By larrygilman on February 18, 2012 · 1 Comment
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Evolution has been accused of evil by friend, foe, and doubter.
Many creationists think that “evolution,” the theory not the thing, is a font of evil. They charge that it teaches us that we are “nothing but animals,” and so leads inevitably to nihilism. The fruits of evolution in this sense, according to prominent creationist Ken Ham, are “lawlessness, immorality, impurity, abortion, racism, and a mocking of God” (The Lie: Evolution, 1987, p. 29). In one version of this view, evolution is not just bad but the central evil of the modern world, the rot at the heart of the everything, from teen sex to genocide. The 2008 movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed attributed the Nazi Holocaust to evolution.
That’s an interesting bucket of goo to delve into, and in a future post I probably will. But evolution has often been thought evil, or at least very nasty, in another sense: the process itself can be seen as abhorrent. It strikes many sincere people as indifferent, cruel, and wasteful; in its course, untold trillions of sentient beings are ripped by predators, consumed slowly by parasites, ruined by disease, crushed, drowned, burned, and otherwise subjected to horrible suffering. Most individuals do not even manage to reproduce. Darwin, in the Origin of Species (1859), emphasized that in light of the theory of... Read More
By larrygilman on January 19, 2012 · Leave a Comment
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A long-time education columnist with the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, has been pushing a strange but all-American thesis (e.g., in his Jan. 18, 2012 essay “We’re smart enough for Darwin debate”): we should inject Intelligent Design ideas into public-school science classrooms and let the kids figure out that it is not science, or at least bad science. Don’t we trust our kids, and their parents, to be “smart”? Isn’t it healthy... Read More
Sometimes there seems a shortage of mirrors. Case in point, an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 2010 devoted to the interesting question of whether religious cues make people more likely to inflict punishment in certain artificial settings. The piece includes this précis of the state of scientific speculation on the origin of religion:
In terms of ultimate evolutionary explanation, our results are consistent with dual inheritance... Read More
By larrygilman on December 23, 2011 · Leave a Comment
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Some neurologists are convinced that they are finally closing in on proof that human brains are deterministic chemical mechanisms, more complex than a ticking watch but no more “free.” Civic-minded writers worry how we will keep on talking ourselves into behaving morally and meting out legal penalties if once we become truly convinced that everything we think and do is a foredoomed self-rearranging of molecules ruled by basic physics. A large... Read More
By larrygilman on December 3, 2011 · Leave a Comment
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Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) is a gentle, thoughtful, and—to me—unsatisfying book.
For one thing, confirming my initial impressions from a few weeks ago, I am frequently unsettled by the sense that its voice has been crafted to allay or bypass the suspicions of readers who take the Bible as a more or less perfect guide to everything, including biology. Although disavowing literalism, Roughgarden seems to choose to... Read More
By larrygilman on November 18, 2011 · 2 Comments
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Physicist Alan Lightman has a fascinating piece on the “multiverse” in the latest issue of Harper’s (“The Accidental Universe,” Dec. 2011).
Multiverse theories posit that what we have long thought of as the Universe, all the galaxies we can observe, is just one of many universes—perhaps an infinite or endlessly growing number of them, or perhaps a fixed but large number like 10500. (The number of atoms in the observable universe is only... Read More
By larrygilman on November 2, 2011 · Leave a Comment
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I have just started Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) by Joan Roughgarden, who is both a convert to Christianity and an evolutionary biologist specializing in lizards. So far, her book strikes me as painstakingly polite and even-tempered:
I don’t want to argue with other Christians. I want to share with them the fellowship and the love of Jesus. (p. 5)
I myself love a good kick-and-bite argument, civilly conducted, but it takes all... Read More
By larrygilman on October 16, 2011 · Leave a Comment
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Evangelical attitudes on evolution are two-sided: all polls show a fat majority for total rejection, about 65%, but a little over a quarter of US evangelicals affirm the statement that “humans and other living things have evolved over time” (a recent Pew Forum survey). Evangelicals who accept evolution, the basic organizing principle of modern biology, are therefore a far from endangered species: in fact, there are about 19 million of them (i.e.,... Read More
By larrygilman on October 1, 2011 · 3 Comments
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A few years ago some psychologists performed an experiment to see if college students who read a violent story would display more aggression afterward if they were told that God sanctioned the violence than if they were told the story was merely from an “ancient scroll.” The story they chose was from the book of Judges, chapters 19–21: nothing unusual for the Old Testament, just a nip of city-razing and total massacre. I can imagine Alex... Read More
By larrygilman on September 23, 2011 · 8 Comments
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To see a fine thinker bamboozled by a minor fallacy is always a freaky spectacle, like watching an elephant trip over a peanut. It’s sad, too: a little spring goes out of my step and my shoulders droop lower. If the mighty can take such falls, what hope for the rest of us? Consider G. K. Chesterton, who repeatedly proclaimed with ringing certainty that gradual evolution cannot produce a bat’s wing because a wing is useless until it’s complete—the... Read More
