Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul
Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul
What should we teach our children about where we come from?
Is evolution a lie or good science?
Is it incompatible with faith?
Have scientists really detected evidence of a creator in nature?
From bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the town’s school board decision to confront the controversy head-on thrust its students, then the entire community, onto the front lines of America’s culture wars. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of “intelligent design,” and what happens when science and religion collide.
Customer Review: Purposeful and Polemic
Monkey Girl is one of the most challenging, eye-opening, involving books I have read. Edward Humes’ commitment to Evolution is strong throughout, but he presents in well-written detail an overall balanced account of the Darwinism/Intelligent Design court controversy in Kitzmiller v. Dover, PA.
Monkey Girl stumbles a bit (3-5) when Humes states that Copernicus showed the Earth was no longer “the apple of God’s eye”, that the Enlightenment’s founding father deists believed in a distant creator, and that Darwinism showed that man was akin to a marsupial or a mollusk; that it provided the “proverbial last straw for the faithful.” This is an interesting take on history. Millions of religious folk around the world still worship weekly, knowing full well the earth’s proper placement in the cosmos. I don’t think that people leave the faith because Copernicus made them do it. As well, the writings of the founding fathers sway more towards the concepts of Jonathan Edwards rather than Charles Darwin, and many people don’t believe that humanity is a “happy accident”, hence the court case and, of course, Monkey Child.
This aside, Humes presents clearly the ignorance of the Dover, PA school board in forcing the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) without knowing much about it, or much about Evolution, and discusses the implosion of the ID camp as the confrontation headed to court. Achieved too was the reality that ID, while argued to be scientific, seemingly is interchangeable with the religious idea of creationism, as even Rush Limbaugh stated (292). Kindly, Humes does not completely excoriate the Dover school board leader, but later shows the difficult circumstances he was under, and keeps him from being two-dimensional.
As a Christian, I was challenged at how the conservative Christian movement is seen through the eyes of others. The words of Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter and the exploits of Kent Hovind were sad to read. I now have a better idea of what Darwinism is, want to study more the stated proofs of the fossil record, and came away with stronger doubts about the young earth idea. The ID movement did not come across well, but it did not seem that Humes had an axe to grind. He did the work of a good investigative reporter, and was able to make a difficult topic readable to a non-science person like myself.
However, I did not “convert” to Evolution. It surprised me that the noted Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould could not “destroy” the lawyer and anti-Darwinist Phillip Johnson in a debate (68), and thought that Humes too easily dismisses Michael Denton’s book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (129-131), which impacted Michael Behe to study and promote the idea of Intelligent Design. Kenneth Miller’s idea that ID turns God into a “tinkerer” (267) loses impact by suggesting that God would choose distant deism rather than a close relationship to creation. And, even though Darwin’s theory did not discuss abiogenesis (how non-life became life), I think it needs to answer it: Evolution’s biggest gain would be to show abiogenesis in action: until then both Evolution and Christianity claim origin non-empirically, that is, by faith. Too, Humes’ epilogual comment that the Bible is “rife with proven geographic, scientific and historical inaccuracies”, that outside of the scriptures there is no record of Christ, and that the Bible contains “no eyewitness accounts of Christ” (348) is embarrassing for Humes. As an investigative reporter he should have studied the works of Lee Strobel, another investigative reporter, rather than write such blatant inaccuracies. That he writes these things to me shows his being influenced by an a priori commitment to Darwinism, and I came away wondering if this commitment led him to shade other aspects of his book due to his beliefs.
Most decisive for me were the concerns of the Christian teacher Jill Gonzalez-Bravo, whose teaching of Evolution brought consternation to her students as it showed they were not “born for a purpose” (172). Humes’ sympathetic portrayal of her loses force when he states that her concerns might be shown to be “baloney” (173), that questions of purpose could be answered outside of the classroom. The problem with this is the lecture I attended in May of 2008 at Colorado College where the renowned Darwinist Alex Rosenberg of Duke University stated unequivocally that Darwinism, which was fact, was incompatible with the Abrahamic Covenant, that is, with the Old Testament and by extension the New. Should I take the word of Humes, a journalist who claims that questions of purpose may have a role outside of the classroom, at home or in a church or synagogue, or of Rosenberg, who holds that Evolution has determined that religious purpose as practiced and believed in by many is a falsehood? It is this very issue, expressed ably by Gonzalez-Bravo and brushed asise by Humes, that gives me pause. True, the theories of gravity, the big bang, relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory and plate-tectonics are adhered to in spite of “gaps”(93), but none of these challenge the role of purpose and meaning as does Darwinism, and for that it should be judged more strictly, even as a science.
All that said, I came away as an avowed (non fundamental, non young earth toting, non ID spouting) theist, and I do this due to my worldview. I say this out of respect for Humes. He wrote a lucid, erudite, page-turning book so convincing I could have gone either way were it not for my a priori commitment to biblical theism. While Evolution could have been God’s method of creating the world, it should not be used to replace the Almighty, and I value the words of Kenneth Miller that “science rules out the supernatural because it is science that is limited, whereas God is not.” (267, as interpreted by Humes) The author Anthony Esolen has stated that life is remarkedly different for one whose view of the universe is not colored by a few beliefs that are in turn believed to be revealed by an almighty God. If God is the personal creator the universe is a deep and rich place; God is the “tinkerer” who enters into the lives of His children who are made in His own image and likeness. Without this the universe, to Esolen, is rather flat and only impacts us environmentally and in faddish moral good or evil. Darwinism might just be incompatible with Christianity as it has never encountered something so rich, but continues to intelligently develop computer programs to show that Intelligent Design (in whatever form it may have taken) might just be superfluous to world Evolution. There is much to consider in the ongoing debate about Evolution, much outside the scope of Monkey Child. It is worth the read as an account of Evolution in the culture wars, but does not deal well with some important questions, ones that are not “baloney”.
Customer Review: Reads like a thriller
Anyone with even a minor interest in the “Intelligent Design” movement will find this book engrossing and educational. It is also a frightening look at what can happen when zealots dominate school boards. Judge Jones emerges as a modest but stalwart defender of enlightened thinking, and the rest of the characters in this drama of science provide more than enough entertainment to keep readers happily turning pages until the end. A must read.
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