Evolution and Religion

I found these somewhat amazing statistics in the New York Times today:

Can it really be that 42% of the American people really do believe that there have been no biological changes since "creation" and 40% of the remainder believe that whatever changes have occurred have been guided by a supreme being rather than natural selection? Is it possible that they are just not aware of the facts? Or is it that they are aware but refuse to believe?

For any of you that happen to fall within this 60% (or within the other 14% who "don't know") but are still willing to look at the evidence, I would strongly recommend reading "Finding Darwin's God" by Kenneth R. Miller. Miller is a cellular biologist who believes deeply in both evolution and God and his book is does a pretty convincing job of demolishing both the Creationist/Intelligent Design "theories" and the underlying idea that evolution is antithetical to religious belief.

But just in case you don't want to read 300 pages on this issue, here is the Cliff Notes version:

First, there is not one scintilla of scientific support for creationism/intelligent design. Rather this whole "theory" is based on the absence of proof. That is, rather than pointing to observable facts that support it, the Creationist/ID argument is based entirely on the following syllogism:

1. Evolution has not explained everything.
2. Therefore, evolution can not explain everything.
3. Therefore, evolution is wrong and there must be a supernatural force at work.

The premise is true enough. For instance, there is (I gather) a so-called "missing link" in the evolutionary chain between apes and humans. The problem with the syllogism comes in the second step: the leap of faith inherent in arguing that because science has not yet explained something, it never will be able to. Religion has made that gamble any number of times in history and it has lost every time. For instance, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his theory that the universe was not be geocentric, since it was inconceivable that the Creator might have placed the pinnacle -- indeed the purpose -- of his Creation on a fifth rate planet, orbiting a mediocre star, somewhere off on the edge of a very ordinary galaxy located amongst billions of other galaxies. Yet, the fact that the Church forced Galileo to recant did not end up making the geocentric theory true. It ended up, instead, providing one of the more famous embarrassments for the Church. (To its credit, the Catholic Church learned its lesson and today has no trouble embracing evolution, even of human beings. It simply insists that whatever the origins of man's body and mind may be, his soul is a gift from God: "Pius XII stressed this essential point: if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God". The American evangelicalism has yet to mature to this point.)

Second, there is nothing inconsistent between evolution and religious belief. At its most basic level, evolution says that biological change happens randomly and by chance and that the ruthless struggle for survival "selects" which changes will be preserved (for a time at least) and which will disappear. The scientific support for this explanation is overwhelming. Even more important, there is not one single fact known to man that is inconsistent with it. It has been proven with every bit as great a degree of certainty as has the theory that the earth is round and that it revolves around the Sun rather than vice versa. Yet, people -- 60% of them if you believe the polls -- resist. It is the randomness of this process that so bothers believers. They believe, as Einstein did at one point, that "God does not play dice with the Universe." But as Einstein himself ended up accepting in the end, if there is a God at all, then He does, in fact, do exactly that: he allows his creation to evolve by chance, confident, it would seem, that sooner or later chance plus natural selection will end up producing man (or whatever creature it is His ultimate goal to produce). Who among believers would deny to God the ability to use chance and randomness to achieve His ends (whatever they are)?

If "creationism" or "intelligent design" is to be taught in schools, then it should be taught in the same manner that one would teach the "theory" that sun is a burning chariot hauled across the sky by a team of horses driven by Apollo: i.e. as a myth used by people at one time to explain what to them appeared inexplicable.