Godless Darwinism?

Andrew Koppelman

The movement against Darwinism is spreading from Protestant fundamentalists to the Catholic Church. Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, archbishop of Vienna, has denounced the idea that mankind came into being through “evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” The Cardinal has thus joined millions of others who think that a mechanical process of evolution is inconsistent with belief in God. The growing popularity of anti-Darwinism is strange, because religious rejection of Darwin rests on such bad theological arguments.

Religious objections to Darwin take two very different, in fact inconsistent, forms. The first holds that the account of creation in the Book of Genesis is literally true, and that any talk of one species emerging from another, or indeed of the earth being millions of years old, cannot be true. Here the conflict is undeniable. But hardly anyone still wants to deny what the fossil record establishes, and even Cardinal Schonborn concedes that “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true.”

The other religious response to Darwin is “scientific creationism,” which jettisons Genesis, but claims that the process by which new species have emerged is one in which some enormously powerful intelligent being must have periodically intervened. (Guess Who.)

The shrewdest of America’s “scientific creationists,” Phillip Johnson, has emphasized that scientific method is predisposed to reject intelligent design, because it assumes, rather than proving, that nature is all that there is. The job of a scientist is to look for natural physical causes, rather than divine interventions. If God had played a role in the creation of new species, then, scientists would have trouble seeing it.

Johnson is right. Science presupposes that everything in nature has a physical, not a supernatural, cause. It only looks for physical explanations. But there is a reason why science has become so prestigious in the last few centuries. The assumption of mechanical causation in nature has led to spectacular results. All of modern technology rests on the assumption that nature is mechanical and predictable.

Is the idea of a causally determined, self-sustaining world inconsistent with religion? If it is, then it isn’t just the evolutionary biologists who are in trouble. Anyone who acts on the physical world, on the assumption that matter is inert and manipulable, would be rejecting religion too. Are auto repair shops hotbeds of atheism?

Cardinal Schonborn writes that there is “purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.” He could mean two things by this. The first is that there is a point to the universe’s existence, and human life has cosmic significance. The second is that ordinary physical processes are not the product of blind causation, but of continuing divine intervention. You can accept the first proposition without accepting the second one. God might well have created a universe in which physical processes – say, the emergence of homo sapiens from other species, or the operation of your car’s engine – take place by themselves. The universe as a whole might be fraught with purpose, even if its parts operate mechanically. This in fact appears to be the view of the book of Genesis, which informs us that on the seventh day, after creating the universe, God rested. If God was resting, then evidently the universe was able to keep running by itself.

Darwin’s most important precursor in arousing the wrath of the religious is, of course, Galileo: the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe was as disconcerting then as evolution is now.

It is, however, at least equally consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition to consider it impious for one to presume knowledge of God's intentions in creating the universe. As God said to Job: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." There is no reason in principle why one cannot believe in God without also believing that He is a kind of cosmic Kilroy, who feels impelled to leave His initials carved on every tree.

It is even doubtful that the hypotheses of the scientific creationists deliver the comfort they purport to give. If the story they tell is accepted, some very powerful being repeatedly intervened in the evolutionary process. The logic seems to be the following:(1) here is a being more powerful than any we have ever encountered; (2) any being more powerful than any we have ever encountered must be God; (3) this is God. The fallacy should be obvious: proposition (2) was accepted by the Aztecs when they met the Spanish conqueror Cortes in 1519. He turned out not to be God. God’s existence may not be the kind of thing that you can prove with historical evidence.

Galileo and Darwin do place greater demands on religious faith than their predecessors. They require that faith stand on its own bottom, rather than leaning on comforting hints drawn from observed phenomena. And this is, perhaps, why they are resisted so fiercely. Faith is hard. But the enemies of Darwin are not helping religion’s cause. If we did not, in our daily activities, assume a mindless, predictable nature, we probably could never do anything at all. The idea that religion necessarily rejects science and mechanism ought to appeal only to the most militant atheists. Its embrace by sophisticated religious people is bizarre.