Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Today's Lunch Break:
The evangelical atheists and Mormon anti-evolutionists have joined forces
Those who know me well know that science is a subject very dear to my heart. When given the chance to speak at my graduation convocation for the College of Life Sciences a year ago, I spent my entire alloted time quoting Elder John Widtsoe and Dr. Francis Collins and gushing about the beauty of biology and evolution.
Those who know me well have probably also had me pestering them to check out The Mormon Organon, a blog written by my former BYU professor. The following excerpt is from his latest post, and is today's featured LB article.
(Note: I wanted to highlight certain sentences, but it is all so good I don't know where to begin. Just read it, even though your brain may want to bypass it since, you know, its indented.)
"The presence of God is found in inwardness, as Kierkegaard argued. God's grace is his willingness to be known. Directly. Not found as part of a scientific deduction. This is where the fear of evolution goes astray..."The naïve view that we must protect our belief in God from the physical facts of the universe (like evolution, big bang etc.) generates harm because it suggests that God can only work in our lives like we can--as a physical mechanic that intervenes in simple manipulations of matter (God took a handful of dust and made it into a body like an advanced claymation creature). No. Unlike the atheists, and those believers who have joined with them, in thinking the battle is fought in the physical world, I suggest that they look towards building a relationship with God in the inward reaches of their soul. That's where the atheists will find the evidence they seek, and the believers will find they don't need to protect our religion from the findings of science. And what they'll find once they discover (the atheists), or trust (the threatened believers), this relationship with God in inwardness, they'll find that God permeates the physical universe in ways they never expected."
I often think of a film from my molecular biology class. It was a documentary of college students from strong Bible-belt upbringings making their journey into the sciences, chronicling their early concerns and later passion for the study of evolution. In the film, it was evident that these students had decided—despite their parent's anger and vitriol towards the subject—that they didn't have to choose between science and faith. In the words of one of the students (I simply love this line): "God was bigger than the box I put him in."
One does more than miss out on the inspiring beauty and order of nature by dismissing science—they also unwittingly and arrogantly constrain God. Feeling empowered by their interpretation of scripture that was never meant to be a treatise on history, geology, or physics, they insist that He did things at a certain time in a certain way that fits within the rigid confines of their worldview—forgetting that God's ways are not our ways, nor his thought our thoughts.
God is bigger than that box. And yet, even after one moves past the dogma that God had to manually sculpt the first humans out of raw materials, it's probably still impossible to escape framing God in other ways. To a certain extent, that's OK. Boxes can serve a purpose, just as Newtonian physics is still taught as a precursor to quantum mechanics. But until we know the truth of all things, man-made boxes should not be the end-all for a God who is endless.
While evolution may seem a controversial subject, the reality is that evidence from the fossil record and genetics is mounting and undeniable. I for one do not believe that God is trying to trick us with all these clues in the natural world. I like this written response to my professor's article:
"...Could all things on and in the earth have been created how they are or placed on the earth as they are as a deception to try our faith? No! As Alma states, "all things denote there is a God". If this is true (and it came from the mouth of Alma), how can science disprove God or be at odds with the gospel? It can't and it's not! The evidence and history contained in the rocks and in the earth are the evidence and history of the hand of God. No member of the church should fear having their faith tried when they visit a natural history museum. On the contrary, it should be a faith building experience as I'm sure your BYU classes are as well."
Having a healthy attitude towards science does more than just help us spiritually. In writing this post, I am reminded of a New York Times essay I read last January:
"That endeavor [science], which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that...is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world."
I hope that it is true. And I hope that believers embrace these fruits of science openly and freely, instead of waging destructive culture wars. For while science and religion serve us in completely different ways—and while God's grace, in the words of my professor, is "not part of a scientific deduction"—I believe that science deserves an important place for every person of faith.
I've rambled, and I could go on much further. I hope, at the very least, I've convinced you that science is not just a lame subject in high school or a pork project that McCain twitters against. Expect to hear more on this subject from me in the future.
UPDATE: I just learned about The BioLogos Foundation, which was recently established by Dr. Francis Collins. I highly recommend a visit to the website, http://biologos.org.
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Lara:
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Comments
Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.I love the quote you shared "God was bigger than the box I put him in." Do you perhaps know where I can watch that clip you saw in molecular bio? I've never seen that video and would like to. Analogous to MLK, I dream of a day when science and religion can co-exist in peace. Unfortunately, on both sides there is misunderstanding resulting in fear.
I also liked steve's comment on the inwardness of God's evidence. Too often we wait to see him in the physical world. I want to start a post on people's internal evidence of God, but perhaps this would be too personal. We'll see.
Thankfully, I feel that more and more people are recognizing that they don't have to choose between science and faith...take the BioLogos foundation.
I worry about LDS church members, as there really isn't a forum (outside of the BYU Biology department) to share and discuss these ideas, and there are so many misconceptions throughout the Church about science (like evolution) and psuedoscience (like intelligent design).
I read the whole article, and it was very good. I very much agree with what he said, especially about atheists and theists alike missing the point by framing evidence of the existence or nonexistence of God in material terms. Revelation, through prophets and to each of us personally, is such a remarkable epistemology, and one which basically no one but us Mormons believes in (correct me if I'm wrong). This struck me during my recent internship. The scholar I worked for, a very intelligent man with good motives, as best I could tell, works in the areas of religion, philosophy, and social policy. Naturally, there were a lot of hot-button issues which he had has hands in, but whenever he appealed to religious ideals (which I totally consider fair game in public policy) in his writing, it always struck me as odd that he never delved into experiential or revelatory experiences for evidence, and seemed instead to keep to the material realm for his evidence. There are, of course, a lot of good reasons for this: seeking to come across as objective, keeping sacred personal experiences sacred, putting on a tough game face in your writing (it's an ideological jungle out there). But it surprised me a bit that he never referenced his own convincing experiences or revelation-based conviction of his church's teachings (I'm sure his church contains a healthy amount of truth) when arguing over a religiously-charged topic such as abortion, for instance. I had to keep reminding myself that I had the good fortune to receive a certain precious gift early on in my life. I think we in the Church are spoiled to have such extensive experience with and relative clarity on spiritual matters to be confident and comfortable enough to speak about them.
Some time, I would like to sit down with you, Elliott, and have you present your most compelling arguments for evolution as a sufficiently cohesive and convincing worldview. I promise I am more open-minded about it than perhaps some of my past comments may have suggested :-)
The brief answer - evolution is not a "worldview," at least not in the sense I think you're thinking of. (I wouldn't consider gravity, for instance, to be a worldview, just simply a natural phenomenon.) The theological ramifications of evolution are interesting to talk about, but gets away from the central question, which is really only answered by scientific inquiry. And all work in biology in the last century has added its support behind one general answer.
To be honest, when challenged to defend evolution, I feel like Alma when he said "Thou hast had signs enough!" I think for many scientists, it seems a bit ludicrous to have to defend evolution - which is why they were slow to react when the intelligent design camp began pushing their agenda, and why I personally prefer to blog about the complementarity between science/reason and faith/religion as if they are both given variables in the equation.
There is a LOT to be said in this area. Books could be, and have been, written to answer your question in scientific terms ("Origin of Species" is a good start).
And its not just a bunch of discrete snippets of evidence - its a large, growing body of evidence in multiple fields of science over centuries of study that all point to the same general conclusion. yes, there are holes in our understanding in some of the areas, but a scientist who claims that evolution is bogus would pretty much have to be in a crazy state of denial. The body of evidence is simply overwhelming.
And while some church leaders have expressed opinions against evolution (i don't have a problem with that; for example, Joseph Smith believed, like many people in his day, that there were Quaker-like people living on the moon - which shows that you can be totally wrong about something in the temporal world and still be a prophet of God), the Church is NOT against evolution. The BYU Biology department has one of the best evolutionary biology programs out there.
Whew. Long, unedited comment. I hope that helps...I look forward to our future discussion :)
But I ramble. I also look forward to having that future discussion :-)
"critics have sometimes alleged, against Darwin's theory of evolution, examples or arguments that, they claim, show that random processes cannot yield meaningful, organized outcomes. It is pointed out, for example, that monkeys, even a large number of them, randomly striking letters on a typewriter,would never write The Origin of Species, even if we allow for millions of years and many generations of monkeys pounding at typewriters. This argument is cogent against ant process that s random. But natural selection is not a random process. It is a process that promotes adaptation by selecting combinations that "make sense," that are useful to the organisms. Consider the following modification of the monkey example.
A process exists by which meaningful words are chosen whenever they appear on the typewriter; words such as "the," "sun," also," "rises," etc. These simple combinations of a few letters will occasionally arise. Assume further that any arising words are transferred to the keys of another typewriter. The random strikes of the monkeys on the keys of this second-level typewriter will on occasion, yield word combinations such as "the sun also rises." Whenever meaningful combinations of words (i.e. sentences) occur, they are transferred to the keys of a third-level typewriter, on which meaningful paragraphs that arise are selected and incorporated into the keys of a higher order typewriter, and so on. It is clear that pages and even chapters "making sense" would eventually be produced. Yet, the end product would not be an "irreducibly complex" text. In nature, it is the process of natural selection that "picks up" the combinations that "make sense." (Francisco J. Ayala; Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion, pp 61-62).
The topic you need to research is "irreducibly complex" (a fallacy by the way). Ayala addresses this very well in his book. It's a quick read (about 200 pages) and is well worth your time if you want to see evolution as a fact, one which does not conflict with religion in the least.