God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (17 page)

The judge in the Dover trial was John E. Jones III, a conservative Republican and 2002 appointee of George W. Bush. On December 20, 2005, Jones issued a 139-page ruling concluding, “The Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause.” He criticized some members of the school board
“who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public” and “would time and time again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.”
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All eight members of the board who voted for the ID policy were defeated for re-election. The new board complied with an order to pay slightly over $1 million for legal fees and damages.

Recall that in the 1982 Arkansas case involving creation science, Judge Overton had ruled that creation science was religion and not science. We saw that philosophers of science disputed his definition of science. Likewise, Judge Jones in Dover felt compelled to rule that ID was not science. In both cases this was unnecessary, since applying the First Amendment was sufficient to overrule the Arkansas law and the Dover board's policy once it was proved that these did not have a secular purpose.

Here again, one of my philosopher colleagues, Bradley Monton of the University of Colorado, voiced his disagreement and argued that intelligent design is science, although probably incorrect science.
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He notes that ID can be formulated as a testable hypothesis and says it should be discussed in science classes.

Monton is an avowed atheist, but those theists who rally behind the teaching of intelligent design creationism, as with those who want to see the Bible taught in schools, may get more than they bargained for if they have their way. Why shouldn't ID and the Bible be taught, as long as it is done with academic freedom and honesty? That would mean pointing out their errors, which for both cases are many.

Evangelical Christians seem to think that teaching the Bible will bring more people to Jesus. In fact, the opposite is likely to happen. A recent poll showed that the more people know about religion, the less likely they are to be religious.
⁶⁰
The best way to become an atheist is to read the Bible from cover to cover—everything, not just the select passages taught in Sunday school or Bible study classes. More than one devout Christian preacher has become an atheist after studying the Bible.
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The same can be said about intelligent design theory. The more you know about it, the better you will understand why it is wrong.

Even today, evolution is usually treated with kid gloves in high schools. A 2010 study of 926 high school biology teachers by Pennsylvania State
University professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer found that 17 percent of high school biology teachers do not cover human evolution at all in their classes, while 60 percent devote only one to five hours on the subject.
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Many of these teachers said they wished to avoid confrontation with students and parents. The same authors found that 52 percent of Americans do not believe that “human beings developed from earlier species of animals.”
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Once again the great Christian propaganda machine is doing its best to push us back into the Dark Ages.

It should come as no surprise that, at least partially as the result of religious intolerance of critical thinking, American students score low in science and mathematics. In a 2009 international education test for fifteen-year-olds in sixty-five nations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked twenty-third in science, seventeenth in reading, and thirty-second in math. Comparing the US scores with those of two nations having similar cultures, Canada ranked sixth and Australia twelfth in science.

Of course, universities are another matter. Within the scholarly world there is little conflict over the teaching of evolution. There, academic freedom and integrity are enforced and evolution is intricately woven into every biological subject.

EVOLUTION THEOLOGY

The theory of evolution by natural selection had a great impact on human thinking in many areas.
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In science, evolution reaffirmed the power of meticulous observations coupled with imaginative theoretical conjecture. It introduced the notion that chance plays a major role in the occurrence of events—before that idea arose in physics, although as noted in
chapter 2
, the ancient Greek atomists had recognized the creative power of chance.

In theology, Darwinian evolution drove the last nail into the coffin of biblical literalism, threw doubt upon revelation, undermined the argument from design and the God of the gaps, and appealed to human experience as a basis for morality. Theologians since have sought less traditional concepts of God
as he acts through the evolutionary process. Of course, they did not give up on God. They are paid to take the existence of God for granted and to come up with models of deity that are consistent with our best knowledge as well as with traditional religious teachings. Drawing the alternate conclusion that God does not exist is not included in their job descriptions. Accepting both that God exists and that evolution is true, God must be using evolution to fulfill his plan for life and humanity.

Indeed, some late-nineteenth-century theologians saw evolution as rescuing the Judeo-Christian God from the deist God of the Enlightenment. Prior to Darwin, deism was difficult to refute. Why would a perfect God have to keep stepping in to adjust the cogs in the Newtonian world machine?

Scottish evangelical Protestant Henry Drummond (died 1897), whose 1874 book,
The Greatest Thing in the World
, sold 12 million copies, wrote in 1894, “The idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is definitely grander than the occasional Wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.”
⁶⁵

The noted twentieth-century theologian Arthur Peacocke described how a theist can view evolution: “God must now be seen as acting to create in the world, often
through
what we call ‘chance’ operating within a created order.”
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Evangelical preacher Michael Dowd and his wife, Connie Barlow, have taken to the road to preach what they call the “‘Great News’ of a sacred view of cosmic, biological, and human evolution.” In Dowd's book
Thank God for Evolution
, he argues that facts are “God's native tongue” and science is “our collective means for discerning God's ongoing public revelations.”
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But his God is still based on faith, not fact.

Until recent years, the common interpretation of evolution assumed that it has a direction toward higher purpose. If events appear random, that randomness is still somehow under God's control. He designed a system of law and chance and so he influences events without controlling them.
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For liberal Christian theologians, God acts in human history through the person of Christ and allows nature to run itself. God acts in the personal lives of humans, not in the impersonal arena of nature. Religion is a way of life encompassing rituals and practices of a religious community. Bible stories are not to be taken literally, in the liberal view, but as guidance for a moral life.
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Of course, this is a major area of dispute between theists and atheists. If
we are to learn our morality from the Bible, then we must own slaves, kill anyone who works on the Sabbath, and stone disobedient wives and children. The fact that we don't (anymore) demonstrates how irrelevant the Bible has become. Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree.

In any case, the evolution theologians are simply reviving natural theology that, as we have seen, takes everything we observe in nature as a window on God's plan for us. They miss the point that Darwinian evolution does not describe how God created life; it describes how complex life developed from simpler forms without God's help. If God set it up that way to begin with and then left the universe to take care of itself, then that is still a deist God, although a God who plays dice rather than the Enlightenment deist God who created the Newtonian world machine.
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SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Not very long after the publication of
Origin
, the notion arose that evolution by natural selection could also be applied to society. This became known as “social Darwinism,” a term first introduced in 1877 and still used today—usually pejoratively. The idea is that the struggle for existence also applies to the competition between individuals and organizations in a capitalist society where only the fittest survive. In some minds, “survival of the fittest” justified eugenics, racism, and imperialism. Since the 1920s conservative Christians have blamed social Darwinism for most of the evils of the modern world, including communism, Nazism, and Fascism.
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Although Darwin used the term “survival of the fittest” in the fifth edition of
Origin
in 1869, he attributes it to Herbert Spencer.
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Spencer is generally regarded as the founder of social Darwinism,
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although his basic idea was that evolution could be applied to virtually all phenomena as a unifying principle.
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In his groundbreaking book
The Selfish Gene
, first published in 1976, biologist
Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the
meme
, which represents an idea, behavior, or other cultural entity that replicates and transmits itself analogous to the biological
gene.
Examples he gave include musical tunes, ideas, catch phases, clothing fashions, and ways of making pots or building arches.
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A
memeplex
is a set of memes that survive as a mutually supporting group. Social Darwinism is a memeplex, as is the similar and equally controversial notion of
sociobiology
advocated by the Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson.
⁷⁶

Dawkins saw many religious beliefs as memes, especially blind faith that “secures its own perpetuation by the simple expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
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Dawkins lists eight different religious practices he identifies as memes. Besides blind faith these include belief in God and life after death, martyrdom, killing or ostracizing heretics and apostates, demanding that others respect their beliefs—even weird beliefs such as the Trinity. In addition, beautiful music, art, and literature serve as replicating tokens of religious ideas.
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The study of memes, called
memetics
, has not yet been accepted as a legitimate line of scientific inquiry, and its application to religion has been severely criticized by philosopher John Gray, among others. In a 2008 article in
The Guardian
, Gray calls the memetic theory of religion “a classical example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere.”
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Gray does not make clear exactly what is nonsense about the observation that ideas propagate in a manner very similar to genes, once one recognizes that in biology, the basic unit that is transmitted from generation to generation is information. As computer scientist Craig James points out, it is neither survival nor fitness of the individual that matters in evolution but reproduction so that the information in the DNA is carried on to the next generation. He gives the example of the black widow spider. The female bites off the male's head during mating and devours him. While the male doesn't survive, his DNA does.
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Information happens to be carried in the medium of the chemical structure of DNA; but it need not be. Your name contains information. You can speak it, write it on paper, type it on a computer, text it on a cell phone,
or transmit it through the air with smoke signals. And thanks to a cultural meme, it is passed on to your children.

RELIGION AS A VIRUS

A number of authors have suggested an apt metaphor for religion that, while not a theory that can be tested empirically (at least not to my knowledge), helps us to organize our thoughts about how religion operates in society. In this metaphor, religion is a virus, or memeplex, of the mind that acts in the way a biological virus acts in living organisms.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested that religions exhibit behavioral control among people similar to the way parasites invade animals, providing “deleterious replicators that we would be better off without…but that are hard to eliminate, since they have evolved so well to counter our defenses and enhance their own propagation.”
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Building on Dawkins's and Dennett's ideas, Craig James and psychologist Darryl W. Ray independently have proposed that the religion meme can be viewed as a virus. Ray lists five properties of viruses that also characterize religion. Viruses

1. Infect people
   
2. Create antibodies or defenses against other viruses
   
3. Take over certain mental and physical functions and hide within the individual in such a way that they are not detectable by the individual
   
4. Use specific methods for spreading the virus
   
5. Program the host to replicate the virus.
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According to Ray, a specific religion infects people by childhood indoctrination and proselytizing. It creates defenses by justifying its rightness and the wrongness of other religions. It takes over mental functions by establishing rules such as abstinence and dietary restrictions and inducing guilt. It has “vectors” such as priests and ministers that spread the virus. It programs its hosts with rituals such as baptism, first communion, Bar
Mitzvah, confession, confirmation, and Bible reading. It immunizes itself against other viruses by preventing followers from learning objectively about other religions.
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