Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on Feb. 12 coincided with the 150th anniversary of his most famous publication, On the Origin of Species. As findings in genetics, paleontology and geology have caused the scientific community worldwide to unanimously accept Darwin’s explanation for the origin of species.
Yet United States citizens reject the Darwinian account of evolution.
Most Americans profess belief in God and many are regular churchgoers. Meanwhile, no other nation has produced so many Nobel laureates in the sciences, and American universities house some of the world’s best research facilities. Thus this conflict between faith and reason in the American psyche is puzzling.
As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII argued that the plausibility of the common origins of all species does not conflict with the Catholic faith. Pius remained ambivalent towards Darwinism, but in his time science had not yet advanced to fully support modern evolutionary theory. Not surprisingly, therefore, Pope John Paul II made headlines in 1996 by saying that evolution is “beyond hypothesis.”
Meanwhile, many prominent Protestant thinkers, such as C.S. Lewis and Rowan Williams, opposed creationism, and most Jewish theologians and a growing number of Muslim ones accept Darwinian evolution.
Perhaps Americans’ reluctance to embrace evolution results from the aggressive anti-religious propaganda spread by certain natural scientists, most notably Richard Dawkins. Yet a reading of “The God Delusion” makes clear that Dawkins, while an outstanding zoologist, is neither a philosopher nor a theologian.
Natural sciences are intended to describe the physical, tangible world. They tell us nothing about what behaviors are ethically acceptable. That is the purpose of philosophy and theology. Therefore, evolution is equally compatible with Abrahamic religious notions and with materialist atheism or agnosticism.
As early as the fifth century, St. Augustine warned his fellow Christians that Genesis must not be interpreted as an empirically verifiable work of history or science. Otherwise, Christianity will be ridiculed by the pagans.
St. Augustine’s words are relevant today as well, a millennium and a half later. In a time when human rights and ethics are subordinated to calculating and primitive consumerism, religious voices are more necessary than ever before.
Espousing pseudoscientific ideas thus marginalizes such potential voices. Copernicus, Galileo, Pasteur and Planck were all devout Christians.
It would be tragic if legacy of searching out truth about the physical universe to decipher God’s mind was destroyed by the particularly pious and scientifically advanced people of America.