Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Hopefully, this week, I’ll have time to post another in the Universal Common Descent series, and I just wanted to say a word or two about the importance of it.

First - it isn’t very important. In the grand scheme of things, it is certainly no-where near as important as the big things in life: family, friends, community, or the things that threaten them: war, famine, plague, hatred.

Even by standards of the interblag, it isn’t of supreme importance. Certainly, when someone is WRONG on the INTERNET, it must be corrected. But really, there are a lot of issues that are more interesting to many people, and a lot of them that are more fun to a lot of people.

But in real life, the only reason to be right about UCD (and evolution more generally speaking) is if your career or your hobbies are directly related to the life sciences. Generally speaking, we want quality education, and we want to keep sectarian religion from being taught as a science class. And, really, that’s about it. The rest of us can live just as well wrong about it, or unthinking of it as right about it.

What about people who interpret the Bible to mean evolution is untrue? This stance requires one of four options for those folks - none of which are necessarily terribly important. Some have some undesirable aspects, though:

1) Believe that one’s Biblical exegesis is more important than observed evidence. Not the end of the world, but one can imagine ways that this could lead to a bad situation. I’m thinking of those whose Biblical exegesis leads them to believe that doctors and medicine should be eschewed in favor of prayer. I personally would encourage people not to adopt this viewpoint, especially when they are responsible for getting their kids to the doctor.
2) Remain ignorant, willfully if necessary, of the science. This can include actively and knowingly disseminating incorrect information about the science. Or it can mean simply listening to the creationists rather than looking at the evidence or listening to the scientists. Again, not harmful except if taken to extremes. My objection to this stance is that it employs or empowers dishonesty. Those who actively and knowingly disseminate incorrect or misleading information about the science are employing dishonesty. Those who are listening to them empower it. I generally object to deception, including self-deception. On the other hand, none of us are completely innocent in that regard. The other side of this option is to form no opinion and listen to no one: refusing to care about the question. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint for those who aren’t science aficionados or employed in the sciences or science education.
3) Re-think one’s interpretation of the Bible. For some, this isn’t a difficult option because their perspective on the Bible is that it is authoritative spiritually but not necessarily scientifically. For others, trying to interpret Genesis in light of science in such a way that there are no contradictions is a bit of a task, and may require some mental gymnastics that bring one dangerously close to self-deception.
4) Re-think one’s fundamental ideas about the Bible. About what it is, and what it means. The problem is, that evolutionary science is a pretty thick subject, and one shouldn’t really have to wade through it to discover that science contradicts some ideas about the Bible. If you have a viewpoint about the Bible that requires you to believe its literal statements of material fact are literally true, then you probably have bigger problems in your perspective than the contradiction with what is ultimately a somewhat esoteric branch of science. A good place to start is with Bart Ehrman’s misquoting Jesus, which is a good, if overly simple, overview of the difficulties in reconstructing the original “Bible” from the surviving manuscripts we have of it - focusing only on the New Testament. It doesn’t get much into the evidence of how the books themselves were put together and sourced, and how they might have been redacted before reaching the forms that are represented in those manuscripts - so something that deals with that area might be a good next step. Certainly being forced to the position by evolutionary science would be taking the long way round to arrive at the point where one got curious about what the Bible really is, enough to change perspectives on it.

Finally, we have two more issues that may seem important to some people, but really just don’t add up to much if you ask me. They are creationism as an apologetic and evolution as a counterapologetic. Some folks like to deny evolution to prove the existence of God, but this doesn’t work even if evolution is false. It only means that whatever brought us the diversity of life on earth wasn’t evolution. It doesn’t prove that it was God any more than it proves that we owe our existence to some New Age “life force”, a cosmic egg, the Tao, or any number of other conjectures about the origin of life. One creationist truism is that it takes intelligence to bring forth intelligence… but the fact is that we have never observed intelligence being brought forth by intelligence. We’ve never observed life being created by intelligence. In fact, the only analogs we can find - new life arising through reproduction - shows us life and intelligence coming about by ordinary, natural means - at least as far as we can see. So, while this by itself does not prove that natural forces are all that are at work, or that our current diversity of life are owed only to natural forces, it certainly does not do anything to provide a basis for the notion that life and intelligence must come from an intelligent agent. This notion is simply an intuition that westerners are fond of, trained as we are to think by analogy to the machine. It is a hunch entirely devoid of empirical or logical basis.

On the other hand, some fear that if it is taught that evolution can produce the diversity of life on Earth without need for a Creator, then it is natural to discard our notions of God - that evolution is proof of atheism. It isn’t, any more than power steering is disproof of a human steerer. Certainly, as is mentioned above, there are notions about God - or more precisely the mode of Creation - which can be answered in a way that is inconsistent from what we know of evolution, but people like Francis Collins, Keith Miller, and Kenneth Miller could not exist if evolution actually disproved God.

So, for those of you who aren’t just entertained by science and the stories of ingenuity, serendipity, and cautious investigation that lie behind all of modern scientific thinking, there isn’t much reason to pay attention. Whatever your worldview, the sciences should not present a major obstacle to you. Whatever your career - as long as it doesn’t deal directly with the sciences, you should be able to make your living without knowing too much about it - or even knowing whether it is right or wrong.

For those of you who are interested, but who have doubts about what the evidence says - stay tuned!