IT SOUNDS SO innocuous.
Of Pandas and People has a whimsical, almost Disneyesque ring to it, a soft-toy tome for children curious about the rich variety of species found in nature. To its critics, though,
Pandas, the result of a collaboration between the American authors Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, is the wrong-headed and downright wicked textbook of intelligent design (ID) theory.
ID claims that organisms are the products of an “intelligent design” conceived by a nameless “intelligent agent”. There is no mention of the G-word in ID, and, unlike creationism, it does not teach that our world is divine in origin, or even created in seven days; but for scientists and most educationists, Pandas and its counterparts are guilty of trying to tear up the principles of biology and drag scientific inquiry back to the Dark Ages.
When a US federal court ruled last week that Pandas and other ID works do not belong in the science curriculum of publicly funded schools, it delivered a Christmas present to cheer the Scroogiest of scientists: here was confirmation that the most technically advanced nation on Earth would not be swayed by Christian fundamentalist attacks on evolution. Corks popped in labs from Seattle to Saratoga.
Yet the argument about ID is a strange one. For a start, there is plenty of room for intelligent design outside the science curriculum, as part of the study of philosophy, religion or the history of ideas. ID may not hold water as a scientific theory now, but it has glorious antecedents. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic philosophers who resurrected Greek philosophy in medieval Europe argued something similar (though they also held that the Sun revolves around the Earth).
But ID’s supporters aren’t satisfied with their theory being studied as an interesting intellectual blind alley; they want it taught as a scientific alternative. Evolution, they say, is just a theory, so let’s consider other theories too. That fundamentally misunderstands scientific language: evolution was a theory when Darwin first posited it; now it is as well rooted as, say, quantum physics. Further elaboration of it is desirable and necessary; but trying to think up a new theory is likely to be futile, and certainly not worth wasting science lessons on.
Intelligent design offers little comfort to the strongest opponents of evolution: the many Americans who believe that the Bible is literally true. God (or someone) may have nudged the evolutionary process, ID argues, but it does not support the claim that He created the world in a week. Moreover, ID is a very selective nibble at the scientific worldview. For a Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, cosmology is just as threatening as evolution, showing beyond all reasonable doubt (albeit not to unreasonable doubters) that the Universe is hundreds of millions of years old, not created in 4,004BC.
The American obsession with ID has less to do with religion than it does with patriotism. Americans are special people, so how can they be descended from apes? Arthur Weis, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, calls it “American exceptionalism — the notion that we are somehow blessed by providence and our own native virtue, and as a result we are above the errors that fill the pages of history. Many feel that no outsider, least of all an ‘expert ’, can tell them what to think.”
It is easy to feel smug about this over here, where we resolved this issue (we think) more than a century ago. In modern Britain, we render unto Darwin (or Dawkins) the things that are Darwin’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
In this country, the compartmentalisation of God and faith has a longer history and has been far more strictly enforced than in America. While US politicians, Hollywood movies and celebrities continue to pay homage to God, the British way of life has no room for the divine. When George Bush talks publicly about God, Americans wouldn’t dream of taking the mickey in the way Britons do when their Prime Minister dares refer to the Almighty. When Oprah Winfrey talks about her faith, no American would dare smirk in the way Britons do when Sir Cliff Richard opens up about his. The price for such secularism is that believers often feel like pariahs; the prize, that no child in a state school will ever learn that the world was made in six days and that woman came from man’s rib.
And yet . . . Christian evangelicals may not be as numerous here as in America, but they are rich and well organised. Like their American counterparts, they are determined to proclaim the truth of the Bible, and to contest what they see as the humiliating evolutionary theory that connects humans, made in God’s own image, to a chimp or, further back, a slimeball. Intelligent design is creeping into our classrooms too, as in the Christian-sponsored city academies run by the Vardy Foundation; and many Christians are uneasy that their religion and scientific claims are at odds.
So believers here too are choosing, unwisely, to stand their ground on evolution, largely in protest against the idea that the Bible and faith have nothing to say in explaining the world and its ways. They have a point: though evolution shows how species evolve, its most ardent supporters stretch it to explain morality, love, violence and all of human nature. You do not have to be a fundamentalist redneck to feel uncomfortable with the idea that the altruism apparently shown by vampire bats in distributing blood to the needy members of their species can explain human sacrificial love in its entirety.
The separation of Church and State was supposed to deal with the scientific illiteracy of religious teachings about geocentricity and the Garden of Eden. But this separation has done little to deal with the religious illiteracy of secular scientists; it should be noted that while Richard Dawkins is invited to parade his ignorance about religious belief on our screens, as he will do next month in More4’s The Root of All Evil, no similarly incisive theologian gets airtime to denounce the secularist moral vacuum. Despite what Professor Dawkins says in his purple polemics, the Christian worldview today accommodates scientific progress. Most Christians in Britain do accept evolution; though the majority of American Christians do not. They recognise, too, that when we speak of mankind and of our Universe, we must contend with more than one dimension. Along with the spiritual, there is also the physical. Different rules apply to each sphere, and different authorities govern them.
Ultimately, intelligent design’s attempt to rewrite the principles of biology is as futile as an attempt to create Christian mathematics, or Islamic physics. Professor Dawkins has a telling reply to creationists and ID supporters who ask him to debate evolution: he apologises, pleading a prior commitment — a debate with the Flat Earth Society.
It would be far better for believers to pitch their tents on a battlefield where the enemy is on weak ground: to take a seasonal example, what, for example, is meant by “peace on earth and goodwill to all men”. Believers, of all stripes, have an answer. The secularists struggle.
