The November 28, 2005 issue of Newsweek featured a piece about Charles Darwin entitled, “Evolution of a Scientist.” It was written by Jerry Adler, who quite eloquently defined Darwin’s personal conflicts over Creationism versus Evolution in the short space afforded him.
Each decade there is some resurgence of interest in this highly charged contest for the faith of Man. This decade is no different. So I get to share my thoughts again, even though I’m not as eloquent as Mr. Adler.
I applaud Darwin’s work and I sympathize with his moral dilemma. Evolution is a marvelous theory and not at all out of step with Creationism (or, in politically correct terms, the theory of Intelligent Design). Many contemporary theologians tolerate or embrace Evolution as constituent to Intelligent Design and have little problem seeing where the two schools of thought dovetail. People of faith can more easily marry Evolution to their religions than atheists can marry gods to Natural Selection. Since I’m a person of faith, I blame the ongoing debate on the atheists. That’s my natural selection.
I’ve always considered Evolution to be the atheists’ religion, which means that they have the same potholed path to eternity that the rest of us do. By adhering to the notion that Darwin’s work proved there was no God, they became their own conundrum. They are so busy convincing the world that there’s no Intelligence worth worshipping that they fail to see their own worship of a theory that screams, “Yes, yes, there is an orderly process going on.”
I imagine that you’d have to have balls of steel to be an atheist…by the time you found out you were wrong, there’d be no way to apologize.
Back to Darwinism…
I’m a human being and I don’t understand how I operate. I’m not going to pretend to understand how the universe operates. As orderly as our world has marched from the Big Bang, there’s still no rational explanation for what led up to it. There’s still no rational explanation for why human beings believe they are best-suited to understand it. The evidence of our superiority is not debated — we have opposable thumbs, bigger brains, greater adaptability, incredible ambition, and the Bible tells us so — but does it mean we understand the universe any better than a dung beetle understands it? How will we ever know?
The debate rages, methinks, because we yearn to define intelligence but lack the tools to do so.
We humans think of intelligence as a sentient trait. We do not apply the term directly to non-sentient things. Being the Biblical namers we are, we feel it’s our duty to stick a label on everything…even the intelligence that runs our universe. We’ve come up with all sorts of names for it and we’ve come up with all sorts of theories and expositories for why it works, but since we’re incapable of moving outside the limits of our own intelligence we can only explain it at our more primal level.
Faith, by contrast, is an openness to things beyond our comprehension. For those of us who have faiths, it is pretty clear-cut stuff: the Intelligence didn’t ask us to comprehend It, It told us to obey the rules.
Evolution, therefore, is working as intended.
It’s a pity Darwin was so panicked about his dogma that he could not see the brilliance of his own theory. It’s also a pity that Christians didn’t have better Bible translators through the centuries. I suspect the debate will not end until the world passes away or until someone with a more startling theory writes a book. I can assure you that it won’t be me. I like letting the Intelligence (in my case, God) take care of all the little details like solar wind so that I can concentrate on the more mundane task of finding things to write about in my blog.
