Science/Angels and Religion/Demons and Vice Versa, Part 1

There are few topics that command my academic interest the way that the relationship between science and religion does. I grew up in a fairly conservative, God-fearing part of the country to non-practicing but generally faithful Christian parents. They specifically raised me in a quasi-secular and intellectually open fashion, in that I was given all the opportunities to learn about science unfiltered by the political and religious ideologies of the curriculum setters. I spent much of my childhood reading about dinosaurs and other fossils of the geological strata, about the formation of the the stars, galaxies and planets, and of the great biodiversity of our planet. And, while we didn't go to church regularly, they did send me to vacation Bible school every year, I suspect so they felt less guilty about not making weekly Sunday outings mandatory, but also to "give us the information," so to speak, that we might make our moral, social, and intellectual decisions based on a secular humanist as well as religious education. My dad has told me numerous times that he wanted us to "decide for ourselves." In general, I've developed into quite the agnostic, and although I disliked Bible school when I went, in retrospect, I'm rather glad that I was given this education for its literary, historical, and cultural merits. I think I would be overstepping my position to say that I could somehow speak for the middle ground in the current culture war that seems to be raging around the non-issue of science vs. religion, but my studies into the philosophies and history of both fields have given me at least some understanding of the complex interplay of the two most powerful institutions of the 21st century.

Most recently, I've been thinking about this issue because of the release of Ron Howard's Angels and Demons last month. I read the book about a week before seeing the movie and liked it alright, though it is heavy-handed and makes science and religion seem like two monolithic entities clubbing each other in their isolated, hermetically sealed, cookie-cutter worlds. The movie improves on some of this, and unlike The Da Vinci Code, does a slightly more even-handed and nuanced job of portraying the relationship between religion and science. It is about as good of a job as one could do turning Angels and Demons into a movie, but unfortunately, that doesn't really help matters. The problem I have with the book and the movie, is that it simply exploits the perceived conflict and paints both religion and science without the depth, complexity, and intricacies that define their intertwined histories. Of course, a third-rate thriller novel and a summer popcorn piece are hardly the places for subtlety and exploration of dynamism, but I am dismayed to see the rich tapestry of these two establishments reduced to a good guy/bad guy relationship.

Contrary to popular opinion, science and religion have not always been at odds in the way they seem to be today. For most of Western history, in fact, they have acted in concert with one another, with theological concepts motivating physical discovery and natural philosophy informing theology. Pioneering this historical theory of the interplay between these two seemingly disparate institutions are historians such as David C. Lindbergh and Ronald Numbers, as well as several scholars within the scientific and religious communities, such as Ian Barbour, Stephen J. Gould and John Polkinghorne, who, though their views differ wildly, nevertheless advocate a greater understanding between the two. Lindbergh and Numbers in particular are critical of what is known as the Conflict Thesis, or the Draper-White Thesis, which enjoyed almost universal currency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Conflict Thesis, as its name implies, envisioned a relationship always at odds, in which religious institutions conservatively and authoritatively forbade any scientific teaching contrary to Biblical dogma, and science played the role of downtrodden bearer of light amidst the darkness. However, as is often the case, more can be gleaned about the society that proposed the theory than the society on which it comments. Most modern interpretations of the Conflict thesis contend that the discord envisioned was a contemporary outcropping of two currents of thought specific and novel to this era: the emergence of a coherent theory of evolution and the beginnings of fundamentalist Christian belief. And it was the latter, which, though commonly believed to hearken back to earlier, more "pure" Christian motives, was really a reactionary response to what was perceived to be an out-of-control progress towards a more secularly oriented society. As the great religious historian Karen Armstrong has noted, fundamentalism (not only Christian, but Islamic, Hindu, and Jewish) is a peculiarly modern institution, designed primarily to act as a traditionalist check against the march of progress, embodied particularly by the scientific enterprise and the liberal open societies of Western democracy. In the political sphere, social scientist from all political stripes have pointed to the commonalities between the ultimate goals of Muslim extremists in the Middle East and their fundamentalist Christian counterparts in the United States - the only difference being that the relative weakness and corruption of political institutions in the Islamic world compared to the West has given these radical extremists a modicum of real power in places such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The centuries of Western history including such formational movements as the Reformation, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, as well as the setbacks such as the Thirty Years War and World Wars, have given Western society an infrastructure in which Church and State are by and large separated. In other words, our own society guards against just such extremists coming to power. The Christian version of this vein of fundamentalist thinking is relegated to bloggers, radio personalities, and televangelists, who are no less extreme, at least in their rhetoric, than their Muslim counterparts:

When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no Satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right of practicing evil.
-Gary Potter, President of Catholics for Political Action

Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God . . . . I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.
-Osama bin Laden

When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd [abortion providers] better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it."
-Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue

There is no reform except through jihad. . . We have to realize the nature of this conflict: Our enemies do not agree with or approve of our rights.
-Ayman al-Zawahiri

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good. . . Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the Ten Commandments. No apologies.
-Randall Terry

If a woman wants to work away from her home and with men, then that is not allowed by our religion and our culture. If we force them to do this they may want to commit suicide.
-Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, Taliban Minister of Justice

We should invade their [Muslims'] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.
-Ann Coulter

Sorry, Ann, but the Crusading Age has been over for about 700 years. But what does this have to do with science and religion? A lot actually. The point of the above quotes is not to disparage Christian belief but to demonstrate the true radicalism that these outliers represent. Just as we consider Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Muslim extremists a plague on civilized society, so too should we consider those preaching hatred in the name of Christianity in this country. And the people who are most responsible for the religious attack on science are these very authors, organizers, "thinkers" (if I may stretch this word to its barest of connotations) and extremists. This fringe element should be treated exactly as it is: fringe. True, these people have more power and influence in the United States than in most other industrialized nations, but they have no power, for example, to impede scientific research in evolutionary biology or particle physics, both of which are unlocking secrets about the universe once solely reserved for the domain of religion. Their power lies in opening a Creation Museum and electing politicians with sympathetic, albeit less extreme views. Some statistics are troubling, such as a recent poll showing that a mere 39% of Americans accept the theory of evolution (compared to 80 or 90% in most other industrialized nations). But overall, science and religion are not mortally opposed to one another the way our media, political structure, and entertainment industry seem to believe.

In my next post on the topic, I will explore the historical relationship between science and religion and why they have not always been and need not currently be at odds, the fact that even the terms "science" and "religion" simplify the problem too much as it assumes that these blanket terms cover all facets of these two dynamic institutions, and finally, examine what appropriate relations between the two should be in the twenty-first century.

Demythologizing Lincoln and Darwin: A Very Short Historiography

Today marks the 200th birthdays of two of the 19th century's, and probably any century's, greatest figures - Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Rather than going into some detailed rambling of the historical importance of these two men as is usually my wont, I'd like to discuss the mythologizing of historical figures and the damage that can often occur when we replace the complexity of a person's character with the stagnant archetypes of our own era's perceptions. To foist upon any historical person traits that are not theirs but ours is, to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, "to kill them all over again." It is not uncommon, of course, for someone's persona to take on a life of its own following his death, especially when the life was so full and the deeds so grand. This disservice begins, I believe, when a person's life can be boiled down to one moment or one act or one thought, and Lincoln's and Darwin's are often described this way: Lincoln freed the slaves; Darwin discovered evolution. End of story. This distillation obscures the complexities of these men's lives and allows, in mythological fashion, for the blanks to be filled in as we will, and depending on our perspectives, allows us to deify or demonize at will. Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator"; Lincoln was a "war-criminal." Darwin was a brilliant naturalist; Darwin was an anti-Christian demagogue. These definitive labels do an injustice not only to the men themselves but to the historical record of which they are a part.

Lincoln scholarship has gone through numerous phases, but the best interpretations have been the ones that ignore the current trends and attempt to get to the heart of the man himself, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses, the flaws and the personal growth that arises from confronting them. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Center for African and African-American Research, has described the writings and historical scholarship related to Lincoln as similar to that of Christ, in the sense that he has been "all things to all people," and Gates is quick to point out that next to Christ, more books have been written about Lincoln than any other figure in history (his count is over 15,000). How can we siphon through all of these to dig out the "true Lincoln" or is such a feat even possible? The short answer, I think, is that it is not. History is a selective narrative of past events and every historian will inevitably emphasize that which they believe is most important for understanding the person and the times. The problem is when we leave out important aspects of a person's character because they don't "fit" with our preconceived notions of who they were. Christopher Columbus is an extraordinary example of selective scholarship that has obscured basic facts about a man. Sure, he was a master sailor, a cunning businessman, and a daring adventurer, and he has been mythologized to the point that we have named cities, built statues, and granted a holiday after the man; but he was also so intent on the acquisition of gold and the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity, that his actions in the New World can be described as nothing short of genocidal. Lincoln's actions, similarly, cannot be boiled down to "he freed the slaves" because this ignores realities that were characteristic not just of Lincoln but of most white men and women of mid-19th century America. Lincoln, while he disagreed with the institution of slavery, did not believe that blacks should be given full citizenship in the U.S., which included voting rights, the right to marry whites, the right to sit on juries, and so on. And while the Emancipation Proclamation is undoubtedly one of the most significant documents in American history, we must not overlook the political calculus in its inception. Some modern scholars have admirably demonstrated that the legal rationale behind the document lay in the war powers granted to the president during the Civil War, and that as enemy combatants, southern slave owners' property was considered the property of the United States because of their state of rebellion. Therefore, all slaves in states that had seceded became property of the U.S., and their freedom was granted at the will of the new property owners. This, of course, did not include slaves in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, or Maryland, since the citizens there were not in a state of rebellion and thus the U.S. had no property rights over them.

The misunderstandings of Darwin are equally as multitudinous and this often has more to do with a misunderstanding of evolution than with the man himself. Perhaps the greatest general myth about Darwin is that he "discovered" evolution. Evolutionary theory had been around for centuries, being discussed in primitive fashion in the Classical Age of Greece and Rome as well as in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. What Darwin did was provide a mechanism by which it occurred - the theory of natural selection. The prevailing notions of life in Darwin's era were dominated by essentialism and uniformitarianism, though the evolutionary theory that did hold sway among some naturalists was the Lamarckian version which said that changes acquired during an organism's lifetime were then passed on to its offspring. Darwin, informed by the thinking of Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, corrected this view by describing change as occurring within a population, rather than an individual, and that only inherited traits that allowed a population to survive would be passed on. One standard example given to explain the difference between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution is that of a giraffe's neck: it's not the case that a giraffe's neck gets a little longer in a single giraffe's lifetime, whose offspring's neck gets a little longer, and so on until the neck is as long as it is now. The case is that, in a given population of giraffes, the organisms with the longer necks are better suited to survive and thus pass along their traits while those short necked giraffes do not pass on their traits and die out. Darwin himself admittedly did not know what was being passed on, and it was over half a century before the discovery of DNA and the field of genetics would give evolution its modern synthesis. But what about the man Darwin? For one thing, he is associated with atheism, not just by fundamentalist Christians out to vilify him, but among atheists themselves who wish to claim him as some sort of patron saint. Darwin began his life on the track to becoming a country clergyman in the Anglican Church as his father wanted, but his restless spirit tended to set him on the wandering path, and this in part led him to the circumnavigational voyage in the Beagle. While he later called himself an agnostic, he never was quite able to completely relinquish the idea of God, and attended Church with his family well after his formulation of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Perhaps more mythologizing than this, is the oversimplified account of his arrival at the theory of evolution. Most have heard the story of Darwin's examination of the variety of finches on the Galapagos Islands and how he wondered how the wild differences in the size, shape, and function of their beaks arose, epiphanously coming to the conclusion that descent with appropriate modifications must account for these anomalies. However, as science writer David Quamman pointed out in this month's National Geographic, his greater clues came three years before in 1832 in Argentina while viewing the assortment of fossils in Patagonia. The diversity and differentiation based on geographic and geological distribution in the fossil record were his first clues. It is also important to note that Darwin is not even the only contemporary figure to come to conclusions regarding evolution, as Alfred Russel Wallace, halfway around the world in Indonesia and Malaysia, came to very similar conclusions after noting the differences in bio-geography between the "Asian" animals West of the Macassar Straight and the "Australian" animals East of it.

Perhaps the mythologizing of historical figures is not all bad. Lincoln has become such an iconic figure of what it means to be a good president, that he has set a standard by which all other presidents are judged. Lincoln should also be a paragon for personal growth and change, as he softened many of his views on the relationship between blacks and whites by the end of his life. In fact, the last public speech he made in his life detailed his plan to grant full citizenship to black veterans of the Civil War and upstanding black men such as his friend Frederick Douglass. One person in the crowd at this speech, John Wilkes Boothe, found this personal growth to go to far. We should be wary though of anything that shrinks the life of any one man or woman to a monolithic action or thought because this removes from them everything that makes them human: flaws, idiosyncrasies of personality, internal conflicts, and the agony of personal decisions which will have consequences for all.