Creationists, Evolutionists Join Forces

Leaders from the creationist Christian community and evolutionary biologists called on President Bush Wednesday to recognize the imminent threat that current fossil fuel use and climate change pose to the environment.

Issuing a “call to action,” the coalition, which includes Harvard scientists and evangelical leaders, held a press conference in Washington D.C. this week. The unlikely pairing came about after a meeting of the two groups in November.

“People came to this meeting not knowing how easy it was to strike common ground,” said James J. McCarthy, a member of the coalition who is the Agassiz professor of biological oceanography and Pforzheimer House master. “We have a serious commitment in both communities to advance this agenda.”

Eric Chivian, director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, spearheads the six-week-old coalition along with longtime friend Richard Cizik, a leader in the Washington-based National Association of Evangelicals.

“We reviewed the science, about which there was no disagreement, that the natural world is imperiled by human behaviors and policies, especially by our unsustainable burning of fossil fuels and our degradation of living systems,” Chivian wrote in prepared remarks delivered Wednesday.

Known as “The Green Evangelist,” the group’s principal faith leader Cizik said he did not always focus on environmental issues.

“Many evangelicals think that environmentalism is about pantheism and paganism and new-age religions,” Cizik said.

To remove this stigma, the coalition developed a new terminology for talking about the environment.

The coalition began “referring to life on this planet as the ‘creation,’” McCarthy said, “because it communicated a sense of deep respect and reverence for all life on this planet. The scientists were quite comfortable with this term, and this facilitated the dialogue.”

The coalition has already won political support from both sides of the aisle. Republican Senators Olympia J. Snowe and Richard G. Lugar, along with Democrat Barack H. Obama, have publicly endorsed the coalition’s message.

There has been little friction between the evangelists and scientists, group members say.

“We found in the evangelicals a respect for the dignity and objectivity of science. This allowed us to see our differences as small,” McCarthy said.

Cizik added, “We’re setting aside differences of opinion about how the earth came to be in order to agree on the things that we should agree on.”

—Staff writer P. Kirkpatrick Reardon can be reached at preardon@fas.harvard.edu.