http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/governor-perry-like-many-christians-wants-to-leave-room-for-god/2011/08/23/gIQAXcxRYJ_blog.html
Governor Perry, like many Christians, wants to leave room for God
Q. Texas governor and GOP candidate Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is ”just a theory” with “gaps” and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” Perry later added “God is how we got here.” According to a 2009 Gallup study , only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?
A. Rick Perry really did it this time.
He dared wonder about Darwinism in public. He better realize that hell hath no fury to match that of a Darwinist scorned. Denunciations will follow, because every age produces people who enjoy denouncing anyone daring to wonder about what they know to be true.
That’s too bad, because there are good discussions that could be had about Darwin, Darwinism, evolution, and evolutionism.
Charles Darwin was a world class scientist and natural philosopher. His writings suggest a general view of how to do science, of reality, and he proposed several scientific theories that most scientists continue to find useful.
Read Darwin. Interacting with his ideas is always stimulating to better thinking. Darwin, like most scientists of his day, wanted to limit science to natural causes partly because they thought natural causes could explain everything.
When he told how species originated naturally, he thought the story was done.
Let’s call his general philosophy “Darwinism” and his scientific ideas “evolution.” Most Americans rightly reject “Darwinism,” but confuse this sensible rejection with denying that “evolution” happens.This mistake is encouraged when loud Internet atheists consistently push the two things together.
“Darwinism” is certainly incompatible with Christianity and quite possibly wrong. Nature, matter and energy, are not all there is. Mind exists and so things can be caused by intelligence as well as impersonal forces. If scientists decided to limits themselves to the impersonal, then science will not be able to explain some important things.
They will leave that job to some other field of knowledge. For example, science can give endless detail about what is the case, but it can never tell a rational man what ought to be the case. If science refuses to consider more than what makes up a thing, then it will never know the purpose of the thing.
An exhaustive description of what makes a star does not tell what a star is without the further dubious philosophical assumption that things the sum of their parts.
Governor Perry wants to leave room for God. Darwinism does not, but evolution can if understood modestly. Internet atheists will be eager to confuse this issue, as will a few religious believers, but there is an important issue here.
Schools should teach the scientific consensus, but not smuggle secularism or Darwinism in with it. They do and it should stop. If these discussions cannot take place in science class, then there should be a good class in philosophy offered.
Of course, there is the further question: “Is evolution true?”
Darwin’s best idea, evolution, came with many other related ideas. Very soon some of them were rejected by scientists as they learned about genetics. Others have continued to enjoy the support of almost all practicing scientists.
A few scientists and philosophers have seen problems with modern forms of evolution. They think these problems are serious enough that the entire theory is called into question. They differ in how radically they wish to challenge the established orthodoxy, but often find that Darwinism prevents their being able to make their challenges heard.
That would be too bad.
Other scientists, theologians, and philosophers have a more radical idea. They think that science took a wrong turn by excluding personal causation or theology. Philosopher J.P. Moreland argues in Christianity and the Nature of Science that while generally a harmless error to practicing scientists, eventually a closed philosopher of science will limit progress.
The first group of skeptics about evolution contain those who believe in a Creator and a few who do not. The second group are “creationists,” though like any intellectual movement they differ amongst themselves about where to draw lines.
A Christian is presented with a cheerful situation. He can, if he wishes, accept the scientific consensus. It is compatible with his faith. On the other hand, the God-given right to wonder may lead him to try bolder experiments in relating his religious knowledge to his scientific knowledge.
All Christians, from Francis Collins an evangelical who accepts evolution, to Michael Behe, a Catholic who is critical of some ideas, to Kurt Wise, a paleontologist and creationist, should agree in rejecting philosophical Darwinism.
What do I think?
I am very skeptical that evolution, as we understand it, is adequate, but cautious knowing I am not a scientist. Separately, I believe science should be more open, at some level, to intelligent causation and believe “creationism” solves some important philosophical problems. It makes sense to commit and see. Finally, I don’t think any of our “big theories” are flawless and enjoy wondering about all of them.
Christianity does not force me to believe any of those things. Intellectual curiosity did as did an aversion to Darwinist bullying. Meanwhile, none of that prevents me from using our best present ideas in thinking about the world. The scientific consensus may not be “true,” but it is still useful.
Like a man with an imperfect tool, I will keep using it until a better one comes along. I suspect one will, but meanwhile am patient.
Plato told a truth about both religion and science in his Timaeus. Both religion and science give humanity useful ideas and theories. Science can better our physical well being and religion heals our souls. Since body and soul are linked, both good science and good theology together produce happy flourishing humans. Plato called the fusion of science and religion a myth.
He did not mean by “myth” a false story about gods, but a big explanation for everything that can never be more than likely given our humanity. Christians know that being right about some details doesn’t mean that we have put them together correctly. Scientists know this as well, which is not surprising since science originated in an overwhelmingly Christian society.
The danger is when we become rigid about our interpretation of scientific data or our interpretation of religious data or how the two should relate. Worse we can treat either science or religion as having nothing to teach us. This arrogance leads to the vitriol on this issue so easy to find.
My own position has been to encourage a maximum set of possibilities in these discussions. I suspect that people will look back and realize that most of what we believed scientifically today was just a subset of some greater series of theories. My suspicion is that Genesis will have been useful in that process.
Governor Perry should think more about these issues. While policy should be made from the current scientific consensus, he should make sure dissenters are heard. He should keep wondering.
NY Times Sunday Book Review August 19, 2011
Seeds, Germs and Slaves
By IAN MORRIS
1493
Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
By Charles C. Mann
Illustrated. 535 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.50.
“There’s a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds,” Dr. Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire’s “Candide.” “If you hadn’t been caught up in the Inquisition, or walked across America . . . you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.”
“True,” Candide answers. “But now we must tend our garden.”
Voltaire would have loved Charles C. Mann’s outstanding new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” In more than 500 lively pages, it not only explains the chain of events that produced those candied fruits, nuts and gardens, but also weaves their stories together into a convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.
Going one better than Voltaire, Mann’s book opens in a garden as well as closes in one. The first is Mann’s own in Massachusetts; the second, a Filipino family plot in Bulalacao. Despite being half a world apart, the two gardens grow many of the same plants, hardly any of which are native to either place. This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the “Homogenocene,” the Age of Homogeneity.
“1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.
Mann generously acknowledges how much of this story line comes from Alfred W. Crosby’s classic “Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900,” first published a quarter of a century ago. This book has had a huge influence in academia (it was one of the main inspirations for Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Guns, Germs, and Steel”), but Mann has long felt it needed updating. When he met Crosby, he nagged the historian to write a new edition. Finally Crosby told him: “Well, if you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t you do it?”
And so Mann did. “1493” is much more than just “Ecological Imperialism” warmed over, however. Mann takes the argument into new territory by suggesting that only by understanding what Crosby called “the Columbian Exchange” — the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years — can we make sense of contemporary globalization. The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that “from the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.”
With admirable evenhandedness, he shows how the costs and benefits of globalization have always been inseparable. We cannot have one without the other. Bringing the potato to Europe made it possible for the Irish famine to kill millions when the potatoes were stricken by blight, but it also kept other millions of half-starved peasants alive. Bringing malaria to the Americas depopulated some parts of the New World, but it also kept European armies out of other parts. Mann can even see the point of view of the chainsaw-wielding loggers who deforested the Philippines so that Americans could have cheap furniture: “These agents of destruction were just putting food on the table.”
Mann has managed the difficult trick of telling a complicated story in engaging and clear prose while refusing to reduce its ambiguities to slogans. He is not a professional historian, but most professionals could learn a lot from the deft way he does this. The book takes a roughly chronological approach, beginning in 1493 and continuing to 2011, and ranges across almost every continent. It is thoroughly researched and up-to-date, combining scholarship from fields as varied as world history, immunology and economics, but Mann wears his learning lightly. He serves up one arresting detail after another (who knew that “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an English election slogan in 1765?), always in vivid language (as in his description of inland Brazil in the 1970s — “bad roads, poor land and lawless violence: ‘Deadwood’ with malaria”).
Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. He makes even the most unpromising-sounding subjects fascinating. I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-century Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.
All historians struggle to get the balance between human will and vast impersonal forces just right. “Should part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria?” Mann asks, and while I’m sure he’s right to answer that “the idea is not impossible,” this claim (and one or two others) seems a stretch. But that is part of the book’s appeal. Almost everyone will find something that challenges his assumptions.
As well as making humans share the stage with other organisms, Mann also wants Europeans to surrender more of the limelight to the rest of humanity. In the 1960s, historians began to flip from casting Europeans as heroic adventurers who created the modern world to casting them as wicked exploiters. But they continued nonetheless to put Europeans in the main roles. Mann repeatedly emphasizes that the numbers do not bear this out. “Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world,” he observes, “was less a meeting of Europe and America than of Africans and Indians.” As late as the 19th century, Europeans were still in a distinct minority in the New World.
Mann might be faulted for sometimes seeming to forget that since 1492 it has overwhelmingly been Europeans (not Africans or Native Americans) who have put animals, plants and microbes into motion, but his larger points still stand. In setting off the Columbian Exchange, humans rarely knew what they were doing. Once begun, the process ran completely out of human control. And now that it has hit its stride, every animal, plant and bug in the world is caught up in it. Back in the 1870s, for instance, the British government, worried about its rubber supplies, offered to buy every rubber seed that could be smuggled out of Brazil. People didn’t ask what this would mean for Laos — why would they? But 140 years on, the chain of events they set off has brought social upheaval and the threat of ecological collapse to this remote corner of the world. There is nowhere to hide from globalization.
Mann shows that Dr. Pangloss was right: Candide’s run-ins with the Inquisition and America’s natives were not just random events. The Columbian Exchange has shaped everything about the modern world. It brought us the plants we tend in our gardens and the pests that eat them. And as it accelerates in the 21st century, it may take both away again. If you want to understand why, read “1493.”
Ian Morris is the author of “Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.”
By Gregory Paul
From Jesus’ socialism to capitalistic Christianity
A truly strange thing has happened to American Christianity. A set of profound contradictions have developed within modern conservative Christianity, big and telling inconsistencies that have long slipped under the radar of public knowledge, and are only now beginning to be explicitly noted by critics of the religious and economic right.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/from-jesus-socialism-to-capitalistic-christianity/2011/08/12/gIQAziaQBJ_blog.html
Here is what is peculiar. Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of – and many of whose followers are — the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin’s evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!
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