The Fool's Progress

I usually seek out the faith column on Saturdays, though it often doesn't pertain to me. A recent Saturday edition prompted the following exchange with the columnist, who has his own blog.

Dear Mr. Tammeus,

I have read your columns with interest for several years, since moving back to the Kansas City area in 1999. I am a non-theist, but am greatly interested in reading about the faith I lack. The writing you did following September 11, 2001 and the loss of your nephew was very powerful.

Your latest column, though, is a real stinker. I know next to nothing about theology, but I do know Darwin never says, "everything that dies somehow is inferior to what survives." Natural selection describes a mechanism or event like the tide or erosion. For example, the shrew-like mammals that were running around the feet of dinosaurs 65 million years ago were not superior to the thunder lizards. They were, however, able to survive the effects of a cosmic impact near the present-day Yucatan Peninsula. It does not matter why. Darwin provides a mechanism for what happened next. That's all. That now, millions of years later, you can provide a value judgment to the occasion can have no bearing on what happened then. It is as if you are arguing against the rising tide instead of merely taking a few steps back.

Similarly, Professor Hanby's fitness paradox exists only in human minds, not in the world we are struggling to understand. We inject 'fitness' into explanations after the fact. That this may threaten what we like to believe about ourselves does not make it less so. I think the basic difference between those who possess faith and those who do not is the expectation of an explanation from the universe. In some ways, the hubris of those of faith is astounding. Gravity is less well understood to scientists than evolution by natural selection (gravity breaks down when examined at the molecular level), but I have yet to encounter anyone threatened by a non-biblical explanation of what happens when you drop your car keys. The world owes you no explanation of your existence and if that leaves you feeling bleak it is your problem. Denying reality as we perceive it to preserve a self-image serves no purpose but ignorance.

KC:

Thanks for your interesting note.

I think that when Hanby was talking about what dies and what survives, he was referring to what becomes extinct and what doesn't (because obviously everything living eventually dies). And I think his concern there (and mine) has to do not so much with what Darwin himself said or didn't say but with where people after Darwin have taken his thinking. One of the dangerous places people have gone is toward what's called social Darwinism, with its descent into eugenics. That, of course, cannot be laid directly at Darwin's feet, but it's helpful to understand where some of the assumptions behind natural selection can lead and how those assumptions may conflict at least with the spirit of the doctrine of creation.

Anyway, if you have read me for quite some time and I'm only now upsetting you, I'd say you were overdue.

I’ve deleted the second exchange, but I pointed out that hopefully the horrors of Nazi Germany discredited social Darwinism for all time. Meanwhile, if modern-day materialists are on the hook for implications of their ideas repudiated sixty years ago, then modern day Christians must answer for Pat Robertson and his outbursts regarding Ariel Sharon, Hugo Chavez, and the Dover PA school board elections.

I also pointed out that with a government of democratic pluralism; the problem isn’t which ideology rules but any ideology that has complete power. Pluralism requires we leave ultimate questions unanswered in the public sphere, thus the current culture war.

Mr. Tammeus responded by asking whom to surrender to re: the culture war, which I thought was funny.

# posted by KC : 14:20