I just sat down for a second viewing of the new HBO documentary Questioning Darwin. This hour-long documentary explores the life of Charles Darwin as he attempted balancing his religious beliefs and his scientific discoveries; the documentary also contains interviews and viewpoints from current pastors, religious leaders, and historians. The documentary raises a few issues that I feel I should address.
As a practicing scientist who is a Christian AND an evolutionist, I feel it is important that I hold a viewpoint on this issue and share that viewpoint when necessary. Again, these are issues raised in the documentary, not issues I have with the documentary itself. These are also ideas that have recently resurfaced since the Ken Ham--Bill Nye debate.
Darwin
Many people have a warped idea of Charles Darwin. Many equate him with atheism or assume that he was an atheist. When he was young, Darwin actually intended to become a clergyman. Even through his scientific endeavors, he himself wrote that he never considered himself an atheist in that he never denied God's existence. He knew that what he was suggesting in On the Origin of Species was controversial and would greatly impact future religious and scientific thought. But he found the evidence of evolution too strong to ignore. He struggled with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent God due to the suffering he saw during his voyage on HMS Beagle: the slavery he encountered and the predation he saw in animal communities. Of the ten kids that he and his wife had, three died in childhood. All of these experiences contributed to his views of God, but he was never an atheist: he never set out to destroy religion through his theories.
Darwin spent many years prior to his death "doing science" at his home outside London. He conducted experiments, observed nature, and theorized more on his experiences on HMS Beagle. Darwin's writings were not capricious or impetuous: they were well-cogitated and thoughtful. Upon his death, he was interred at Westminster Abbey, a place of interment reserved for religious persons of influence.
Equating Evolution with Atheism
A common assertion of many religious persons is that evolution is an invention of the atheists, and is inherently atheistic. Several pastors interviewed in the documentary claim this exact thing: evolution is an idea that atheists created in order to combat creationism. Another interviewee in the documentary claims that he is more willing to put his faith in the Bible than in secular scientists. I am not sure whether he was calling all scientists secular or just some of them secular; either way, I see no reason to place that adjective before the noun.
There is nothing inherently religious or anti-religious about evolution. Many of the religious interviewees claim that evolution takes away the possibility of hope, love, morality, miracles, and prayer since evolution claims that God is not there. This is simply untrue. Evolution makes no such claim. Evolution is a term that scientists use to describe the process of change in the morphology of species over time. Whether it's controlled by God or not is outside the realm of its definition. My response is that hope, love, a sense of morality, etc. all come from God. Even if creation is true, then those attributes still come from God. The characteristics of humanity can come from God regardless of how humans came into being.
Misunderstanding Evolution
This one might just be an issue of semantics, but I want to briefly address it anyway. One of the biggest problems that the pastors in the documentary seem to have with evolution is that it "reduces our status as humans to that of an animal" and that evolution "puts man down as just an animal." Well, guess what, we are animals! Kingdom Animalia includes humans, dogs, sponges, and insects, just to name a few. In a strict scientific sense, humans are animals who have developed advanced cognitive processes leading to the ability of speech. So evolution does not reduce humans to animals: we are already animals. I believe what the interviewees really mean is that evolution appears to reduce humans to a lower species that lacks a sense of morality and humanity.
One other item that caught my attention was near the end of the documentary, where a mother reveals that she and her husband chose to home-school their kids due to the prevalence of evolution being taught in the school systems. When discussing this with a few friends from church, I immediately jumped to the question of why parents would home-school their children based on an idea that is taught for 1-2 weeks in high school Biology. Does that really warrant 12 years of home schooling? One of my friends who was there then clarified what I knew to be true deep down: some Christians believe that if you are an evolutionist, then you lack a sense of morality, you don't practice Christian principles, and you are probably going to be a bad influence on kids. So there is much more to it than just wanting to avoid those 1-2 weeks of high school Biology.
My hope here was to address a few salient points that some of you may contemplate or encounter as you live your lives. I suppose my takeaway points are as follows: we need to better educate ourselves about Darwin and his life before making assumptions about him, we need to clarify the definition of evolutionary theory as a prominent idea in science, and we need to realize that religion and science are both made more powerful when in tandem. Science addresses how; religion addresses why. The idea that the two are incompatible is a notion that needs to be disabused.
