THE DARWINIAN STRUGGLE: The victory of creationists in Kansas suggests that religious people need to understand the theory of evolution much better.
Haught, John F.
THE DARWINIAN STRUGGLE Catholics, pay attention John F. Haught Charles Darwin has never been more popular than today," writes John Durant in the July 11 New York Times Book Review. "His...
...Even though most noncreationist theologians have given notional assent to evolution, and the pope himself has conceded its general probability, those who have actually appropriated Darwin's science in depth are, I believe, comparatively few...
...For example, Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown & Co...
...Next, the John F. Haught is professor of theology at Georgetown...
...Even apart from the obvious challenge by evolutionary science to biblical literalism, it is not terribly difficult to understand why...
...And the Catholic biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box, Touchstone), proposing "intelligent design" as a scientific refutation of Darwin, has achieved considerable popularity among religious conservatives...
...Science has won and religion has lost," he proudly announces...
...competitive "struggle" in which weaker organisms (the reproductively unfit) are ruthlessly eliminated exposes a universe apparently untended by divine compassion...
...The journal First Things habitually offers safe harbor to anti-Darwinians such as Phillip Johnson (who has also written for Commonweal) and Nancy Pearsey...
...A reCommonweal 14 September 24,1999 cent editorial in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review called Darwin's science "a fairy tale for adults...
...In a subsequent article, Professor Haught will elaborate on his ideas about the nature of a post-Darwinian theology...
...This is not, says Hull, "the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray...
...Most contemporary theology still fails to reflect the obvious: Darwin has changed forever how we can reasonably think about God—that is, if we think about God at all...
...His theory of natural selection is all but universally accepted as the correct explanation for the diversity of life on earth...
...whom Marvin Minsky calls "our best current philosopher," brazenly declares his agreement with the creationists, claiming with them that Darwin's great idea is indeed incompatible with the Bible...
...Both the Kansas decision and Gould's essay provide the occasion for a few remarks on the question of evolution and theology...
...H owever, if theology has fallen short of Darwin, so has the intellectual world at large...
...And to many contemporary neo-Darwinians such "disbelief' seems to be a most logical implication of their science...
...Appropriately lamenting the decision, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould commented in Time magazine (August 23) that the deletion of evolution from the required biology curriculum is comparable to teaching chemistry without the periodic table, or American history without mentioning Lincoln...
...For one thing, the variations that compose the raw material for evolution are said to be completely accidental, undirected by any divine intelligence...
...Many will allow that "evolution is God's way of creating," but in order to espouse even this much they often seem to edit out the most repellent features of Darwin's own troubling picture of life...
...On August 11, for example, the Kansas Board of Education, bowing to pressure from Christian "creationists," decided that the topic of evolution (as well as reference to Big Bang cosmology) will no longer be included in statewide tests for evaluating students' knowledge of science...
...Moreover, it is worth noting that "enlightened" evolutionary materialists are typically no less biblically literalist than the majority members of the Kansas Board of Education...
...And the disinterested manner of natural selection strongly suggests that we live in a remorselessly uncaring universe, one hardly residing in the bosom of a providing deity...
...The evolutionary process is, in the words of David Hull, "rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror...
...Recently, however, America's most prolific evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, has been striving mightily to put a distance between himself and the publicly anti-theistic neoDarwinians...
...While candidly professing his own agnosticism, apparently Gould has awakened to the fact that in a theistic culture the cause of science education is hardly served by tying Darwin's ideas as tightly to the death of God as do his rivals, especially Dennett and the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker [Norton] and The Selfish Gene [Oxford University Press...
...Although Dennett and Wilson may differ from creationists in declaring Darwin right and the Bible wrong, they are just as anachronistic in expecting the ancient texts to yield reliable science...
...Any God who would devise or watch over a Darwinian world must be "careless, indifferent, almost diabolical...
...Darwin's idea has banished the Book of Genesis to the limbo of quaint mythology...
...Wilson expresses wonderment that anyone would try to reconcile the Bible with biology...
...Surely, he complains in his celebrated recent book Consilience (Alfred A. Knopf), if the Scriptures were inerrant they would not have given us so faulty a picture of nature...
...Add to this the idea that life and mind arose with no sharp breaks from mindless matter over a period of billions of years, and you have the picture of a universe quite unlike any conceived of by our traditional religions...
...Much of the religious world, however, still struggles with Darwin...
...Meanwhile, even moderate and liberal Christian theologians generally avoid sustained discussion of Darwinian evolution...
...Lacking a convincing theology of evolution, not only biblicist Kansans but also the world of religious thought in general has had difficulty coming to grips with Darwin...
...Together with the Kansas creationists he puts Darwin's science into sharp competition with Genesis, a work that disappoints him by failing to provide a quality grade of information about the natural world...
...Even outside of Protestant fundamentalist circles antipathy to Darwin seems to be gathering strength in some religious circles...
...Similarly, Harvard biologist E.O...
...To a large number of American Christians (over 40 percent), Darwin's vision of nature still seems irreconcilable with their most cherished beliefs...
...His latest book, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, will be published in October by Westview Press...
...As the result of long brooding over his own discoveries, Darwin himself had confessed that disbelief gradually "crept over" him...
...As the late Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas reminded us in one of his last essays, philosophy remains stuck in a materialism completely inadequate to the opulence of evolution...
...By overlooking evolution "the biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all...
...Dennett and Dawkins Commonweal 15 September 2i, 1999...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 16
