 |
|
 |
|
 |
||||||||
Science: |
 |
|||||||
Anthropocentrism: If you claim that anthropocentrism causes people to object to evolutionary theory, you need to show that people are more anthropocentric in the US than in Europe. I don't see any evidence for that off hand. Anti-Intellectualism: My first intent was actually to address the question as you do and to identify creationism as part of the US tradition of anti-intellectualism. But as I prepared to write the rant, I found creationism itself by far and away the best example of US anti-intellectualism. If you could make a clear case for US anti-intellectualism that wasn't religious in nature, that would be compelling, but I found I couldn't make the case once I set out actually to do so. You can see in US culture, especially in religion, a hostility toward experts. This hostility looks a lot like anti-intellectualism when it's aimed at scienticfic experts, but it's also leveled against government and religious authorities. A key difference between European and US Christianity is that European Christianity has a centuries-old tradition of general scholarship. For example, Mendel, the guy who made evolution finally believable by solving the problem of blood, was a monk. By the time US Christianity had found itself, however, science had spun off as an entity separate from religion. It may be too much to say that lack of an intellectual tradition amounts to anti-intellectualism, but it at least means that US Christianity is less fondly disposed toward intellectual pursuits than European Christianity. Maybe someone can pull this together into a coherent rant, but I can't.
And a few words in defense of my rant. Religious Timing: You're right that the Great Awakening occurred long before Darwin wrote Origin of the Species. (I was named after Jonathan Edwards, BTW.) But the Great Awakening was all about European denominations: mostly Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. I'm talking about when US Christianity took shape, and that was mostly in the 19th century. That's where you get your Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Southern Baptists, Christian Scientists, Millerites, Seventh-Day Adventists, the holiness movement, etc. Present-day US Christianity has a lot more to do with these religious developments and their apocalyptic visions than with the Great Awakening. (Meanwhile, the apocalyptic vision that came out of Europe at that time was political, not religious.) European Christianity: It's true that evolution caused controversy in Europe as well as in the US, but that's no reason to see European and US Christianity as alike. In Europe, the controversy resolved in favor of the evolution, and in the US the controversy persists. That's a telling difference. Recap: US Christianity came into its own when defying the theory of evolution was plausible. After all, Darwin's theory of evolution implicitly contradicted scientific knowledge of his day, so denying the theory was reasonable. Nowadays it's unreasonable, but a hundred a fifty years ago US Christianity staked its identity partly on creationism, and that's what half the people in the US are stuck with today. —JoT |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|