Religious Right Watch

"Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith"

"A Religion for Darwinians?" - H. Allen Orr's review in The New York Review of Books of Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher.

Highlights:

The problem with creationism, [Kitcher] insists, is not that it's not a science (because, for example, it is untestable); the problem is that it's a dead science. Creationist claims have been tested repeatedly against the facts of nature and they have failed badly. Unfortunately, this has not prevented the attempted resurrection of these claims by religiously motivated individuals or groups, often many decades after the ideas were falsified by scientists.
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Creationism based on Genesis was popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it more or less represented scientific orthodoxy. This species of creationism was committed to the literal truth of the Bible.

Kitcher looks at how "novelty creationism" begs questions, yet it persists even when evolution (descent with modification) has always been (was in Darwin's day and is still today) the only scientific (evidence-based according to the scientific method) explanation for the origin of (the existance of) species:

Did the Creator design a blind insect that was optimally suited to life in darkness? If so, Darwin asked, why do cave insects from America look so much like their seeing neighbors who live above ground, while cave insects from Europe also look so much like their seeing neighbors who live above ground?... [T]his was merely one of hundreds of examples considered by Darwin:

Why are there birds with webbed feet that live on dry land? Woodpeckers where no tree grows? Why are the fossils of extinct mammal species in Australia similar to the marsupials that inhabit the continent today? Why are the extinct armored mammals of South America akin to the currently living armadillos? Why are the birds of South America so like one another and so different from the birds of the Old World? Why does the same apply in the case of reptiles and mammals? Why do the floras and faunas of islands regularly resemble those of the neighboring continents?

In all such cases, creationists strained to find explanations while evolutionists easily accounted for the observations. Even before the advent of genetic technologies like DNA sequencing that essentially proved the point, the conclusion grew inescapable: all species are related to one another and can change through time. There is a single "tree of life" and no evidence whatever that this tree has been broken by sudden acts of creative intervention. Lyell was wrong and Darwin right -- although this did not, of course, prevent the recrudescence of novelty creationist claims in the 1920s and 1970s.

Orr sees Kitcher concluding that there may be "spiritual religion," which is

religious faith beyond supernaturalist religion. [It] abandons both the supernatural and literalism and, in their place, offers ethical models of right action and moving portraits of nobly lived lives. The "seekers" who pursue spiritual religion are plainly the product of liberal theology, and Kitcher concentrates on Christian versions of the faith. Such Christians surrender the literal resurrection and any prospect of eternal life but celebrate the "teachings, the precepts and parables" of the gospels.

Orr points out also that some may describe such spiritual religion as "secular humanism viewed through stained glass." And Kitcher at best heavy-handed in describing some "voices of reason" in the science-and-faith debate as being "frequently...without charity" and "always without hope." (Always?) Kitcher's description begs the question: hopeless about what? About the existance of an afterlife? Probably fairly hopeless, yes. About at least the potential for a better life in the here and now through a more widely-shared humanism and the cultivation of wonder based on an appreciation of the complexity of life and cosmos? Probably fairly hopeful much of the time, I think, even among the so-called New Atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. But that is not to say that everyone involved in the science-and-faith debate would not be well-served by reminders to have respect and charity for every other participant. In the end, it seems Kitcher is coming from a reasonable yet warm-hearted perspective.

(Image: the first known sketch by Darwin, drawn in his journal, suggesting the interconnectedness of species through evolution.)

Salon's review of "For The Bible Tells Me So"

The Salon.com review of the documentary, For The Bible Tells Me So:

What would Jesus do? If his son was one of Judy's friends, that is.

Whether Daniel Karslake's admirable and moving "For the Bible Tells Me So" can reach across the gaping wound it documents in American society -- between traditional Christian families and their gay sons and daughters -- is a dubious proposition. Karslake does a fine job of approaching his subjects in a neutral, non-judgmental manner, and even when the parents he interviews are having a really tough time accepting their gay kids, he never presents them as demons or bigots. Liberal mainline Christians will embrace this elegantly structured, TV-ready concoction, with its message that the biblical proscription on homosexuality has been misinterpreted, and its focus on healing and mutual understanding. I doubt many fundamentalists will want to see it in the first place.

Of course they should. Two of Karslake's subjects are more or less celebrities: Chrissy Gephardt, lesbian daughter of former House minority leader and presidential candidate Dick Gephardt, and Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. But in some ways the other families in the film are more critical to its argument, like the Poteats, an African-American fundamentalist family from North Carolina who have never quite adjusted to their daughter's sexual identity, or the Reitans, white-bread Minnesota Lutherans out of Garrison Keillor's universe who have embraced their gay son Jake after a protracted struggle with his coming-out and how it affected their hopes and dreams for him.

In fact, if Karslake's interviews are to be believed, the Gephardts and the Robinsons ought to be nominated for sainthood. Dick Gephardt is a Southern Baptist, although his wife and kids were raised Catholic, which is a double whammy as far as homosexuality goes. But the former congressman insists he was only concerned about Chrissy's welfare and happiness, and within a couple of years of Chrissy's leaving her husband for another woman, the new couple were included on the family Christmas card. Robinson's parents, who attend a conservative Disciples of Christ church in rural Kentucky, had much farther to travel, but their immense pride in their son's achievement simply blew away their misgivings about what he did, and with whom, in the bedroom.

Most upsetting of all is the story of Mary Lou Wallner, a Colorado fundamentalist whose estrangement from her lesbian daughter ends in irredeemable tragedy. Wallner is a composed woman in late middle age who must live out her life amid prodigious pain and regret, and Karslake handles her story with grace and sympathy. As for the film's detour into theological discussions of Leviticus -- yes, homosexuality is condemned as an abomination, but so is the eating of shrimp and the wearing of wool-linen blends -- of course it will convince those with open minds that 4,000-year-old ritual practice should not govern contemporary behavior.

Similarly, families with gay kids all over the country who are already receptive to Karslake's ecumenical message will clasp this film to their hearts, but those who need it the most may never see it.

"For the Bible Tells Me So" opens Oct. 5 at the Quad Cinema in New York, Oct. 12 in Boston, Lake Worth, Fla., Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Springfield, Mo.; Oct. 19 in Athens, Ga., Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Dallas, Denver, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Rochester, N.Y., Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, N.M. and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

Of course, one thing Karslake’s documentary will likely demonstrate (unintentionally) is that the only way faith reconciles itself with homosexuality--especially Christianity, Islam, and Judaism--is by becoming a little bit less of a faith and a little bit more of a modern set of beliefs based on humanist ethics and evidentiary reasoning: the twin pillars of the Enlightenment that so influenced America’s founding fathers. To find homosexuality intrinsically, essentially “bad” may not require religious faith, but it sure helps.

(Editorial quibble: I've always found the phrase "friend of Dorothy" odd. As a label for an entire category of humanity, it really makes as much sense as calling all Christians "friends of Falwell" or all citizens of South America, "friends of Simón Bolívar." It's not just slightly offensive, it's really rather stupid: After all, most gay 20somethings and teens don't even know who Judy Garland was, and plenty of gay people--regardless of age--who do know who she was really couldn't care less about her.)

"Root and Branch"

There are some gems in Ian Hacking's essay on anti-Darwinism, "Root and Branch," in The Nation. In it he looks at Living With Darwin--"Philip Kitcher's brief and cogent manifesto"--and seeks to extol the link between democracy (which he rightly deems as good despite all its problems) and American anti-Darwinism, while lambasting anti-Darwinism itself.

This honest appraisal:

...chance variation and natural selection have sufficed to produce the living world as we know it. It is an incredible doctrine. Darwin himself was pretty cautious about it. I respect anyone who says he cannot believe it. But that is where one should stay, in a state of disbelief. Once you start arguing against it, you end up being silly.

For instance:

Intelligent design is silly. It is a refurbished version of the argument advanced at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth by those I call Royal Society divines--important Anglican clergymen, often fellows of the Royal Society of London, the leading scientific institution of the day.

Along the way, Hacking's helpful reminder thus:

Theories of evolution have been evolving ever since Jean-Baptiste Lamarck began lecturing on the subject in 1800. "Founder of the evolutionary theory," it says on his grand statue at the entry to the botanic gardens in Paris. That is a good reminder that Darwin, marvelous thinker and naturalist that he was, is only part of an ongoing story. The pedigree of evolution passes through Darwin's natural selection, through the synthesis with Mendel's genetics, through the idea of mutation--but also through the statistician's observation that you can get a lot of speciation without mutation, by sheer combinatorial chance, called genetic drift.

(Image: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, 1744-1829)