Evolution, Science, and Religion 1: Introduction

“The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Feb 5, 2012. Science is not an undivided good – it has torn our world apart.

Lethal weaponry – the heritage of centuries of sustained scientific effort – continues its rapid pace of development. Science and technology industries continue to pollute, except now they do it in China or India. Energy and carbon production continues to grow, as does the resulting global warming, the threat of rising sea levels, the destruction of vast swathes of our environment, and the accompanying massive social disruption.

But none of these seems to have had the social and psychological impact – direct, emotional, disruptive, and highly divisive – of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A New Series of Blogs

This week, we start a series of blogs addressing the origins and impact of the conflict between evolution and religion while exploring the consequences for the relationship between science and religion. We will also bring into play the Baha’i teachings on the unity of science and religion. The aim is to understand the threads that make up the conflict of evolution and religion with the goal of seeing what can be done to reduce or eliminate their negative impact and to explore the possibilities of the emergence of something good from the seeming debacle.

We start by exploring American public opinion about evolution, followed by the surprisingly bitter response to that opinion on the part of some scientists, and finally entertain the idea that evolution is frequently taken as secular religion.

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What Americans Believe About Evolution

Polls tell us that Americans are divided into warring camps over evolution, and that the conflict it engenders spills over into the political sphere, very likely intensifying Washington’s political paralysis.

The Pew Research Center – a leading non-partisan public opinion research organization in the United States – surveyed American opinions on evolution in 2009. They present their results in Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media, reporting that 31% of Americans reject all ideas about evolution, even those that include guidance by a supreme being. Here is how they describe their results:

A majority of the public (61%) says that human and other living things have evolved over time, though when probed only about a third (32%) say this evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” while 22% say “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.” Another 31% reject evolution and say that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Another poll conducted by the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell reported in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us describes belief in evolution as strongly anti-correlated with belief in religion. The more religious you are, the less likely you are to accept evolution:

Americans’ attitudes on evolution are also sharply divided by religiosity. Less than 2 percent of the most religious Americans believe that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life but God had no part in this process,” compared to 45 percent of the least religious. Over three quarters of the most religious reject evolution altogether, and believe instead that God created human beings less than ten thousand years ago.

This conclusion is corroborated by the Pew poll described above and the polls by the Gallup organization (see On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution). (For an extended discussion of polls on the topic, see Wikipedia’s excellent Level of Support for Evolution.)

The Pew Research Center poll makes it clear that the divisiveness over evolution spills over into the political arena and to other topics like climate change, energy policy, stem cell research, and animal testing.

Interestingly, other polls show that divisiveness over evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that those who are religious are opposed to science. Apparently, it only means that evolution “feels wrong”. For a fascinating discussion on this, see Science and Religion: A False Divide by John H. Evans, a sociologist at UC San Diego and Belief in Evolution Boils Down to a Gut Feeling by David Haury and colleagues from Ohio State.

Taking Sides: Creationism as Blind Faith vs. Evolution as Secular Ideology

Where, we must ask, does this division of opinions come from?

We’ll explore this in depth in this series of blogs. But, for now, lets briefly explore how some scientists react to the American rejection of evolution. They do so in ways that can be surprisingly vehement.

“The Visigoths Are At The Gate”

Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement is a recent anthology of articles against intelligence design (ID), the weapon of choice wielded by those hoping to undermine evolutionary science. Edited by John Brockman, it features a who’s who list of the best and the brightest, including Steven Pinker, Scott Atran, Lee Smolin, Stuart Kaufman, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and many others.

Brockman describes the dangers of Intelligent Design in tones of comical overkill:

Religious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of “intelligent design,” by elbowing its way in the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long.

Moreover, intelligent-design imperils American dominance in science and in so doing presents the gravest of threats to the American economy, which is driven by advances in science … There are examples in history of the collapse of great civilizations. There is no particular reason that the United States should be exempt from historical forces. The Visigoths are at the gates. Will we let them in?

The sense of hysteria and cluelessness of this introduction is frequently echoed in the pieces in the anthology. Even though the arguments about evolution are well-reasoned and not even wrong, they invariably miss the point entirely (as well as disparaging the intelligence and morals of anybody who lacks a pulpit of scientific authority). The assumption is that the issue is about science, when it is really about how science is interpreted materialistically as a secular counterpart to religion and its creation myths.

“Evolution as a Religion”

Is evolution a religion? It can be, according to two of its most distinguished students.

The English philosopher Mary Midgley – whom The Guardian (one of Britain’s leading newspapers) describes as “the foremost scourge of scientific pretensions in this country” – warns against the dangers of taking evolution as a secular faith (scientism). In Evolution as a Religion, she writes:

[W]e need to avoid extending the confidence which is due to the central, well-established findings of the sciences to a vast area which has only an imaginative affinity with them, an area where only the name and trappings of ‘science’ are present. The attitude sometimes called scientism – a general veneration for the idea of science detached from any real understanding of its methods – is at present extremely powerful.

Of secular faith, she writes:

[New secular faiths] are hungrily seized on by people whose lives lack meaning. When this happens, there arises at once, unofficially and spontaneously, many elements which we think of as characteristically religious. We begin, for instance, to find priesthoods, prophecies, devotion, bigotry, exaltation, heresy-hunting and sectarianism, ritual sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin, absolution and salvation, and the confident promise of a heaven in the future.

The two greatest secular faiths, she writes, are Marxism and evolutionism:

Marxism and evolutionism, the two great secular faiths of our day, display all these religious-looking features. They have also, like the great religions and unlike more casual local faiths, large-scale ambitious systems of thought, designed to articulate, defend and justify their ideas – in short, ideologies.

Michael Ruse, the leading philosopher of biology of the day, says much the same thing in Is Darwinism a Religion? in The Huffington Post:

Is evolution, Darwinian evolution in particular, a religion? To sound like the philosopher that I am, it all depends on what you mean by “religion.” …

I don’t think believing that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection (his version or today’s version) commits you to religious belief. I think that if, as I myself would, you extend the scope of the theory to an understanding of knowledge acquisition and justification and the same for morality — evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics — then it can act as a religion substitute or alternative. It gives you a world picture that some people, starting with me, find entirely satisfying.

In Is Evolution a Secular Religion? (in Science), he writes:

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world’s mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world’s major problems, from racism to education to conservation.

So, one of the things that Brockman and his collection of scientific eminences seems to be missing entirely is the extent to which evolution is used – or should I say misused? – as a substitute religion. They can see that evangelicals are using religion as a substitute for science, but apparently they can’t see that they are using science as a substitute for religion.

It turns out that the folks on the evangelical side see this all too clearly. This is what we will explore in next week’s blog.

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This is the 1st in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he is author of Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution. He did worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.