News | Sunday, 22 February 2009

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Evolving beyond belief

150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection remains an intensely divisive issue. Is evolution incompatible with Christian faith? Raphael Vassallo on the great Darwin dilemma

Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov once quipped: “I’d let them teach creationism in the schools, if they let us teach evolution in the churches.”
He was of course joking, but the underlying reference was to a very serious debate that erupted in the American Midwest in the late 1990s... when the State of Kansas attempted to formally ban evolution from science classes, to replace it with creationism: i.e., that the Biblical account of creation is to be taken literally.
The attempt has since been repeated, with varying degrees of success, in other parts of the USA and beyond... prompting the Council of Europe to pass resolution 1580, which urges EU member states to “to firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution.”
This advice appears to have fallen on deaf ears here in Malta, where creationism has found its way into at least one licensed school.
“We don’t teach evolution,” Pastor Victor Fenech, director of Mosta’s Accelerated Christian Academy, proudly informed this newspaper in 2007. “On the contrary, we inform our students that the theory of evolution is an attempt to discredit the Holy Bible, by providing an alternative explanation for the origins of life.”
Pastor Fenech would probably be surprised to discover that his own existence is itself evidence to the contrary. He is, after all, a product of the combined genetic information of his parents; who in turn inherited their own parents’ genes, and so on all the way back to our earliest Homo sapiens pro-genitor... who was born to a pair of similar (but not identical) hominids, somewhere in East Africa less than 200,000 years ago.
In fact, you can trace this process over billions of years until you get to the first emergence of a single, self-replicating DNA molecule. And while there may be differences in opinion regarding how this tiny particle later evolved, the world’s scientific establishment is nonetheless emphatic in its consensus that all living things on earth are the products of an entirely self-contained process known as “natural selection”.
But 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, a sizeable majority on both sides of the Atlantic still actively reject the international cannon of scientific knowledge on this point. And judging by the fervour with which these people seek to abolish evolution from the education system, the concept that “man descended from monkeys” continues to offend religious sentiment as much today, as it did when Darwin published his Origins of Species in 1859.
What, exactly, are these people so afraid of?

The Darwin dilemma
Prof. Victor Axiak is perhaps ideally placed to comment on this dilemma. Not only is he a biologist and a lecturer in the University of Malta’s science department; he is also a practising Catholic and chairman of the Church’s Environment Commission.
“I am a biologist and a believer in God,” he affirms. “I appreciate that this is not easy, especially when many scientists and theologians often appear to be at loggerheads. However, I firmly believe that this is only a superficial divide. If you manage to get over this gulf dividing the two mentalities, then you may be a better scientist and a better believer.”
For Prof. Axiak, Darwinism is controversial mainly in its implications for the basic Christian tenet of a Divine Plan of Salvation.
“The most challenging aspect of Darwin’s idea was that evolution occurs through processes which are essentially occurring at random, and which, as such, do not need to happen according to some plan or direction, or with some purpose,” he explains. “This was, and still is to some people, a controversial materialistic idea.”
Certainly it was controversial in Darwin’s own lifetime. Ironically, it was the Anglican Church which reacted most adversely: Rev. Adam Sedgwick, himself a renowned Victorian scientist, complained that Darwin had omitted any reference to God’s munificence: without which “humanity... would suffer a damage that might brutalise it, and sink the human race”.
For its part, the traditionally less tolerant Catholic Church chose an entirely different tack: for 100 years it ignored Darwinism altogether, with the first oblique reference appearing only in 1950, when Pius XII’s encyclical ‘Humani Generis’ observed that “the Church does not forbid that... research and discussions... take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.”
By this time, it was perhaps a little too late to resist the theory in the same way the Church had earlier resisted Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. For one thing, popes no longer wielded the unbridled temporal power of the pre-Enlightenment era; for another, the Church soon found itself faced with an overwhelming and unprecedented volume of scientific evidence – more evidence, in fact, than had ever been amassed in support of a single theory.
This much is guardedly acknowledged by an International Theological Commission document on creation and evolution, endorsed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004: “While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage...”
The official Church position today, while often criticised as vague, is nonetheless favourably disposed towards Darwin and his legacy. It acknowledges, for instance, that human beings descended from apes; but at the same time it retains a belief that we were somehow singled out and set apart from other species – “created in God’s image and likeness”, as the Biblical version maintains – and that unlike any other living thing, we were endowed with an immortal soul.
Having said that, the Church never quite specified the precise instant when ensoulment took place... nor whether the same boon was also extended to other, extinct human species such as Neanderthal man or Homo erectus.

Demotion of Man
This brings us to the second apparent contradiction between Darwinism and Christian doctrine: its transformation of the way human beings view themselves.
“Darwinism implies that the evolution of humans as a natural species is determined by ‘materialistic’ mechanisms,” Prof. Axiak explains. “Therefore, from a biological point of view we are not different from other species, and we should not assume that as a species we have any guarantee that we will never become extinct.”
For most scientists, this observation is as self-evident as the fact that a falling object will accelerate at a rate of nine metres per second. But for those brought up to believe in the inherent uniqueness of man, it borders on heresy.
Dr Michael Asciak, the former Nationalist MP entrusted with drawing up Malta’s bioethics law, acknowledges that Darwinism presents an apparent challenge to the assumed superiority of mankind.
“Although man’s position in the world is always regarded as the pinnacle of creation, Darwin’s concepts showed for the first time that man shared with the rest of creation a common origin,” he points out.
But Dr Asciak – who is also a member of the conservative Catholic lay organisation, Opus Dei – sees no essential contradiction between these two world visions.
“Man shares with all God’s creatures certain biological parameters and is put in stewardship of managing creation and refraining from abuse,” he asserts. “The concept, present in Genesis II rather than Genesis I, is given more force by Darwin. This means that we should respect all creatures as we are responsible for their welfare and management, and be able to pass on this heritage, with which we are intrinsically entwined, to future generations.”

Chance or design?
While mainstream religious institutions generally accept Darwinism, the basic scientific principle of evolution now faces a new challenger: Intelligent design (ID).
ID in fact presents the single most successful (if scientifically groundless) alternative to Darwinism, having already supplanted evolution in the science curricula of several schools worldwide.
The concept distinguishes itself from the creationism embodied by Pastor Vincent Fenech, in that it acknowledges evolution as a general principle. However, its adherents argue that the world is altogether too complex a place to have come about, so to speak, “by accident”.
Citing complex life-forms as “evidence” of an intelligent designer at work, they reject Darwinian natural selection on the grounds that “random chance occurrences”, of the kind described above by Prof. Axiak, cannot by themselves account for the sheer diversity of life on earth as it appears to us today.
At a glance, natural selection certainly appears to work by an entirely random series of genetic mutations; but for evolutionary biologists like Prof. Richard Dawkins – author of ‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘The God Delusion’ – “chance” plays only a very small part in the process.
The basic mechanism of evolution involves the transfer of genetic information by a process of self-replication. As individual genes make copies of themselves, “errors” sometimes creep in, resulting in occasional variations of any given living organism.
Sometimes these variations prove to be a handicap, with the result that the organism dies before getting the chance to reproduce. In others, the variation proves advantageous... in which case the organism will increase its own survival rate, and with it the ability to pass on the mutated gene to its descendents.
It is these successful variants which are “selected” – not by any supernatural entity, but simply because they lived while others died. But there the chance factor ends. A single random variation may open up a new branch of the evolutionary “tree”... but from that point onward, the branch will evolve within the strict parameters dictated by the organism’s own genetic information.
Darwinists argue that this alone accounts for the remarkable “illusion of design” inherent in all life: a plant species may grow taller over generations in what looks like a deliberate attempt to get away from herbivores... but the real reason for the change is that the taller variant is automatically advantaged, in an environment where shorter plants invariably get eaten.
By the same mechanism, a giraffe would not grow to a height of 18 feet merely by chance... nor would it necessarily have to be designed that way.
And this is what frightens the faithful. Taken to its logical conclusion, the process of Darwinian natural selection will make redundant the entire notion of a divine plan: no maestro conducting the orchestra; no master puppeteer pulling the strings; no intelligent designer at work behind the scenes... and barring the possibility of a God who simply left his creation entirely to its own devices (a possibility which Darwinism alone cannot easily refute), the resulting inference is... no creator, and therefore no God.

Bridging the gap
For believers in both science and religion, attempts to bridge this gap are often fraught with difficulty. Dr Michael Asciak seems to suggest that “acceptance of the truth” is sufficient to overcome the apparent contradiction.
“Science can throw much light on the laws of nature as God intended them to be and one has to accept this as being the way God wanted things,” he observes. “The Bible is only concerned with the truth that God created the world. The world did not just happen. There is an efficient cause. It is God. However, the Bible does not tell us how God is creating the world; only science can do this.”
But he also concedes that “this is not easy to accept if you have been brought up on a ‘seven-day’ only diet.”
“Darwin showed us that we have to accept evolution as the means through which God still chooses to create the world in the past and at present, and wonder aloud why he would want to make us his co-creators and share directly in his creation.”
It remains debatable, however, whether Darwinists will share this appraisal of their hero’s great achievement.

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