Science and Faith: The Real Missing Link

I preface this whole blog with the following statement. I am a Jesus-loving, God-fearing Christian with a firm belief that everything that we see (and a whole bunch of stuff that we have yet to see) was created by a sentient God.

That being said, I LOVE reading about evolution. I personally find the concept fascinating. And I cringe whenever I hear cases going before the Supreme Court where a well-meaning Christian dolt is trying to force a school district into teaching Intelligent Design. It’s not that I don’t believe in Intelligent Design. Quite the contrary. But I don’t understand how any reasonably non-moronic person can fail to grasp the essential difference between a science and a philosophy. You cannot test the existence of a Creator by scientific means – at least not yet – and I challenge anybody to state otherwise. Unfortunately for we Creationists, as of now evolution is the foremost scientific theory dealing with life on Earth and there is plenty of scientific evidence to back it up. And when a theory has that solid a foundation, the burden really does fall on dissenters to disprove it. And while, yes, there are flaws in the theory – which I think should be mentioned in textbooks right alongside the evidence – the fact is Creationists are going to have to present a bit more evidence of their own before they get rational school boards to allow a philosophy to be taught inside a science lab.

The book that first turned me on to how intriguing the science of evolution can be was the book How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Prior to that, I never really knew much about the topic beyond what I and everybody else learned in 10^th grade biology – which basically amounted to vestigal organs, a bit about dominant and recessive genes and something to do with finches and the size of their beaks. But what Pinker does in his book is to essentially “reverse engineer” a human mind, showing how every aspect of human life, from the way we see, to the way we think, to the way we interact, to the emotions we feel, to the way we “made up” the concept of “God” were all shaped by our evolutionary past. While the book was probably the hardest thing I have ever read voluntarily, it brings up a lot of fascinating points to ponder, even if you don’t fully agree with the concept of evolution (which I’m still not sure I do… for reasons I’ll get into later). It was a truly life-changing book that left me wanting to know more.

Well it’s been a couple years but I finally took another plunge into that wacky world of Charles Darwin. I just finished the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins – perhaps the most famous Darwinist short of Darwin himself. In a nutshell, Dawkins presents evolution and natural selection from the point of view of the gene. He paints a probable picture of how life might have originated in the “primordial soup” and shows how DNA has become the very thing that controls every aspect of life everywhere on this planet today. One can’t help but conjure up images of The Matrix as Dawkins talks about a gene’s selfish, almost maniacal need to survive in the form of exact replicas and copies of itself – passing itself down through generations upon generations of engineered “survival machines” (a.k.a. “us”). Yes, according to Dawkins, humans, plants, insects, fungus, everything on earth that can be considered “alive” are nothing more than just elaborate “vehicles” designed for one reason and one reason only: to protect genes for long enough to produce more copies. Of course, unlike the machines in The Matrix, everything the genes do is unconscious and brought about purely by random chance. Nothing happens for a reason. It’s all accidental. Genes do nothing by effort or foresight. If a mutation gives its “survival machine” an edge on a competition, it’s purely by mistake, with natural selection giving it blind creedence.

Even as somebody who believes in God, it’s hard not to be swayed by people like Dawkins and Pinker. Beyond being brilliant scientists in their respective fields, they have such a way with words and metaphors that they break down highly mathematical concepts and make them so a completely science-illiterate person such as myself can understand. (Dawkins in particular weaves such stimulating prose, producing such droll and compelling lines like “Sex: that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication.”) What I often find myself saying is, “If evolution really happens, then it makes total sense that this is the way it would work.” But there is one thing that I have yet to glean from anything I’ve read about evolution thus far. It’s the one thing that gives me hope that the theory might one day be disproved: TIME.

There is an adage that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. With just a bit of trivial mathematical understanding, this makes perfect sense. Sure, give anything an infinite amount of time and they’ll write just about any damn thing you want. The evolution of complex organisms such as ourselves seems to evoke that adage, with each successive generation (from primordial soup to all modern life forms) representing another “monkey keystroke”, and the long and intricate spiral of DNA representing their Shakespearian text of choice. Except in this analogy, the number of monkeys is FINITE, as is the duration of typing time. In this analogy, the monkeys haven’t had all the time in the universe to produce their magnum opus. And rather than banging out the complete works of Shakespeare just once, they have apparently done it a couple billion times – once for every complex species that has ever lived. How the hell does that happen, even once, purely by accident? Especially when, as Dawkins says, most mutations (which are necessary for evolution to happen) end up being a detriment to the new offspring, resulting in its death to natural selection. As near as I can see, in my admittedly puny scientific mind, there just doesn’t seem to have been enough time for evolution (as Darwinists present it) to have produced the insanely complex and diverse forms of life that exist today. The only thing that makes logical (albeit not scientifically verifiable) sense is if evolution was at least guided by an intelligent being.

I know to some Christians, even this is an unacceptable view of life on this planet. Anything short of the divine creation of the sun, the moon, and every living being on earth – completed in seven days less than 10,000 years ago – is a sinful mockery of God. I see their point, but I sometimes wonder if it’s necessarily an either/or thing. I personally look at evolution as being the “Helio-Centric Heresy” of our time. For those of you who flunked history, Galileo was nearly put to death for making the extremely sinful suggestion that it is the sun, not the earth, which is center of our universe. The faithful of that time thought it was a mockery of God to even suggest that we weren’t the very thing that all of Creation revolved around. Today we, of course, know the truth… turns out it was even worse than Galileo let on. But I daresay there isn’t a religious or secular person alive who thinks this scientific revelation in any way diminishes the power and majesty of God. And how silly do you think the scoffers of Galileo’s theory felt when they got to heaven and realized they had been invoking God’s name over a complete and total farce? I can’t help but wonder how many antagonists of evolution might end up getting to heaven and realizing the same thing. Yes, evolution may be wrong. We may have all simply appeared here in the blink of an eye. The devil may have even placed all those fossils just to throw us off the straight and narrow path. But won’t we feel silly to have spent so much time saying, “God does NOT work that way,” only to get to heaven and have Him say, “Uh… yes I do.”

Ben Stein is coming out with a documentary this year called EXPELLED which explores a growing group of scientists who are using actual science to try and prove Intelligent Design. Further, it explores how the science community as a whole has been systematically silencing anyone who even suggests that Darwin might have been wrong. While I’m initially leery of the film (based on research I’ve done into the blacklisted scientists) I am actually very intrigued to see what kind of new experiments are being done in this field. Short of a gloriously unexpected scientific revelation (like realizing our carbon dating methods were WAY off or, ya know, somebody inventing a time machine to actually go back into the primordial soup) I can’t imagine evolution will be disproved in our lifetime.

But that’s okay. The way I see it, somewhere between Science’s inherently flawed interpretation of the universe (the foremost theory in physics today can’t even be tested!) and Religion’s inherently flawed interpretation of the Bible (nearly every passage, according to scholars, can have as many as seventy possible interpretations!)… somewhere between these two extremes of thought lies the Truth. God is in there. Science is in there. There is room for both. We just need to figure out where they meet. Or not. When the end of our life comes and we meet Jesus in the sky, will any of these trivialities really matter? I doubt it. As such, I will continue to read about evolution (or quantum physics, or string theory or any other “ungodly” science), allowing myself to be fascinated and filled with wonder – while at the same time remaining skeptical of the evidence… the way any good scientist should.