Like a Fish Without a Bicycle

Inayat Bunglawala, over in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, asks the question: Darwin and God: Can They Co-exist?

A believer himself, he feels that they can, but is clearly made uncomfortable by those who see god as an irrelevant fairytale. Bunglawala, for example found the “militant atheism” of Richard Dawkins “quite off-putting”. Much more to his taste are Kenneth Miller and Stephen Gould’s attempt to soften the blow of the implications of evolution on religion.

The trouble is that the arguments of Miller and Gould that try to reconcile evolution and religion are far from strong.

By chance, this week I’ve been reading Follies of the Wise, a selection of essays by Frederick Crews. Chapters 14 and 15 (The New Creationists And Their Friends and Darwin Goes To Sunday School) were originally published as a two-part essay “Saving Us From Darwin” in The New York Review of Books, October 4 and 18, 2001. The essay Darwin Goes To Sunday School is a damning critique of the arguments of Miller and Gould. While Crews applauds much of Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God for its ”most trenchant refutation  of the newer creationism to be found anywhere”, when Miller tries to drag God and Darwin to the bargaining table, “his sense of proportion and probability abandons him, and he himself proves to be just another ‘God of the Gaps’ creationist". Crews points out a number of flaws in Miller’s arguments, and wryly observes that:  “As the fruit of a keen scientific mind, Finding Darwin’s God appears to offer the strongest corroboration yet of William Provine’s infamous rule: if you want to marry Christian doctrine with modern evolutionary biology, ‘you have to check your brains at the church-house door’”.

Stephen Gould, with his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, does not emerge with any honours either from under Crews’ withering glance. Gould’s central idea is that there are two “magisteria” or domains of authority, which will enjoy mutual respect if their adherents refrain from any attempted synthesis. That is, scientists can investigate nature, while religionists can pursue spiritual values and ethical rules.

As a side issue, this idea that religionists can pursue spiritual values and ethical rules often seems to be taken as only religionists can speak with any authority in matters of morality and ethics (and perhaps that is what Gould himself meant). It is hinted at in Bunglawala’s piece: “[Gould] also gently chided those scientists who made similarly unsupported atheistic claims about what evolution had to say regarding questions of meaning and purpose – questions that have traditionally been the domain of religion”. As Ophelia Benson, over at ButterfliesAndWheels.com, says:

Religion does not (whatever it might like to think) get to put up "Keep Out" signs on questions of meaning and purpose. Anybody can address those questions, anybody at all, and that emphatically includes atheists. In fact, of course, atheists are better people to turn to for such discussions, since their versions of purpose and meaning don’t rely on belief in a fictitious being who watches the sparrow and makes babies and animals suffer torments of pain because it’s good for them.

But I digress; back to Crews on Gould… Crews finds that “Gould delivers gratuitous restraining orders to both factions. In exchange for abandoning their immanent God and settling for a watery deism, the religionists get the realm of ethics largely to themselves, while scientists are admonished to eschew ‘invalid forays into the magisterium of moral argument’ (Rocks of Ages, p. 176)”. But as Crews points out, the supreme irony of that statement is that “Rocks of Ages is itself a moral argument proffered by a scientist and an infidel – and why not?” Gould is clearly trying to have his cake and eat it.

The last two paragraphs from Darwin Goes to Sunday School are, I think, worth quoting in full:

The evasions practiced by Pollack, Haught, Ruse, Miller and Gould, in concert with those of the intelligent design crew, remind us that Darwinism, despite its radical effect on science, has yet to temper the self-centered way in which we assess our place and actions in the world. Think of the shadows now falling across our planet: overpopulation, pollution, dwindling and maldistributed resources, climatic disruption, new and resurgent plagues, ethnic and religious hatred, the ravaging of forests and jungles, and the consequent loss of thousands of species per year – the greatest mass extinction, it has been said, since the age of the dinosaurs. So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wide responsibility for these calamities.

An evolutionary perspective, by contrast, can trace our present woes to the dawn of agriculture ten thousand years ago, when, as Niles Eldredge observes, we became “the first species in the entire 3.8 billion-year history of life to stop living inside local ecosystems”. Today, when we have burst from six million to six billion exploiters of a biosphere whose resilience can no longer be assumed, the time has run out for telling ourselves that we are the darlings of a deity who placed nature here for our convenience. We are the most resourceful, but also the most dangerous and disruptive, animals in this corner of the universe. A Darwinian understanding of how we got that way could be the first step toward a wider ethics commensurate with our real transgressions, not against God, but against Earth itself and its myriad forms of life.

Follies of the Wise is worth reading. I thoroughly recommend it.