Living with Unfinished Conflict Between Religion and Science

I’d like to take a step back here and ask what may seem to be a stupid pair of questions. Why are we, where issues of science and religion are concerned, writing mainly about evolution? And does the lack of historical perspective make this a more troubling and divisive issue for us than it needs to be? 

The perspective available to us is quite deep. Heliocentrism was once seen as an attack on faith, and perhaps as a more threatening attack than evolutionary theory appears now; not human origins and purpose but the origins and purpose of the whole universe inevitably came into question. The Biblical creation story, to start with, doesn’t work so well if our planet is a sort of footnote in a solar system, and if that solar system is just a speck in a galaxy. Christianity got over this intellectual difficulty, or rather didn’t even fully experience it. Church authorities digested the problem over time and quietly allowed for it in their doctrine. Luckily for them, the scientific debate was over before most ordinary people even knew of it.

In my own field of ancient languages, the challenge of faith by science is more or less passé as a matter of public controversy (though not of course as a source of pain and conflict within individuals and religious communities). But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the research and publications were a seemingly endless source of passionate debate. That’s over now. Granted, certain believers and certain institutions still reject philology in connection to the Bible, but those views aren’t indulged in a respectable divinity school or seminary, nor do they take up much space in the media or public life.

Tellingly, though, the terms by which adepts try to guide religious young people’s adaptation to the two fields are similar. Here is the physical evidence (in the case of philology, that’s the manuscripts with their numerous variants—they can’t all be the inerrant word of God, can they?); here is a theoretical reconstruction of the evidence’s interrelationships (for the Bible, that’s an account of which manuscripts seem to have come from which, if only through now-lost intermediaries—no hard facts here, but some very convincing arguments).

Further, here are some proponents of this science who don’t consider it a threat to faith, and here are some who think otherwise. You yourself may or may not be able to integrate the science into your religion; but it isn’t a socially acceptable option for you to turn on the science’s purveyors and treat as criminals people who, as researchers and teachers, can’t in good conscience modify their testimony about their knowledge and experience; and who, in expressing whatever religious or nonreligious views they have, do only what they’re entitled to. The theological problems the science suggests are arresting and important, but these problems—it’s been widely agreed for a long time, an agreement strongly in the interest of the civilization Christianity do so much to form—don’t lie at the door of an apparatus criticus or a manuscript stemma.

I’m confident that, partly by these means, the controversy over evolution will eventually go the same way as the controversy over the Bible’s origins. But I also think that, in the meantime, it’s wholesome to be asking why we’re so preoccupied, right now, about this particular thing. As it happens, I have an insider’s view of one side, going way back. As a biology professor’s daughter, I heard little about creationism until the mid-seventies, and then it seemed to be everywhere, in the new form of “creation science.” In the stacks of Bowling Green State University, for example, where my father taught, I encountered Creation Science Quarterly, with its articles looking a lot like the ones in periodicals where my father published, with graphs and charts and long stacks of bibliography.

My father was incensed to learn of Creation Science Quarterly and descended on the library administration, demanding to know why public money had been spent on the subscription, or, if the subscription were a gift, why it had been accepted. He was outraged at the disingenuousness of claims that “creation science” was an objective, spontaneous, and sincere critique of modern biology, and his work fighting the unregulated dumping of toxic waste revealed ways in which the challenge to peer-reviewed science could back up terrible abuses.

For example, after he retired to Pennsylvania with my mother, he found that the state legislature there had actually passed a bill reclassifying a number of known, dangerous toxins as “beneficial,” so that they could be sprayed straight onto the ground, even in a flood plain. As in many other instances, the damage done to the credibility of the life sciences through the undermining of evolutionary theory in the media and schools proved a candy story with pre-smashed windows for corporate and government hooligans. They no longer had to justify their actions on scientific grounds but could do the opposite, denigrate scientific claims per se, and this was easy when they relied on existing prejudices. Cadmium in your drinking water won’t hurt you, because this man who says it will also believes in evolution; he’s an elitist, antireligious scientist. (My father, for the record, was a devout Methodist, who taught Sunday School for decades.)

But a daughter’s affection doesn’t blind me to another view of the evolution controversy, a view by which the role of scientists looks less heroic. All of my relatives had been rural and poorly educated until the mid-20^th century. My father did by far the most with his G.I. Bill financing, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a tenured professor, and he was excessively proud of this—and more than a little impatient with those who weren’t interested in pursuing post-graduate degrees, or who wouldn’t listen to his opinions on public policy. As the economy went its sad way and it became less and less easy, even for people who were keen, to get an advanced education, the ideological dividing lines in my extended family became much sharper. One member, my brother, is now a tenured Ivy League anthropologist; and one nuclear family has supplied several volunteers to the Creation Science Museum in Kentucky. There’s a clash-of-cultures element here, an emotional one involving, on both sides, assertions of “You can’t take intellectual life away from us and do whatever you want with it!” And it’s an intransigent conflict partly because almost all the parties are, in this state of American society, permanently set where they are and have less and less contact outside that milieu.

I hope I don’t cause offense (especially not to my family) by going into personal matters here. I’d just like to make the case that the evolution controversy is a phenomenon of its time, a time of environmental stress and increasing social division; much as the controversy on the origins of the Bible was fueled by rapidly increasing literacy. To think of a wound that we can trust God to heal in the fullness of time might be better than insisting that we, with our mere human abilities, can somehow work everything out and soon reach a state where there isn’t considerable distress and dissonance over the issue. In fact, as I’ve indicated, distress and dissonance are part of the natural process, and trying to make them go away won’t help and may well do harm.