Jesus Gonna Be Here... As Soon as He Evolves

I listen to Slate.com's daily podcast every morning, and today they did an interview with Jacob Weisberg, author of an article on Slate about the teaching of evolution, one of my favorite topics. Mr. Weisberg makes the claim that religious people are right to be worried about evolution; it does, he says, tend to lead people toward atheism or agnosticism. His claim is not that evolution and (monotheistic) religious belief are incompatible. After all, there are people who believe in God and evolution. However, he claims that one of effects of evolution since Darwin's seminal The Origin of Species has been to lead people away from religious belief because it provides a non-supernatural answer to one of religion's biggest questions: how did we get here? Thus he feels religious people are justified in fearing evolution.

However, I disagree with Mr. Weisberg on several points. First, I do not think evolution is a stake in the heart of religion. Rather, it is another nail on the coffin. Western society was already becoming more secular when Darwin made public his theory. The conflict between religion in science began in earnest with Galileo, and is not science's problem. It is religion's attempt to use its weight to support specific scientific theories that is the problem. In Galileo's day, it was fairly obvious to most people that the sun revolved around the earth. After all, they only had to look at its motion throughout the day. However, Copernicus, Galileo, and others discovered evidence that this was not the case. This was a scientific question, but the church decided to weigh in in favor of one hypothesis--the wrong one, as it turns out. This gives them a credibility problem, especially when they claim divine guidance.

It is the same with evolution. Until Darwin, there were few compelling reasons to disbelieve the church's claim that God created the earth in seven days, etc. But now there is good evidence to the contrary. Rather than accepting that a literal interpretation of the bible is not correct, as some denominations, including the Catholic Church, have done, many religious people choose to throw the weight of their belief behind the disproven hypothesis. This does not make it right. On the contrary, it gives them a credibility problem, forcing people who agree that evolution is a resonable theory to choose between religion and science. If religious people did not force this unreasonable distinction, evolution would not make people more atheistic.

At the heart of this issue, to me, is a retention of primitive, mythic thinking. As much as many theologians (and certain biblical authors) point out that God is a transcendent concept that is not reducible to our ideas about it/him/her/whatever, many of us persist in seeing God as the modern analog of Zeus: a big, bearded fellow who sits up in the clouds watching everything we do to make sure we aren't screwing around. In this scenario, God aka Superman basically casts magic spells to create the world, making creatures, mountains, iPods, etc pop out of thin air and start disobeying him. He does all this in the time span of the modern work week, cause he's concerned about the market, too. This is the only creation story that evolution discredits. If, on the other hand, we accept that God really is transcendent and awesome and unknowable, then we accept that the seven days account is no more than it claims to be: a myth, a way of talking about creation on human terms (i.e., the magic spell aspect) while acknowledging that the truth is bigger, greater, and more awesome than anything we can come up with. If religious opponents of evolution would remember this, they would see that there is no problem. From our perspective, maybe God's creation of the world looks a whole hell of a lot like evolution.

I realize this raises problems of theodicy (survival of the fittest, etc) and knocks down man a little in the cosmic scheme of things because we weren't created "special." (Though if man is created in God's image, what about apes and chimps? I'm sorry, but they look pretty damn similar to us, even with the hair.) But theodicy is still a problem even if God did create the world with magic spells in seven days because there is still suffering. In fact, I'd say it's even more of a problem in this system because suffering is an anomaly rather than an integral part of the system of creation. If we accept evolution, we actually have a rationale for suffering and can begin to look at its transformative aspects. And as for man being special, well, we're still the only creature we know of who has language, and who has developed the ability for abstract symbol manipulation, and advanced tool-making, etc. And maybe we aren't special anyway. Why is a man more special than a turtle? Maybe if we stepped down from our pedestals for a moment and actually began helping one another, as Jesus suggests, rather than believing our own press, we really would be a special species that could be worthy of God's praise.