Why is it that today, some 150 years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, we're still fighting over evolution? The Catholic Church endorses evolution; every competent biologist relies on its theoretical framework; its mechanism and consequences are thoroughly documented.
"We" is too strong a word. In fact only a handful of people are attacking evolution—people who insist the Bible is actually a science book. For them the Word is most important—the Word from the Book, from God himself through the preacher's voice to the worshiper's ear. They dislike the word "species," preferring God's terminology: "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds."
Thus creationists in Clayton County (Georgia) once had a sticker put in every biology text (since removed). "This textbook," it begins, "may discuss evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans." That one sentence has three gross errors, or lies if you prefer:
- "controversial": Evolutionary theory is not controversial among scientists; it is a bedrock element of biology.
- "some scientists": Evolution is universally accepted by biologists as the basic engine of speciation.
- "origin of living things": Evolution explains how species arise from earlier species, not how life itself arose.
The Bible's view of biology is very different from the biologist's. There God presented every "living creature" to Adam, who then gave them names. These were freshly created, ideal plants and animals, as perfect and archetypal as Adam himself—none of them with navels.
In this world-view the idea, the word, the ideal Logos is primary. The variation we find in the world today is a sign of decay from that original perfection—noise in the signal. The different types of oranges, say, or the similar species of camels, are considered variants of a single original "kind." From this generality comes no further insight.
Contrast that sterile approach with the way Darwin opened his book: "When on board HMS 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species . . ."
Darwin, like every scientist of his time, began with the facts of the Earth, its rocks and its life forms. That evidence shows that every living thing is individual, and that a species is just a name for the average of all the individuals. This is a bedrock principle of paleontology as well. A fossil species is designated for convenience by a particular "type specimen" in a particular drawer in a particular collection.
That looks like what Adam did, in a way. However, the type is not an ideal but a label: just as essential to a fossil species is the degree of variation around the type. Noise IS a signal. At the center of geology (and all natural sciences) is the primacy of the actual rock, the Lithos—because the world is not Eden, and it presents us today, as it did Darwin, with real creatures. And instead of stopping fruitlessly with a list of "kinds," we can erect a tantalizing structure of genetic relationship that connects all life into one family tree.
For a good entry to the pleasures and puzzles of evolution, that is, science as it's really practiced, visit my Evolution Subject list. For much more depth see the About Atheism Guide site (I must disclaim that evolution has nothing logical to do with atheism). Or survey the frontiers of Darwinism in the writings of William Calvin, who gives life to Darwin's exclamation that with evolution, "how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!"
To arm yourself for political battles with Logos believers—people who feel a few vague words about Adam outweigh the work of two centuries of geologists and biologists—bookmark the National Center for Science Education. NCSE works to counter the misunderstandings, distortions and nonsense of creationists. Please consider supporting them. When creationists threaten the teaching of science, they threaten the basis of our very civilization.
PS: Finally a theologian has echoed what I believe. In the May–August 2003 NCSE Reports, Prof. John Haught of Georgetown University says that creationism debases the Bible: "Theologically, 'intelligent design' trivializes both science and the scriptures by bringing in God at the level of science. . . . The proponents of 'intelligent design' seem unable to separate evolution from evolutionary materialism. They throw the baby out with the bathwater, discarding good science and at the same time turning God into a tinkerer rather than a creator."
