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Stephen Jay Gould

“Kuhnian Paradigm Conflict”: Evolutionists and Creationists

Happy Election Day! As we wait impatiently for results to start rolling in, I offer a distraction (that’s nevertheless implicitly related to the Big Thing on everyone’s mind). Today’s post is about how evolutionists and anti-evolutionists understand science in such radically different terms that they might as well be speaking different languages. On this, I follow an excellent essay written by religious historian George Marsden, “Understanding Fundamentalist Views of Science.” Marsden’s smart piece appeared in Science and Creationism, an anthology published in 1984, just as debates about evolution and creationism were heating up to a degree not felt since Scopes. Read more