Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why We Are Still Arguing About Darwin?

Contrast this on-going battle over Darwin with the fate of the other great scientific revolutions. The same Christian fundamentalists who argue that public school should teach creationism have no quarrel with the Copernican revolution. No one argues that public schools should be forced to teach the Ptolemaic system because it permits Joshua to make the sun stand still. Yet polls in the USA show that a large segment of American society continues to reject Darwin's scientific revolution.

The stumbling block to an acceptance of Darwin, I would like to submit, has little to do with Christian fundamentalism, but a whole lot to do with our intense visceral revulsion at monkeys and apes. This revulsion, while certainly not universal, is widely shared, and it is a psychological phenomenon that is completely independent of our ideas about the literal truth of the Bible.

Quite possibly. Invariably, one of the first "problems" anyone raises with respect to the notion of evolution is some variant on the theme of "I don't believe my great-to-the-however-many-times ancestor is a monkey!" Very few people open with some esoteric disquisition on the nature of the Krebs cycle or the blood clotting cascade. Indeed, in his "Thirty Years War", Rabbi Lapin blames evolution for the lack of respect today's secularized kids show their parents. The way he sees it, the difference is due to one critical point. The Bible teaches your parents are one generation closer to God. Evolution teaches your parents are one generation closer to monkeys. Which do you respect.

Yes, I think Lee Harris has a point.

1 comment:

Anthony said...

There are actually fairly sound intellectual reasons, which leaked a little bit, for the Protestant rejection of Darwin.

Darwinian theory had, by the time it was ready to start putting into school textbooks, given rise to "Social Darwinism", which led to all sorts of nastiness, in the name of overthrowing "outdated Christian morality".

So naturally, Protestant leaders decided to oppose this strange new morality at its very source. Which they thought was Darwin's theory. Insisting on the literal truth of the bible was an easy way to explain this to the hoi polloi, as many had no real need to believe otherwise.

You still hear echoes of this when you listen to anti-evolutionists blaming Darwinism for all sorts of social and political problems. To some extent, they're right.