The Christian Humanist

 

Back in the 1950s when I was in high school I was an ardent and committed evangelical Christian, an eager and curious student, and an avid reader, particularly of “Christian apologetics”—that branch of theology that attempts to reconcile Christian theology with the natural world and to resolve apparent conflicts that were obstacles to faith. I was keenly aware that there was a simmering feud between my brand of Christianity and science, and as I took high school courses in biology, chemistry and physics I stored my anxious metaphysical questions until I could read enough to understand the issues and to resolve the apparent conflicts in my mind. It did not occur to me that science was on the wrong track any more than it occurred to me to doubt the fundamental concepts of my religious faith. I took it for granted that the conflict was more apparent than real, that to quote Paul, “now we see through the glass darkly” but eventually we would resolve what appeared at the moment to be conflicts between two fundamentally different approaches to reality.

The point is not that one of these approaches to understanding reality was wrong and that we had to choose between them, but rather they were different perspectives by which to understand reality and the conflict between them was more apparent than real.

There were everyday examples of such apparent conflicts, one such being the tension between two different theorems used to understand the nature of light—the particle theory and the wave theory. Both were “true” in the sense that they explained the behavior of light under particular circumstances, yet they were in apparent conflict with each other such that logically we could not comprehend how they could both be true at the same time. Scientists at that time (I have no idea whether this issue has been resolved yet) took the position that over time a new theory may be developed that explained both sets of facts with respect to the behavior of light under different scenarios. In the meantime we had to live with the apparent contradictions.

My undergraduate years were spent at the University of Richmond, a Baptist institution at which I took classes in science, philosophy and religion. Scientific knowledge lived along side religion in the university and among its faculty and there was no apparent “conflict” between them. Science and religion lived in their separate spheres and did not interfere with each other. There were no arguments over “evolution versus the creation story.” Religion professors discussed the creation story in terms of its “meaning” rather than whether it was a literal description of events in time, and even those more inclined to literalness dismissed the “7 days” of creation as periods of time, aeons or ages, and left it to science to explain the process by which our world came into being while insisting that whatever the process and however long the time it took, the point was that God was the ultimate source and ground of the creative process.

In the 1950s for the most part mainline traditional Christianity (even among conservative Baptists) had no argument with the teaching of evolutionary process in schools, although from time to time there were local fusses created by biblical literalists who railed against “modernism” in Christian thinking. The Scopes Trial in the 1920s and some later litigation by diehards had pretty well settled the argument that evolution was a fundamental principle of biology and was essential to understanding scientific thought and had both a rightful and necessary place in school curriculums. Creationism as a literal description of the origins of the universe was seen as a religious concept belonging to fundamentalist biblical literalists with little education and like another silly idea of the 17th Century Irish Bishop Ussher that the world was created in 4004 BC, was relegated to the trash can of outmoded sectarian ideas that had no place in schools.

A few years ago it came as something of a surprise that creationism was back and that fundamentalist religious activists were trying to get equal time in schools for Creationism along side Evolution as equally valid “theories” to which school children should be exposed. For the most part the courts have seen through that “equal time” fuss for what it is, an attempt to get a particular sectarian religious view into the school curriculum as an alternative to teaching the scientific process of evolution. Having failed at that, those who are attempting to confuse students and undermine the teaching of evolution are now insisting that “intelligent design” should be considered an alternative explanation to the theory of evolution. It is perhaps one sign of the deterioration of our schools, the lack of education of our citizens, and the naivete of our populace, that this pseudo-scientific attempt to subvert science education gets any traction at all.

The gist of the intelligent design argument is that our world is too complex – from the human body to the structure of an atom – to have evolved naturally from random events without the hand of a designer guiding the process, so they conclude that design implies a designer. That argument is logically flawed. It has a certain beguiling simplicity about it, but it is not science and it is not an explanation. It is more like looking at a sunset and saying “wow, it is so beautiful, I just can’t believe that it just happened that way.” But it did happen. And we can explain how and why. The point is that the argument of “wow, I’m so amazed, I can’t believe it…” is not a scientific argument and it is not an alternative to understanding the process by which more complex forms of life evolved from simple forms. It is emotionally satisfying to some and it is comforting to others to say that “God did it” but it is an attitude based in religious faith, not an alternative scientific explanation and for that reason it does considerable disservice to the gullible who might be persuaded that scientific conclusions are unfounded. It is not scientific, it is an attempt to undermine faith in science in order to maintain an overly-simplistic and incredible religious fundamentalism.

An advocate of intelligent design wrote an opinion piece for our local paper in which he began his argument with the false premise that is constantly repeated by creationist advocates – “the continuing debate between creationists and evolutionists generally boils down to religion vs. atheism.” That is not true. What is true is that the Christian god is not a necessary explanation in science and therefore has no place in a science curriculum. However it is equally true that Evolution does not necessarily conflict with Christian theology. Major Christian theologians both Protestant and Catholic accept that there is no inherent conflict between Christian theology and science. The conflict is between a Christian fundamentalist interpretation of passages in the Old Testament and mainline Christian theology that does not accept a literalistic reading of the Bible. That is a dispute based in religious interpretation and has no place in our schools, and certainly not in our science classes.