A rchive Date
[ 18-04-2006 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Charles Darwin ]
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[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=032406C
Scraps Of God And Darwin
By Erik Baard: 24 Mar 2006
At a time when America is lamentably polarized, perhaps our deepest and most enduring debate rages between Creationism and evolution. But now one surprisingly prominent research leader is daring an attempt to bridge the gap with a book about DNA called The Language of God.
"I believe that one can be both a rigorous scientist and a believer in God. Don't get me wrong - science is the only reliable way to draw conclusions about how the natural world works. But God cannot be defined in purely natural terms, or he wouldn't be God," argues Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the US government program that sequenced the human genome and now works to unravel the coding errors of disease.
He ascribes the espousal of atheism by other leading scientists (the majority of biologists with the National Academy of Sciences) as coming from "some personal agenda" and not from "rational argument."
"From a purely logical perspective, it will never be possible to disprove the existence of God, since the tools of science apply only to the natural world. Thus of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the most irrational choice," Collins stated in an interview with TCS.
But will The Language of God, to be published in July by Simon and Schuster, fulfill a deep need? Most Americans are scientifically ignorant and not all that pious. And no one would describe us as particularly logical. In the canyon bottom between the Creationist and Darwinian atheist absolutists is a flood of rationalizers, compromisers, and people simply comfortable with a life of cosmic contradictions. We casually enjoy the fruits of biotech and pharmaceutical advances based on science that wholly confirms evolution by natural selection, and we pray to a Creator in times of need and gratitude.
Our most notable attempt as a national culture to unify these divergent worldviews was the mirage of Intelligent Design. Collins won't truck with weak and waning Intelligent Design, which he views as limiting God.
"Essentially this then puts God in the gaps. And it says: if there's some part of science that you can't understand that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out - and I believe it's very likely that science will - how it is that the complexity of the eye came into being one step at a time, perhaps beginning with a single-light sensitive cell and gradually resulting in a very complex organ, with each of those steps having its own natural selection ability, then where is God? If we've put him in a box - if we said okay, God has to be in this particular part of nature and science explains that - then we have potentially done great harm to people's faith," he said in a video interview for the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit, Darwin.
Another solution proposed, and largely accepted by the Catholic church, is to have scientists and theologians play in separate sandboxes. The division of science and religion into natural and spiritual zones was famously expressed in 1997 by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in a Natural History Magazine essay titled "Nonoverlapping Magisteria."
But Collins faults this segregation as "rather hollow and unsatisfying." Instead, he finds "no conflict whatsoever between being a person of faith and a scientist, and that happy blending of perspectives can even transform a moment of scientific discovery into an occasion of worship."
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most prominent atheist of our time, isn't buying that rosy worldview. For 30 years he's railed against the "intellectual flabbiness" of amiable sophistries crafted to head off a culture war. In his view, science demands that all systems and laws be accountable and complete - there's no room for divine intercessions. But religion can't resist pawing the natural world - it won't surrender miracles and signs, nor will it entirely disassociate the soul with the physical body.
Indeed, Collins himself points to science's inability to answer, ""What happens after we die?"
Science is ready to provide a list of organisms that feed on carcasses.
Of course religion allows for more leaps and rationalizations than the discipline of science. Some historians argue that the last time Yahweh was wilting "in a box," that of tribal god, He escaped by being promoting by his people to being the single, universal God. The beleaguered Israelite rationalization was that greater foreign powers were not dominating the tribes through the support of more powerful gods. No! These empires must be merely Yahweh's instruments of punishment and instruction directed at His believers.
But that battle was entirely in the realm of faith, and the use of faith to superimpose a spiritual order on a sketchy desert neighborhood in ancient times. Today, secular morality is no longer seen as an oxymoron, especially as new research uncovers the genetic and neurological bases for altruism and social cohesion. Perhaps religiosity itself.
Intelligent Design fails as religion because one basic tenet of faith is that it should be professed, not cloaked in pseudoscience. But what if we take Dr. Collins' full embrace of both evolution and a "personal God" at face value? The mechanisms of evolution are horrifying. Darwin himself dismissed this as a means of Creation for a loving God. Progress is made through the relentless suffering caused by mutation and predation. It makes the bipolar God of the Hebrew Bible seem mellow.
If a respectable intellectual synthesis of science and religion is ultimately untenable, where does that leave us? Healthily and happily, where most of us already are. We turn to nature, including evolved human intelligence, to explain itself. We pray when we feel the tools of nature are inadequate to our needs.
The Pentagon, operating under an evangelical Commander-in-Chief, is conducting a threat-response software development program based on the Cambrian Explosion, Earth's wildest evolutionary moment 540 million years ago when invertebrates suddenly diversified into an unmatched range of basic body designs that were quickly and ruthlessly winnowed. The Bible won't be consulted. But we do pray in wartime, from the president to children at their bedsides, for God to protect soldiers entering battle and for the souls of heroes leaving life.
One might call this incoherent, non-philosophy SCRAPS: Sentimental Creationism, Rational Atheism, Predictably Switching. Scraps of faith and scraps of science to make it through the day or a lifetime. We're not hypocrites because we don't pretend to weave a seamless tapestry between the two realms or to wholly reject the benefits of either.
Fundamentalists won't be satisfied with this, but they will have to come to grips with evolution's overwhelming confirmation, discovery by discovery, from remote Indonesian islands to biotech laboratories. And if fierce atheists like Dawkins have trouble accepting their place in a species that's stubborn in its spiritual quest, here's a reason for accommodation that even an evolutionist can love: Religious people are far outbreeding atheists.
Erik Baard is a freelance science writer living in NYC.
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