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Why are there still creationists? : human evolution and the ancestors

Marks, Jonathan (Jonathan M.), 1955-2021

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Summary

The evidence for the ancestry of the human species among the apes is overwhelming, accepted by non-religious and religious people across the world. But the facts are never "just" facts. Human evolution has been a value-laden scientific theory since its very beginning and anthropology makes clear that the ancestors are always sacred. They may be ghosts, or corpses, or fossils, or a naked couple in a garden, but the idea that you are part of a lineage is a powerful and universal one, full of symbolic energy. When it comes to personhood and ancestry, meaning and morals are at play and they most certainly transcend science and its quest for maximum accuracy. With clarity and wit, anthropologist Jonathan Marks shows that the creation-evolution debate is not science versus religion. After all, modern anti-evolutionists reject humanistic scholarship about the Bible even more fundamentally than they reject the science of our simian ancestry. Widening horizons on both sides of the debate, Marks makes clear that thinking perceptively about values and meanings should not be an alternative to thinking about science -- it should be a part of thinking about science. And creationism needs reclassifying as a strictly theological debate.