Light On Dark Water

Let’s Get Religion Out of the Biology Textbooks

I’ve been thinking a lot—“brooding”
might be an applicable term—about evolution, materialism,
and the nature of science. It seems plain that materialists, in
their eagerness to suborn science in aid of their views, have
drawn conclusions that aren’t supported by the physical
facts. And it occurs to me that the almost violent objection of
the scientific establishment, which I think can fairly be called
predominantly materialistic in philosophy, to the concept of
intelligent design may be a tactical mistake.

The charge against intelligent design is that it is not
science. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, if
“science” means laboratory or experimental science,
it is indeed hard to see how ID qualifies. But the same objection
applies with the same force to the materialistic conclusions
drawn from facts by doctrinaire evolutionists.

One need not be a scientist to see this. It requires only
common sense and open eyes. A week or so ago I ran across a brief
article describing the relationship between the chromosomes of
chimpanzees and humans, which was presented as a vindication of
Darwinism. But what struck me was that it was nothing of the
sort. It did not even touch on the Darwinian
mechanism—common descent by means of chance variation and
random selection. It illustrated a resemblance: a striking and
fascinating resemblance, and an even more striking difference
which nevertheless emphasized the connection between the two. But
it was only evidence of common descent if you brought that
assumption to the data. (My apologies for not citing the piece; I
ran across it on the net, failed to bookmark it, and now
can’t remember where it was.)

I’m not particularly concerned to deny common descent.
Once you’ve conceded ground on the literal interpretation
of Genesis, which I’m willing to do, there’s no
particular difficulty in accepting the idea that the human body
has as its ancestor some sort of ape body—no problem in the
idea that God used, so to speak, existing material with a long
developmental history to receive the first human soul. Granting
this, and granting that the transition from ape body to human
body was gradual, the facts do not supply any reason whatsoever
to believe that the changes were the result of the Darwinian
mechanism or any other array of purely material causes. Let me
emphasize that: no reason whatsoever. The facts can tell
us at most only that a very complex transition seems to have
occurred; they tell us nothing at all about how it
occurred.

If scientists want to take material causes as a working
assumption for further investigation, that’s fine. That
indeed is what they are supposed to do. But when they go beyond
this and declare their certainty that purely physical forces have
produced the unimaginably complex structures which fill the cosmos, still more
when they imagine that they have disproved the existence of God,
yet more, absurdly and unacceptably more, when they declare the
question closed, they have stepped far beyond the facts and
beyond science, and are pretenders to knowledge which they do not
have.

I think the time is ripe for theists of all stripes—and
for that matter rationalists who can see the question of
intellectual integrity at stake—to press the attack here.
It is no more tolerable in a secular biology textbook to state
materialist conclusions on these questions than to state
religious ones. If science, and, more to the point, spokesmen for
science, would get out of the philosophy and theology business,
the level of acrimony in this controversy could be greatly
reduced. Unfortunately the tactic which comes immediately to mind
for this effort is the very acrimonious one of the lawsuit. But
that battle is already under way. The scientific establishment is
making legal war on any attempt to include the idea of purposeful
design in scientific education, and that, as I mentioned above,
may be a tactical mistake. Darwinism and Intelligent Design are
both attempts to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of origins.
Neither has been proved or is, in my opinion, likely to be
proved, by physical evidence alone. We are constantly being told
that science textbooks are no place for religion. Very well;
let’s get all the religion out of them.