Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (22 page)

For the faithful cannot embrace
that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which
the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Of course, more liberal theologians have rushed into the breach with some solutions. But in the end they're worse than the problem, for the solutions are so clearly contrived that they can hardly be taken seriously.

I won't describe these in detail, but they take several forms. The first tries to save the notion of the two “ancestors” of humanity by suggesting that the ancestors were cultural rather than genetic. This is the “federal headship” (or
Homo divinus
) model floated by several theologians and religious scientists. The biochemist Denis Alexander, emeritus director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University, explains:

According to this model
, God in his grace chose a couple of Neolithic farmers in the Near East, or maybe a community of farmers, to whom he chose to reveal himself in a special way, calling them into fellowship with himself—so that they might know Him as the one true personal God. From now on there would be a community who would know that they were called to a holy enterprise, called to be stewards of God's creation, called to know God personally. It is for this reason that this first couple, or community, have been termed
Homo divinus,
the divine humans, those who know the one true God, the Adam and Eve of the Genesis account.

You can guess the rest. One of the federal heads disobeyed God's commands, and that sin spread, like a virulent disease, to everyone else. Apparently the spread was not “vertical” (transmitted from parents to offspring) but “horizontal,” like a virus passed between unrelated people. But this replaces one set of problems with another, for by trying to save some bits of scripture, it rejects others—with no good rationale. Catholic doctrine, for instance, maintains not only the existence of just two ancestors, but a vertical inheritance of sin, as if it were carried in the genes. Alexander's model is clearly motivated not by data but by the need to retain the credibility of a
critical religious belief. In fact, to call it a “model” is an offense to science; it is instead an untestable, made-up story.

Another version, the “retelling model” of Alexander, gives up the attempt to base Adam and Eve on historical figures. Instead, it's said, the evolving human lineage became aware of God, but then for some reason unanimously rejected his presence and law. But this again leaves the origin of “sin” (whatever it may be) unexplained, and as Alexander himself notes, this model “evacuates the narrative of any Near Eastern context, detaching the account from its Jewish roots.” Like the federal headship model, it takes Genesis as an allegory but the Gospels as literal truth.

The most “sophisticated” attempt
to reconcile Adam and Eve with the data of genetics is that of the biblical scholar Peter Enns, an evangelical Christian.
Accepting that the Bible was a historical document assembled by humans yet inspired by God, Enns simply sees Genesis as a metaphor for the creation of the Israelite nation. But he accepts a literal Crucifixion and Resurrection, as well as their redemptive effects.

As for Paul's absolute conviction that Adam and Eve existed, Enns hypothesizes that Paul was simply casting about for an Old Testament explanation for the decline of humanity that arrived with sin. As Enns argues, “
One can believe that Paul is correct
theologically and historically about the problem of sin and death and the solution that God provides in Christ without also needing to believe that his assumptions about human origins are accurate. The need for a savior does not require a historical Adam.”
While that may appeal to more liberal sentiments, it's still a made-up reconciliation that faces big theological problems. If “sin” is merely our evolved tendency to be greedy, aggressive, and xenophobic, then God, who either foresaw or directed evolution, becomes responsible for sin. That's unpalatable to theists who believe that sin results from our free choice.

And Paul—as well as many famous theologians—is seen as wrong in some of his beliefs but right about others. That raises the cherry-picking problem, which becomes obvious when Enns argues that “
Paul's handling of Adam
 . . . is appropriating an ancient story to address pressing concerns of the moment. That has no bearing whatsoever on the truth of the gospel.”
But it surely does, for the “truth of the gospel”—presumably the divinity,
Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus—is supported by precisely the same kind of evidence that once buttressed Adam and Eve. On what basis can we reject one story but accept the other? Like other attempts to save Christian doctrine by doing an end run around science, even the most “sophisticated” attempt seems like a desperation move fueled by confirmation bias.

Mormonism and the Origin of Native Americans

A linchpin of Mormon theology is that the ancestors of Native Americans were in fact Israelites of four tribes—Nephites, Lamanites, Mulekites, and Jaredites—who came to the New World from the Middle East about twenty-six hundred years ago. A thousand years later, the Nephites and Lamanites clashed, and the sole surviving Nephite, Moroni, helped write the Book of Mormon, burying it in upstate New York as a collection of golden plates. Later, taking the form of an angel, Moroni pointed it out to Joseph Smith in 1827. The Book of Mormon clearly states that North America was devoid of people when the Middle Eastern tribes arrived, for they “
possess[ed] this land among themselves
.”
Generations of Mormon teachings and prophecies affirm that North America was occupied solely by these immigrants and their descendants.

But as with the existence of Adam and Eve
, both genetics and archaeology have shown that the Middle Eastern origin of Native Americans is a fiction. The data are clear: Native Americans, like all native peoples in the New World, descended from East Asians—Siberians—who migrated over the Bering Strait roughly fifteen thousand (not twenty-six hundred) years ago. The estimate comes from the dating of settlements, from other archaeological and linguistic studies (Native American languages, for instance, bear no trace of Hebrew), and, most important, from genetics, which shows a close affinity between the ancestries of East Asians and Native Americans.

Mormon theologians have tried the usual evasions to reconcile their scripture with science. They have, for instance, declared that the migrants from the Middle East landed in Central America. That, however, doesn't work, because Central Americans are also closely related to East Asians. Some apologists claim that the DNA from Middle Eastern ancestors was lost through interbreeding with Native Americans already living in North
America. But no such squatters are mentioned in the Book of Mormon. In the end, the church simply punts, stating that “
DNA studies cannot be used
decisively to either affirm or reject the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”
To do otherwise would be to admit that the Book of Mormon was false, at least in an important claim. But of course had we found substantial Middle Eastern DNA in Native Americans, the church would use that as strong support for their dogma. This is the usual double standard in using evidence—accept it if it supports your preconceptions, reject it if it doesn't—that distinguishes science from religion.

Theistic Evolution

On twelve occasions since 1982
, the Gallup organization has polled Americans on their beliefs about human evolution. Those surveyed are given three statements and asked which comes closest to their view. The first is this: “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” This is the way scientists see evolution, as a purely naturalistic process, although we don't use terms like “advanced” because all living species have lineages of the same length, extending back to the first species. The second alternative is unadulterated biblical young-Earth creationism: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” The third choice is “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” (Historically, about 6 percent of those surveyed reject all three answers.)

The last alternative, evolution guided by God, is called “theistic evolution.” Although roughly 40 percent of Americans choose the pure creationist answer, between two-thirds and three-quarters of those who
do
accept human evolution prefer the God-guided version to the purely naturalistic one. Such theistic evolution infuses religion into science.

Theistic evolution is not just the belief of most science-friendly Americans, but has also been accepted by the Catholic Church, often said to be supportive of “Darwinian” evolution. Yet Darwin never saw a role for God in his theory, and neither do modern scientists. Nevertheless, human evolution, says the church, involved a deliberate intervention by God, who inserted
something unique among animals—a soul—somewhere in our lineage. Pope Pius XII made this explicit in his encyclical
Humani Generis:

The Teaching Authority of the Church
does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

There is, of course, no empirical evidence for either a soul or its unique presence in humans. It's a superfluous religious add-on to a scientific theory.

Now, it's not so much evolution as a whole that bothers religious people, but
human
evolution. Nobody seems to care whether squirrels or ferns evolved via a purely unguided and naturalistic process. Christians and Jews, however, see
Homo sapiens
as “made” in God's image. And while the meaning of that statement has been debated for millennia, it clearly sets us apart from other creatures.

Naturalistic evolution hits these views right in the solar plexus. To an evolutionary biologist, our lineage is simply one twig among millions on the great bush of life. Granted, we have special features like culture and a big brain, but we also lack features that make other species “special” (we can't photosynthesize, fly on our own, or hibernate). And there's nothing about our big brains—the source of our rationality, intelligence, and culture—that isn't consistent with natural selection acting on social primates.

Notice that I said
natural
selection. Darwin undoubtedly used that term not only to distinguish it from the
artificial
selection practiced by animal and plant breeders, but also to emphasize that the process, which he saw as his most novel idea, was purely natural
.

Besides dethroning us as nature's pinnacle, evolutionary biology discomfits us in other ways. It implies that because species change purely as a result of random mutations having different abilities to propagate, there's no need for a creator.
And because life itself
probably arose via a similar process of “chemical selection” among collections of molecules, there is probably no
sharp distinction between the
origin
of life and the
evolution
of life.
Not only that, but natural selection and extinction seem like cruel and wasteful ways to “create” a world, producing additional headaches for theologians forced to explain why a loving God would create in such a way.

The blows keep coming. Evolution disproves critical parts of both the Bible and the Quran—the creation stories—yet millions have been unable to abandon them. Finally, and perhaps most important, evolution means that human morality, rather than being imbued in us by God, somehow arose via natural processes: biological evolution involving natural selection on behavior, and cultural evolution involving our ability to calculate, foresee, and prefer the results of different behaviors.

It's no wonder, then, that theistic evolution is centered squarely on the evolution of our own species
.
When John Scopes was convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 in the famous “Monkey Trial,” it was not for teaching evolution, but for teaching
human
evolution, for only the latter violated Tennessee's Butler Act. In Muslim countries, and even Western ones, Islamic schools may teach evolution, but nearly always with the caveat that humans were created specially by Allah.

Human exceptionalism was advocated even by Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection. Observing that the brains of modern humans can do far more things than could possibly have been favored by natural selection (music, playing chess, doing complex mathematics), Wallace concluded that “
in [a modern human's] large and well-developed brain
he possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements—an organ that seems prepared in advance, only to be fully utilized as he progresses in civilization.” Because evolution can't bestow individuals with features that become useful only in the future, Wallace concluded that the human brain could never have evolved by natural selection. He concluded that “the brain of prehistoric and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power, distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.”
Here Wallace grants a single trait in nature—the human brain—an exception from pure naturalism. Because he was not conventionally religious, this view probably came from his immersion in mysticism and spiritualism that began several years earlier.