In the past couple of posts I’ve been talking about evolution, now I hope to wrap up this short series of posts.  I’ve mentioned the reasons that I think it’s the truth, but I’ve not really mused about the opposition.  It’s an interesting question, why do people shout so loudly about evolution?  It seems to me that it’s not just faith, but given the strident approach and the volume, I’m wondering if it runs a little deeper.

Why do I say that it’s not just faith?  Well, there are plenty of religious moderates for who evolution seems to coexist quite happily with their faith.  There are plenty of accommodations that can be made along the lines of “God started it all, evolution is just one of the tools he chose to use” and so on and so forth.  The thing is that all of this requires the understanding of the believer to change.  The believer needs to think about it, question, and then allow their personal theology to evolve.

Bingo.  That’s why the screaming.  Even for a moderate, evolution requires a reassessment of their beliefs, mental accommodations must be made.   This begins to shift the so-called “rock of faith”.  I keep talking about a shifting of the rock on which a religious faith is built, now I can start to illustrate a little more clearly what I mean.

Now … If I was a fundamentalist this sort of thing would keep me awake at night.  Let’s think about this in and I’ll invoke a question that I first saw on “Atheist Thought”, the site of an atheist writer from the Orkneys called Eric Stockton.

When  reality puts a spanner in the works of a dogmatic religious system, the adherents have a limited series of choices.  You can remain utterly fundamentalist and deny reality, but anyone who’s seen the courtroom scenes in “Inherit the Wind” knows how bad that makes you look.  Or, you go down the rabbit hole……

The question is “Given the words of Matthew ch 6, v5-6, how do you justify the practice of collective prayer and worship in church? “.  I’ve given the exact wording from the NIV below.

5. And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.

6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

OK, we have a contradiction between scripture and practise here.  Of course the question above could have been phrased “Given the overwhelming and ever increasing evidence for evolution.  Given the fact it produces the goods in both science and industry and is therefore beyond any reasonable doubt.  How do you justify the Adam and Eve story in Genesis?” But whichever, let’s take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes……

We have but 3 real choices:

1.  The religion’s founder was wrong. Our first option, this is the least acceptable as a religion based on the word of a mistaken founder simply won’t do.  What else was he wrong about? There’s not much else to be said there, it’s the nuclear option.

2.  The scripture was mis-reported / mis-transmitted. Again a fairly nuclear option, it means that there is absolutely no guarantee that any of the scripture is reliable.  I’ve covered this before in my essays, and in summary, I consider this a highly likely thing.

3.  It’s all open to interpretation.  This is the option I’ve seen used as the main answer to this problem it leads straight into “Cafeteria Christianity”.  Once you can interpret things anyway you please, the centre cannot hold.  Frankly, at this point it’s all over for any orthodoxy and fundamentalism bar the shouting.  You may as well simply do as you please, so what’s the point?

Given the above, I can see why Evolution has caused such a controversy.  It is indeed the wolf at the door of dogmatic religions.  I should point out that I see no threat to Paganism or some forms of Buddhism in Evolution, I also plan to move on from this now, I think I’ve said my piece.

In a previous post I talked a little about Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.  I mentioned that the second episode covered Evolution and now I’d like to say a little more about my views on Evolution.

First, we have to clear something up, the term “Theory of Evolution”.  This is much used by its opponents to denigrate it with the words “it’s only a theory”.  On the surface, they would seem to have something, but looking deeper I have my doubts.

A Scientific Theory is an attempt to explain a series of observations.  It must be stated in such a way that it is testable and potentially could be disproved.  The following quote covers it pretty well:

“A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it’s an accepted hypothesis. ” [1]

It seems fair to say then that Evolution is certainly no mere hypothesis, Darwin’s ‘best guess’, but that there is evidence stacked up in favour of it.  Some of this is observations, resistance to antibiotics in bacteria and pesticide resistance in insects.  Our knowledge of Evolution has been used to make predictions in the fossil record, and also in the biotech industry. [2] [3]  Further to this, while some may still deny that species can arise through evolution;  Speciation, the arising of a separate species or sub species, has been directly observed. [4]

My third reference link below provides what I consider to be the killer blow in favour of Evolution, the thing that makes it quite plain that it is fact.  There are a number of practical applications, the implications of this are clear. Our use of our knowledge of Evolution has saved rare species, assisted in engineering, helped create antibiotics and more.

My question is; In light of this, scientific convention notwithstanding, how can Evolution now be viewed as anything other than solid fact?

References

[1] – http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

[2] – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html (see “Evolution has never been observed”, paragraph 3)

[3] – http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA215.html

[4] – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html (more specifically, section 5)

I got involved in a debate with a work colleague a week or so ago about the death penalty, he was for it and I was against.  It was interesting to notice the faith in Science to give the right answers in such a case, almost unquestioning, though I’ll ponder the question of Science as a religion at a later date.

What was interesting, was that his position seemed to be emotionally chosen, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.  I’m very sure everyone reading this has come across people making decisions emotionally or holding positions on issues emotionally.  For example, the debate on climate change seems to be such an issue, with much shrillness and name calling, and that does the subject no justice given the massive importance of what they’re discussing.  I also recall Richard Dawkins telling us in his book “The God Delusion”, of some very senior scientists who, while holding no religious faith themselves, go to church or synagogue out of a feeling of “supporting the team”[1].

So why do we have emotions?  The study of the evolution of emotions began with Charles Darwin in his book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, which was published in 1872.  Darwin noticed that even in people who are born blind, many facial emotional expressions remain the same as in sighted people, research since has shown that many emotional expressions (joy, anger, etc) are common across even isolated cultures.

So why use them in decision making?  The answer, in my opinion, lies in the value of fast decision making.  Dr Dawkins covers this in great detail in the God Delusion, and I highly recommend that book to everyone.  In short, we often need to make quick fairly reliable decisions, if we take time to consider our actions thoroughly, then the odds are we’d be dead long before we made a decision.  Sometimes, you need to act very quickly indeed, and our emotions cut in before our thoughts [2], how often have you acted first and then stopped to think?  This is the nub of it, emotions hit first and then we override our emotions with complex thought.

So coming back to where I started, is it so surprising that we take emotional stances?  How often do we hear the question “How do you feel about that?” not “What do you think of that?”, so I did an informal experiment.  I put the phrase “How do you feel about that issue?” into our Google overlord.  Interesting results, both with and without the quotes, showing a range of subjects in both searches that should not be left to feelings to decide.  I’m not saying we should abandon empathy and emotion, far from it, but my searches turned up health care reform, abortion, stem cell research, choosing the gender of children, these things need more careful consideration.

I think we as a species need to engage in a little consciousness raising here, stop letting our emotions control us and start thinking with our heads.  Not only the use of Science, but the Buddhist emphasis on mindfulness and the Taoist emphasis on awareness all serve to lead us in this direction, I suppose that there’s hope for us yet, eh?

[1] The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  2007 Black Swan edition. ISBN 978-0-552-77331-7.

[2] Ethics as Emotions – An Evolutionary Approach.  Chris Lucas (date unknown)