America, December 9, 2000, No. 19, Vol. 183; Pg. 26

HEADLINE: In the Beginning; Review; book review

BYLINE: Toolan, David S.

    Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
    The Relationship Between Science and Religion
    By Michael Ruse
    Cambridge Univ.Press. 233p. $24.95

     Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy and zoology at the University
of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is that rare bird, a theologically literate
scientist. He was a major expert witness, along with the theologian
Langdon Gilkey, in the 1981 test case of the state law (signed by then Governor
Bill Clinton) which permitted the teaching of "creation science" in the
Arkansas school system. Ruse's new book assumes that some version of
Darwinism is true and then goes on to give an affirmative answer to his
title's question--can a Darwinian be a Christian? He thus takes issue with
all those--scientists like Richard Dawkins, William B. Provine and Edward
O. Wilson, philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Daniel C. Dennett, and
the legal scholar Phillip Johnson--who claim that you can't be a Darwinian and
a person of faith at the same time. Science and religion, as they view
things, must inevitably conflict. Or, as Stephen Jay Gould holds, the
questions science and religion ask are so different that there can be no
overlap or connection between them.

       In contrast, Ruse defends the classic theological position, which
is that of both Catholics and mainline Protestants, that finds a fundamental
congruence between science and faith. Yes, there will be tensions between
reason and faith, but as Galileo once proposed, there can be no conflict
in principle. The bulk of Ruse's book is concerned to lay out where Darwinism
and Christianity may be thought to contradict each other--in their
different accounts of origins, human nature and evil, for instance, or in
the conflict between naturalism and miracle, or the challenge of "selfish
genes" (sociobiology) to Christian ethics. Contrasts there are, but the
alleged contradictions, Ruse argues, are misconceptions. Natural selection
and divine providence are not to be opposed; they are explanations that
take place at different conceptual levels, and hence Ruse can argue along
with philosopher Keith Ward of Oxford University that there is "every
reason to think that a scientific evolutionary account and a religious
belief in a guiding creative force are not just compatible, but mutually
reinforcing."

     Ruse won me over immediately by demythologizing two classic tales of
the science-religion conflict. The first is the legendary confrontation in
1860 between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry
Huxley, "bulldog" for the new theory of evolution, in which Huxley supposedly
bloodied the stuffy bishop and champion of biblical authority. The second
story involves the encounter between the spellbinding biblical literalist
William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow (portrayed, respectively, by
Frederick March and Spencer Tracy in the film "Inherit the Wind")
defending the agnostic John Thomas Scopes in the Tennessee "monkey trial" of the
early 1920's. Reporting for the Baltimore Sun, H. L. Mencken sold a lot of
newspapers by making a laughing stock of Bryan in the Scopes trial, but
again, the truth is that Bryan "never subscribed to a narrow reading of
Genesis," and four ordained clergymen had been ready to speak on Scopes'
behalf if the judge had only allowed it. The truth of the
Wilberforce-Huxley debate, on the other hand, says Ruse, is that
"everybody enjoyed himself immensely, and all went cheerfully off to dinner together
afterwards."

     The perceived conflicts between Darwinism and religion, however, are
not as easily dismissed as the Wilberforce-Huxley debate. The virtue of
Ruse's book is that, one by one, he takes up all the serious questions
that Darwinism can pose to the Christian worldview and systematically answers
them. Is there a necessary conflict between the biblical account of
origins in the first chapters of Genesis and the notion of the Big Bang and the
Haldane-Oparin theory of how organic life began on a 4.5 billion-year-old
earth? Is Darwinism bound to a materialistic theory, reducing everything
to molecules and atoms, and therefore denying doctrines of the imago dei and
an immortal soul? Is Darwinism's commitment to the ubiquity of law--and to
naturalism--opposed to Christianity's commitment to the Virgin birth,
turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000 or raising the dead? Ruse draws
a useful distinction here between "methodological" reductionism and
naturalism, and "metaphysical" reductionism and naturalism. Believers can
work with the former, he suggests, but must rightly object to the
dogmatism
of the latter.

     Then there are the questions that relate more directly to Christian
ethics. Is natural selection incompatible with the intervention of an
intelligent Designer? Does the "struggle for existence" necessarily
translate into "social Darwinism"--a brutal laissez faire socioeconomic
system that excludes Christian compassion? How is it that human-caused
evil comes into existence? Do our genes make us do it? Is altruism of Mother
Teresa's kind ruled out by the fact that our social behavior bears some
similarity to that of an ant colony? (One of Ruse's best chapters is
devoted to a careful analysis of Edward O. Wilson's theory of
sociobiology.) "We are not marionettes," writes Ruse, "dancing blindly to
the tune of our DNA. That is the fate of the hymenoptera. The whole point
about morality, and the reason a full-blooded genetic determinism will not
work...is that we humans have taken an evolutionary route for which such
simple determinism would be fatal."

     Then there is the theodicy question: When things go wrong, as they
often do with chance mutation, must God be held accountable? There is no
standard Darwinian response to this question, but even for hard-line
atheists like the biologist Richard Dawkins, it can hardly be said that
there would have been any alternative to the trial and error of
evolutionary change--even for God. Not even God, in other words, can be
expected to do the impossible; God cannot make two plus two equal five.
Similarly, once God decided to create, God had to do so through a series
of small, incremental alterations, and that being so, God is necessarily
locked into a path that involves physical evil, the inevitable losses at
the core of the struggle for existence. For every beneficial mutation,
there will be hundreds of random changes that spell doom. Moreover,
natural selection acts to keep deleterious mutations around. Sickle cell anemia,
for instance, stays in the population because its carriers have a natural
immunity to malaria. This is simply the price we pay for an adaptive
process that has resulted in something as amazing as the human brain.

     Darwinism concentrates the mind on the problem of physical evil, and
to a degree explains how this evil happens. But it hardly has an answer to
Dostoevsky's question about whether eternal happiness can be worth the
needless suffering of one small child. The most Darwinism can offer is an
added reason to be modest about questions like this. We are, after all,
primates who have come down out of the trees into the (hunting and
gathering) garbage and offal business. As a Darwinian, Ruse doubts our
selection-based powers to fathom the ultimate mystery of existence, much
less the mystery of evil.

     David S. Toolan, S.J., is an associate editor of America. His new
book, At Home in the Cosmos (Orbis), will be published next February.

["America" is a Jesuit magazine.]