The President and the Paleontologist: Jimmy Carter’s Dalliance with Creationism and Stephen Jay Gould’s Stumble in Rebutting It

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values , entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.

As Gould related in a postscript to his 1988 essay “In a Jumbled Drawer” (reprinted in his 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus), Carter called him out of the blue one day in the late 1980s, “simply to express his good wishes and his hopes for my continued good health” (Gould was in remission from cancer). In gratitude, he then sent Carter a copy of Wonderful Life (1989), his new book about the Cambrian fauna of the Burgess Shale. As was typical with Gould, the paleontology served as a springboard to explore a larger theme: “the ‘pageant’ of evolution as a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.”

Having read Wonderful Life with pleasure while attempting to defuse armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Carter nevertheless offered a counterargument:

You seem to be straining mightily to prove that everything that has happened prior to an evolutionary screening period was just an accident, and that if the tape of life was replayed in countless different ways it is unlikely that cognitive creatures [such as humans] would have been created or evolved. It may be that when you raise “one chance in a million” to the 4th or 5th power there comes a time when pure “chance” can be questioned. I presume that you feel more at ease with the luck of 1 out of 10 to the 30th power than with the concept of a creator who/that has done some orchestrating.

Gould described Carter’s argument, a bit fulsomely, as “a brilliant riposte ... a brilliant twentieth-century version of natural theology ... fascinating.”

But he insisted that Carter’s argument was nevertheless wrong, and wrong for the same reason that a similar argument he discussed in “In a Jumbled Drawer,” due to the 19th-century Harvard paleontologist Nathaniel Shaler, was wrong: “because a probability cannot even be calculated for a singular occurrence known only after the fact.” (It’s because of the similarity of Shaler’s and Carter’s arguments that Gould added the postscript to “In a Jumbled Drawer.”) Gould approvingly quoted the 19th-century Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, as writing, in a letter to Shaler, “Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of ‘probability’ at all.”

Gould’s answer to Carter thus presupposed that attributions to probability to individual events are not legitimate: it’s wrong to say that the chance that the next toss of a coin will be heads is 1 in 2, or that there’s a 30 percent chance of rain in Chicago tomorrow, or that the probability that a given atom of cobalt-60 will decay in about 5.27 years is 0.5. Such a view is indeed accepted by a few (such as the mathematician Richard von Mises, who famously declared, “The phrase ‘probability of death,’ when it refers to a single person, has no meaning at all for us”), but it is hard to square with the abundance in ordinary life and scientific practice of attributions to probability to individual events.

And Wonderful Life itself abounds in such attributions. Early in the book, Gould explained, “This book is about the nature of history and the overwhelming improbability of human evolution under themes of contingency and the metaphor of replaying life’s tape”; toward the end, he mused, with reference to Homo sapiens, “we are an improbable and fragile entity,” and interpolated a new adjective in a familiar Shakespearean line: “O brave — and improbable — new world, that has such people in it!” In light of these and similar passages, it is hardly fair for Gould to have faulted Carter for wanting to discuss the improbability of human existence.

What should Gould have said to Carter instead? Carter in effect was arguing that because the probability of human existence is very low on the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance, and humans yet exist, the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance is therefore false. But the form of inference is incorrect, as the philosopher Elliott Sober (among others) observes. To see why, take a homely example exactly parallel to Carter’s. Suppose that you buy a single Powerball ticket. If the drawing is conducted properly, it is very improbable (about 1 in 300 million) that you hold a jackpot ticket. But if you turn out to hold a jackpot ticket, are you entitled to infer that the drawing was rigged in your favor? Surely not.

Endorsement of the incorrect form of inference is not limited to creationists. The biologist Richard Dawkins, who is about as far from creationism as anyone could be, fell into the trap in his discussion of the origin of life in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), for example. But it is common among creationists, and Carter’s argument was creationist, at least in a broad sense, for he thought that it showed that it was scientifically necessary to appeal to divine guidance in explaining the facts of life. That was apparently a deviation from his settled views on science and religion, however: in Our Endangered Values, he relates, “I had always understood that we didn’t need scientific proof of the existence or character of God.”

It actually isn’t clear what Carter himself thought of Gould’s rebuttal. In Living Faith (1996), he wrote that Gould “later contradicted my argument — with good humor.” But in his later book Our Endangered Values, he seemed a little miffed, writing, “He didn’t respond directly, but subsequently quoted and slyly ridiculed my opinion.” Any rancor evidently subsided by the time of Faith: A Journey for All (2018), in which Carter listed the influences on his thinking about theology and philosophy, ending with Gould. Although he alluded to their arguments “about facts or principles,” he stressed their agreement about science and described Gould’s Rocks of Ages (1999) as one of his favorite books.

In any case, despite his dalliance with the creationist argument he proposed to Gould, Carter was a stalwart defender of the teaching of evolution. In 1980, as the presidential contest was peaking, his challenger Ronald Reagan declared that evolution “is a scientific theory only” and that “the biblical theory of creation” deserved a place in public schools. Carter replied, through his science adviser, that the scientific evidence for evolution was convincing and that schools ought to respect the constitutional separation of church and state. Since creationism was favored by about 44 percent of the American public at the time, Carter’s reply was — typically for him — both principled and courageous.