EVOLUTION, CREATIONISM, AND OSAMA BIN LADEN
At the 81st anniversary of the Scopes Trial, the dispute over evolution persists like a backwoods feud. If anything, Darwin’s theory is under stronger challenge today than it was in that sweltering Tennessee courthouse back in 1925. The opposition to evolution comes, now as then, from one or another version of creationism, the belief that the vast complexities of nature can only be the product of a designing intelligence. But the evolution debate is an exercise that reflects credit on neither science nor religion, and it is something we could well do without at the dawn of a civilizational conflict with resurgent Islam.
There were good reasons to expect that this controversy would by now exist only as a memory from an earlier, less enlightened time. Biology, after all, has made spectacular progress since 1925, and virtually all of it rests on a base of evolutionary theory. Religion has not stood still, either, as the events of the past century provoked a searching re-examination of theological presuppositions and priorities in virtually every religious community. Nevertheless, continuing failures by both science and religion allow the dispute to drag on. A perverse and unintended consequence of this lamentable pas de deux may be to impair our ability to sustain a difficult and prolonged global war against Islamic militancy.
Science has failed by doing a pathetically inadequate job of presenting a coherent and convincing case for evolution. The excuses are many, and none of them hold water. Claiming to be too busy writing proposals and supervising graduate students, for example, is a description of current priorities, not a justification for them. Scientists are generally loathe to admit that they are losing a war of ideas, and they refuse to give their opponents nearly enough credit for fighting that war with tenacity and skill. Dismissing creationism as unworthy of being answered in a systematic and sustained way is proving a poor strategy. Surveys of public opinion indicate just how poor: a March 1994 Harris poll found that 44% of adult Americans thought humans developed from earlier species; by June 2005 the percentage had fallen to 38%.
Public understanding of the most elementary principles of natural selection is practically nonexistent, despite the fact that the basic ideas are easy to grasp and have been around for 150 years. Comprehension does not guarantee acceptance, of course, but once the basic mechanisms of evolution are understood they carry great plausibility for most people. That the level of public knowledge is so low can only be the result of a scandalously half-hearted and ineffective educational effort. Better results will not come from a further proliferation of elaborate but poorly-focused websites, or more lavishly illustrated textbooks. This is not something that can be farmed out. Effective teaching will require that scientists take a page from the creationists’ playbook, and climb down out of the ivory tower to preach the scientific message personally and directly in the give-and-take of public forums.
Creationists demonstrate how effective that kind of outreach can be, as they work to influence public opinion against evolutionary theory. It’s easier than it ought to be, because the meager educational efforts of the scientific community make this tantamount to writing on a collection of blank slates. Although one might well question whether there is anything theologically important at stake that justifies this anti-evolution effort, it’s hard to argue with success. Creationists take encouragement from their gains so far, and they no doubt feel on the edge of a turning tide. But these are cheap victories, depending on uninformed audiences and an opponent who rarely bothers to show up.
Worse, creationism is frequently promoted with a dismaying lack of intellectual honesty. For one example, creationists enjoy pointing to the impossibly small probability that some complex structure, like a human eye, could occur as a product of random chance. It would be like shaking a box of Scrabble tiles, then opening the box to find they spell the Gettysburg Address -- only a lot less likely. So, the fact that such structures do exist must reflect the activity of an intelligent designer, a purposeful arranger of the tiles.
But that argument is beside the point, because evolution doesn’t work by popping up complex structures as one-time chance events; rather, they form by the gradual accretion of successful (adaptive) variations. Randomly generated letters can build the Gettysburg Address by accretion, if successes can be saved: F, FO, FOU, FOUR, FOURS, FOURSC, and so on. Similarly, evolution makes an eye over eons of time by accreting improvements to what started out as primitive light-sensitive cells, not by miraculously hitting on the finished product in all its complexity, the prize in some bizarre biological lottery.
The point is not that creationist arguments like this are bogus, but that the people who present them know that they are bogus. This form of persuasion is not an intellectually honest attempt to convey a truth, but merely a polemical tactic to dominate a discussion by taking advantage of the ignorance of the audience. Such hucksterism is made possible, of course, by science’s having defaulted in its educational role. But what does any of this have to do with Osama bin Laden?
We find ourselves in a civilizational war against an enemy energized by unconditional belief in a religion of unquestioned authority, which permeates every aspect of his society. The worldview of the jihadist is therefore clear, absolute, and profoundly enchanted; his mission partakes of the sacred, and so is constrained neither by doubt nor by concern for personal survival in this world. It would be hard to conjure up a more formidable enemy than this, and a prolonged war against him may be decided as much by the depth of each side’s moral resources as by technology and military hardware. If so, the evolution debate isn’t helping our side one bit.
In sharp contrast to their Islamic counterparts, Western intellectuals have waged an unrelenting war against religion, portraying it as an elaborate hoax. Postmodernism has sought, above all, to debunk the notion of an objective moral order, of moral absolutes backed by divine imperative. True or not, that conclusion renders moral law a matter of convention and therefore negotiable. In every society where that view has prevailed, moral law has sooner or later been negotiated into irrelevance. But even absent that kind of catastrophic outcome, at some point such skepticism surely becomes corrosive of the traditions and non-rational commitments necessary to maintain a collective moral spine. Only religion has significant authority in insisting on a transcendental basis for moral law; no other societal institution has standing to advance that case. But to do that effectively, religion must be jealously protective of its own credibility, stature, and right to be taken seriously. Wrangling over evolution subverts all such claims.
The fact that none of us are about to don a suicide vest for Presbyterianism or Reform Judaism is something to be proud of, without doubt. But it also raises questions about our Islamist enemy, the non-rational roots of his commitment, how we are different from him, and how that difference could affect the outcome of a difficult, long-duration conflict. We may imagine that rational-intellectual systems (socialism, perhaps, for Europeans) or political ideals (freedom and democracy for Americans) can inspire similarly deep commitments, or that they can function like religions in the crunch. But experience could prove us wrong about that; an important function of religion must be to keep us from putting all of our societal eggs into that basket.
Eager to question the reality of a divine basis for moral law, intellectuals miss more existentially important questions: Can a society survive under extended duress if people do not believe that a transcendent view of the world is, in some sense, important and true, and worth fighting for? What would prevent a society like that from negotiating itself onto history's ash heap? Religion has a unique and profound responsibility with respect to questions like that. Squandering its credibility in a dispute over evolution, in effect waving a chimpanzee femur in a tent on the edge of town, is an exercise in irresponsibility. It is highly ironic that such behavior persists as a kind of collateral damage from a continuing failure by the scientific establishment.
If we are to garner the moral resources to prevail in what promises to be a decades-long and bitter war against militant Islam, religion will need to earn the respect of people not inclined to offer it. It can do that by entering into a serious discussion about the moral foundations necessary for a successfully enduring society. Devoting time and effort to a dispute about evolution accomplishes nothing except to confirm religion as an object of ridicule among its cultured despisers. We need to leave that Tennessee courthouse behind.
