remain silent about their opposition to it. In the wake of the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that creationism cannot be legislated into public schools, they have not conceded the debate. Instead of continuing to pass state laws, they have developed new battle tactics, focusing in the 1990s especially on debates in local school districts. They will probably keep up the fight until they can join Andrew Young and the former Communists of whom he was speaking in 1989 in a fundamentalist victory song: "When they come out from behind the Iron Curtain, they are singing 'We Shall Overcome,' a Georgia Baptist hymn."

A first idea is that this controversy finally reflects a deep conflict between the basic tenets of liberalism and fundamentalism. In his essay, "Evolutionism, Creationism, and Treating Religion as a Hobby," Stephen D. Carter writes: "the liberal believes that reason is the most important human faculty, and that amenability to reason is the trait that distinguishes humans from the rest of creation." The problem arises when a fundamentalist challenges this "faith in the faculty of reason" (988) by positing instead a faith in "God's revelation; no artifice of mortal man can contradict that; and any 'evidence' that the revelation is incorrect is either erroneous or deceptive" (993). Carter believes that by valuing faith in the Bible more than faith in reason itself as a primary criterion for determining truth, fundamentalists effectively reject the basis of liberalism: "They are independent thinkers who insist on a right to their own means for seeking knowledge of the world, and they deny the right of the state to tell their children that their worldview is wrong" (981). For Carter, this clash of worldviews leads liberalism to tolerate religious beliefs only by removing them from the public sphere to the private. In his book The Culture of Disbelief, Carter further focuses on the problem of dealing with religious beliefs in a culture erected on Enlightenment ideals. Identifying again a key conflict between worldviews, he writes, "Not everyone agrees that the Enlightenment project of replacing divine moral authority with the moral authority of human reason was a good idea." In the creation/evolution controversy, he concludes, one can see a "war . . . between competing systems of discerning truth.". . .

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