Faith & Reason

AS THE INTELLIGENT-DESIGN CASE IN DOVER, PENNSYLVANIA DEMONSTRATES. THE BATTLE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION RAGES ON

Michael Behe is a modest-looking man--short, balding, bespectacled and given to wearing cloth caps that make him look like an escapee from a comic strip about the English working class. Racing pigeons, a snooker cue and a pint of bitter come to mind, but appearances are deceiving. Behe thinks he is the author of a scientific breakthrough equal to that of Copernicus, the genius who put the sun at the center of our universe. And although the whole American professional biology community thinks Behe is nuts, laypeople are starting to think he may have a point. He is in constant demand on the lecture circuit. He always pops up in the media, on radio, television and even the New York Times op-ed page. He testified as an expert witness at the Dover school district trial last fall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where advocates of so-called intelligent design were defeated when their theory was found by a U.S. district court judge to have religious intent. He has written a book, Darwin's Black Box, that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The president of the United States thinks Behe's ideas are worth exploring and has said they should be taught in the nation's science classes. In this pedagogical sentiment, our highest officeholder is joined by Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, a man with presidential aspirations of his own.

Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, is a main force behind the intelligent-design theory. Along with retired Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson and mathematician and philosopher of science William Dembski, Behe has claimed that to explain the existence of animals and plants we must invoke something (or Something) beyond the usual laws of nature. The living world, Behe and his friends argue, is too complex simply to be the result of blind chance. Evolution is not enough. We must presume an intelligence behind it all. Although ID theorists pretend this intelligence does not necessarily imply the existence of an intervening god, in this they are less than candid. For political reasons, they want to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's separation of church and state. ID theorists truly believe that the god of the Bible--the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the god of Jesus--has been an active participant in the material history of the world as it has unfurled since its earliest beginnings.

Karl Marx said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. I don't know how else to regard the intelligent-design controversy other than as something from the French theater at the end of the 19th century. A minor scientist proclaims himself one of the intellectual giants of the ages, and despite the scorn and opposition of the establishment--Behe's own colleagues posted a disclaimer on his department's website--within a few years the leader of the free world believes these ideas should be part of biology education. One looks for the cuckolded husband entering stage right, probably in his underpants.

History is certainly repeating itself. Eighty-one years ago, in Dayton, Tennessee, a young schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes was put on trial for teaching his class that humans have simian origins and that this is part of an overall process. He told his students that in 1859 the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin published The Origin of Species, in which he argued that all organisms, living and dead, are the result of a long, slow, natural process of development: evolution. Prosecuted by the Great Commoner, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and defended by notorious freethinker Clarence Darrow, who was fresh from saving child-killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the death penalty, Scopes was convicted and fined $100, although the fine was later overturned on a technicality.

In Inherit the Wind, the play and movie based on the Scopes trial, the encounter is (continued on page 128) Faith & Reason (continued from page 56) presented in part as a tragedy. Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to the cause of his fellow Americans, a man of tremendous integrity--he resigned from Woodrow Wilson's cabinet because he thought it improperly intent on war--is brought low by his obsession with a crude, Protestant, literalist reading of the Bible. Barred from putting his own expert witnesses on the stand, Darrow calls Bryan as a witness on religion and mercilessly torments him for his theological crudity. In real life Bryan defended his position with far more dignity and understanding--he was in fact no crude literalist and openly allowed that not every claim in the Bible bears a face-value interpretation--but there was something poignant about the encounter. Darrow and Bryan were old friends who had been comrades in arms against what they saw to be the oppressively evil forces in American society. It was a tragedy back then, and still is, that America should be cleft by its idiosyncratic religious currents.

Traditional literalists, known appropriately as creationists, believe in a Genesis-based account of origins: six days of miraculous creation, a 6,000-year-old earth, a worldwide flood and so forth. Intelligent-design theorists like Behe strongly deny belonging to this group, and it is indeed true that Behe accepts a great deal of conventional geology and probably some evolution. Nevertheless, as ID supporters and more traditional creationists agree, considerable continuity exists between old-fashioned literalism and the new movement. Both groups feel that today's science, as epitomized by Darwinian evolution, is thoroughly and grotesquely naturalistic, which means it excludes any place for the Creator. If not explicitly so, it is implicitly atheistic and deeply anti-Christian. It is therefore to be deplored and opposed. Thus, although they would no doubt be unhappy with the label, it is perfectly fair to call intelligent design creationism lite.

Let there be no misunderstanding on this matter. The scientific establishment is rightly united in opposing both traditional creationism and intelligent-design theory. No one pretends that we know everything about origins--there is, for instance, considerable debate about the first organisms on earth--but no conventional scientist is in any doubt that organisms, including humans, are what they are because of evolution. And all think that, however much it may need modifying in light of modern discoveries, Darwin's theory hit on the chief causal mechanism. More organisms are born than can survive and reproduce. There will therefore be a struggle for existence, with some succeeding and some losing. All this adds up to a kind of winnowing process, or as Darwin called it, a natural selection. Over time this leads to fullblown evolution.

Direct evidence of evolution by natural selection abounds. For example, if you have an infection, you need a lot of penicillin today compared with what you would have needed in the 1940s. Why? Because the bugs you are fighting have evolved; those naturally resistant to penicillin survived and spread, and now we need greater forces to oppose them. At least as important for the evolutionist is the huge amount of indirect evidence we find throughout the living world. Take just one example, which put Darwin himself on his route to discovery. The little birds on the Galápagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Pacific, differ from island to island. They also differ from the birds on the South American mainland, although they resemble them considerably more than they do those of Africa, Asia and Australia. Why do today's Galápagos birds vary this way? Because their ancestors came from the mainland, moving from island to island and evolving into new forms in their new homes. To suppose otherwise is to suppose miracles, and that is simply unacceptable in science.

Darwinian evolution is mainstream science. In countries like the U.K., France and Canada, this is accepted as the norm. I grew up in England; I got evolution. My kids grew up in Canada; they got evolution. The United States is different. Survey after survey shows that intelligent-design theorists are preaching to the choir. More than half the nation's citizens believe evolution is false and that events happened exactly as told in Genesis. Most of the others think God rolls up his sleeves and gets involved every now and then in the history of the earth. Very few believe that an unbroken law--even an unbroken law put in motion by God--did it all. This is an amazing state of affairs. It is truly remarkable that at the beginning of the 21st century, in the country with the greatest scientific establishment the world has ever seen--every year roughly half the Nobel Prizes in the sciences are shared by Americans--people want to push biblically influenced doctrines to young people in science classes. How depressing that the leader of this country thinks this may be a good idea. It is truly frightening that, with the Supreme Court becoming more conservative and more favorable to religion, we could find that ID theory and its friends are given permission to enter biology classrooms.

Evolutionist or not, everyone agrees that to understand the present one must look into the past. The first thing you learn as you dig into the history of Christianity is that its relationship with science is complex and nuanced. Saint Augustine of Hippo, who lived around 400 A.D., is the authority here. He was a man of strong passions about which he was deeply conflicted. Driven by his voracious sexual appetite, Augustine had a long succession of mistresses and girlfriends in his early life. He famously prayed, "Lord, grant me chastity and continence;but not yet." When he converted to Christianity, however, he founded a monastery and practiced and preached austere celibacy. Also possessed of a ferocious intellect, the young Augustine was tempted by the Manichaeans, a sect that rejected conventional Christianity and endorsed a belief in two gods, one above and one below, who battled here on earth. As a Christian, Augustine devoted much of his efforts to combating these earlier beliefs and similar heresies. He knew his enemies. The Manichaeans rejected the Old Testament; they were always pointing out inconsistencies in and problems with the text to their Christian rivals. When Augustine became a Christian, he accepted the Jewish part of the Bible;through it he was able to make sense of such things as original sin;but was ever careful to tell his fellow believers that Genesis was not necessarily to be interpreted literally. It is true, he told them, but it often speaks metaphorically or allegorically.

Of course, no one believed in evolution back then because no one had evidence for evolution. But the way was prepared for an accommodation between scientific findings and sacred texts. Move forward to the 18th century, what we call the age of the Enlightenment. Many historians of religion believe this to be a more important time in the story of Western Christianity than the Reformation had been, two centuries earlier. The great founders of Protestantism, Martin Luther and John Calvin, broke with Rome but went on believing Jesus was the son of God and died on the cross for our sins. Thanks to what the Enlightenment brought--philosophy, science and ever greater knowledge of other civilizations, such as those in Asia with their own sophisticated religious systems;people for the first time faced the awful possibility that Christianity might not be true. Essentially there were two reactions to the Enlightenment, and one finds both reflected in North America, which by then had been settled by Europeans and was developing an identity and culture of its own. Some people attempted to reverse the scientific tide. They put their hope in faith and in the loving, trusting heart. They were not against reason, but for them the ultimate truths about life and the place of humans in it was to be found in sentiment, in feeling, as given in the words of the Creator, the holy Bible. This was the time of the Pietists in Germany, the Methodists under John Wesley in Britain and the First Great Awakening in America, led by the theologian Jonathan Edwards as well as itinerant preachers such as George Whitefield. But others went further down the path of reason, turning more to science and philosophy: France had philosophes such as Denis Diderot and Voltaire; in Britain (especially in Scotland) there were philosophers and political economists such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The American colonies had men like Benjamin Franklin who were soon to be leaders of the Revolution.

The idea of evolution was caught up in all this. For followers of reason, the underlying philosophy was one of progress: the belief that humans can, on our own, with our reason and our efforts, make a new Jerusalem here on earth; we can improve education and health in society. Many started with progress in the cultural and social world, found in the world of organisms a reflection of this belief--which they cashed out in terms of an evolution in animals and plants from the simple to the complex--and read organic progress back into the social world as justification for their philosophical ideas.

A prime example of such a thinker was Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. A caricature of an 18th century man of the senses and passions, he seems to have stepped straight from the pages of a Fielding novel. Grotesquely fat thanks to a gargantuan appetite, he had a semicircle cut into his dining table that he might get closer to his food; eating red meat and dairy in bulk and often, he was a dietician's nightmare. Forswearing wine and beer for other pleasures, he had three children by his first wife and then two daughters by a mistress. He followed this at the age of 49 by marrying a rich young widow, with whom he fathered seven more children. A brilliant physician--poor, mad King George III begged him to come to court--Erasmus Darwin was the best conversationalist of his age, an accomplished poet, an ardent advocate for change and progress and a friend of other forward-looking men. He was strongly in favor of the American Revolution, corresponding supportively on the subject with those at the heart of the action. He was also a keen evolutionist, explicitly seeing this belief as part of his overall world picture.

Those on the other side of the divide were neither timorous nor complacent. They fought back with vigor, especially when men like Erasmus Darwin made the mistake of following their approval of the changes in North America with initial enthusiasm for subsequent upheavals in France. Although such people of faith were deeply committed to the Bible as a guide to life, their main complaint about evolution was not that it went against Genesis--traditional Christianity could handle that sort of thing--but that evolution was so bound up with the notion of progress. For these believers, the idea that we tainted humans could make things better without divine aid was ludicrously unchristian. Rather, for future happiness, they thought we must wait for God's saving grace, which he gives and which we do not deserve. We will not build Jerusalem; God will, and if we are lucky, he will let us in. This was the God of Providence.

What happened in America in the 19th century? The country's founders were men of the Enlightenment, men on the side of reason. But this was not the case for most of the new republic's citizens. They were people who worked hard in tough conditions to create a new world, one without the support and traditions European countries had taken centuries to develop and refine. The preachers moved in. The first half of the 19th century, the era of the Second Great Awakening, saw evangelical Protestantism become the guiding force in American life, the social and moral guide for living. For those in the South, and increasingly in the West as the country expanded, religion became the center of their existence. It gave them comfort and encouragement. Through a careful reading of the Bible, it gave direct instruction for life. How should a master treat a servant? How should a husband treat his wife? How should a parent treat a child? The good book would tell them.

The Civil War, which started just after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, was a dividing point in religion as in so many other things. The victorious North increasingly used its energies after the battles had ended to create the powerhouse our country is today. With the expansion of the railroad, the United States became the breadbasket of the world. This feat was complemented by the huge factories that were being built--Andrew Carnegie's steelworks in Pittsburgh, for instance. New modern universities were founded. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was the paradigm of a science-friendly institution that equaled the established academies of Europe. Religion also developed, as theologians took on the sophisticated thinking of German scholars and as pastors tried to make sense of urban living, with its large influxes of populations that were not uniformly Protestant and increasingly not entirely Christian. Progress was no longer seen as the ultimate threat to doctrine; the acceptance of evolution was seen as the mark of a modern thinker rather than a move to the dark side. In the words of the charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame), evolution was simply a sign of God working wholesale rather than by miracle or retail.

Crushed by the war, people in the defeated South also developed their religion to accommodate their needs. They turned to the Bible for consolation, finding that God often afflicts those he loves most. Read literally, the Bible justifies slavery. When Abraham makes his covenant with God, he is not told to free his slaves but rather to circumcise the males. When Paul addresses the escaped slave, he does not tell him to go into hiding but rather to return to his master. So in the South and in those areas of America that were not enjoying the North's prosperity, there was a hardening of evangelical Protestantism and a move to a more stringent literalism. This was as much a new theological and religious development as anything happening in the North. As in the North also, evolution became caught up in the changes. It was seen as a mark of all that was wrong and was to be repudiated. It was not simply that evolution contradicted the literal interpretation of Genesis; it was seen as a symbol of the oppressors. Dwight L. Moody, the Billy Graham of the late 19th century, preached on the "four great temptations that threaten us today": the theater, ignoring the Sabbath, Sunday newspapers and atheism, which included evolution.

Naturally, and perhaps unfortunately, this kind of talk set off reactions in the North, especially among those who rejected any kind of religious belief. Historians and scientists started to argue that science and religion were natural enemies and that the Galileo episode--when the aged scientist was forced to deny that the sun is the center of the universe--was but the tip of a large iceberg. Typical was Andrew White, the first president of the science-based Cornell University and author of A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom. If the South wanted to regard evolution as a symbol, some in the North were happy to take up the challenge.

In the North evolution increasingly took on the garb of a kind of secular religion, something that was seen to explain not only origins but also the destiny of human progress. Many started to adopt some form of so-called social Darwinism, arguing that society, like the living world, runs along evolutionary lines. One of the strangest figures in the story, Herbert Spencer, then came into his own. Born into a lower-middle-class family in the British Midlands, Spencer was a nonconformist--that is, a Protestant who isn't a member of the Anglican Church--and grew up both deeply traditional and harboring a hatred of the established forces he believed were strangling his country's ability to move forward; in this he was a forerunner of someone a century later from the same background, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Entertainingly neurotic (he was a lifelong bachelor who lived in drab boardinghouses so his brilliant thinking would not be disturbed) and ever desirous of attention (he was supported by groupies who catered to his every whim, and they were many), Spencer became the people's philosopher of the age. He was an authority on everything from child rearing (children should wear warm underclothes--not all his advice was entirely stupid) to self-abuse (too much indulgence leads first to headaches and then to insanity) to lighthouses (shipowners, not the state, should pay for their maintenance), as well as a prophet of progress and evolution. Spencer was wildly popular in America, where people from all walks of life took his message to heart. Rich supporters founded museums stuffed with the new fossil finds from Western states. These buildings were the equivalent of the churches' cathedrals, institutions where children and their parents could go on Sundays to look at dinosaurs and receive the message of unfurling progress from our primitive beginnings to the successful men of the day. Not by chance was Teddy Roosevelt--the American president who most personified this philosophy--a childhood chum of Henry Fairfield Osborn, the influential director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The scene was set. In America after the Civil War both sides righdy saw evolution as a symbol of Northern ideology and a counter to Southern thoughts and ways. In a sense evolution served as a litmus test that determined which of the two modes of thinking and two completely different ways to run one's life one subscribed to. This challenge continued unabated into the 20th century. In testimony from the Scopes trial and in letters and newspaper reports of the day, one notices that nobody who opposed evolution was lying awake at night worrying about gaps in the fossil record. The concern was that states like Tennessee were being flooded with the ideas and ways of the North, and no one much liked this.

What of today? Am I simply saying we still have a battle between two religions--the secular one of evolution and the literalist one of the creationists? The story is more complex than that. The 20th century saw the development of Darwinian ideas into a fully professional science that repudiates simplistic notions about progress. It is properly experimental and fact-based and is no more a religion than physics and chemistry are. Nevertheless, we do still have a popular idea of evolution, the one described in TV shows and by best-selling writers and (often still) the museums. This is an evolution that is more than science; it is something with a message--usually about the necessity of progress and its virtues, and often condemning the reactionary, civilization-slowing nature of religion. Richard Dawkins, author of such best-sellers on evolution as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, is a paradigm. He detests all religions, speaking of his own "road to Damascus" experience that led to his loss of faith. He proudly calls himself a zealot and speaks of "the dangerous collective illusion of religion." He thinks religion incorporates die great sicknesses of the human psyche. Few speak in terms quite this bitter, but Dawkins is not alone in his hostility. Look at the popular articles published in Natural History penned by the late Stephen Jay Gould and you will learn his thoughts about the need to remodel society on science-friendly terms. Watch on television the greatest evolutionist in America today, die world's expert on ants, Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, and he will tell you that Christianity is outmoded, that its directives have led to a short-term exploitation of nature and that we need an evolution-based ethics to help us preserve our planet.

Turn to the intelligent-design theorists and you will find them doing exactly the same thing from the other side. The writings of Phillip Johnson, the chief organizer of the movement, are highly instructive. Like the anti-Darwinists in Scopes's day, Johnson isn't worried about the fossil record, gappy or otherwise. For him evolution is evil because it represents a naturalistic view of the world. Because it excludes God, it has moral implications. Evolutionists favor abortion on demand, accept gay marriage, reject capital punishment and--a particular bugaboo of Johnson's--tolerate cross-dressing. This is, as I have said, a litmus test for which of two different views of society one shares. I hardly need say it corresponds to the red and blue divisions we saw in the 2004 presidential election: "moral values" versus a far more secular worldview.

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Let me clarify that the purpose of this essay is to find understanding. I am passionately committed to the side of science, reason and progress. The Enlightenment, I believe, was the best thing to happen to Western civilization. I regard Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection as one of the greatest achievements of humankind, along with Plato's Republic, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Tolstoy's War and Peace. I think intelligent-design theory and its companions are nasty, cramping, soul-destroying reversions to the more unfortunate aspects of 19th century America. Although I am not a Christian, I look on these ideas as putrid scabs on the body of a great religion. Like Behe, I have written extensively on evolution, I have appeared as a witness in a court trial, and (although I did not discover it) I too believe I am on the side of a scientific discovery ranking with that of Copernicus.

But if you are going to fight moral evil--and creationism in its various forms is a moral evil--you need to understand what you are fighting and why. As the judge in the Dover, Pennsylvania case indicated, "the citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the school board who voted for the ID policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy." History shows we are not in a simple fight about science but in a greater fight about life philosophies. This being so, we should fight at this level. We who cherish science should realize what is at stake. We must defend not just our technical theories and hypotheses but the values on which they are based and that they reinforce. We must be prepared to counter those who would repress us and impose a theocracy. Although I cannot honestly confess that I have ever felt the urge to end a long day's work by slipping into something pink and fluffy, the very thought that this might be a moral issue strikes me as ludicrous. To adapt a saying by S.G. Tallentyre, summing up the philosophy of Voltaire, "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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What does fighting mean in practical terms? Trying to reach an audience that is receptive but needs education. But the way modern research functions, especially science research at universities, is almost perversely directed against helping the general cause. A young scientist who announces to his or her chair that he or she is going to spend the summer fighting creationists rather than doing research in the field would soon be without a job and without tenure. We must sensitize people on our side to what has to be done and get them to see that rewards come from participation. One should not be punished for efforts directed toward the public good. In the past 20 years, we have witnessed a change at universities with respect to teaching. Taking teaching seriously was once a sign of weakness; now it is both a necessity and a source of pride. This must also become the case for public participation in the debates of the day.

At the same time, we who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more effort running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist. This was just plain stupid. Traditional Christians hate biblical literalism as much as atheists do--more, in fact, because it sullies their religion. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt did not like Stalin and Communism. But in fighting Hitler they realized they had to work with the Soviet Union. Evolutionists of all kinds must likewise work together to fight creationism: Don't ignore differences, but don't make them a reason for inaction.

Finally I urge my fellow evolutionists to think about what they write and say. I am not arguing that someone like Wilson should quit promoting biodiversity and the preservation of the rain forests. I am not saying that Gould was wrong in connecting evolution to issues such as racism. I am not even saying that Dawkins should stop linking evolution to atheism. I am saying that those in the public domain sometimes have an obligation to think more carefully about what they say. If evolution does lead to atheism--although I'm a nonbeliever, I don't think it does--then the links need to be spelled out carefully rather than ignored under a gust of rhetoric. If you want to use science for more than scientific purposes--if you want to move into public discourse and make recommendations--you should realize that this is what you are doing. If you are at the level of general philosophy, your thoughts demand appropriate arguments. Simply falling back on one's status as a scientist is not enough.

These are dark times, and they may well get darker. I am an evolutionist and a progressionist. I invite you to join the fight for the values and achievements of the Enlightenment. There is no more worthy and pressing cause in America today.