Evolution: Just A Theory, Parts One & Two

PART ONE:

It's been eighty years since the Scopes Monkey Trial yet the war between Evolution and Creationism lives on. I admit I don't know that much about Darwin's theory of evolution. Maybe that's because I slept through biology class in high school and managed to fulfill my science requirements in college with environmental science, not biology. Anyways, getting to the point . . . it appears that the Evolution vs. Creationism debate is growing wider, with the troops of Creationism gaining strength. Here's what's going on in Dayton, TN, the home of the Scopes trial:

As the town prepares for its annual re-enactment of the trial here eight decades later, debate over teaching evolution lives on. Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, said it is increasingly difficult to teach American students the basics of evolution. "We have been facing more anti-evolution activity in the last six months than we have ever faced in a comparable period before," Scott said Friday. In Kansas, the state school board could change science standards to include criticism of evolution. In Cobb County, Ga., labels describing evolution as a "theory, not a fact" were required in some textbooks before a court overturned the order.

Is the orthodoxy of religious-minded people so threatened by evolution that they must censor Darwin's theory in the classroom? Conversely, why do science-minded people treat evolution as pure fact and adhere to it as if it were religious dogma?

Have no fear creationists, the Vatican is now officially on your side. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, staked out the Catholic Church's position on evolution in a NY Times editorial:

EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith. But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

The Catholic Church has always been a little more open minded towards evolution than have the Christian fundamentalists. However, with Pope Benedict XVI, we can probably expect to see more critical rhetoric towards evolution from the Holy See. After all, this is the man who believes modern philosophy is a poison to the minds of believers. The pope has argued that the ideologies spawned from the secular philosophical tradition of Marx, Darwin, and Freud have kicked the concept of "God" to the gutter and have "sown the wind, and reaped the whirlwind" (Moynihan, 44).

Evolution is a theory, not scientific fact. Creationism, a.k.a. intelligent design, is also a theory. How can you prove that God created the world except for the fact that it is written in the Bible?

Agitprop takes no real stand in this battle of The Culture War. In my mind, Creationism and Evolution are perfectly compatible: God created the world, and then slowly let it evolve on its own.

PART TWO:

The Evolution vs. Creation debate is huge right now, so I thought I'd give a second offering of Evolution: Just A Theory. Evolution is just a theory, like, a krispy kreme is just a donut. Ok, bad analogy, I digress. But in the comments section of my first post, res publica raises some great points:

The problem with the "just a theory" rhetoric is not that it isn't true. Rather, it plays on the public's lack of understanding of scientific method and terminology. In the strict scientific sense, there is no "step up" from theory to something like "law" or "fact". . . These "ID" guys are just pimping the distinction that exists in COMMON useage between "theory" and "fact".

In part one, I failed to mention the difference between a theory of Evolution and a theory of Creation. The creationist crowd is playing semantics here and exploiting public ignorance about the scientific method. The Linkmeister argues that the Catholic Church is abusing the definition of the word theory since a theory is "a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."

Creationism (a.k.a. intelligent design) is also a theory--one that is rooted in religious and cultural explanations of the world rather than a product of the rigorous scientific method. The early humans made up stories about gods who created the universe in order to provide meaning and structure to their lives. After all, religion is a cultural explanation of the world, so, Creationism belongs in anthropology class. Moreover, humans have always explained the concept of God in human terms. One can't possibly describe something that is divine in human terms.

Some scientists do cling to evolution as if it were religious dogma. Could we reconcile the angst between Evolution and Creation? Now I have stated previously, that in my mind, both evolutionary and God-centered accounts of the universe are compatible. John F. Haught helps articulates my views pretty right on in his book God After Darwin. The following is from a review of Haught's book in America, The Catholic Magazine:

God After Darwin continues this argument, but focuses mainly on remedying a major theological deficiency. "To a great extent," writes Haught, "theologians still think and write as though Darwin had never lived. Their attention remains fixed on the human world and its unique concerns. The nuances of biology or, for that matter, of cosmology have not yet deeply affected current thinking about God and God’s relation to the world." In contrast, Haught takes Darwin and his "dangerous idea" seriously, contending that the whole notion of God as "source of order" or "designer" of the cosmos has to be rethought. Why? Because if we fail to rethink our notion of God-as-designer, we run flat-footed into the problem of evil. It will seem that God must oversee a process of incredible waste, death, pain and horror. In short, God runs the horror show of the "survival of the fittest," and if that is the case God must be careless, indifferent and close to diabolical (with a preferential option for the strong). For this very reason, for many scientists, atheism is the logical correlate of
evolutionary science.

Lance Mannion echoes this sentiment and how it applies to Catholic religious practice:

The Church's teaching that God guided evolution is not a competing theory to natural selection. It is a statement of faith to be held onto in the face of the fact of evolution. And as such it's a lesson to be learned from the priest in the pulpit not the teacher in your kids' biology class. It is fine for a Catholic to accept the fact and still keep the faith. Unless you don't have faith in your faith to survive an encounter with a fact.

So it's the fundies, not necessarily the Catholics, that are horrified about evolution being taught to their children. There is always more room for debate in Catholicism than fundamentalist Christianity. When you have a black and white view of the world and believe that literal truth is contained in only one book (The Bible) then of course you wouldn't like science or evolution or reality. But The Green Knight gets to the point of the matter, similar to what Haught was arguing:

This is the theological sticking point. The question, if you think that God exists and that species have evolved over time, is whether God directs every step of the process or whether random variation is an integral part of the process, or possibly is the process as created by God.Frankly, the Green Knight doesn't understand why the idea of random variation in evolution should be such a challenging notion, even to someone who believes in an omnipotent God. After all, look at all the random events that happen all the time, every day. Why should one aspect of reality be singled out as a place where random events are just unthinkable? Just because an omnipotent God could micromanage everything in the universe doesn't necessarily mean She does. While claiming to represent the church's usual teachings, the Cardinal is inventing big chunks of theology on the fly.

God must be a blind watchmaker who created the world and let it evolve on its own. He/she/it is not up in some cloud heaven tinkering with the universe all day long. That concept is foolish at best.

Ok. I forgot where I was going with all of this. Oh yeah! Keep evolution in schools! But if you want to teach Creationism in the schools then you better teach every creation story from every culture possible: Babylonian, Buddhist, Chinese, Christian, Mormon, Greek, Hindu, Hopi, Inca, Mayan, Navajo, Zoroastrian . . .