DARWIN AND GOD



DARWIN AND GOD

Years ago someone must have made a killing by beginning to sell the stylized fish you see plastered all over the back of cars. It was a symbol of Christianity announcing to the world that the person driving the car was a Bible Believing Christian. Later, in response, someone began selling what a lot of us have on our cars, a fish with legs and inside of it the word “Darwin.” I’m not quite so sure what it means, except that we’re among those who believe that with Darwin came a challenge to that other symbol. Daniel Dennett, from whom we took this morning’s reading, calls Darwin’s theory of evolution the most dangerous idea ever to enter both the worlds of science and religion. He says:

If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and purpose.

Dennett continues:

But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It’s a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin’s magnificent ideas is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them. For instance, I want to protect the campfire song, and what is true in it, for my little grandson and his friends, and for their children when they grow up.

The campfire song that goes:

Tell me why the stars to shine,

Tell me why the ivy twines,

Tell me what the sky’s so blue.

Then I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,

Because God made the ivy twine,

Because God made the sky so blue.

Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

Well, after Darwin published On the Origin of the Species the lyrics of this song didn’t ring so true. If Darwin’s idea is right – and almost all the evidence uncovered about our world, the life on it, and its origin have shown that it is – it’s hard to believe in a God who had a hand in the creation of stars and ivy and skies and the people we love, at least in any direct way. The interesting thing, though, is that Darwin believed in God, just not that kind of one. He was a Unitarian whose father said something Mark Twain liked to quote: “Unitarianism is a feather to catch falling Christians.” For Darwin it was a faith broad enough to avow a deity more like the Spirit I talked about last week, or more like the Clockmaker believed in by deist Unitarians, like Jefferson and Priestly.

Before such freethinkers came along people were inclined to accept the story in Genesis as an adequate explanation for the way the earth and life on it came into being. An English bishop had studied that story and the others in the Bible and came up with 4,004 BCE as the date of creation. But by the time Darwin came along, he was born in 1809, scientists who were beginning to study geological formations found it hard to believe that they had all been created at the same time. They also found fossils in them that had no counterparts among the creatures then alive, while there were no fossils of the now-living creatures. They couldn’t understand why God would allow so many species to die out and how so many new ones could come into being seemed odd. Naturalists were also beginning to look at the variety of now-alive creatures and were finding patterns of adaptation among them that seemed too strange to be a part of some divine plan. Others wondered why God would have ever created such an ill-adapted creature as a dodo, when it was bound to die out, and adorned human beings with such useless organs as the nipples on men?

The notion of a six-day creation taking place just a few thousand years ago, altered only by the flood survived by Noah and the animals that he could cram into his boat, didn’t fit the growing body of evidence being discovered by the curious people of Darwin’s time. So people began to postulate theories of creation other than the one in the Bible began. Lamarck theorized that each species evolved on its own from separate moment of spontaneous generation. Some died out and some lived on. Charles Lyell hypothesized that new species and geological formations were constantly being created, while others were passing away, though he didn’t quite know how. Others assumed there had been periodic upheavals over the course of time which destroyed what then existed so that more complex species could take the place of the ones that existed before – something scientists now think actually happened.

There were even some in the era into which Darwin was born who called themselves “Evolutionists.” Among them was Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus. He was a physician who wrote what one critic called “unbelievably bad” evolutionary poetry, such as this one that he wrote in 1803:

Organic life living beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nursed in Ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,

Which bears Britannia’s thunders on the flood;

The whale, unmeasured monster of the main,

The lordly lion, monarch of the plain,

The eagle soaring in the realms of air,

Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,

Of language, reason, and reflection proud,

With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod,

And styles himself the image of his God;

Arose from rudiments of forms and sense,

An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

(Whatever an “ens” is.)

To his credit, Darwin didn’t follow in his grandfather’s poetic footsteps, but he did inherit his curiosity. At first he tried to indulge it by studying theology, but he became bored with it and turned to the study of philosophy and science instead. His family was wealthy enough so that he didn’t have to work for a living, so he decided to sign on for the cruise of HMS Beagle, a British ship being sent around the world to chart the coasts and islands of the South Seas. The trip took five years, during which Darwin collected thousands of biological and geological samples from the various places the crew went ashore. The diary he kept, published as The Voyage of the Beagle, is one of the most well-read travel books of all time. But it’s the conclusions he drew from all the things he observed that make up the dangerous idea that goes with the symbols on our cars of the fish with the legs.

What he saw was in the contest for survival those creatures born with mutated features that made them better adapted to the environments in which they lived were the ones who lived on. Poorly adapted creatures didn’t. He said: “More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die – which variety or species shall increase in number and which shall decrease or finally become extinct.” This is called “natural selection.” It means on one island a species lives on adapted to catch a certain kind of insect. On another island it’s cousins live on because they are better adapted to eat something else. Species also evolved in ways that let them behave like completely different creatures. Whales evolved flippers to swim like fish and squirrels evolved webbing between their toes so they could glide like birds. Life evolves and changes through adaptation and natural selection, rather than through the hands of God.

It’s a dangerous idea, indeed, at least if one has a stake in a hands on God. But it’s not an idea that wouldn’t have come along if it weren’t for Darwin. Darwin waited a long time to publish this findings, knowing how dangerous they were. In 1858 Alfred Wallace wrote to say that evidence he had seen caused him to develop a theory much like his. So Darwin sent his publisher the text of On the Origin of the Species.

It was an instant success, fitting the temper of a time when people were beginning think that they didn’t want their God to be tarnished by the messiness of the world. Darwin, himself, didn’t like the idea of being the orderer of creation since it would mean that God had created a lot of things that were bad. To see the bad as a part of a natural process of evolution made it a lot more palatable. Darwin believed that a sense of the goodness that’s in the Divine helps us cope and overcome what’s bad, which for him was a better to think of God than as the Creator of all that is. I guess you can see why he was a Unitarian. Darwin was a moralist whose notion of God was like that of the ancient Greek philosopher who said: “God, if God there be, is outside the world and could not be expected to care for it.” Caring for it is our task. It’s not the task of God. As Cornelius Hunter puts it in Darwin’s God, The idea that God must be aloof – separated from creation – now became more respectable. With evolution, science’s stamp of approval gave further credence to the idea of a distant God, which was fine with Victorians like Darwin, because “God not only is distanced from evil but also becomes more sublime and worthy of worship.” And, “A more passive God does not dabble in his creation, so scientific inquiry because plausible.” Thus even religious leaders, like Rev. William Conybeare, could say that the “Bible is exclusively the history of the dealings of God towards men,” meaning that it was “spiritual” and thus “should not be used to infer the history of creation. Religion has to do with morality, as Conybeare's colleague, Rev. Baden Powell put it, physical and moral problems have completely separate foundations that should have nothing to do with one another.

It’s in trying to put the two back together that those with the symbols of fish without legs and those with them on their cars are now in such trouble. Creationists, believing the Bible to be the literal word of God and it’s stories accurate depictions of history, including the history of the creation of the world and what’s on it, try to claim evolution is just a theory and. therefore, should be taken no more seriously than the Biblical story of how things began and came to be as they are.

The trouble is, the evidence we have in the fossil and geological record, the evidence we have from the discoveries of astronomers, the evidence we have for the continuation of evolution as life moves one, even the evidence of archeology and the records of history show that the Biblical story can’t be true as it’s written – unless one regards it as myth and allegory, which it is. Creationism isn’t science. As Niles Eldridge, the author of The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism puts it science is not a myth, even though it involves theories. “Science is a set of rules and an accumulated set of ideas, some more powerfully established than others, about the nature of the natural world. By its own rules, science cannot say anything about the supernatural. Scientists are allowed to formulate solely ideas that pertain to the material universe and they are constrained to formulate those ideas in ways that can be testable with empirical evidence detectable by the senses.”

The stories of religion are about something else. They are about how we might order our lives in ways that bring meaning and satisfaction. They are records of human beings striving with the mysteries of life, rather than its material substance. Whether we identify with the stories of Judeo-Christian tradition, or the stories of Buddhism or Islam or the many varieties of Paganism, has more to do with what they tell us about how we should be living than with their historical accuracy. Myths don’t have to fit the evidence we can see, the way scientific theories do. They are “true” in a different way.

In trying to make the stories of the Bible seem as though it’s true in the way science is, Creationists have to twist the evidence that exists to fit their the theory of a recent and non-evolved creation that would fit the story of Genesis, or a prolonged version of it. But it doesn’t work, any more than does the claim that the Earth is the center of the universe or that human beings are the aim of creation. We’re not the aim. We’re the result of the chances and changes that allowed our evolution but could equally well have allowed the evolution of something else.

This is actually pretty amazing, as miraculous as anything claimed by Creationists. Dennett says that Darwin’s dangerous idea, as challenging as it is to the historic accuracy of the myths of religion, provides us with a notion of something as sacred and as precious as whatever is lost because of the challenge. He says:

I quoted the physicist Paul Davies proclaiming that the reflective power of human minds can be “no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless purposeless forces,” and suggested that being a byproduct of mindless purposeless forces was no disqualification for importance. And I have argued that Darwin has shown us how, in fact, everything of importance is just such a product. Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature, expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing explanation about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature.

Darwin offers us one: it is in the distribution of Design throughout nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could never be exactly duplicated in its many details. What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, over billions of years.

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anslem’s “being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

So it is, and we should thank our Unitarian forbear, Charles Darwin for quitting his theological studies so he could look at the world it is and how it evolved and help us feel it. The Spirit is here and among us, wrapped through and through the Tree of Life whose branches have brought to where we are. May we join with it, having now the intelligence to do so, in helping evolution move in positive ways being inspired by these other myths, the ones called religious, that suggest ways in which we can do it, and helped by the ideas of science that help show how and why the world is the way it is.

I’m not sure whether the cosmos of which we are a part was created by God or not – and it doesn’t really matter to me, since I don’t think God is in charge of what goes on among us. But if God didn’t create us, we were created with minds – minds to make use of in finding out what best explains what we can see, rather than making us of to twist evidence to fit some preconceived view. To do so would be blasphemy, at least that’s what Charles Darwin though, and we should thank him for it.

Comments for MDUUC

By Rev. Dr. David Sammons

November 11, 2001

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