Why Darwin Matters (19 page)

Pain and evil in the human world made Darwin doubt even more. “That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes,” he wrote to a correspondent. “Some have attempted to explain this with reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and they often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.” Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? “The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.”
²
The death of Darwin’s beloved ten-year-old daughter Anne put an end to whatever confidence he had in God’s benevolence, omniscience, and even existence. According to the great Darwin scholar and biographer Janet Browne, “this death was the formal beginning of Darwin’s conscious dissociation from believing in the traditional figure of God.”
³

Throughout most of his professional career, however, Darwin eschewed the God question entirely, choosing instead to focus on his scientific studies. Toward the end of his life Darwin received many letters querying him on his religious attitudes. His long silence gave way to a few revelations. In one letter dated 1879, just three years before he died, Darwin finally expressed his beliefs: “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”
⁴

A year later, Darwin clarified his thinking. The British socialist Edward Aveling had compiled a volume entitled
The Student’s Darwin
, on the implications of evolutionary theory for religious thought, and Aveling wanted Darwin’s endorsement. The book had a militant antireligious flavor and unabashedly radical atheist tone
that Darwin disdained, and he declined the request, elaborating his reason with his usual flair for quotable maxims: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science.” He then appended an additional hint about a personal motive, noting “I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.”
⁵
Darwin’s wife Emma was a deeply religious woman, and out of respect for her he kept the public side of his religious skepticism in check, an admirable feat of self-discipline by a man of high moral character.

Was Darwin’s approach to science and religion healthy? Was it logical? Is it possible to reconcile religious belief with scientific thinking? The answer one gives to these questions determines the attitude one takes to the relationship of science and religion: conflict, harmony, or indifference. And if we could find some level at which agreement could be reached between all sides of the debate, much of the angst and rancor in today’s culture over this divide would subside. I have made such an attempt in the form of a three-tiered model of the possible relationships between science and religion.

1.
The Conflicting-Worlds Model
. This “warfare” approach holds that science and religion are mutually exclusive ways of knowing,
one being right and the other wrong. In this view, the findings of modern science are always a potential threat to one’s faith and thus they must be carefully vetted against religious truths before acceptance; likewise, the tenets of religion are always a potential threat to science and thus they must be viewed with skepticism and cynicism. The conflicting-worlds model is embraced by extremists on both sides of the divide. Young Earth creationists, who insist that all scientific findings must correlate perfectly with their own (often literal) reading of Genesis, retain a suspicious hostility toward science, while militant atheists cannot imagine how religion could contribute anything positive to human knowledge or social interaction.
⁶

2.
The Same-World Model
. More conciliatory in its nature than the conflicting-worlds model, this position holds that science and religion are two ways of examining the same reality, and that as science progresses to a deeper understanding of the natural world, it will reveal that many ancient religious tenets are true. The same-world model is embraced by many mainstream theologians, religious leaders, and believing scientists who prefer a more flexible cognitive approach to science and religion, allowing them to read biblical passages metaphorically. For example, the “days” in the Genesis creation story may represent geological epochs of great length. The theology of Pope John Paul II as well as that of the Dalai Lama fall squarely into this tier, as they argue that science and religion can work together toward the same goal of understanding the universe and our place in it.
⁷

3.
The Separate-Worlds Model
. On this tier, science and religion are neither in conflict nor in agreement but are, in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, “nonoverlapping magisteria” (NOMA).
⁸
Before science began its ascent four centuries ago, religion provided an explanation for the natural world in the form of various cosmogony
myths. Since the scientific revolution, however, science has taken over the job of explaining the natural world, making obsolete ancient religious sagas of origins and creation. Yet religion thrives in the modern age because it still serves a useful purpose as an institution for social cohesiveness and as a guide to finding personal meaning and spirituality, a function that science has left largely untouched.

Can the conflicting-worlds and same-world models of science and religion work? Frankly, they cannot. To accept science requires accepting one of its central tenets: that a claim must be
falsifiable;
that is, there has to be some way to test the claim and show that it is false. If it cannot be proven false, then it cannot be proven true. The philosopher of science Karl Popper made the definitive statement on the matter: “I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.”
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On the question of God’s existence, what criteria for falsifiability could we establish? If we want to make God’s existence a scientific question that can be decided by empirical evidence, we would need to establish an operational definition of God and quantifiable criteria by which we can arrive at a testable conclusion of the deity’s existence. In experimental science we begin by accepting the “null hypothesis” that whatever is being tested does not exist or has no effect. If the evidence is significant, we may “reject the null
hypothesis” and conclude that our subject does exist or has some effect. In subjecting God to experimental science, we would have to begin by accepting the null hypothesis that He does not exist, and then assess the evidence to determine if it is significant enough to reject the null hypothesis.

The claim that intercessory prayer (in which one prays for God to intercede) can effect healing, for example, is testable. If true, it would imply that the deity is acting in our world in some measurable fashion. However, the handful of studies that have found significant differences between the prayed-for experimental group and the not-prayed-for control group have had deep methodological flaws (such as not controlling for age, socioeconomic class, or condition of health before entering the hospital, all of which influence recovery).
¹⁰
To date, strictly controlled prayer studies, as a testable hypothesis of God’s divine providence, have failed the test.

The numerous other claims by Intelligent Design creationists that science supports belief in God also fall dramatically short of the empirical standards of science. Based on these results, were we to take a strictly scientific approach to the God question, we would have to reject the God hypothesis. Are theists willing to go this far when they attempt to use science to support their religious tenets? I doubt it, which is precisely why the separate-worlds model is the best approach to take for theists.

Darwin’s separate-worlds approach to science and religion worked well for him in both his home and his culture, but it still leaves open the deeper question about whether one can logically believe in God and accept evolution. That is, if carried to its logical conclusion,
does the theory of evolution preclude belief in God? This is where the epistemological rubber meets the hypothetical road.

Belief in God depends on religious faith. Acceptance of evolution depends on empirical evidence. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile and combine religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity; for any question about nature, if your answer is “God did it,” a scientist will ask such questions as “
How
did God do it? What
forces
did God use? What forms of
matter
and
energy
were employed in the creation process?” The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena. What place, then, for God?

One could logically argue that God
is
the laws and forces of nature, but this is pantheism and not the type of personal God in which most people profess belief. One could also reasonably argue that God created the universe and life using the laws and forces of nature, but it leaves us with those nagging scientific questions:
Which
laws and forces were used, and in
what manner
were they used? For that matter,
how
did God create the laws and forces of nature? A scientist would be curious to know God’s recipe for, say, gravity. Likewise, it is a legitimate scientific question to ask:
What
made God, and
how
was God created? How do you make an omniscient and omnipotent being?

The theists’ response to this line of inquiry is that God needs no cause—God is a causeless cause, an unmoved mover. But why should God not need a cause? If the universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be, God must be within the universe or
be
the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be caused, and thus the regress to a first cause leads back to the question: What caused God? And if God does not need to be caused, then
clearly not everything in the universe needs to be caused. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own first cause and the Big Bang was the prime mover.

The problem with all of these attempts at blending science and religion may be found in a single principle: A
is
A. Or:
Reality is real
. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is a violation of A
is
A. It is an attempt to make reality unreal. A cannot also be
non
-A. Nature cannot also be non-nature. Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism.

Pope John Paul II, whose theology was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, two of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy and theology, understood this fundamental principle and argued the point in his 1996 encyclical,
Truth Cannot Contradict Truth
. The only way science and religion can be reconciled, particularly in the context of the evolution-creation controversy, is if body and soul are ontologically distinct; that is, if they exist in different realities. Evolution created the body, God created the soul:

With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say. Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again, of aesthetic and religious experience, falls within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans.
¹¹

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A
non
-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. Thus, the most logically coherent argument for theists is that
God is outside time and space;
that is, God is beyond nature—super nature, or supernatural—and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. God is beyond the dominion of science, and science is outside the realm of God.