ABSTRACT
Genesis tells us that God created heaven and earth, but not how. For that we need science. Science tells us how things work, but not why. For that, if such questions deserve an answer, people turn to religion. Religions seek meanings, as it’s sometimes put. That seems a fair division of labor. But religion cares about facts too, and science is incomplete if it ignores values. Many Bible readers press scripture for a cosmology. Others assume that
science preempts whatever scripture may relate. Religions, they assume, like mushrooms, thrive best in the dark. Focusing on the colorful words, quaint rituals, and sometimes violent doings of extremists, they cast all piety as regressive and repressive. Darwin becomes a culture hero for topping off the labors of Democritus and Epicurus by reducing teleology to mechanism, freeing humanity from baneful fantasies, making atheism not just respectable but obligatory. Modernity means replacing myths of value and purpose with hard facts about necessity and chance. Human nature, choice and freedom, reason, insight, awe, and love are just the products of vast, uncaring subatomic and molecular roulette. More than a little autobiography may hide between the lines of such
valedictories. Choler bespeaks a sense of loss: All deities must be swept away once feet of clay are glimpsed on childhood’s household gods. Even right and wrong may be tossed into the same bin as God’s six-day work week. These too, Nietzsche said, are ghosts of God. If scripture can’t be silenced it can at least be gagged, squeezed into the crudest possible reading. Some people, of course, love the dark and don’t want to know how God creates, fearing, like children at a magic show, that miracles will vanish once the mystery is known. Yet there’s broad and fertile ground between the literalism that finds no truth in poetry and the rival literalism aghast at the thought of poetry in prophecy, eager to offer up science on the altar of a God who never asked for that sacrifice. Still, Darwin did not purge value from nature or reduce biology to chance.
Nor doesDarwinism dissolve human dignity and freedom. Living beings do have worth, nearest to hand in the human case, where values are chosen and projects devised with conscious intent. If evolution announces anything, it proclaims
precedents for the pursuit of value. Just as the worth of being and the dignity of persons opened the way to the discovery of monotheism, so do the emergence of purpose and subjecthood make evolution itself a powerful argument for creation. Reductionists may slight such values. But who then is turning a blind eye to the evidence?
