It was probably inevitable that my comment last week about
the pseudoconservative crusade against Darwinian evolution in today’s America
would attract more attention, and generate more heat, than anything else in the
post. Some of my readers abroad expressed their surprise that the subject was
even worth mentioning any more, and it’s true that most religious people
elsewhere on the planet, even those who revere the same Bible our American
creationists insist on treating as a geology textbook, got over the
misunderstandings that drive the creationist crusade a long time ago.
While it’s primarily an American issue, though, I’d like to
ask the indulgence of my readers elsewhere in the world, and also of American readers who habitually duck
under the nearest couch whenever creationists and evolutionists start shouting
past each other. As a major hot-button
issue in the tangled relationship between science and religion, the quarrel
over evolution highlights the way that this relationship has gotten messed up,
and thus will have to be sorted out as the civil religion of progress comes
unraveled and its believers have to find some new basis for their lives.
Mind you, I also have a personal stake in it. It so happens
that I’m a religious person who accepts the validity of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. That’s not despite my religion—quite the contrary, it’s part of my
religion—and so I’m going to break one of my own rules and talk a little bit
about Druidry here.
The traditions of modern Druidry, the faith I follow,
actually embraced biological evolution even before Darwin provided a convincing
explanation for it. Here’s part of a ritual dialogue from the writings of
Edward Williams (1747-1826), one of the major figures of the early Druid
Revival:
“Q. Where art thou now, and how
camest thou to where thou art?”
“A. I am in the little world,
whither I came, having traversed the circle of Abred, and now I am a man at its
termination and extreme limits.”
“Q. What wert thou before thou
didst become a man in the circle of Abred?”
“A. I was in Annwn the least
possible that was capable of life, and the nearest possible to absolute death,
and I came in every form, and through every form capable of a body and life, to
the state of man along the circle of Abred.”
Like most 18th-century rituals, this one goes on for a good
long while, but the passage just cited is enough to give the flavor and some of
the core ideas. Abred is the realm of incarnate existence, and includes “every
form capable of a body and life,” from what used to be called “infusoria”
(single-celled organisms, nowadays) all the way up the scale of biological
complexity and diversity, through every kind of plant and animal, including you
and me. What the dialogue is saying is that we all, every one of us, embody all
these experiences in ourselves. When Taliesin in his great song of triumph said
“I have been all things previously,” this is what we believe he was talking
about.
There are at least two ways in which all this can be taken.
It might be referring to the long biological process that gave rise to each of
us, and left our bodies and minds full of traces of our kinship with all other
living things. It might also be referring to the transmigration of souls, which
was a teaching of the ancient Druids and is fairly common in the modern
tradition as well: the belief that there is a center of consciousness that
survives the death of one body to be reborn in another, and that each such
center of consciousness, by the time it first inhabits a human body, has been
through all these other forms, slowly developing the complexity that will make
it capable of reflective thought and wisdom. You’ll find plenty of Druids on
either side of this divide; what you won’t find—at least I’ve yet to encounter
one—are Druids who insist that the existence of a soul is somehow contradicted
by the evolution of the body.
Yet you can’t bring up the idea of evolution in today’s
America without being beseiged by claims that Darwinian evolution is inherently
atheistic. Creationists insist on this notion just as loudly as atheists do,
which is really rather odd, considering that it’s nonsense. By this I don’t
simply mean that an eccentric minority faith such as Druidry manages to combine
belief in evolution with belief in gods; I mean that the supposed
incompatibility between evolution and the existence of one or more gods rests
on the failure of religious people to take the first principles of their own
faiths seriously.
Let’s cover some basics first. First of all, Darwin’s theory
of natural selection may be a theory, but evolution is a fact. Living things
change over time to adapt to changing environments; we’ve got a billion years
of fossil evidence to show that, and the thing is happening right now—in the
emergence of the Eastern coyote, the explosive radiation of cichlid fishes in
East Africa, and many other examples. The theory attempts to explain why this
observed reality happens. A great deal of creationist rhetoric garbles this
distinction, and tries to insist that uncertainties in the explanation are
proof that the thing being explained doesn’t exist, which is bad logic. The
theory, furthermore, has proven itself solidly in practice—it does a solid job
of explaining things for which competing theories have to resort to ad hoc
handwaving—and it forms the beating heart of today’s life sciences, very much
including ecology.
Second, the narratives of the Book of Genesis, if taken
literally, fail to match known facts about the origins and history of the Earth
and the living things on it. Creationists have argued that the narratives are
true anyway, but their attempts to prove this convince only themselves. It’s been shown beyond reasonable doubt, for
example, that the Earth came into being long before 4004 BCE, that animals and
plants didn’t evolve in the order given in the first chapter of Genesis, that
no flood large enough to put an ark on Mount Ararat happened during the
chronological window the Bible allows for the Noah story, and so on. It was worth suggesting back in the day that
the narratives of the Book of Genesis might be
literally true, but that hypothesis failed to fit the data, and
insisting that the facts must be wrong if they contradict a cherished theory is
not a useful habit.
Third, the value of the Bible—or of any other scripture—does
not depend on whether it makes a good geology textbook, any more than the value
of a geology textbook depends on whether it addresses the salvation of the
soul. I don’t know of any religion in which faith and practice center on
notions of how the Earth came into existence and got its current stock of
living things. Certainly the historic creeds of Christianity don’t even
consider the issue worth mentioning. The belief that God created the world does
not require believing any particular claim about how that happened; nor does it
say in the Bible that the Bible has to be taken literally, or that it deals
with questions of geology or paleontology at all.
What’s happened here, as I’ve suggested in previous posts,
is that a great many devout Christians in America have been suckered into
playing a mug’s game. They’ve put an immense amount of energy into something
that does their religion no good, and plays straight into the hands of their
opponents.
It’s a mug’s game, to begin with, because the central
strategy that creationists have been using since well before Darwin’s time
guarantees that they will always lose. It’s what historians of science call the
“God of the gaps” strategy—the attempt to find breaks in the evolutionary
process that scientists haven’t yet filled with an explanation, and then to
insist that only God can fill them. Back in Darwin’s own time, the usual
argument was that there weren’t any transitional forms between one species and
another; in response to the resulting talk about “missing links,”
paleontologists spent the next century and a half digging up transitional
forms, so that nowadays there are plenty of evolutionary lineages—horses,
whales, and human beings among them—where every species is an obvious
transition between the one before it and the one after. As those gaps got
filled in, critics of evolution retreated to another set, and another, and
another; these days, they’ve retreated all the way to fine details of protein
structure, and when that gap gets filled in, it’ll be on to the next defeat.
The process is reliable enough that I’ve come to suspect that biologists keep
an eye on the latest creationist claims when deciding what corner of
evolutionary theory gets intensively researched next.
Still, there’s a much deeper sense in which it’s a mug’s
game, and explaining that deeper sense is going to require attention to some of
the basic presuppositions of religious thought. To keep things in suitably
general terms, we’ll talk here about what philosophers call classical theism,
defined as the belief that the universe was created out of nothing by a unique,
perfect, eternal, omnipotent and omniscient being. (There’s more to classical
theism than that—you can find the details in any good survey of philosophy of
religion—but these are the details that matter for our present purposes.) I’ve
argued elsewhere that classical theism isn’t the best explanation of human
religious experience, but we’ll let that go for now; it corresponds closely to
the beliefs of most American creationists, and it so happens that arguments
that apply to classical theism here can be applied equally well to nearly all
other theist beliefs.
Of the terms in the definition just given, the one that gets
misused most often these days is “eternal.” That word doesn’t mean “lasting for
a very long time,” as when we say that a bad movie lasts for an eternity; it
doesn’t even mean “lasting for all of time.” What it means instead is “existing
outside of time.” (Connoisseurs of exact diction will want to know that
something that lasts for a very long time is diuturnal, and something that
lasts for all of time is sempiternal.) Eternal beings, if such there be, would
experience any two moments in time the way you and I experience two points on a
tabletop—distinct but simultaneously present. It’s only beings who exist in
time who have to encounter those two moments sequentially, or as we like to
say, “one at a time.”
That’s why, for example, the endless arguments about whether
divine providence contradicts human free will are barking up the wrong stump.
Eternal beings wouldn’t have to foresee the future—they would simply see it,
because to them, it’s not in the future.
An omniscient eternal being can know exactly what you’ll do in 2025, not
because you lack free will, but because there you are, doing it right out in
plain sight, as well as being born, dying, and doing everything else in
between. An eternal being could also see what you’re doing in 2025 and respond
to it in 2013, or at any other point in time from the Big Bang to whatever
final destiny might be waiting for the universe billions of years from now. All
this used to be a commonplace of philosophy through the end of the Middle Ages,
and it’s no compliment to modern thought that a concept every undergraduate
knew inside and out in 1200 has been forgotten even by people who think they
believe in eternal beings.
Now of course believers in classical theism and its
equivalents don’t just believe in eternal beings in general. They believe in one, unique, perfect,
eternal, omnipotent and omniscient being who created the universe and
everything in it out of nothing. Set aside for the moment whether you are or
aren’t one of those believers, and think through the consequences of the
belief. If it’s true, then everything in
the universe without exception is there either because that being deliberately
put it there, or because he created beings with free will in the full knowledge
that they would put it there. Everything that wasn’t done by one of those
created beings, in turn, is a direct manifestation of the divine will. Gravity and genetics, photosynthesis and continental drift, the
origin of life from complex carbon compounds and the long evolutionary journey
since then: grant the presuppositions of classical theism, and these are, and
can only be, how beings in time perceive the workings of the eternally creative
will of God.
Thus it’s a waste of time to go scrambling around the
machinery of the cosmos, looking for scratches left by a divine monkeywrench on
the gears and shafts. That’s what the “God of the gaps” strategy does in
practice; without ever quite noticing it, it accepts the purely mechanistic
vision of the universe that’s promoted by atheists, and then tries to prove
that God tinkers with the machinery from time to time. Accept the principles of
classical theism and you’ve given up any imaginable excuse for doing that,
since a perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent deity leaves no scratches and
doesn’t need to tinker. It’s not even a matter of winding up the gears of the
cosmos and letting them run from there, in the fashion of the “clockmaker God”
of the 18th century Deists; to an eternal divine being, all of time is present
simultaneously, every atom is doing exactly and only what it was put there to
do, and what looks like machinery to the atheist can only be, to the believer
in classical theism or its equivalents, the action of the divine will in
eternity acting upon the world in time.
Such a universe, please note, doesn’t differ from the
universe of modern science in any objectively testable way, and this is as it
should be. The universe of matter and energy is what it is, and modern science
is the best toolkit our species has yet discovered for figuring out how it
works. The purpose of theology isn’t to bicker with science over questions that
science is much better prepared to address, but to relate the material universe
studied by science to questions of ultimate concern—of value, meaning and
purpose—which science can’t and shouldn’t address and are instead the proper
sphere of religion. To return to a point I tried to raise in one
of last month’s posts, not everything that matters to human beings
can be settled by an objective assessment of fact; there are times, many of
them, that you have to decide on some other basis which of several different
narratives you choose to trust.
Step beyond questions of fact, that is, and you’re in the
territory of faith—a label that properly includes the atheist’s belief in a
purely material cosmos just as much as it does the classical theist’s belief in
a created cosmos made by an infinite and eternal god, the traditional
polytheist’s belief in a living cosmos shaped by many divine powers, and so on,
since none of these basic presuppositions about the cosmos can be proven or
disproven. How do people decide between
these competing visions, then? As noted
in the post just mentioned, when that choice is made honestly, it’s made on the
basis of values. Values are always individual, and always relative to a
particular person in a particular context.
They are not a function of the intellect, but of the heart and will—or
to use a old and highly unfashionable word, of character. Different sets of
presuppositions about the cosmos speak to different senses of what values
matter; which is to say that they speak to different people, in different
situations.
This, of course, is what a great many religions have been
saying all along. In most of the religions of the west, and many of those from
other parts of the world, faith is a central theme, and faith is not a matter
of passing some kind of multiple choice test; it’s not a matter of the intellect
at all; rather, it’s the commitment of the whole self to a way of seeing the
cosmos that can be neither proved nor disproved rationally, but has to be
accepted or rejected on its own terms. To accept any such vision of the nature
of existence is to define one’s identity and relationship to the whole cosmos;
to refuse to accept any such vision is also to define these things, in a
different way; and in a certain sense, you don’t make that choice—you
are that choice.
Rephrase what I’ve just said in the language of salvation and grace, and
you’ve got one of the core concepts of Christianity; phrase it in other terms,
and you’ve got an important element of many other religions, Druidry among
them.
It’s important not to ignore the sweeping differences among
these different visions of the nature of existence—these different faiths, to
use a far from meaningless idiom. Still, there’s a common theme shared by many
of them, which is the insight that human beings are born and come to awareness
in a cosmos with its own distinctive order, an order that we didn’t make or
choose, and one that imposes firm limits on what we can and should do with our
lives. Different faiths understand that
experience of universal order in radically different ways—call it dharma or the
Tao, the will of God or the laws of Great Nature, or what have you—but the
choice is the same in every case: you
can apprehend the order of the cosmos in love and awe, and accept your place in
it, even when that conflicts with the cravings of your ego, or you can put your
ego and its cravings at the center of your world and insist that the order of
the cosmos doesn’t matter if it gets in the way of what you think you
want. It’s a very old choice: which will
you have, the love of power or the power of love?
What makes this particularly important just now is that
we’re all facing that choice today with unusual intensity, in relation to part
of the order of the cosmos that not all religions have studied as carefully as
they might. Yes, that’s the order of the biosphere, the fabric of natural laws
and cycles that keep all of us alive. It’s a teaching of Druidry that this
manifestation of the order of things is of the highest importance to humanity,
and not just because human beings have messed with that order in remarkably
brainless ways over the last three hundred years or so. Your individual actions
toward the biosphere are an expression of the divide just sketched out. Do you
recognize that the living Earth has its own order, that this order imposes certain
hard constraints on what human beings can or should try to do, and do you
embrace that order and accept those constraints in your own life for the
greater good of the living Earth and all that lives upon her? Or do you shrug
it off, or go through the motions of fashionable eco-piety, and hop into your
SUV lifestyle and slam the pedal to the metal?
Science can’t answer that question, because science isn’t
about values. (When people start claiming otherwise, what’s normally happened
is that they’ve smuggled in a set of values from some religion or other—most
commonly the civil religion of progress.)
Science can tell us how fast we’re depleting the world’s finite oil
supplies, and how quickly the signs of unwelcome ecological change are showing
up around us; it can predict how soon this or that or the other resource is
going to run short, and how rapidly the global climate will start to cost us in
blood; it can even tell us what actions might help make the future less
miserable than it will otherwise be, and which ones will add to the misery—but
it can’t motivate people to choose the better of these, to decide to change
their lives for the benefit of the living Earth rather than saying with a
shrug, “I’m sure they’ll think of something” or “I’ll be dead before it
happens” or “We’re all going to be extinct soon, so it doesn’t matter,” and
walking away.
That’s why I’ve been talking at such length about the end of
the civil religion of progress here, and why I’ll be going into more detail
about the religious landscape of the deindustrial world as we proceed. Religion is the dimension of human culture
that deals most directly with values, and values are the ultimate source of all
human motivation. It’s for this reason that I feel it’s crucial to find a
common language that will bridge the gap between religions and the
environmental sciences, to get science and religion both to settle down on
their own sides of the border that should properly separate them—and to show
that there’s a path beyond the misguided struggle between them. We’ll talk more
about that path next week.
