Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin
Today marks the 207th birthday of Charles Robert Darwin, born in 1809 Shrewsbury, England, to a Scottish-trained physician. Charles was urged to become a physician, too. It didn't work out, though. He was a disappointment to his father.
After some years of studying the classics by rote, young Darwin's interest turned to what we now call botany, and later to such creatures as the earthworm. He continued his studies at Cambridge. In his 50th year (1859) and, after much dilly-dallying and a nearly five-year voyage on the Beagle, Darwin with some ambivalence suffered his On the Origin of Species to be published.
It was as revolutionary a text as ever came off a printing press. His work had yielded incontrovertible evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. Thus was the Theory of Natural Selection born.
Darwin established that over eons every species of life on Earth had descended from common ancestors -- a phenomenon that has been illustrated wryly in many a New Yorker cartoon. It is the unifying theory of biological science.
How is it, then, that after 157 years the Theory is so embattled in, of all places, the United States of America, home to some of the world's greatest scientists? How is it that legislatures and boards of education in school districts in many of the 50 states have from time to time insisted that "Theory" means what a mad scientist wakes up thinking one morning and foists on the world?
How is it that 90 years after the spectacle of the Scopes trial there remains a powerful minority in education and in government, which insists on having the biblical creation story taught in tandem with Darwin's unifying Theory, if not banning the latter entirely from the classroom?
What is there about the Theory of Natural Selection and its evolutionary consequences that so troubles otherwise sane people?
The usual answer is that it contradicts the Hebrew Bible's take on creation, of which there are actually two -- Genesis 1:1-2: 4a and Genesis 2:4b-3:23 -- that tell the story in starkly different terms./1
To the fundamentalist, that contradiction is bad enough, yet reconcilable to some degree because one can concede that the six days of creation in the first (but later version) can be understood as indefinite spans of time, even as the late William Jennings Bryan reluctantly admitted under Clarence Darrow's harrowing direct examination during the 1925 trial of John Scopes. Bryan was the best-known fundamentalist of his time.
Having covered a major federal trial/2 as late as 1981, which had Christian fundamentalism defending itself against settled science, and for several years thereafter reporting on the continuing efforts to have creationism taught in public school classrooms, I propose that it is not so much the when and how of Earth's origins that are at issue but the nature of deity imagined to have engineered it.
I think when it became clear that evolution perforce had to include natural selection and the survival of the fittest, the evangelicals found it unacceptable. If, for example the λογος of the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verses 1-4, was to be acclaimed that which "through whom all things were made"/3, then what was made or created had to be the work of a loving and caring deity. And if that were so, how could such a deity allow only the fittest to survive?
That was too much for a religious world that treasures such sentiments as John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that all who believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
It came to the point that those who took the Bible more or less literally on such issues had to part company with Darwin on evolution. It did not help that so-called social Darwinism had entered the conversation with its ideas that the strong should naturally dominate the weak, the successful the unsuccessful and the secure the vulnerable. Those ideas became known colloquially as "the law of the jungle."
From the Scopes trial of 1925 on, the brighter among conservative preachers attacked Darwin at just that point rather than on the six-days-of-creation issue, already muddled by Bryan's testimony.
Practitioners of liberal religion have no clear path from "the loving God" theology to evolution. They can and mostly do affirm the existence -- Entschuldigung, Herr Doktor Tillich/4 -- of the biblical deity, and they do well on the sentimental side of Jesus as the good shepherd, etc. etc., but largely they avoid the survival of the fittest aspect of evolution. It doesn't play well where Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est is sung.
The late Reverend Duncan Littlefair -- who held court for 35 years at the Fountain Street Church in the citadel of religious correctness that was Grand Rapids, Michigan, in his day -- was untroubled by the survival of the fittest.
Littlefair, an agnostic secular humanist, once said that the survival of the fittest was not only obvious but the only way for Earth to remain habitable. "The unfit are unfit. It's a pity they have to succumb, but any God in His right mind could not possibly have it any other way."
One can see readily how much such a point of view is threatening to true believers.
1/ The first creation narrative encountered in Genesis, the work of the so-called Priestly class, was compiled some time after 545 BCE as the formerly exiled elite of what would become a new Israel had returned to the homeland. The text reflects an organizing principle of telling a story dispassionately. The second such narrative is of older provenance, perhaps as early as 900 BCE, and represents a more lyrical, emotive approach. The two traditions are answering different questions.
2/ McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255, 1258-1264 (ED Ark. 1982), was a 1981 legal case in Arkansas filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas by various parents, religious groups and organizations, biologists, and others who argued that the Arkansas state law state law known as the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act (Act 590), which mandated the teaching of "creation science" in Arkansas public schools, was unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Judge William Overton found for the plaintiff.
3/ The Nicene Creed, ca. 325
4/ Paul Tillich, a prominent Protestant theologian of the 20th century, skated past the idea of the "existence of God." Rather, he spoke of "uncreated creator" and the "ground and source of being."
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