Fundamentalism and Evolution
I am told fundamentalists disbelieve in evolution. While many do, I've never seen a definitive study on it, and it is not a part of The Fundamentals to disbelieve in evolution.
Indeed: The Fundamentals, the essays that started the fundamentalist movement, contained some ardently anti-evolution essays, but also contained essentially pro-evolutionist essays, or perhaps more accurately, papers that are explicitly accepting that evolution may be true, and that this does not in any way harm Christianity, and that there's nothing anti-Christian about evolution. For example, George Frederick Wright in The Fundamentals almost 100 years ago:
That is a fundamentalist, in The Fundamentals, almost 100 years ago, saying there is nothing especially wrong with evolution (though he did not explicitly subscribe to it; he was, essentially, an Old Earth Creationist, which is not very similar to what we think of as Creationism, but is more similar to today's Intelligent Design, in that both accept that evolution may be true, but that God intervened to cause [at least some of] those evolutionary steps, which is, given the nature of God, not all that different from the Catholic church's view of Divine Domino Player who does not intervene, but sets up all the blocks and then starts the chain reaction).
And Wright even bashes Richard Dawkins well before Dawkins was born, for good measure:
Granted, some groups of "fundamentalists" are predominantly anti-evolution; maybe most fundamentalists are (though I suspect the strongest reason people believe that is because the loudest fundamentalists are anti-evolution). But being anti-evolution is not a necessary or fundamental feature of fundamentalism. The fundamental features of fundamentalism are noted in The Fundamentals, some of which explicitly tell us that evolution isn't evil.
Indeed: The Fundamentals, the essays that started the fundamentalist movement, contained some ardently anti-evolution essays, but also contained essentially pro-evolutionist essays, or perhaps more accurately, papers that are explicitly accepting that evolution may be true, and that this does not in any way harm Christianity, and that there's nothing anti-Christian about evolution. For example, George Frederick Wright in The Fundamentals almost 100 years ago:
Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are "deistic" -- admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process.
It is, therefore, impossible to get any such proof of evolution as shall seriously modify our conception of Christianity. The mechanism of the universe is so complicated that no man can say that it is closed to Divine interference.
That is a fundamentalist, in The Fundamentals, almost 100 years ago, saying there is nothing especially wrong with evolution (though he did not explicitly subscribe to it; he was, essentially, an Old Earth Creationist, which is not very similar to what we think of as Creationism, but is more similar to today's Intelligent Design, in that both accept that evolution may be true, but that God intervened to cause [at least some of] those evolutionary steps, which is, given the nature of God, not all that different from the Catholic church's view of Divine Domino Player who does not intervene, but sets up all the blocks and then starts the chain reaction).
And Wright even bashes Richard Dawkins well before Dawkins was born, for good measure:
Furthermore, a great mistake is made when the dicta of specialists in scientific investigation are accepted in religious matters as of any particular value. Indeed, the concentration of specialists on narrow lines of investigation really unfits them for duly weighing religious evidence.
Granted, some groups of "fundamentalists" are predominantly anti-evolution; maybe most fundamentalists are (though I suspect the strongest reason people believe that is because the loudest fundamentalists are anti-evolution). But being anti-evolution is not a necessary or fundamental feature of fundamentalism. The fundamental features of fundamentalism are noted in The Fundamentals, some of which explicitly tell us that evolution isn't evil.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
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