Double-Dealing in Darwin

Continued from page 1

Similar views were held by "Darwin's bulldog," the late 19th century biologist and science-popularizer Thomas Huxley. Seeking a secular alternative to the Anglican establishment that he and others saw as opposing the social reforms required by mid-Victorian Britain, Huxley actively promoted evolution as the new religion for the new age. In a deliberate echo of Biblical language, he implored us to sit down before facts as a little child, and be guided by our senses. He was known in the contemporary press as "Pope Huxley."

Today, likewise, we see that evolutionism has its priests and devotees. Entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University tells us that the "evolutionary epic is mythology," depending on laws that are "believed but can never be definitively proved," taking us "backward through time to the beginning of the universe." Wilson knows that any good religion must have its moral dimension, and so he urges us to promote biodiversity, to amend our original sin of despoiling the earth. There is an apocalyptic ring to Wilson's writings, and in true dispensationalist style, he warns that there is but a short time before all collapses into an ecological Armageddon. Repent! The time is near!

Am I arguing that natural selection theory, and Darwinism specifically, is merely a secular answer to religion? Certainly not. Most of the work done by most evolutionary biologists most of the time is as stolidly scientific and as powerful as you could wish. Am I arguing that making a religion out of science is necessarily bad? Certainly not. If Wilson finds it spiritually helpful to think of his science as he does, and if this worldview leads him to campaign for the preservation of the rainforests, who could object to that?

I am saying that when I hear people with spiritual views accused by scientists of "cowardly flabbiness of the intellect," I suspect that there is more at stake than factual disagreement. In that context, when evangelicals complain that it is unfair if a secular religion (evolution) is allowed into classrooms but competing theological views are not, I start to feel sympathy. Not for creationism, which is pernicious nonsense, but for stacking the deck against religious thought, by allowing dogma in science but not in theology. If creationism has no place in the classroom, then neither does a secular religion based on evolution. We who care passionately about science should know when to keep the science and religion separate and remember always when it is appropriate to teach the one and not the other.