Darwin's Synthesis
Kosar, Kevin r.
Darwin’s Synthesis How much conflict between science and religion? BY KEVIN R. KOSAR Scarcely a year can pass without a hubbub erupting over evolution. Frequently, these fi ghts involve the...
...Rather than bash God as a “delusion,” and pound one’s fi st for a purely materialistic explanation of existence, Bowler suggests opposing creationists and fundamentalists “by showing them that they have oversimplifi ed the response of religion to the quest for a Kevin R. Kosar is a writer in Washington...
...Barnes, despite the obvious challenges, was undaunted: “Can we accept the idea that man and the gorilla have sprung from a common stock and yet hold that man has an immortal soul...
...Bowler suggests that the two nations’ divergent responses to Darwin, and evolution more generally, had two causes...
...All earth’s people are not rent over the subject...
...Lamentably, Bowler gives their work little attention until his last 20 pages...
...While Bowler is skeptical about the veracity of religion, he thinks that hardline atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are not giving evolution the best defense...
...The astronomer Sir John Herschel mocked natural selection as the “law of higgledy-piggledy...
...the ultimate meaning of those facts Christ’s teaching discloses...
...1928), reads, “TO THAT BEST AND MOST SEVERE OF CRITICS MY WIFE...
...Though his head was stuffed full of deep learning in mathematics, physics, and theology, Barnes wrote with gusto...
...If atheists wish to abuse science by saying that it proves there is no God, they will...
...To achieve this, Bowler fi rst pulls back our collective oculus to reveal that there is no war between all of the religions and all of the sciences...
...Michael Ruse, Arthur Peacocke, and others receive brief mention, and their efforts at reconciliation are little explained...
...To demonstrate this, Bowler whisks the reader back to 19th-century England in order to take in the late 19th and early 20th-century religious and scientifi c debates that followed the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871...
...If Darwin is right, what to do with Genesis’s description of God fashioning an orderly, hierarchical creation, populating it with individual species and placing man above them...
...The time has now come when we must not try to evade any implications of the theory of natural selection...
...In 1925, Americans witnessed the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, which featured the State of Tennessee prosecuting a high school biology teacher named John Scopes for violating its anti-evolution statute...
...It’s Inherit the Wind’s fanciful rendering of Clarence Darrow versus William Jennings Bryan all over again, a war of antipodean worldviews, and never the twain shall meet...
...First, Britain (and Europe more broadly) was sliding toward secularism...
...Despite this, Bowler makes his point: Darwin’s ideas were not universally condemned by Christians, or lauded by scientists, of the day...
...The implications are huge...
...Others, such as the anatomists Richard Owen and St...
...Barnes himself advocated something like this in the Gorilla Sermons: Between the religious revelation of Jesus and modern science there is no opposition...
...A historian of science, Bowler has written plenty about evolution, although here he brings no new revelations to the subject...
...One obvious approach to the conundrum is philosophy, which teaches the ways of knowing and their limits...
...Avoiding a false debate over how the earth came to be, Barnes urged Christians to focus on the teachings of Christ: “Christianity is belief in Christ as Way, Truth, and Life: belief that He was the Light of the World, the Guide of the spiritual evolution of humanity...
...science of origin...
...Others, such as the Scotsman Henry Drummond and the Englishmen Reginald Campbell and Ernest William Barnes, were receptive to the theory of natural selection—and to science, more generally...
...This effort makes up a goodly chunk of Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons and, regrettably, Bowler’s material is not well organized...
...One certainly does not see Quakers or Episcopalians up in arms over the subject...
...That’s a pity, because Barnes was a good writer and a bit of an imp: The dedication of his chrestomathy, Should Such a Faith Offend...
...Some churchmen rejected Darwin’s arguments as atheistic and contrary to Christianity in toto...
...The year after that, President Bush provoked howls and hosannas when he said that schools should teach both evolution and intelligent design...
...This backwoods backlash, Bowler seems to think, was part of a more general recoil from economic modernization and the erosion of “family values...
...In this discussion, Bowler plays at making a comparative case between the United States and Great Britain...
...Frequently, the media depictions of these fl are-ups portray a battle between would-be theocrats and loudmouth atheistic advocates of science...
...The image of confrontation between evolution and religion is so pervasive that to challenge it might seem quixotic...
...Critically, Hume emphasized that knowledge is inevitably contingent: What past experience has taught, future experience can disprove...
...And if man is not fallen, who needs a Christ to be savior...
...As Bowler notes, “Evolution raises general issues about how God might govern the universe, and specifi c issues about the status of humanity within the universe and the wider scheme of creation...
...After Hobbes, Berkeley and Hume further developed skepticism’s assault on mankind’s ability to know...
...If Plato taught us anything, it is the folly of trying to make all men wise...
...Today, Barnes’s intellectual descendents continue their work at reconciling the Christian faith and the fi ndings of evolutionary biology and the allied sciences...
...One does not read of India’s Hindus urging the house arrests of biochemists or Shintos in Japan rioting against astrophysicists...
...Man’s a quarrelsome creature...
...Evolution describes facts...
...and Roman Catholics, whose church still is bashed for bullying Galileo, long have accommodated evolution...
...So it was that Kant, the colossus of K?nigsberg, who devoted much of his life to studying the workings of reason, made room for faith in life by establishing the limits of knowledge through reason...
...Even within the United States, the clashes tend to involve only some fundamentalist Protestants...
...In our own time the leaders of Christian thought have, with substantial unanimity, accepted the conclusion that biological evolution is a fact: man is descended from the lower animals...
...Science, as an approach to seeking knowledge, has been embraced nearly worldwide...
...Happily, however, most bystanders do not seem eager to enter the fray...
...Neither could agree amongst themselves what to make of the claim that all existent life forms descended from a single original species...
...he asked...
...Despite highlighting Barnes’s Gorilla Sermons, Bowler does not quote them at length...
...in America, the opposite was happening...
...Across the pond Bishop Barnes was preaching his “Gorilla Sermons,” which argued that Christians needed to accept apes as their ancestors...
...A few years back, the National Park Service was caught selling books that said the Grand Canyon was produced by the fl ood that lifted Noah’s Ark...
...But the purpose of this book is to show that such a rigidly polarized model of the relationship benefi ts only those who want us to believe that no compromise is possible...
...The books were urged to be removed...
...This notion, of course, has been discredited: Just because Arnold Schwarzennegger developed muscle mass through weightlifting does not mean that his children will be beefcakes...
...Still other scientists were bluntly dismissive of Darwin...
...Some scientists clung to ideas about evolution that preceded Darwin, such as Lamarckianism, which postulated that life forms could inherit the attributes that their forebears acquired in their lifetimes...
...George Jackson Mivart, argued that man’s evolution occurred but was guided by a higher power...
...Yet, neither philosophy nor Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons will put an end to the eye-gouging fi ghts between fundamentalists and Darwinists in America...
...Hence, the scientifi c method, which relies on the testing of hypotheses about how things work, never can establish anything once and for all...
...But these clashes are not just happening among the hoi polloi in the hinterlands...
...Rather, Bowler repackages existing historical scholarship in the hope of defusing the purported clash between science and religion...
...Often the reader feels like he is in a freshman survey course: The names of the long dead and little remembered tumble forth, along with their often-outdated notions about the earth’s origins and organization...
...If man is the product of a “higgledypiggledy” process, what to do with the doctrine of original sin as the source of suffering and death...
...Among the clergy, too, responses were mixed...
...Bowler might be on to something, but the reader will never know: He drops the topic—perhaps wisely, since he seems to know little about American religious history...
...In his sermon, “Christian Revelation and Scientifi c Progress,” Barnes declares that Evolution was, and still is, not an observed fact, but a theory so probable that no alternative to it can be entertained...
...Bowler argues that the perception of a longstanding skirmish between fundamentalists and Darwinists is a fairly recent phenomenon...
...One month before, there was a stink in suburban Northport, New York, over a man teaching a night class on “creation science” at a local public school...
...we cannot prove its truth by the methods of inquiry useful in the physical and biological sciences, for the spiritual world is a type of reality which the organs of sense will not reveal...
...Frequently, these fi ghts involve the public schools...
...We need faith to accept the Lord’s message...
...The best defense of evolutionism is to show the complexity of the religious approach to science...
...This is likely due to their mixed-mindedness about the matter: Polls have shown that most Americans believe that evolution is probably true, but most of them also believe in God...
...In late 2007, it was reported that Texas’s director of science education had been fi red because she forwarded an email to colleagues about a gathering of evolution supporters...
...If fundamentalists want to read the Bible—in translation, no less—and assert that every word of it is purely factual, then they shall...
...The reader is left wondering: Is synthesis, or at least rapprochement, possible...
...Four centuries ago, Hobbes picked up where Descartes left off, and taught his readers that man’s limited faculties kept him from knowing much of reality...
...The two dovetail into one another with singular exactness...
...I answer emphatically that we can...
...While churches in big, industrialized cities accommodated the new science of man’s origins, the hinterland’s houses of worship turned hostile to evolution and, eventually, to the notions of archaeologists, paleontologists, and physicists when they did not comport with the Genesis story of creation...
...From his perch at Queen’s University Belfast, Peter J. Bowler seems to look upon these battles with fascination and dismay...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 21
