A Humanist's Reflections on Evolutionary Biology
Editor's Note: The so-called Scopes Monkey Trial concluded on July 21, 1925, making this year the trial's eighty-fifth anniversary. HNN is pleased to present two articles, one by an evolutionary biologist, the other by a humanist, to mark the occasion.
As a whole, David Reznick’s piece is right on. I have a few small reservations: the history of the evolution debates is more complex than his quick summary suggests, and there are real distinctions between the current climate and that of the 1920s. Antievolutionists today, for instance, are torn between appealing to postmodern notions of pluralism and modern ideas of objective truth. However, Reznick’s main point is that alongside scientific colleagues, we humanists can do a major service when we directly engage the relationship between science and religion. As an English professor who wrote a dissertation on this conjunction and teaches an interdisciplinary course on evolution, I enthusiastically agree, and would offer several suggestions about how best to proceed.
Carefully distinguish between science and scientism. When I ask my Midwestern, largely middle-class students about their attitudes toward evolution, not surprisingly the way I frame the question has a major impact on the results. If I present evolution as the theoretical foundation of modern biology, and by extension, medicine, there is relatively little resistance. It makes sense as a paradigm emerging from a rigorous pursuit of testable, falsifiable knowledge. However, if I shade the question so that the overwhelming evidence for common descent and natural selection seems to slide into a metaphysical claim, one that rejects religious faith but ironically cannot be confirmed by the scientific method, there is much greater disagreement. My students smell scientism: the assumption that since the natural order of things can be productively examined via objective, empirical means, there can be nothing outside science’s purview. Scientism makes science into its handmaiden, targeting whatever claims about reality or values that it perceives as threats. Thus evolution has been co-opted historically by social Darwinism and eugenics, wherein accurate natural descriptions are twisted into dangerous moral prescriptions. And thus more recently the New Atheism represented by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has marketed a reductive determinism in the name of science, in the process occluding the scientific method’s openness to change, unpredictability, nuance, and variety. Keeping this difference sharp is critical to productive discussions.
Humanize Darwin and other scientists. It is well known in advertising that a white lab coat raises an actress’s credibility with many viewers. For all its prestige, though, this symbol also connotes an objectification that treats patients as statistics. The wearer may become a trustworthy paragon of knowledge, but she may also seem to embody creaturely hubris in the face of divine will. Neither image says much about most scientists, people who would peel back the unknown out of personal fascination and so that others might enjoy better lives. Yes, they make questionable ethical decisions and serve institutions that prioritize image over substance, but it never fails to impress me how different my students find the real scientists they meet from their pop-culture-instilled visions of nerds and narcissists. In Darwin’s case, exposing students to portrayals like those of the PBS Evolution series or last year’s Paul Bettany-Jennifer Connelly film Creation can help them look beyond the bitter old skeptic and sense his curiosity, patience, and very human timidity. Darwin was no saint, but neither was he the ardently anti-religious man that much propaganda imagines. Sensing his complexity helps many students begin to take his ideas seriously.
Question bifurcations of the religious and the secular. If our culture fails to distinguish between science and scientism, it is prone to distinguish too absolutely between the religious and the secular. This is only comfortable. We bracket politics and religion from polite conversation, letting us pretend our ideas about race, gender, and other topics proceed from the purportedly neutral standpoint of secularism. But where is this secular no-place? Isn’t what counts as secular defined in relation to particular traditions and practices we call religious, and vice versa? The boundaries here are hardly unyielding: our “secular” friends express religious devotion to sporting events and national defense, while “religious” ones routinely champion popular media and political parties. Even more importantly, as Tracy Fessenden and Michael Kaufmann have argued, we need to see how the term “religious” indicates a very specific form of American Protestantism, while “secular” pretends neutrality, but is really only a reaction. Why does this matter for understanding science? Because many people will only consider the evidence for evolution after understanding how their confusion derives from a relatively recent form of Christianity. This is not to disparage that tradition as a whole or to discount other religions’ mixed responses to evolution; as detailed by Salman Hameed, many predominantly Muslim nations also evince serious tensions about evolution and creationism. But in the U.S., the leaders behind efforts like Cincinnati’s new $27 million Creation Museum have been mostly fundamentalist Christians, and a secularism that exists only to thwart them is unlikely to serve anyone very well.
Cultivate more careful readings of scriptures, not their dismissal. Blanket statements about the Bible and other scriptures remain frequent in our culture, even among academics. A still-common assumption among those outside religious studies is that the purpose of discussing Genesis or the Gospels is either to do theology or to debunk it. To be sure, this mistake has become less prevalent over the last decade than it once was, but I suspect it remains even where unstated. I mention this not as a plea for greater tolerance, but as an invitation to more extensive engagement with the world’s scriptures, which can prove a very significant step toward the open-mindedness Reznick seeks. Too often Americans refuse to read from the library we call the Bible with as much attention to genre, historical context, and intertextual relationships as they extend to popular fiction, news radio, and Facebook postings. Challenging this inconsistency does not require a choice between biblical literalism and raging heresy, but only a willingness to become wiser believers, doubters, and knowers. To encourage this shift is merely to appreciate that setting the writings of an amazingly resilient ancient Near Eastern tribe or of a sixth-century Meccan revolutionary against a product of Victorian science is to compare apples and oranges. When people grasp the differences in purpose between the Bible, the Qur’an, and The Origin of Species, major stumbling blocks on the path to consilience begin to dissolve.
These suggestions are no more exhaustive than the brief list of books on evolution and religion that I’ll close by recommending. For one of the most compelling overviews of this relationship, I like Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin (its subtitle, How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, unnecessarily limits its audience). Also providing excellent broad treatments are books by Eugenie Scott, Kenneth Miller, Michael Ruse, and David Sloan Wilson. For good examples of the historical work in this area to which Reznick alludes, see Michael Lienesch’s analysis of the Scopes Trial and Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s look at Darwin and slavery. Those interested in biblical studies will appreciate William P. Brown’s latest volume. And to begin imagining how better understandings of evolution could reshape my own discipline of English, Brian Boyd’s new contribution to Darwinian literary criticism is worthwhile reading—even if many will be more provoked than convinced—and the science novels of Richard Powers are simply stellar.