God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (15 page)

After an up-and-down career that was diminished by an unstable mental disposition, FitzRoy became founding director of the British weather office and set up invaluable weather stations around Britain and northern France that greatly reduced the number of shipwrecks. He travelled by train to the British Advancement of Science meeting in Oxford to give a talk on British storms and was present during the confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley. Standing up and waving a Bible, FitzRoy was shouted down by the audience.

After becoming the butt of jokes for the perfectly understandable inaccuracies of his weather forecasting, which still saved many lives, Robert FitzRoy became a broken man. On April 30, 1865, he kissed his daughter, Laura, and repaired to his dressing room where he slit his own throat.

Robert FitzRoy had spend his large inherited fortune supplementing the costs of his many ventures for the public good with little reimbursement and died with most of it drained away. Darwin contributed £100 to a fund set up for FitzRoy's family.

Darwin kept his own beliefs largely to himself out of love and respect for his devout wife, Emma, and the desire for a quiet, socially respectable life. At the time of
Origin
, he still seemed to see God behind it all but did not support Christian doctrine, especially the notion that only the faithful are saved while everyone else, no matter how virtuous, was consigned to eternal torment.
¹⁴

As time went on, however, Darwin became increasingly doubtful of a beneficent deity. In his explorations he had seen close up the cruelty of nature. He famously gives the example of the ichneumon wasp that lays its eggs inside a caterpillar so that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive.

However, to my knowledge Darwin never described himself as an atheist, preferring the designation “agnostic” that was invented by Huxley. Even today the simple observation of nature remains the best scientific argument against the existence of a beneficent God.

The scientific controversy that occurred with the publication of
Origin
was not, as is often thought, basically over the idea that species evolve, which disagrees with the common interpretation that the Bible's “kinds” are immutable. Only the most diehard fundamentalists then, as today, believed that life has remained unchanged since creation. The breeding of animals demonstrated the mechanism of artificial selection. The issue was, and still remains,
the role of natural selection. Biologists raised legitimate questions, and there were many unsolved problems with the Darwin-Wallace proposal.

For example, some organic structures had no useful function and did not seem to be adaptive. Now we know that this is the way evolution works. A long-held misconception assumes that every part of every biological organ must have had some survival value to have become part of the whole organism. In fact, many parts are simply neutral, retained just because they do no damage and were never evolved away. Or, as we will see below, functions often change.

Recent excellent books by biologists Jerry Coyne
¹⁵
and Richard Dawkins
¹⁶
are the latest in a huge literature that amply makes the case for the basic Darwinian mechanism in which unguided, random mutations are selected out that either aid in survival or at least do not inhibit it. And, as will be elaborated later, it is not the survival of the individual organism that matters but the survival of the information stored in its DNA. If other physical processes play a role, such as the self-organization that occurs with inanimate objects such as crystals, they are minor except, most likely, in the origin of life itself on which biological evolution has little to say.
¹⁷

DARWIN AND DESIGN

More relevant to my thesis are the philosophical and theological implications of Darwinism. The argument from design, as applied by Paley and others to the complex forms of life, was countered by providing a purely natural process that lacked design or purpose. Contrary to common sense, complexity can arise naturally from simplicity. Just as a snowflake arises spontaneously and uncaused from simple water vapor, so living organisms arise spontaneously and uncaused from simple collections of quarks and electrons.

Giving an apologetic spin on Darwinism, Ian Barbour refers to the “design” of the laws by which evolution occurs. He claims that evolution is not just a matter of blind chance but actually extends the rule of law to nature. Variations arise accidentally, Barbour admits, but they are preserved lawfully. However, it should be noted that the term “natural selection” is misleading,
suggesting that some agency is in operation that decides which mutations will aid in an organism's survival. A better term is “environmental sifting.”

Barbour says a new kind of law is introduced in evolution that incorporates chance: a “statistical law.”
¹⁸
But is it proper to refer to a principle that arises out of chance a “law”? Let us consider another example of such a statistical law. In the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei, no known theory can predict when a particular nucleus will disintegrate. Assuming that only chance is in operation, the probability for the nucleus to decay in any given time interval is the same for all equal time intervals. For example, so long as a radioactive nucleus has not decayed, its probability of doing so in the next second is a fixed value characteristic of the type of nucleus. The time of its decay is as random as logically possible.

From this one can easily derive mathematically what is called the
exponential decay law
in which the number of nuclei in an initial sample of identical nuclei will drop off exponentially with time. This is precisely what has been observed for radioactive nuclei for a century now, providing strong evidence that nuclei decay randomly without a predetermined cause.

Calling such a statistical principle a “law” misleads the reader into thinking that some lawgiver or law-abiding process is behind it all. In fact, the conclusion is quite the opposite. When an observed phenomenon follows a statistical pattern that can be predicted from pure randomness, then the conclusion can be drawn that the phenomenon occurred spontaneously without any action by an outside agent.

And this is exactly the place where the greatest conflict between science and religion exists in biology. Although the Catholic Church and moderate Protestant churches claim they support evolution by natural selection, the fact is they do not. In a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996, Pope John Paul II refers to encyclical
Humani Generis
(1950) composed by Pope Pius XII as stating that “there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points.” Pope John Paul hedged considerably on his acceptance of evolution, implying it has not yet been validated and there is more than one hypothesis in the theory. And he made it very clear that mind or spiritual soul did not emerge from matter but is a creation of God.
¹⁹

To reinforce this teaching, in his 2011 Easter Homily, Pope Benedict XVI said:

It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it. If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason.
²⁰

A recent survey indicated that only 9 to 14 percent of Americans believe that evolution is
not
God-guided.
²¹
This is about the same percentage of Americans who do not belong to any church. This would indicate that virtually all Christians who accept that species evolve, contrary to the Bible they believe is the word of God, think evolution is God-guided. This is intelligent design, not Darwinism. How many American Christians believe in evolution as it is understood by science? The data indicate
none
.

As the Christian theologian and apologist Alvin Plantinga spins it:

The claim that God created human beings
in his image
…is clearly consistent with evolution…. God could have caused the right mutation to arise at the right time. He could have preserved populations from perils of various sorts, and so on; in this way, by orchestrating the course of evolution, he could have ensured that there come to be creatures of the kind he intends.

What is
not
consistent with Christian belief, however, is the claim that evolution and Darwinism are
unguided
—where I'll take that to include
being unplanned and unintended
. What is not consistent with Christian belief is the claim that no personal agent, not even God, has guided, planned, intended, orchestrated, or shaped the process. Yet precisely this claim is made by a large number of contemporary scientists and philosophers who write on this topic.
²²

Plantinga and other theists argue that even if there is no evidence for design, this does not prove that God isn't still behind it all. As philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out, this logic allows for other possibilities
besides the creator God of the Abrahamic religions. There could be other gods. Prehistoric visitors from another galaxy could have fiddled with the DNA of earthly species. Here is his Superman scenario:

Superman, son of Jor-El, also later known as Clark Kent, came from the planet Krypton about 530 million years ago and ignited the Cambrian explosion. Superman could have [quoting Plantinga] “caused the right mutation to arise at the right time. He could have preserved populations from perils of various sorts, and so on; in this way, by orchestrating the course of evolution, he could have ensured that there come to be creatures of the kind he intends.”
²³

Plantinga calls this example “silly” and a “foolish proposition.”
²⁴
Dennett agrees, but he asks: “Is it
relatively
foolish? Compared to his [Plantinga's] alternative?”
²⁵

Obviously this becomes the philosophers' endless cyclical war of words. The only way to break out of such vicious cycles is with evidence. There is no evidence for design, but there could have been. If God or Superman interfered with the normal course of evolution, it should have resulted in some observable effect in the fossil record.

EVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

The United States is a remarkable anomaly on the question of the public acceptance of evolution. In a 2005 survey of thiry-four nations and their beliefs in evolution, only Muslim Turkey scored lower.
²⁶
Unfortunately, this survey did not ask the key question: guided or unguided evolution? Perhaps the most telling response in the survey was to the question of whether evolution was “definitely true, probably true, probably false, definitely false.” Only 14 percent of American adults thought that evolution is “definitely true.” A third said it was “definitely false,” compared to just 7 percent in Denmark, France, and Great Britain, to 15 percent in the Netherlands who said evolution was definitely false.

Objection to evolution is strong within moderate and orthodox Islam. In
early 2011, a prominent British imam, Dr. Usama Hasan, a physicist and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, received death threats for giving a speech claiming that Islam was compatible with evolution. Despite issuing a retraction saying, “I seek Allah's forgiveness for my mistakes and apologise for any offence caused,” he was fired from his position at the Masjid al-Tawhid mosque.
²⁷
As we saw previously for Turkey, evolution is widely unaccepted in Islamic nations.
²⁸

After Darwin, many Christian churches accepted evolution and viewed it as another example of the grandeur of God. It made more sense, they claimed, for God to use the natural laws he had created than to constantly intervene in the running of the world. This was deism more than theism, but preachers swept that fact under the rug.

However, many objected to the notion that humans were cousins to apes and apricots, which denied the special nature of humanity implied in the Bible. Since God had come to Earth in the person of a man, it was degrading to both men and God to view humans as nothing more than less-hairy apes.

America has proved to be a unique battlefield in the conflict between creationism and evolution, starting with the Scopes “Monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 and carrying on through the Dover, Pennsylvania, courtroom clash in 2005. The issue, which has almost always centered on what to teach in schools, has been more political than scientific. We do not have an intellectual debate here; we have a power struggle over who should decide what is taught in class—academic eggheads or the pious majority.

The defendant in the 1925 trial, teacher John Scopes, was accused of discussing evolution in class, which had been forbidden by state law. The trial attracted wide attention and was broadcast nationally, with the prosecution led by three-time unsuccessful presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and Scopes defended by the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, which he never had to pay. He did break the law, after all. However, the press came down hard on Bryan.

The famous journalist H. L. Mencken had reported on the trial from Dayton. He wrote that the campaign against evolution “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic [Bryan], rid of sense and devoid of conscience.”
²⁹
Bryan died shortly afterward.