TCS: Tech Central Station - Why 'Theology Is a Simple Muddle'

CHAPTER FOUR:

Why Do Fundamentalists Reject Darwin?



Now, at last, we can approach our final question, Why do fundamentalist Christians have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution? Why did the Southern Baptist Church refuse to accept the Reconciliation Thesis that I had offered them?



According to Richard Dawkins, there is a simple explanation-fundamentalist Christians are ignorant boobs. But this explanation, as tempting as it may be to some, simply won't do. Catholics, according to Dawkins, are also ignorant boobs, and yet they have never had much trouble accepting Darwin's theory of evolution. John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker of the nineteenth century, remarked that if evolution was the method by which God decided to organize the details of creation, then Darwin's theory, far from casting doubt on God's existence, merely demonstrated the perfection of his providence. Or to use his words:



"It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of year ago, gave laws to matter."



Rather than micro-managing the adaptations of each organism, God had simply established certain fundamental laws by which these adaptations could be produced-all according to plan, needless to say, but in this case, a plan that was laid at the very foundations of the universe.



The great seventeenth century French philosopher and Catholic priest, Pierre Malebranche, believed that it was unseemly to suppose that God worried overmuch about the minutiae of the world's day-to-day operation. Better to conceive of God as establishing, by an unchangeable and eternal decree, a set of general laws in accordance with which all the actual events of our world would be regulated-so perfectly regulated that Malebranche even ruled out the possibility of miracles. God had decreed that gravity should swiftly move objects towards the center of the earth-hence, when a three year old child fell off a balcony eleven stories high, how absurd to expect God to overturn his immutable decree by permitting the child to survive his crash into the pavement below.



Many Christians of Darwin's time also felt the same way. Henry Ward Beecher preached that "Design by wholesale is grander than design by detail," and the leading American biologist Asa Gray accepted the Darwinian principle of natural selection, but interpreted it as the method God had chosen to implement his eternal design. According to this lofty point of view, God is no humble craftsman forced to carve, piece by piece, each and every specimen of life with his own two hands and by the sweat of his brow-a mortifying role for the supreme deity, considering the fact that even Santa Claus can avail himself of an army of industrious elves to do all the boring and tedious work for him. Rather, thanks to Darwin's theory of evolution, God was no longer seen as a lowly artisan, laboriously crafting each species; instead, he was the grand architect who worked from a set of elegant and simple principles-namely, those discovered and set forth by Charles Darwin in The Origins of Species.



But if a man can accept the theory of evolution and believe in intelligent design without any logical inconsistency, what can explain the failure of Christian fundamentalists to jump on the same bandwagon that has been graced with the presence of men like John Henry Newman, Henry Ward Beecher, Asa Gray, and, today, nearly all Catholics, not to mention the more intellectually respectable denominations of Protestants? Do Southern Baptists, and such, just have lower IQ? Or is there a deeper reason for the fact that Christian fundamentalists remain opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution?



I would like to suggest that there is a deeper reason than stupidity or ignorance. Furthermore, I want to argue that it is the same deeper reason that led Darwin to reject the efforts to reconcile the belief in intelligent design with the theory of evolution that he had developed.




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