Why Darwin Matters (20 page)

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feeling of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms, capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of His laws.”

—Charles Darwin, 2nd edition of
On the Origin of Species
, 1860

During the cultural brouhaha whipped up by the media frenzy over President George W. Bush’s 2005 comments on Intelligent Design and evolution, a reporter from
Time
magazine solicited my opinion about whether one can believe in both God and evolution.

I replied that, empirically speaking, apparently so, because lots of people do—a 1996 survey found that 39 percent of American scientists profess belief in God, and a 1997 poll found that 99 percent of American scientists accept the theory of evolution. More
recently, preliminary results from a long-term survey of 1,600 scientists from twenty-one elite universities revealed that over half consider themselves “moderately spiritual” to “very spiritual,” and about a third hold formal religious affiliations.
¹
So either a third of my colleagues live in a cognitive fantasyland of logic-tight compartments, or there is a way to find that separate-worlds harmony between science and religion.

If scientists can believe in God and evolution, can Christians? Using the same empirical standards, evidently so, because approximately 96 million American Christians do: In a 2001 Gallup poll, 37 percent of Americans (107 million people) agreed with the statement “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Since about 90 percent of Americans are Christians, approximately 96 million Christians believe that God used evolution to guide the process of creating advanced forms of life.
²

Even many evangelical Christians—the religious cohort most outspoken against the theory—accept evolution. Consider the statement by former president Jimmy Carter—who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian—in response to a measure passed in Georgia in 2004 that required all public school biology textbooks to include a sticker proclaiming:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

President Carter was outraged. “As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox’s attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia’s students,” he wrote. “The existing
and long-standing use of the word ‘evolution’ in our state’s textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians’ belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe. There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”
³
The requirement was subsequently repealed, though not before it served as fodder for other state legislatures as well as for political cartoonists.

And as seen in the previous chapter, the compatibility of God and Darwin finds evidence in the one billion Catholics who embraced Pope John Paul II’s 1996 Pontifical Academy of Sciences Encyclical. He asserts that evolution happened, that it is okay to accept it as fact, and that it is no threat to religion:

New knowledge has led to the recognition that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.
⁴

Despite these examples, recent polling data show that we still have a way to go before the theory of evolution achieves total acceptance. According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared to 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics; politically, 60 percent of Republicans are
creationists while only 11 percent accept evolution, compared to 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. Similarly, a 2005 Harris poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry; further, those with a college education, those between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four, and those from the Northeast and West are more likely to accept evolution, whereas those without a college degree, aged fifty-five and older, and from the South are more likely to believe in creationism.
⁵

What these figures tell us is that the nonscientific, demographic reasons for rejecting evolution, most notably religion and politics, are very strong. Can a Christian be a Darwinian? Can a conservative accept evolution? Yes. Here is how and why.

As outlined in this book, the theory describing how evolution happened is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Christians and conservatives embrace the value of truth-seeking as much as non-Christians and liberals do, so evolution should be accepted by everyone because it is true. In this sense, evolution is no different from any other scientific theory already fully accepted by both Christians and conservatives, such as heliocentrism, gravity, continental drift and plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, the genetic basis of heredity, and many others.

Christians believe in a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal. The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of when creation took place. And compared to omniscience and omnipotence, what difference does it make
how
God created life—via spoken word or via natural forces? The grandeur of life’s complexity
elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.

In contrast, Intelligent Design creationism reduces God to an artificer, a mere watchmaker piecing together life out of available parts in a cosmic warehouse. If God is a being in space and time, it means that He is restrained by the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance, just like all other beings of this world. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such constraints, not subject to nature and chance. God as creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible would need necessarily to be outside such created objects. If He is not, then God is like us, only smarter and more powerful; but not omniscient and omnipotent. Calling God a watchmaker is delimiting.

But more important, evolution explains family values and social harmony. Humans and other social mammals, including and especially apes, monkeys, dolphins, and whales, share a host of characteristics: attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peace-making, community concern and reputation caring, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. As a social primate species we evolved the capacity for positive moral values because they enhance the survival of both family and community. Evolution created these values in us, and religion identified them as important in order to accentuate them. “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable,” Darwin theorized in
The Descent of Man
, “namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as
soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” The evolution of the moral sense was a stepwise process, “a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense and conscience.”
⁶

Evolution also explains evil, original sin, and the Christian model of human nature. We may have evolved to be moral angels, but we are also immoral beasts. Whether you call it evil or original sin, humans have a dark side. Individuals in our evolutionary ancestral environment needed to be both cooperative and competitive, for example, depending on the context. Cooperation leads to more successful hunts, food sharing, and group protection from predators and enemies. Competition leads to more resources for oneself and family, and protection from other competitive individuals who are less inclined to cooperate, especially those from other groups. Thus we are by nature both cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes, and a society based on the rule of law, are necessary not just to accentuate the positive, but especially to attenuate the negative side of our evolved nature. Christians would find little to disagree with in the observation of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s chief defender in the nineteenth century: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
⁷

Thus, by explaining the origins of our positive and negative behaviors and characteristics, evolution explains the origin of morality and religions designed moral codes based on our evolved natures. For the first ninety thousand years of our existence as fully modern
humans, our ancestors lived in small bands of tens to hundreds of individuals. In the last ten thousand years, these bands evolved into tribes of thousands; tribes developed into chiefdoms of tens of thousands; chiefdoms coalesced into states of hundreds of thousands; and states conjoined into empires of millions. How and why did this happen? By ten thousand years ago, our species had spread to nearly every region of the globe and people everywhere lived where they could hunt and gather. This system tended to contain populations, but the invention of agriculture around that time allowed these populations to explode. With those increased populations came new social technologies for governance and conflict resolution: politics—and religion.

The moral emotions, such as guilt and shame, pride and altruism, evolved in those tiny bands of one hundred to two hundred people as a form of social control and group cohesion. One means of accomplishing this was through reciprocal altruism—“I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” But as Lincoln noted, men are not angels. People defect from informal agreements and social contracts. In the long run, reciprocal altruism works only when you know who will cooperate and who will defect. This information is gathered in various ways, including through stories about other people—more commonly known as gossip. Most gossip is about relatives, close friends, those in our immediate sphere of influence, and members of the community or society who have high social status. It is here we find our favorite subjects of gossip: sex, generosity, cheating, aggression, social status and standings, births and deaths, political and religious commitments, and the various nuances of human relations, particularly friendships and alliances.

When bands and tribes gave way to chiefdoms and states, religion developed as a principal social institution to accentuate
amity and attenuate enmity. It did so by encouraging altruism and selflessness, discouraging excessive greed and selfishness, and especially by revealing the level of commitment to the group through social events and religious rituals. If I see you every week participating in our religion’s activities and following the prescribed rituals, this is an indication that you can be trusted. As organizations with codified moral rules and the power to enforce the rules and punish their transgressors, religion and government responded to a need.