Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (3 page)

In the seventeenth century, the main source of debate and conflict was astronomical; since the middle of the nineteenth it has been biological, centering on the theory of evolution. Many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals find incompatibility between the contemporary Darwinian evolutionary account of our origins and their version of the Christian faith. Many Darwinian fundamentalists (as the late Stephen Jay Gould called them) second that motion: they too claim that Darwinian evolution is flatly inconsistent with classical Christian or even theistic belief. Contemporaries who champion this conflict view include, for example, Richard Dawkins (
The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil’s Chaplin
), Daniel Dennett (
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
), and, far to the opposite side, Phillip Johnson (
Darwin on Trial
). In Darwin’s own day, this opposition and strife could assume massive proportions. Now Darwin himself was a shy, retiring sort who hated public controversy and confrontation; but given what he had to say, he was often embroiled in violent controversy. Fortunately for him, there was his friend Thomas H. Huxley, who defended Darwin with such fierce tenacity that he came to be called “Darwin’s bulldog.” Huxley himself continued the canine allusion by referring to some of Darwin’s opponents as “curs who will bark and yelp.”
⁸
The canine
connection has proved resilient, or at least durable, extending all the way to the present, where we have
Discover Magazine
(September 2005) calling Richard Dawkins “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” and Gould referring (no doubt unkindly) to Daniel Dennett as “Dawkins’s lapdog.”

Many have claimed, therefore, that there is deep incompatibility between evolution and Christian belief and hence between religion and science; but are they right? To investigate the question we must know how to think of Christian belief. Suppose we take it to be defined or circumscribed by the rough intersection of the great Christian creeds: the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, but also more particular creeds such as the Catholic Baltimore Catechism, the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and Westminster Confession, Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles; the result would be something like the “Mere Christianity” of which C. S. Lewis spoke.

In the same way, we must specify how we are to think of evolution. The term covers a multitude—not necessarily a multitude of sins, but a multitude nevertheless. (1) There is the claim that the earth is very old, perhaps some 4.5 billion years old: the
ancient earth thesis
, as we may call it. (2) There is the claim that life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms (though in terms of sheer bulk or weight the simple forms still vastly overshadow the complex; bacteria outweigh all other living creatures combined). In the beginning there was relatively simple unicellular life, perhaps of the sort represented by bacteria and blue-green algae, or perhaps still simpler unknown forms of life. (Although bacteria are simple compared to some other living beings, they are in fact enormously complex creatures.) Then more complex unicellular life, then relatively simple multi-cellular life such as seagoing worms, coral, and jellyfish, then fish, then amphibia, then reptiles, birds, mammals, and finally,
as the current culmination of the whole process, human beings: the
progress thesis
, as we humans may like to call it (jellyfish might have a very different view as to where the whole process culminates). (3) There is the thesis of
descent with modification
: the enormous diversity of the contemporary living world has come about by way of off-spring differing, ordinarily in small and subtle ways, from their parents.

Connected with the thesis of descent with modification is (4) the
common ancestry thesis
: that life originated at only one place on earth, all subsequent life being related by descent to those original living creatures—the claim that, as Gould puts it, there is a “tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy.” According to the common ancestry thesis, we are all cousins of each other—and indeed of all living things. Horses, bats, bacteria, oak trees, and even poison ivy—we are all cousins of them all; you and the summer squash in your backyard are cousins under the skin (rind).
⁹
(5) There is the claim that there is a naturalistic
mechanism
driving this process of descent with modification: the most popular candidate is natural selection operating on random genetic mutation, although some other processes are also sometimes proposed. Since a similar proposal was characteristic of Darwin (“Natural selection,” he said, “has been the main but not exclusive means of modification”), call this thesis
Darwinism
.

Finally (although this thesis is not part of evolution strictly so-called), it is often assumed that (6) life itself developed from nonliving matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of processes described by the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry: call this the
naturalistic origins thesis
. These six theses are
of course importantly different from each other. They are also logically independent in pairs, except for the third and fifth theses: the fifth entails the third, in that you can’t sensibly propose a mechanism for a process without supposing that the process has indeed occurred. Suppose we use the term “evolution” to denote the first four of these; the fifth thesis, Darwinism, is stronger than evolution (so defined) and points to the mechanism allegedly
underlying
evolution; and the sixth isn’t really part of the theory of evolution.

So where does real or apparent conflict arise? Many Christian evangelicals or fundamentalists accept a literal interpretation of the creation account in the first two chapters of Genesis (as well as the genealogies in the next few chapters); they are inclined therefore to think the earth and indeed the universe vastly younger than the billions of years of age attributed to them by current science.
¹⁰
This seems to be a fairly straightforward conflict, and hence part of the answer to our question is that current scientific estimates of the age of the earth and of the universe differ widely (not to say wildly) from scripturally based beliefs on the part of some Christians and other theists (Muslims for example). Of course Christian belief just as such doesn’t include the thought that the universe is young; and in fact as far back as Augustine (354–430) serious Christians have doubted that the scriptural days of creation correspond to 24-hour periods of time.
¹¹

A more important source of conflict has to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, in particular the claim that God has created human beings
in his image
. This requires that God
intended
to create creatures of a certain kind—rational creatures with a moral sense and the capacity to know and love him—and then acted in such a way as to accomplish this intention. This claim is clearly consistent with evolution (ancient earth, the progress thesis, descent with modification, common ancestry), as conservative Christian theologians have pointed out as far back as 1871. Thus, for example, Charles Hodge, the distinguished Princeton theologian, speaking of the design of plants and animals: “If God made them, it makes no difference how He made them, as far as the question of design is concerned, whether at once or by a process of evolution.”
¹²
What is less obvious is that it is also consistent with Darwinism, the view that the diversity of life has come to be by way of natural selection winnowing random genetic mutation. For example, God could have caused the right mutations to arise at the right time; he could have preserved populations from perils of various sorts, and so on; and in this way he could have seen to it that there come to be creatures of the kind he intends.

You might wonder whether
random
genetic mutations could be caused by God: if these mutations are random, aren’t they just a matter of chance? But randomness, as construed by contemporary biologists, doesn’t have this implication. According to Ernst Mayr, the dean of post-WWII biology, “When it is said that mutation or variation is random, the statement simply means that there is no correlation between the production of new genotypes and the adaptational needs of an organism in a given environment.”
¹³
Elliott Sober, one of the most respected contemporary philosophers of biology,
puts the point a bit more carefully: “There is no
physical mechanism
(either inside organisms or outside of them) that detects which mutations would be beneficial and causes those mutations to occur.”
¹⁴
But their being random in
that
sense is clearly compatible with their being caused by God.

What is
not
consistent with Christian belief, however, is the claim that this process of evolution is
unguided
—that no personal agent, not even God, has guided, directed, orchestrated, or shaped it. Yet precisely this claim is made by a large number of contemporary scientists and philosophers who write on this topic. There is a veritable choir of extremely distinguished experts insisting that this process is unguided, and indeed insisting that it is a part of contemporary evolutionary theory to assert that it is unguided, so that evolutionary theory as such is incompatible with Christian belief. According to Gould, “Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us.”
¹⁵
After Darwin, though, he says, we realize that “No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature.”
¹⁶
Gould’s sentiments are stated more clearly by the biologist George Gaylord Simpson:

Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes of
heredity…. Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
¹⁷

Among the most eloquent and influential spokespersons for this incompatibility claim (the soloists, we might say) are Richard Dawkins in
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986),
River Out of Eden
(1996),
Unweaving the Rainbow
(1998), and
A Devil’s Chaplain
(2003), and Daniel Dennett in
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(1995). Both Dawkins and Dennett assert, loudly and slowly, as it were, that evolution and Christian belief are incompatible. But are they right? Is this claim true? Is there any reason to believe it? Here the best course is to look carefully at what these writers actually say, thus avoiding the danger of attacking straw men. Let’s begin with Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins has retired from his post as Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Dawkins is the world’s best known atheist (for what that’s worth) and the world’s most popular science writer. He is also an extremely
gifted
science writer; his account in
The Blind Watchmaker
, for example, of bats and their ways is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.
¹⁸
In the series of books I just mentioned he states his claim: the enormous variety of the living world has been produced by natural selection winnowing some form of genetic variability—unguided by the hand of God or any other person. Probably his most widely known declaration to that effect is to be found in
The Blind Watchmaker
:

All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the
blind
watchmaker.
¹⁹

The very subtitle of this book trumpets his theme: “Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” Now it is part of Christian and other theistic belief that God has created human beings, and created them in his own image. Obviously, if Dawkins’s claim is true, this claim is false. The latter requires that God intended to create creatures of a certain kind—creatures “in his image”—and then acted in such a way as to see to it that they come into existence. This claim does not require that God
directly
created human beings, or that he didn’t do it by way of an evolutionary process, or even that he was especially interested in creating precisely our species (or even you and me). But if he created human beings in his image, then at the least he intended that there be creatures of a certain sort, and acted in such a way as to guarantee that creatures of that sort came to be. Dawkins’s claim—that the living world emerged by way of unguided natural selection—is clearly incompatible with this claim. We shall have to look into his reasons. Why does he think that natural selection is blind and unguided? Why does he think that
“the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design
”? How does the evidence of evolution reveal such a thing?

Well, what, exactly, does current evolutionary science claim? That’s not entirely easy to say; you can’t find an authoritative statement of it emblazoned on the walls of the National Academy of Science or anywhere else; there is considerable diversity of opinion as to what, precisely, are the essentials of contemporary evolutionary theory. Dawkins, for example, apparently thinks once life began, it was more or less inevitable that we would wind up with a living world very much like the one we see. Gould disagreed: he thought that if “the tape were rewound and then let go forward again,” chances are we’d get something wholly different. Writers also differ as to how
much
natural selection explains, how much must be explained in other ways, and how much is left unexplained.