Seeing Darwin Through Christian Eyes? It All Depends on the Christian
Seeing Darwin Through Christian Eyes? It All Depends on the Christian
By MARK OPPENHEIMER, New York Times, Beliefs, 2/1/2013, original
On Jan. 22, Rush D. Holt, a Democrat who represents central New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, introduced a resolution designating Feb. 12, 2013 — Charles Darwin’s 204th birthday — as Darwin Day, “recognizing the importance of science in the betterment of humanity.”
Perhaps a day in honor of Darwin would help the cause of science, if only a little.
“I hope we can hold hearings,” Mr. Holt said, “where people can hear about Darwin and science and the jobs it creates, the lives it saves, everything.”
Mr. Holt, a nuclear physicist by training, would probably not have the support of his colleague Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. Representative Broun, a doctor, is famous among science lovers for having told the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet last fall that “all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang theory, all that is lies, straight from the pit of hell.”
Evolution, he added, is one of those “lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
Two congressmen, two Christians and two very different views of the man who in 1859 published On the Origin of Species. A century and a half after the publication of the book that changed our understanding of the living world, “this amazingly creative man,” as Mr. Holt called Darwin in an interview this week, still gets a whupping from politicians trying to scare up the votes of conservative Christians.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Broun’s wife told a room of surprised onlookers that her husband would be running for the Senate in 2014.
Mr. Holt says he is a Christian whose spiritual home is the Quaker meeting in Princeton, N.J. Mr. Broun, whose spokeswoman said he was expected to make an announcement about his possible candidacy in the next week, attends a Baptist church in Athens, Ga., and is a member of the Gideons, the group that places Bibles in hotel rooms.
Many Christians, of course, believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is compatible with a Christian worldview. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, is comfortable with Darwin, especially as his work relates to the evolution of bodies (souls come from God). In 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote, confirming older Catholic teaching, that “there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith.”
Ronald L. Numbers, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin, said that many evangelical Protestants were once willing to accept the theory, as long as it was applied only to animals, not to humans.
For example, the Tennessee law that gave rise to the famous Scopes trial, in 1925, “banned the teaching of human evolution, not the teaching of evolution,” Mr. Numbers said.
“And the reason was that most people were concerned about its ethical teaching,” he added. “If you read the first chapter of Genesis, it’s very clear humans were created perfect, then they sinned, then degeneration set in. Whereas evolutionists of any stripe believed humans had progressed over millennia or longer.”
Non-Christians, too, worried about the way Darwin’s teachings could be twisted.
“Exposés coming out of World War I indicated that the German high command had been influenced by Darwinism,” Mr. Numbers said. The Germans interpreted it as “the idea that might makes right, that only the strongest will survive,” he said.
As time went on, Darwin was blamed for all sorts of moral decay. In the trial of Leopold and Loeb, two University of Chicago students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924, he said, “there was the argument they had killed little Bobby Franks in cold blood because they had imbibed Darwinism and lost any respect for human life.”
The argument was hinted at by Clarence Darrow, their defense lawyer, who went on to defend John T. Scopes on charges that he had taught human evolution in Tennessee. Darrow specifically mentioned the pernicious influence of reading Nietzsche, but others saw Darwin’s malignant hand at work.
In the 1960s, as Americans, racing the Russians to the moon, embraced science, fears of Darwin were calmed a bit. But as Chris Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science, points out, the 1970s, a time of rising power for evangelicals, also saw a resurgence in Darwinism as a code word for all that they loathed.
“Evolution is connected to the culture of Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Mooney said, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized most abortions. “You take down humans’ sense of selves as something created, therefore you lower and debase them, and they act like beasts and do all these immoral things. Then you get teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, et cetera.”
Today, Darwin’s name energizes not only Christians but skeptics.
Edwina Rogers, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, said that when her coalition polled more than 1,800 of its supporters, “education issues,” a topic that includes creationism and anti-Darwinism in public schools, were their top concern.
“This is what they care about more than anything,” Ms. Rogers said. “They want their kids to be able to go out in the world and get jobs based on scientific knowledge.”
I asked Mr. Holt if he had talked with Mr. Broun about his proposal for a day devoted to Darwin.
“I haven’t,” Mr. Holt said. “I probably should have. Now that you say that, I’ll go talk to him. But if we had dinner, I suspect there’d be a lot of things that would be more fun for us to talk about than Darwin.”