On the Origin of Man...sort of

I found you can play with the publish date and make it look like you published a thing earlier than you did. This piece I wrote in response to a Chicago Tribune article. I threw it together in a hurry because I wanted to be au courant, but they didn't want it anyway. Sorry for the tiny print, but it's kinda long.

Origin Debate Overlooks its Origin

It is perhaps too much of a truism nowadays to suggest that finding answers depends on asking the right questions, but the notion goes at least as far back as Aristotle, who spent a great deal of time in his works laying foundations on the belief that finding the origin gets one well on the way to the answer.
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne’s recent Perspectives piece (September 18, 2005) on the place of intelligent design in the science classroom typifies the kind of misunderstanding of origins that has stagnated this and so many other debates. Their brief article covers most of the standard arguments against intelligent design, which tend to take the line that ID is not good science: it is not scientific because it is not a testable theory; it critiques but offers no positive proof; it is really a means to sneak the supernatural into science class.

I have no wish to question Dawkins and Coyne on their position from the viewpoint of science itself. In fact, so far as I understand the theoretical underpinnings of empirical, positivist science, I have to agree with them that intelligent design does not meet the criteria for a scientific theory. But I think something else is at the heart of the debate, which becomes clearer in the ways Dawkins and Coyne identify intelligent design with creationism. That is, they bring the discussion back around to religion, which is to recognize the connection of the evolution debate with fundamental explanations of life and, more specifically, suffering. The Tribune itself emphasizes this relationship by placing the article in a series alongside a piece on the implications of Hurricane Katrina on American civilization.
But this is not as self-evident an association as one might think. Creationism is a theory about the origins of life; Darwin, on the other hand, entitled his book The Origin of Species. Whatever Darwin did or did not say, it is clear that many have applied his theory to a story about the origins of life itself, and then gone on to oppose that story to religious stories as the fact behind the fictions. This has understandably irked (and still irks) the religiously minded. Enlightenment science began as a practice independent of theology and its claims, but with Darwin it seemed to overstep its bounds.

In the November 2004 National Geographic, David Quammen tried to reinforce this opposition by crafting a sort of Enlightenment myth of awakening from supernaturalism to naturalism in the life of Charles Darwin, making him a sort of Buddha (since enlightened), or Christ (since crucified), for evolutionists. At the same time he inserted, in a nod to the lofty humanist values of understanding, compassion, and political correctness, patronizing remarks about those religious people who still disbelieve evolution, seemingly blissfully ignorant of the offensive character of his words.

Dawkins and Coyne unhelpfully follow in this tradition, though I think quite consciously. At their most generous, they allow intelligent design a place in a history of ideas classroom, or shove it back to the church with a sneer. At their most condescending, they consign it to “a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies,” comparing the teaching of intelligent design to teaching alchemy in a chemistry class or “the stork theory in a sex education class.” “Opposition to intelligent design is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published date,” they go on to say.

It seems clear to me that the debate about intelligent design is really about theological (or, rather, anti-theological) claims made by science, and about scientific (or, again, anti-scientific) claims made by theology. And it seems further clear that this has to do with the fundamental structure of both areas of study. Science observes and attempts to account for the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Theology observes and attempts to account for the invisible inhering in the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Each has its own sort of evidence—sacred texts or observable, natural phenomena—and it is usually when one denounces the evidence of the other that problems arise.

Because theology’s object includes in some part science’s, we can understand how theology might conflict with science, for the one will make explanations based on human desire, will and frailty, while the other will make explanations based on impartial laws of matter and energy. And insofar as the theologians are right in attributing something like a soul to the human being, we can understand how science might conflict with theology, for whatever the soul may be, it must be something that resists material reductionism, and even a reductionistic story of our origins is still a story, and all stories by their nature reach beyond the material in search for a higher unity: animals do not tell stories.

I have not been able to spend the time to find parallel examples in religious opinion of the kind of condescending and disrespectful rhetoric Quammen, Dawkins and Coyne use against their opponents, but I do not at all doubt they are out there, because the debate hits close to home for both science and religion. Both seem intent on holding their ground in opposition to the other, and this is probably due to the fact that, though individuals here and there have tried, no one has yet compellingly reconciled them—at least, not in a way comprehensible to the American public. But this is precisely what is required if my locating of the origin be at all accurate. Theology and science each need to establish for themselves and the rest of us just what kinds of claims they are capable of making, and avoid making other kinds.

This will not be an easy task(indeed, has not been, for again, many have been working on it for ages, and I in no way want to be glib or simplistic) because neither can simply draw a circle around itself and forbid the other cross, for, as we saw with Katrina, both must at times wrestle with understanding the same phenomenon—they are not mutually distinct, which may very well be a clue to the importance of each. Room will have to be made in the one for the other, and in such a way so as to respect the valid claims the other has to make, and so that the collaborative data reveal what neither alone could. The theologian declaiming vice, overlooking the fact that the sun shines, and the rain falls, on the good and the wicked alike, does not take us very far toward understanding how to better prepare for the terrifying powers of nature. Nor does the scientist describing the impassive and destructive forces at work in Katrina take us very far toward understanding why it hurts us so much to see the suffering of strangers on our TVs. As the third article in the Tribune’s series points out, there are also things we are doing to nature that will come back to bite us and which must therefore be attended to. As an illustration of the way I imagine this reconciliation may work, I suggest that the Judeo-Christian tradition has within its origin story perhaps the most powerful and helpful image the scientist could ask for in encouraging people how to interact with the earth: that of the garden.