More Reasonable Mouth-Foaming on Evolution

Courtesy of Jacob Weisberg for Slate.com in "Evolution vs. Religion - Quit pretending they're compatible."

Well, Mr. Weisberg is all worked up! Apparently, he's decided that Evolution and Religion can't co-exist--so we all better stop acting ignorant and Foolish and start accepting Evolution as Reasonable. He has the usual sneers to make toward "Red State" folk and a babble of Non-Sequitors that he calls statistics to back him up. In the end, however, all he has is a wet stain on the carpet. Time to get the broom.

Among his slobberings:

But let's be serious: Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well). Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States, 63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison, 24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent believed in evolution. You can believe in both—but not many people do.

So what? All this proves is that the ruptured dialectic between Reason and Faith--first ruptured, in fact, by Martin Luther's protest--has led to many people needlessly choosing sides. It doesn't prove an inherent imcompatibility between Evolutionary theory and "all forms of religious beliefs". It doesn't even prove that it "undercuts the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions." Mr. Weisberg's use of non-sequitors has already hamstrung his argument. However, that won't stop him from trying:

That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries.

Actually, the mystery of suffering and evil is what "destroyed" Darwin's Faith:

Darwin is accurately depicted as a loving family man who experienced a crisis of faith following the death of his daughter Annie. The problem of evil genuinely troubled the divinity school trained Darwin and can reasonably be argued to have impacted his view of nature and God.

Funny, that mystery has had that effect on people since long before Darwin's time. Nice try, though, Mr. Weisberg. Play again?

n reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was "utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God." (The passage is quoted in Daniel C. Dennett's superb book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.)

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, was saying nothing very different when he argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on July 7 that random evolution can't be harmonized with Catholic doctrine.

The Reasonable Mr. Weisberg evidently did not get the memo: Cardinal Schonborn is "making a philosophical point, not a scientific one."

"I agree completely with what was formulated in number 69 of 'Stewardship and Communion.' And I feel confirmed in my convictions by this document. In any case I think it is necessary to cite the whole paragraph 69, when it states: 'In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science.'

"For Catholic thinking," Schönborn told me, "it was clear from Pius XII's encyclical, Humani generis, that evolutionary theory can be valid to understand certain mechanisms, but it can never be seen or accepted as a holistic model to explain the existence of life."

Schönborn's point thus seems to be that in "absolute" form, meaning as a "holistic model" that would exclude design as a metaphysical matter, "evolutionism" turns into a philosophy that parts company with Christianity.

Mr. Weisberg's efforts to push all religious believers into the fundamentalist clock-turners box he wants us in suffers from reality. Catholics simply aren't biblical literalists or scriptural fundamentalists. We don't believe in sola scriptura. Of course, I understand Mr. Weisberg's confusion; to a Reasonable commentator such as himself, all of us religious Fools look alike. Besides, he's a MSM guy. He can't let a little thing like the truth get in the way of a hatchet-job for the Agenda. What would all the good Reasonable defenders of Great-I-Am think? Undaunted, our fearless columnist presses on:

But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does.

Sure it does--if the only provision for humanity's deepest needs remain an explaination for the physical facts of our existence. It's not as if every one starves for meaning and desires a lasting relationship of love. Perish the thought that science can't fill the void usually composed by metaphysics. After all, people are Reasonable, not Foolish. Unless they're from Red States.

Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence.

Ah, that desire for the empirical, as though mystery contains no truth. How arrogant. How sad. As for evidence: granted, Darwinian evolution explains a lot, and does seem to have a great deal of evidence that supports it. Then again, it appears to miss some important things as well:

...evolutionist and zoologist with the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry, University of Southampton (England), G. A. Kerkut writes the following conclusions in his Implications of Evolution. He refers to the seven basic assumptions of evolution and assesses their validity:

The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material.This is still just an assumption…. There is, however, little evidence in favor of biogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed…. It is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that biogenesis did occur….

The second assumption was that biogenesis occurred only once. This again is a matter for belief rather than proof….

The third assumption was that Viruses, Bacteria, Protozoa and the higher animals were all interrelated…. We have as yet no definite evidence about the way in which the Viruses, Bacteria or Protozoa are interrelated.

The fourth assumption was that the Protozoa gave rise to the Metazoa….Here again nothing definite is known….

The fifth assumption was that the various invertebrate phyla are
interrelated…. The evidence, then for the affinities of the majority of the invertebrates is tenuous and circumstantial; not the type of evidence that would allow one to form a verdict of definite relationships.

The sixth assumption [is] that the invertebrates gave rise to the vertebrates…. As Berrill states, “in a sense this account is science fiction.”

We are on somewhat stronger ground with the seventh assumption that the fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds, and mammals are interrelated. There is the fossil evidence to help us here, though many of the key transitions are not well-documented and we have as yet to obtain a satisfactory objective method of dating the fossils…. The evidence that we have at present is insufficient to allow us to decide the answer to these problems. 39

Kerkut goes on to state that, in essence, evolution has to be taken on pure faith: the evidence is circumstantial and much of it can be argued either way. He says of these initial assumptions for evolution, “The evidence is still lacking for most of them.” 40 Scientists may claim evolution is a demonstrated fact, and this may routinely be stated in student textbooks, but this is wrong. Creationists have pointed this out for decades. And not without good cause.

Uh oh. Still, Mr. Weisberg is persistent:

Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.

Funny, how scientists begin to doubt his assertions, but I digress. Mr. Weisberg apparently holds a pretty fundamentalist position regarding religion: either there's no God or there's an all-controlling God. As though God were some frustrated switchboard operator forever making connections, barking orders at an over-harried Gabriel and sputtering St. Peter. Has he considered that God may directly and indirectly cause phenomena? That in the case of the second, he allows processes to occur that then cause other phenomena to occur? How does the evidence of evolution discount this? It doesn't.

That's the problem that Mr. Weisberg has. He needs evolution to render religion obsolete. Unfortunately, scientists begin to suspect that evolution may not be the ironclad science its supporters have claimed that it is. Mr. Weisberg blames those scary and ignorant religious fundamentalists Fools for exerting an undue influence. He's determined to shut the door on that influence once and for all. All he's done, however, is coat the carpet with the frustrated druel of yet another mouth-foamer. His entire thesis rests on the ridiculous premise that somehow the science of evolution discredits the doctrines of religion. As I've said before, science and religion address different questions. They can't be used to discredit the other without harming the integrity of reason and Faith. Reader Doctor Thursday of GKC's Favourite offers some words of wisdom from his inspiration that address this issue:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain
earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think.
[GKC, Orthodoxy, CW1:237-238]

Unfortunately for him, Mr. Weisberg has proven G.K. Chesterton correct.