It is tempting but tricky to ask if something at the theological roots of Christianity and Islam makes one or the other inherently friendly or hostile to evolution. The attempt has been made by G. Willow Wilson in an essay for Science and Spirit titled “Only in America” (2007).1
Wilson begins by reviewing the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005). It’s fun to write about Kitzmiller, at least for evolution-lovers like me, because the story is simple, action-packed, and ends happily. The school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, populated largely by conservative Protestants, tried to force the district’s high-school science teachers to tell their students that Intelligent Design (ID) is a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution. A group of parents sought a Federal injunction against the policy, resulting in a bench trial — that is, a trial in which a judge decides, not a jury. (Juries can’t grant injunctions.) After the scientific merits of ID were reviewed in dozens of hours of expert testimony from both sides, the judge, John E. Jones III, ruled smashingly against ID.
The nub of that ruling: “ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” And that was that, because Federal courts (most notably the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987) have repeatedly barred creationism from public schools.
In “Only in America,” Wilson probes the theological roots of Kitzmiller. Christianity, she argues, is an iconic religion. That is, it makes images of God — paintings, icons, that sort of thing. Judaism and Islam, however, do not. They, Wilson says, “endorse total iconoclasm — opposition to the religious use of images . . .” Why? Because they “contend that God does not occupy a specific location—is not ‘above,’ is not solely ‘in heaven,’ does not incarnate — and, therefore, cannot be represented by a specific object or person, or be treated as an individual being with a definite form.”
This theological difference, Wilson argues, makes Judaism and Islam inherently evolution-friendly and anti-ID: “A totally iconoclastic approach to God clashes with current ID theory,” which, she says somewhat confusingly, “is based heavily on semi-iconoclastic Christian ideology”: “ID in America posits a God that occupies space, and envisions a relationship between God and creation similar to that of a gardener and a plot of land.” But Islam (Wilson’s own religion) and Judaism posit, she says, a “totally iconoclastic, nonlocal God” who is “inseparable from creation, eliminating the conflict between evolution and design.” Because of Judaism and Islam’s “alternate reading of divine identity,” monistic rather than monotheistic, “God is One, indivisible from action or creation.”
I have tried to come up with a brief, kind way to say this, but I have failed, so I will say it in a brief, blunt way: Wilson gets almost everything wrong.
(1) She uses Christianity throughout as a simple synonym for creationist Christianity, not mentioning the existence or even possibility of evolution-friendly Christianities. Yet the Catholic Church, which she cites to illustrate Christian iconophilia, has officially affirmed the reality of evolution. Pope John Paul II’s 1996 statement that “evolution is more than a hypothesis” was reported heavily by global media; evolution has been taught in Catholic schools for decades (often better than in US public schools); Vatican-convened conferences on evolutionary biology in 2008 and 2009 made headlines for snubbing creationism, for not inviting a single ID proponent.2 There are many creationist Catholics — Michael Behe, a prime mover of ID, is Catholic — but the Catholic Church’s official doctrinal stance is pro-evolution.
The United Methodist Church has also officially declared its support for evolution.3 So has the Episcopal church. One could go on. And on. And on. Consider Kitzmiller v. Dover, Wilson’s Exhibit A. You would never guess from reading her piece that the judge who decided that case against ID was an evangelical Christian and Dubya-appointed Republican to boot. Nor that the star scientific witness for the plaintiffs — the anti-ID side — was a religiously active Catholic, biologist Kenneth Miller.
(2) When Wilson says that Christians think that “God occupies a specific location” or is “solely ‘in Heaven’” my mind goes plunk. Nothing happens, as if someone had just opined that the color blue is fast or that when pawn takes queen bacon is validated. In fact, almost all Christianities have historically contended that God is both uniquely incarnate in Christ and fully present at every point in space and time — everywhere, always. The extensive literature of modern Christian panentheism emphasizes God as incarnate in everything that exists.
This has long seemed to me an obvious consequence of the Incarnation and Sacraments. Consider the latter. To hand me wheat and wine assembled by evolved life, solar fire, falling rain, and human hands from elements forged in dying stars billions of years ago, saying as one does so that these are the flesh and blood of God — if that isn’t telling me (among other things) that the Universe is the body of God, that there is nothing, nothing, nothing that is simply apart from God, then what the heck is it telling me? Nor are these rare, oddball, merely personal notions. They are far from universal, but versions of them are prominent across a range of modern Christianities. They arise because of, not in spite of, the doctrine of the Incarnation. Staunchly orthodox C. S. Lewis waxed lyrical over 50 years ago about the possibility of an evolutionary Incarnation:
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created.4
And although I oppose ID, I must note that Wilson misrepresents that belief system, too: “ID in America posits a God that occupies space.” But it doesn’t. No such thing. What is she talking about? (Plunk.)
(3) Wilson writes, “To a Christian assertion of ‘intelligent design’, a Jew or a Muslim might say, ‘The design and the intelligence are one.’” What’s wrong with this statement, besides its condescending divisiveness?
What’s wrong with it is that creationism — of which ID is merely a lab-coat-wearing subspecies — actually dominates public opinion in majority-Muslim countries even more than in majority-Christian countries. (To keep the subject manageable, I will not discuss Judaism.) Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. As contact with evolutionary ideas has increased in Muslim societies in recent decades, there has been no sign of a deep-seated theological fondness for Darwin across the ummah. So far, most Muslims have adopted attitudes similar to those of anti-evolutionary Christians.
Let’s put some statistical meat on the table. According to a 2006 study of public acceptance of evolution in 34 countries, a large minority of Americans (almost 40%) think evolution false; a slightly larger number think it true.5 In that particular study, the US ranked next to last in terms of acceptance of evolution — but not, perhaps, as a side effect of Christian iconography. Although post-religious Scandinavian countries took the gold, silver, and bronze, with acceptance rates over 80%, Christianity-dominated France (85–90% Christian) and UK (71.6%) placed fourth and sixth. Ireland, significantly more Christian than the US (92% vs. 78%), ranked a respectable 15th. See a clear pattern? I don’t.
Acceptance of Evolution by Country
Only one country surveyed was more evolution-unfriendly than the US: Turkey, where over 50% of adults reject evolution and about 25% accept. Turkey, 99.8% Muslim and the only majority-Muslim country in the list. A later poll of six Muslim countries confirmed these figures for Turkey and also found that over 60% of adults in Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Egypt affirm that evolution “could not possibly be true” or is “probably false.”6 In Egypt (94% Muslim), only 8% think evolution true.
This picture bears no resemblance to that painted by Wilson, in which monism-nurtured Muslims calmly bypass the creationist anxieties of icon-addled Christians. Wilson states that “current ID theory may be a tent large enough for many Christian doctrines, but it is not large enough to house other world religions,” but the data show that globally, most Muslims affirm a range of creationisms, including ID. The Turkish Muslim creationist organization Bilim ve Arastirma Vakfi distributes creationist materials translated from Christian fundamentalist originals.7 An evolution display in an Iranian government science museum terminates in a Koran on a stand with a poster on the wall above it published by the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, a fundamentalist Christian outfit.8 Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol, described by one scholar as “the chief Muslim ally of Christian creationists in the United States,”9 labors to explain “Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design.”10 I could multiply such examples.
I do not argue that these patterns arise from deep theological sources or reflect on the relative worth of the faiths in question. Actual Muslims, like actual Christians, occupy the whole range of possible responses to evolution, from professional scientific engagement to hard-core rejectionism. That is an empirical fact. But one of its corollaries is that Islam does not, in general, immunize its believers against hostility to evolution any more than Christianity does.
(4) Wilson claims for Islam an inherent monism, which she says is a “cornerstone of divine identity in . . . the Quran.” But her picture of Islamic theology is as one-sided as her picture of Christian theology. Only Sufi Islam has a monist emphasis; non-Sufi Islamic theologies tend to be strongly anti-monist, emphasizing the absolute divide between Creator and creation. As the New American Encyclopedia states, the “distinct separation that is seen to exist between human beings and God in Islamic theology has led to staunch resistance among [non-Sufi] Muslims toward anything even implicitly monistic.”
“Only in America,” Wilson titled her piece. Only in America what? Well, there is precious little that can really happen only in America, but I think she meant that only in Christian America could misguided religious upsetness over evolution get as far as it did in Kitzmiller. It would be less untrue to say that only in America could a religious judge, heeding testimony from religious scientists, overturn anti-science religious policies of a religious school board — all of them members of the same religion. At least, we can probably say that this particular spectacle has yet to be witnessed in any other country. But I doubt that there is any grandiose theological lesson to be drawn from it. Certainly not the one that Wilson seeks to draw.
I commend to your attention another Muslim writer on these subjects: Salman Hameed, trained in physics and astronomy and now a professor of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College. Hameed provides up-to-date coverage on science and religion issues, with a special emphasis on Islamic creationism, on his superb blog. Plus, he’s cute.
[Originally posted March 30, 2009]
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NOTES
1. http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=598
2. http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0804713.htm;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4588289/The-Vatican-claims-Darwins-theory-of-evolution-is-compatible-with-Christianity.html,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29535870/.
3. Pew Foundation, http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=394.
4. Lewis, C. S., Miracles, Touchstone, 1996 (orig. 1947), pp. 147-148. Lewis was wise, by the way, to withhold unconditional assent from a simplistic notion of fetal recapitulation: see Stephen Jay Gould,Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977.
5. Miller, Jon D, Scott, Eugenie C., and Okamoto, Shinji. “Public Acceptance of Evolution,” Science, 11 August 2006, pp. 765-766.
6. Hameed, Salman, “Bracing for Islamic Creationism,” Science, 12 Dec. 2008, pp. 1637-1638.
7. “Anti-evolutionists Raise Their Profile in Europe,” Nature, 23 Nov. 2006, pp. 406-407.
8. Bohannon, John. “Science in Iran: Picking a Path Among the Fatwas,” Science, 21 July 2006, pp. 292-293.
9. Riexinger, Martin, “Propagating Islamic Creationism on the Internet,”http://www.digitalislam.eu/article.do?articleId=1980.
10. Akyol, Mustafa, “Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design,”http://www.islamonline.net/english/Contemporary/2004/09/Article02.shtml. But Mustafa may be softening, or at least ambiguating, his stance: seehttp://sciencereligionnews.blogspot.com/2009/03/mustafa-akyol-backing-away-from-id.html.
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