Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry
by Vine Deloria

About the Author
Vine Deloria, Jr., is a leading Native American scholar, whose research, writings, and teaching have encompassed history, law, religious studies, and political science. He is the former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, a retired professor of political science at the University of Arizona, and a retired professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Evolution, Creationism, and other Modern Myths, Spirit & Reason, God Is Red, Red Earth, White Lies, Power and Place: Indian Education in America, Custer Died for Your Sins, and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties.

Vine Deloria, Jr. was honored at the 2002 National Book Festival on Oct 12, 2002. Vine also received the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in Boulder Colorado on Oct 23, 2002. This annual award is named after one of the most influential writers in the modern West.

Book Description (from the publisher)
"I offer no comfort to religious fundamentalists or evolutionists," writes Vine Deloria in his introduction to Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths. "Both are passé and represent only a quarrel within the western belief system, not an accurate rendering of Earth history." With this salvo, Deloria, named by Time magazine as one of the eleven greatest religious thinkers of the twentieth century, launches a witty and erudite assault on the current state of evolutionary theory, science, and religion.

When Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859, a philosophical upheaval on par with the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century occurred. Darwin was roundly criticized for promulgating ideas inconsistent with the Bible, and many hailed the death of God and religion. For more than a century, the schism between scientists, espousing progressive theories about evolution and the Earth's beginnings, and religious fundamentalists, focusing on the inconsistencies between these theories and western religious dogma, has grown.

Using the tension between evolutionists and creationists in Kansas in the late 1990s as a focal point, Deloria takes Western science and religion to task, providing a critical assessment of the flaws and anomalies in each side's arguments. Incorporating non-Western and Native American ideas, as well as the concept of "Intelligent Design," Deloria provides us with a framework to better understand our beginnings.

Excerpt from Introduction

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO the Kansas State Board of Education decided to de-emphasize the teaching of evolution in its curriculum, setting off a brouhaha of no small proportions. Commenting on the case, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould reminded us that Kansas has usually been associated with the land of Oz in our folklore and dogmatically declared evolution to be a "fact"—although his definition of a fact lacked certain logic in itself. Hordes of scientific Chicken Littles proclaimed the end of the intellectual enterprise, and school principals searched their classrooms for teachers who might be offering a critical analysis of Darwinism to minds as yet not fully shaped in beliefs approved by the scientific establishment. No matter that the bookstores were filled with volumes pointing out the flaws and frauds inherent in the present articulation of evolution.

I followed this controversy with some fascination, since many well regarded thinkers have issued consistent and prolonged criticism of Darwinism for decades. The astounding thing about the uproar was the knee-jerk reaction among academics, most of whom could not have spoken intelligently on evolution for five minutes and who used examples that bore no resemblance whatsoever to evolutionary theory. I concluded that evolution had become a major tenet in our civil religion and, like patriotism and other generalities, was whatever anyone wanted it to be. More to the point was the realization that almost everyone involved in the debate had picked up their knowledge of scientific theory from The New York Times Sunday science section, Newsweek, or USA Today. When I turned to various "authorities:’ they seemed to know less than I did—about their own fields, in many cases.

The fundamentalists wisely hid in their bunkers during this struggle, since it was not at all clear that advocates of intelligent design and of the anthropic principle, which are intellectual ways of describing an anti-Darwin belief in patterns and purposes in nature, would come down on their side of the equation. It became clear that in addition to the age-old perspectives of science and religion, there was a third way of looking at the data, one that comforted neither the Darwinians nor the creationists. For nearly two thousand years we have believed that our solar system, indeed the cosmos itself, was a smoothly operating mechanism and that the Earth was a special project of either mother nature or god. Then the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet hit Jupiter, and studies of the meteor/asteroid/comet hits on our planet suggested that we live on a small bull’s eye that has been frequently visited by monstrous disasters of cosmic origin.

Today we receive our scientific knowledge piecemeal from two-inch newspaper columns, and each discovery is trumpeted as affirming what we already believe, so that only minor adjustments in our worldview need be made with each item. When enough discoveries begin to accumulate, however, the implications become clear: We need a major shift in our interpretation of data, and we can no longer cling to the other ways of understanding. If each meteor hit exterminates close to 90 percent of the living organisms on the planet, how can the Darwinian "trees of life:’ which are supposed to show how creatures evolved, be produced? If a tsunami can deposit strata hundreds of feet thick in a matter of days, what does that imply about the validity of the slow erosion and deposition process, which has been taught as fact for more than a century?

When the smoke clears and we make all the proper adjustments in our thinking, we will come to understand that quite possibly we are not the first humanoid species to live on this planet: that there is a rough repeating pattern in the Earth’s history in which the planet is transformed and new biospheres come into existence through processes of which we have not yet dreamed. This worldview is found in the traditions of non-Western peoples, including many tribal peoples. Such beliefs, which we may have previously rejected as childish superstitions, may turn out to be our only glimpse of the real planetary past.

This view, many people tell me, represents a retreat to the past. But non-Western people did not "evolve" their beliefs; they remembered events that they survived. We have cast aside these experiences because they did not fit into a neat package that explained creation, be it YHWH or the Big Bang theory, and spent our time convincing ourselves that we are the only example of intelligence in the universe. Thus our present knowledge is illusory because we have excluded so much data that the anomalies now outweigh doctrinally compatible evidence.

This book sketches an outline for a new way of looking at the world. The footnotes refer primarily to newspaper articles that have announced our great triumphs, but their arrangement supports the emerging paradigm, not the old one in which they are now located. I offer no comfort to religious fundamentalists or evolutionists. The views of both are passé and represent only a quarrel within the Western belief system, not an accurate rendering of Earth history. Like my earlier book, Red Earth, White Lies, this book will initially be bitterly attacked by smug academics, later will appear as a supplementary reading, and finally will become a major part of some college courses.

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