Evolution vs. Religion

Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren. I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." The president seems to view the conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design as something like the debate over Social Security reform. But this is not a disagreement with two reasonable points of view, let alone two equally valid ones.

You are right. Evolution taught in conjunction with ID answers all questions, while Evolution taught from a Secular Humanist point of view requires you accept, on faith, that major leaps from one type of

Intelligent design, which asserts that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation, may be—as Bob Wright argues—creationism in camouflage. Or it may be—as William Saletan argues—a step in the creationist cave-in to evolution. But whatever it represents, intelligent design is a faith-based theory with no scientific validity or credibility.

The idea of religion must really scare Left Wing Liberals. The only thing ID and Creationism has in concept is God. Creationism says that the story in Genesis is literally true. ID says that God created everything, but that He may well have used Evolution as one of the tools, but that the parts of Evolution where you must accept on faith that they happened (like the jumps from one speciecs to another, where there is no fossil evidence to prove it, ID just says God made those jumps without using Evolution,

If Bush had said schools should give equal time to the view that the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, he'd have been laughed out of his office.

One can prove scientifically those are not true; you cannot prove scientifically the parts of Evolution that disagree with ID.

The difference with evolution is that a large majority of Americans reject what scientists regard as equally well supported: that we're here because of random mutation and natural selection. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject (2004), 45 percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago, while another 38 percent believe that God directed the process of evolution. Only 13 percent accept the prevailing scientific view of evolution as an unguided, random process.

So only 13 percent are definitely wrong.

Being right and yet so unpopular presents an interesting problem for evolutionists. Their theory has won over the world scientific community but very few of the citizens of red-state America, who decide what gets taught in their own public schools. How can followers of Darwin prevent the propagation of ignorance in places like Kansas, whose board of education just voted to rewrite its biology curriculum to do what President Bush suggests?

Many biologists believe the answer is to present evolution as less menacing to religious belief than it really is. In much the same way that intelligent-design advocates try to assert that a creator must be compatible with evolution in order to shoehorn God into science classrooms, evolutionists claim Darwin is compatible with religion in order to keep God out. Don't worry, they insist, there's no conflict between evolution and religion—they simply belong to different realms. Evolution should be taught in the secular classroom, along with other hypotheses that can be verified or falsified.

So you admit that Evolution is being falsified?

Intelligent design belongs in Sunday schools, with stuff that can't.

Orrin Judd blogged And then liberal intellectual elites wonder why so many of their fellow citizens hate them and think they're anti-American.

Anonymousliberal blogged I think Weisberg overstates his case a bit, particularly in that last sentence, but he has a point. There is a reason why people who understand evolutionary theory are more likely to be agnostic. Throughout most of human history, one simple bit of logic was enormously compelling. People looked around them and observed a world of extraordinary complexity; quite naturally they concluded that it must be the work of some creator. In the absence of any compelling alternative explanation, this was an entirely reasonable and proper inference to make, and it naturally drove people toward religion.

But then Darwin came along and offered a way out of this logical bind. He offered, for the first time, a compelling alternative explanation, one that not only made a lot of sense, but has subsequently been overwhelmingly confirmed by evidence from nearly every field of science. Now it is no longer necessary to postulate a creator in order to explain how the world around us came to be. To be sure, there is nothing preventing someone from believing in a creator and accepting evolution at the same time.

That combination is called Intelligent Design.

Many people do. But what Darwin did was make religion truly optional. One may still believe in God, but one is no longer logically compelled to do so. Such belief is now truly an act of faith.

Belief in God is always optional; no one is compelled to believe (at least not here; I can't say the same thing about Islamic States).

This, more than anything else, is why evolution so threatens established religion. Those who truly understand evolutionary theory are less likely to be drawn to religion for the simple reason that they have less of an explanatory void for religion to fill.

Faith fills a very big void, and that is true whether we are talking about Evolution, or anything else.

Belief in evolution makes religion a tougher sell. To win over the hearts and minds of people who understand and accept evolutionary biology, a religion must 1) offer a belief system that does not contradict established scientific knowledge and 2) fill some other void than simply the need to understand where we came from.

The important thing about religion is not where we came from, but where we are going.

The reason that belief in evolution correlates so heavily with agnosticism these days is because those who preach religion have all too often failed on both these counts.