[Erin] The unhappy evolutionary

I found this Olivia Judson column in the New York Times to be an interesting look at Charles Darwin and the likely festivities that will surround two important anniversaries soon to be celebrated:

The party is about to begin.

In a week or so, the trumpets will sound, heralding the start of 18 months of non-stop festivities in honor of Charles Darwin. July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of his discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution. Since 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (Feb. 12), as well as being the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species" (Nov. 24), the extravaganza is set to continue until the end of next year. Get ready for Darwin hats, t-shirts, action figures, naturally selected fireworks and evolving chocolates. Oh, and lots of books and speeches.

But hold on. Does he deserve all this? He wasn't, after all, the first person to suggest that evolution happens. For example, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, speculated about it towards the end of the 18th century; at the beginning of the 19th, the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck made a strong case for it. Lamarck, however, failed to be generally persuasive because he didn't have a plausible mechanism -- he could see that evolution takes place, but he didn't know how. That had to wait until the discovery of natural selection.

Judson goes on to explain just why Darwin, who wasn't the first to think of natural selection either, deserves the parties that will be held in his honor; and I'd tend to agree, for the most part.

As a Catholic, I don't have any special problems with Darwin's theories. I believe that God made the world and everything in it; I believe that He directly created the souls not only of the first two fully human creatures on Earth, but that He continues this act of direct creation of the souls of every human being in existence. In other words, the human body may have been formed by evolution, but the immortal soul of every human being is not something which developed naturally, or exists as a naturally occurring characteristic of the material existence of humans.

The real conflict between religion and science often comes about when science*** claims that the ability to demonstrate certain empirical truths automatically disproves the existence of the non-material. This is no less true for the various debates that have arisen about ideas based on Darwin's observations than it has been for other similar conflicts. Those followers of Darwin who say that evolution and natural selection prove that there is no God, as man no longer requires a Creator, or that there is no immortal soul, as such a thing could hardly have evolved and can't be empirically observed anyway, are stepping outside the bounds of science and into metaphysics, where by definition they have no business; the tools of empiricism are useless in the realm of the transcendent realities.

But the strict empiricist doesn't believe that there are transcendent realities. All is physical, all is observable, all is the result of brain chemistry or hormones or the twirl and dance of deoxyribonucleic acid. Love isn't a many-splendored thing, but the predictable and combined result of proximity, the observable qualities of the other that strike the observer's eye as desirable, and the activity of certain physical and chemical processes; beauty may not be in the eye of the beholder, but what does it matter so long as the proper hormonal response is achieved?

And hate is in the gut--literally--and crime located somewhere in the glandular systems, and free will is an illusion that we've evolved to believe in because otherwise the sheer randomness and preprogrammed nature of our choices would drive us to despair--or, at least, to whatever physical/chemical combination "despair" really is.

So for the empiricist, any talk of God being involved in the creation of the world, even if religious believers are quite willing to entertain the notion that it pleased God to set evolution in motion (provided we retain our beliefs about the soul, which the strictest empiricists don't believe in anyway) still isn't acceptable. For certain people whose beliefs in non-creation and the non-Creator are inextricably tied to their beliefs about science and about all of reality, this is not a compromise they can live with--it seems as though they must convert believers to their non-belief, so ardently do they insist that evolution proves that God is not.

It does no such thing, of course. And I can't help but wonder just what sort of biochemical impulses the strict empiricist-evolutionist blames for his unhappiness with the whole notion.

***Update. I have been made aware that this blog is read by some people who appear to be suffering from Metaphor Impairment Syndrome. I would like, for their sakes, to clarify that I do not think of Science as some kindly old man with a beard, handing down pronouncements from on high, or making claims of any sort whatsoever. The metaphor adopted means to signify "People who identify themselves as being on the "side" of science and who then make these claims," which was too clunky and non-poetic for the structure of the sentence. Clearly, Official Science In All Its Glory is far too wise and humble to say (could it speak) that evolution disproves the existence of God. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.