July 21, 2006
Dummies for Darwin Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:20 PM EST Well, I think the world is in a hell of a state when John Steele Gordon agrees with Joshua Zeitz and Ellen Feldman agrees with me.
I don’t have much to add to Ms. Feldman’s excellent discussion of the Scopes trial and its image in the popular imagination. I’ve never seen the movie of Inherit the Wind, but we did read the play in my high school English class, and you can’t truly appreciate a text of that richness and depth until you’ve heard it read haltingly out loud by a bunch of bored teenagers.
The only comment I have on creationism is that as a private belief system—not something you impose on others, but something you believe yourself—creationism is no more irrational than evolutionism. It is non-rational—that is, it is founded not on reason but on revelation. But it is not irrational, because once you accept that revelation, what follows it is not contrary to logic.
Here’s what I mean. William Jennings Bryan’s version of creationism might be quickly summed up as follows: I know that God created the world and all its creatures, because the Bible tells me so. That’s an unquestionable fact. Everything else is just a detail, and anything that seems to conflict with the basic premise is not my concern. God is a lot smarter than me, and just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
This requires a considerable measure of faith, but to be honest, so does most people’s belief in evolution, including my own. I, Fred Schwarz, accept the theory of evolution completely and without reservation. That said, I’ll admit that my understanding of what is meant by “the theory of evolution” is quite hazy. It’s easy to imagine quadrupeds in prehistoric Africa competing for high-hanging fruit, and the ones with the longest necks survive the best, and that’s how we got giraffes. Neanderthals who could talk made better warriors than ones who could only grunt, and that’s why we have so many lawyers. That sort of evolution is easy to understand.
But how, for example, did sexual reproduction come about? Did all the organs and the plumbing and the internal chemical balance required for it spring into existence overnight, and species that had been reproducing asexually suddenly started shaving and buying breath mints? Sexual reproduction does seem to not fit the step-by-step model of evolution, and it’s hard for a layman like me to see how any sort of haphazard process could result in it.
And that’s the whole point. I don’t go from there to saying, “Sexual reproduction does not fit my understanding of evolution, so therefore it must be the result of intelligent design” (intelligent perhaps, but far from perfect, as any woman will tell you). Instead I think, “I’m sure the evolutionists have an explanation for this, or at least they have some theories, and even if they don’t, there must be a scientific answer that has yet to be discovered.” I have no idea what such an explanation might be like, and I don’t have the time or inclination to investigate the question myself. But I’m sure that an explanation exists—because I have faith in evolution.
To me, this is no different from a creationist saying, “I believe in creation, and when something doesn’t seem to fit that model, it doesn’t shake my faith; it’s merely one of many things in this world that I don’t understand.” True, either of us could try to resolve the whole mess by making a detailed study of paleontology, evolutionary genetics, archaeometry, and a host of other subjects. But the creationist has to feed his family, and I have half a dozen blog entries to catch up on, so neither of us has the time. Instead, we choose what to believe in based on what we know and have experienced, and we leave the details to the experts.
I’m sure any well-read creationist could rip me to shreds in a debate, if I were so foolish as to try to defend evolution. He would bring up a bunch of anomalies and unexplained events and challenge me to defend them, and I would keep clearing my throat and nervously taking sips of water, and finally I would have to admit that I didn’t know what I was talking about. This doesn’t mean that creationism is right and evolutionism is wrong—just that I personally don’t know enough about evolution to explain or defend it in any detail.
So, to repeat: As a private belief system, creationism is not irrational. I don’t think creationists are crazy or stupid or ignorant, just that their beliefs are different from mine. Now, if someone wants to start teaching creationism in public schools, they’ll have to prove that it can be deduced from something other than religious doctrine. That’s a much higher standard, one that I don’t think can be met. But creationists are not ignoring reality or shutting their eyes to the truth; all they’re doing is choosing a set of basic beliefs, sticking to them, and leaving the fine points to those with the leisure to consider them. And that’s something all of us do all the time.
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