Catch That And Paint It Green

A few postings ago, (last week I think) I was talking about Dr. Richard Dawkins, a British biologist who thinks the so-called "Intelligent Design" theory is just about the dopiest thing he ever heard of, except maybe for the idea of God itself. Dawkins is a militant atheist, very in-your-face about it, and I took him to task, second-hand as it were, for being so snotty and disrespectful to people whose beliefs might be different from his.

At the same time, I tried to make it clear that I don't have much more use for the Intelligent Design theory than he does. Dawkins comes across as a most unpleasant individual, and I wouldn't want to have lunch with him, but I agreed with him that I.D. doesn't meet the most basic requirement of real science: that you begin with no assumptions and work forward based on the available evidence. I.D. doesn't meet that criterion: it starts off with the assumption that an intelligent creator lies behind the universe, based in turn on the idea that some life forms are too complex to be accounted for by natural selection. Proponents of Intelligent Design are selective about the evidence they accept: if it doesn't fit their assumption, it's tossed out. This is the same mistake that orthodox Marxists made in the last century when they tried to assert the "scientific" nature of Marxism--any evidence they encountered that didn't dovetail with the Marxist vision of economic and social apocalypse, followed by the establishment of the worker's paradise on earth, was dismissed.

Marxism belongs (if it still belongs anywhere) in the sociology classroom, not the scientific lab. And Intelligent Design's logical place is in the theological seminary, not in biology class.

While kicking all of this around, I got to talking about the whole creation-vs.-evolution brouhaha, of which the Intelligent Design controversy is a sideshow, and expressed my amazement that now, 80 years after the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Tennessee, in which a biology teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of natural selection, people are still arguing about this.

Conservative Christians, with the Christmas season over, can now take a break from the trenches of the "war on Christmas" and get back to their other pet conspiracy, the claim that evolution is being taught in classrooms as established fact and not as theory.

Fundamentalist religion is, and always has been, bellicose. From Savonarola to William Jennings Bryan to Osama bin Laden, fundamentalism has always been more interested in fighting enemies than in discussing ideas, and isn't especially interested in the Areopagitica notion of letting opposing ideas clash in the public square, free of censorship, with the idea that if truth and falsehood can duke it out on equal terms, without help from the sidelines, truth will prevail. (John Milton, who advocated just this when he wrote the Areopagitica, was no slouch of a Protestant believer himself, but we'll leave that discussion for another day.) Religious fundamentalists, by and large, don't have much patience for the Areopagitica approach: they think their enemies already have the deck stacked. "They're out to get us" has been a favorite religious rallying cry since the Reformation (when it was often true.)

A generation ago, conservative Christians, led by Rev. Tim LaHaye, (who has made buckets of money off the end of the world with his Left Behind novels) threw a collective hissy-fit over their claim that so-called "secular humanism" was being taught in public school classrooms as a form of religion. The uproar embodied evangelicals' frustrated response as they watched school districts in the early 1980s, knuckling under to pressure from people like the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair and groups like the ACLU, moving to rid public school classrooms of the Judeo-Christian references that had been hitherto quite common. Obvious counter-tactic: claim it was all a secret, secular-atheist anti-God conspiracy.

I was a young newspaper reporter in 1981-82 and, since education was my "beat," I got to cover this controversy for my paper. What fun I had: born-again Christians wanted to talk about this endlessly, but when I went in search of one of their villainous "secular humanists," I couldn't find one. I ended up interviewing the superintendent of the local elementary school district, who wasn't quite sure what I was talking about and had to go do his homework first.

One pentecostal lady in particular gave me a head-scratch: alleging the conspiracy in the classroom to be very real, she told me earnestly that she believed in the hydra of "circular humanism."

I asked around the newsroom if anyone had any idea what "circular humanism" might be.

Our courthouse-beat guy, an editorial wit who also happened to be a bit portly, spoke up.

"A circular humanist is a humanist who eats too much," he explained. "I'm a circular humanist."

The "secular humanism" thing had pretty much blown over by the end of the first Reagan administration. But the creation-vs.-evolution thing really has legs: it's been going on at least since the drama in that broiling-hot Tennessee courtroom in 1925, and shows no signs of losing steam.

Which brings me to Christmas Eve. Last week we had some friends over for a Christmas Eve pig-out: roast turkey with all the trimmings, hors d'oeuvres, a fancy dessert, lots of white wine. A good gorge was had by all, including a good friend of mine who might have been created by Dostoevski. He is both passionately religious...and a drunk. A would-be journalist, in 2004 he took up the cudgels for Mel Gibson's film The Passion Of The Christ against an army of supercilious unbelievers in the media whom he insisted were indulging in a regular sneer-fest over this movie because of its religious content (as well they may have been.) He fired off a spirited letter to the editor, exulting in the victory of Gibson's film over the sneerers, and shortly after was found passed out under a tree in a public park. Something of a sad case, my pal, but he's passionate about what he believes in, and also what he doesn't. And he most decidedly does not believe in Charles Darwin (who, by the way, I don't think he's ever read.)

Now, I'll give my friend his due: on Christmas Eve he was reasonably sober. But he was also determined to make his point, which was that evolution is being taught as FACT in public classrooms, and not as theory. He and I amused the rest of the company by practically getting into a shouting match about this, my point being that most of the world, even most of the religious world, including the late Pope John Paul II, now accepts that Darwin's ideas about natural selection are so well-supported by scientific evidence that they must be treated, if not as established Truth, at least as very solid theory.

My friend was having none of this. While he pulled up short at defending the literal truth of the account of creation in the book of Genesis, seven days to make the universe, the Garden of Eden, the Adam and Eve story, etc., he nevertheless insisted at the top of his lungs that evolution is ONLY A THEORY, evidence supporting it be damned, and in defense of I.D. he offered me some story he'd heard in biology class about how life may have begun when a lucky pool of amino acids was struck by a well-directed bolt of lightning.

We dropped this discussion when it was time to eat. But a few days later, in an e-mail, he wanted to get started again.

Why is he so exorcised over this, I kept asking myself? What is it about Charles Darwin that makes so many religious people (most of whom have never been in the same room with a copy of The Origin of Species) feel their faith so threatened that they feel they have to wage constant war against ideas laid out in a book they've never read?

They don't seem particularly bothered by other scientific theories, even ones that are as well supported by evidence as those of Darwin. When was the last time you heard an evangelical Christian getting apoplectic over Einstein's theory of relativity? Or the big bang theory? (actually, religious conservatives like the big bang for the same reason that atheists hate it: it supports the idea that the universe was created, somehow.) But there's something about the idea that our species evolved from lower species that just drives them nuts. "My Ancestors Ain't Apes!" screamed one of the placards waved by the faithful in Inherit The Wind, the Broadway dramatization of the 1925 Scopes trial. Well, no, they probably weren't, says Darwin. Darwin doesn't say that people evolved from apes. He offers evidence that people and apes had a common ancestor. But to evangelicals like my pal the holy drunk, this is so much pettifogging. To teach natural selection in biology class is just part of the great secularist conspiracy against America's religious foundations.

Heck, if he wants to get upset about a scientific theory, I could refer him to an essay by Tom Wolfe, Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. Without taking sides one way or the other, Wolfe discusses current research in the newly-established field of neuroscience, which is taking materialism to the nth degree. In picking apart the secrets of the brain, neuroscience is calling into question not only the existence of the soul, but the very notion of self-hood. There may be no such thing as "me." According to the neuroscientists, the most fundamental of all human ideas, that I am I and you are you, may be nothing but an illusion based on electronic impulses popping around. Jesus! If my fundamentalist pal thinks Darwin is still something to feel threatened by, let him consider the implications of all this, and chances are he'll forget all about fretting that his ancestors may be apes.

And by the way, if the very idea of selfhood is nothing but an illusion, what does that portend for all of our other cherished notions about what's true and what's false, including the latest scientific innovation or the oldest and most cherished religious belief?

Remember the old conundrum that the 16 year-old atheist in the high-school hallway used to whip out in order to bedevil his believing friends? I used it in the earlier posting; here it is again: "If God can do anything, can he make a rock so heavy that he can't pick it up?" Of course the fun in this question is that it contains its own contradiction. Its logic is so faulty as to be laughable, but plenty of credulous high-school kids were stumped by it. Either way they answer, God clearly can't do everything.

Well, apparently neither can the Devil. Long before I heard the rock conundrum for the first time, I remember hearing this joke on the playground:

"Three guys died and went to hell. The Devil told them that if they could come up with one thing he couldn't do, he'd let them go to heaven instead. The first guy says, 'OK, chop off the nose of everybody in the world.' The Devil promptly swoops out and does that. No cigar. The second guy says, 'OK, chop off the ears of everybody in the world.' The Devil immediately does that as well. When it comes to the third guy's turn, he offers the Devil a big, loud fart. 'Catch that and paint it green,' he says. Well, even the Devil can't do that, so the third guy gets to go to heaven.

I doubt whether, even if all the school districts in the world were to suddenly agree to teach evolution as "only a theory," my friend and his cohort would be satisfied. In due time they'd be quibbling about how earnestly it was being put forth as a theory, or complaining that textbooks didn't offer alternative theories, even though they have yet to come up with one that merits anything more than a quick once-over followed by a "try again." Meanwhile, he might want to ponder what there is to be gained from continuing to holler about evolution, a theory more than 150 years old, when clearly the blasphemies of science, as one of the lead characters in Inherit The Wind called them, are taking us to much more "dangerous" shores.

Lightning struck a lucky pool of amino acids? Catch that and paint it green.