Darwin v Jesus

I've been thinking a lot lately about this whole new wave of monkey business over evolution, and whether it should be taught in schools. While I'm firmly in the mainstream science camp (and I'm a card-carrying member of the heathen commie intellectual elite to boot), I'm not going to make any particular argument here; I'm just trying to sort a few things out and make a few observations.

As a moderately well-educated person who has spent many of the last 20+ years living and working on the edges of science, I just can't understand what the fuss is about. I don't have what you'd call a deep understanding of evolutionary biology, but it seems to me that this "evolution" thing is not very controversial among working scientists. I don't know any scientists who practice a religion called "Darwinism," nor any who would say "Darwin was right; therefore Jesus is wrong." I can't think of a single practicing scientist who would try to ascribe inerrancy to Darwin's writings.

I do know a few scientists who are deeply religious (christians but also jews, muslims & buddhists) and they just don't seem to find a conflict between their religious beliefs/practices and their understanding of biology, nor do they appear to find it necessary to spend time refuting such concepts as natural selection in their work or in their conversations.

I also know a few christians of the hard-core bible-is-the-inerrant-word-of-god persuasion and they seem to feel deeply threatened by science generally and poor old Darwin in particular. Their definitive argument seems to consist of the evidence that Darwin himself is dead, and Jesus is not, therefore education is evil and science classes should teach religion instead of science. I think I'm reading the bumper stickers correctly.

But in any case, the evolution-haters have come up with this "intelligent design" (ID) concept to replace the largely unsuccessful "creation science" efforts of a few years back. It's been written about all over the place lately; google it yourself, or you can look it up here at the Intelligent Design Network website. And TalkDesign.org is a website set up by the same folks as TalkOrigins.org; both of these explore the creation/evolution controversy, with the former focusing more exclusively on ID and its implications. TalkOrigins has a lovely FAQ page and an excellent archive.

Oh, and The Panda's Thumb is an excellent group blog in which the integrity of both science and science education are defended. Among other things.

So if I'm understanding ID correctly, one of their central points is that everything in the universe is so amazingly perfect that it couldn't be the result of a random process -- like, say, evolution -- and must be taken as evidence that an "intelligent designer" -- god, for example -- is running the show. On the one hand, this is a pretty harmless idea, and doesn't necessarily contradict natural selection, for example, as a description of the mechanism by which this "intelligent designer" constructs its designs. It does, however, seem to fall prey to the very thing I find most irksome about the popular understanding of Mr. Darwin's theory: namely that homo sapiens is somehow the "end product" of natural selection; that there is this orderly progression of increasingly sophisticated organisms from primeval ooze to lizards to monkeys to contemporary humans, such as we are. Like we evolved -- or someone evolved us -- on purpose. Seems goofy to me.

I know it's difficult to get your mind around it; didn't Galileo or somebody get into hot water for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe? This is sort of the same thing. We're not only not at the center of the universe, we might not even be the goal of evolution. Yeah, this is a bummer for some. And yeah, I know that it's disconcerting to think that it's possible no one is in charge. I imagine this is why religious traditions and creation stories are so essential to humans, and why pretty much every community of humans comes up with some way to account for it all and impose some sort of order. It's what we do.

And yes, I know that I'm going to go to hell for implying that there might not be a god. I told you already I was a heathen.

But I digress again.

What I was saying was that while such notions as those comprising ID are harmless enough on their surface, I am extremely nervous about the ways in which they are being used as levers to divide communities, ravage local school district budgets, and undermine the efforts of educators. (See Michelle Goldberg's recent Salon article, for just one recent example).

And this Darwin v Jesus argument is only one part of the current wave of hostility that I find increasingly difficult to stomach. Just as is the case on every other front in the ongoing culture war, the two sides of the argument are so far apart that they can't even hear each other. There is no middle ground. Everybody's getting more angry and/or more afraid.

And everybody's losing.