- who: Michael Ruse
- what: Can a Darwinian Be a Christian: Conversation at the Crossroad of Science and Religion (philosophy lecture)
- where: Student Center Ballroom D
- when: Wednesday, February 10
The Conflict Between Religion and Science:
Michael Ruse on Evolution and Christianity
by Meg Moynihan
The SIU Honors Department will reprise its annual celebration of the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth with a lecture by science philosopher Michael Ruse. A professor of philosophy at Florida State University, Ruse will bring more than forty years of experience to his discussion of the increasingly fractious crossroads between science and religion. Ruse's lecture, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?, will take place Wednesday, February 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Ballroom D of the SIU Student Center.
Born in 1940 in Birmingham, England, Ruse began his academic career at the University of Bristol, earning his undergraduate degree in 1962 and returning for a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1970. He published his first book, The Darwinian Revolution, in 1979, and has gone on to write or edit seventeen more, addressing topics as diverse as the concept of progress in evolutionary biology and a philosophical approach to understanding homosexuality.
But perhaps Ruse is most notable for his ongoing contention that Darwinism is not just compatible with but actually similar to Christianity as a way of understanding the world. As the title of his lecture suggests, Ruse's books work to collapse the often cavernous distance between evolutionary science and religion, focusing on common ground between Darwin's writings and the Bible. He also frequently debates William A. Dembski, a prominent proponent of "intelligent design," as an advocate of Darwinian evolution.
In addition to this longstanding focus on the philosophical and religious implications of Darwin's works, Ruse has written extensively about the controversy over teaching creationism versus evolution in public schools. Ruse appeared as a key witness in the landmark 1981 court case McLean versus Arkansas, wherein a federal judge ultimately struck down the state law permitting the teaching of "creation science" in the Arkansas school system.
More recently, Ruse has been outspoken in his reproach for the so-called New Atheists, a group of writers including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who have attacked the institution of religion and defended atheism as both a moral choice and a scientific mandate. Whereas the New Atheists generally reject the idea that Darwinian evolution can exist alongside religious faith, Ruse has made that synergy the cornerstone of his recent work.
For more information about Ruse's lecture, log on to <http://honors.siu.edu>.
Nightlife recently caught up with Ruse to discuss the overlap between Darwinism and Christianity, the perils of Biblical literalism, and the fraught parentage of the evolutionary process.
Your 2001 book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? has the same title as your upcoming lecture, and both are phrased as questions rather than statements. What led you to this decision, considering that your own position seems clearly to be yes, one can be both a Darwinian and a Christian?
My first job is as a philosopher, and the task of a philosopher is to pose questions, not necessarily to answer them. But beyond that, I want to encourage people to think about things for themselves rather than just assuming that they agree with me and that I'm right. The issues raised by any analysis or comparison of Darwinism and Christianity are deep and personal and should be considered by everyone, and I think one is more likely to achieve that by offering a question rather than an answer.
I think that's one of the big problems with the New Atheists, that they enter the discussion with the assumption that anyone who is a religious believer is stupid and doesn't actually have a well-thought-out view of the world and just blindly accepts religious premises as true without any analysis or critical thought at all. And while that is certainly true of some Christians, in the same way that it's true of some scientists, it's a very unfair and reductive way to begin any conversation about questions this significant.
I'm glad you brought up the New Atheists, because you've been vocal in your criticism of their methods and attitudes despite the fact that on paper you would seem to share many of their beliefs. Do you think they have contributed anything positive to the discourse surrounding religion and evolution?
Well, to be honest with you, no, I don't! And I know that that sounds very arrogant and dismissive, but it's the truth. I think that their absolute refusal to take believers seriously is nothing but a hindrance to the goal of having their own views taken seriously. They are also inconsistent and intentionally misleading in their depictions of the metaphysical beliefs held by the majority of religious people.
Richard Dawkins is particularly guilty of both those things. He's written a book called The Selfish Gene, and if someone were to say that he's wrong because genes can't be selfish, Dawkins would be completely entitled to object, because he obviously isn't actually suggesting that genes are conscious entities that can act on emotions like selfishness. It's a metaphor for the evolutionary process, not a literal description of a gene. But Dawkins never affords his critics that subtlety or respect. He just generalizes and belittles their beliefs without giving them the space and context they deserve. He doesn't extend the courtesy of equal consideration.
The New Atheists want to argue that all religion is evil and harmful, and I think that is just an absurdly black-and-white view of something that is very complex. I agree that religion can take evil and harmful forms, and that that evil is often related to the church as a religious institution. The recent troubles of the Catholic Church are a perfect example of that. But at the same time, look at the American Quakers and Evangelicals of the nineteenth century, who saw their deepest religious beliefs as a mandate to publicly oppose slavery during a time when that view was very unpopular.
The New Atheists also like to point to war criminals and perpetrators of genocide like Hitler and Stalin and argue that they were driven by their religious views. Particularly in Hitler's case, this was absolutely not true. The contempt for religion and especially Christianity is clear in both Nazi propaganda and Hitler's own personal writings. So I object to any approach where you choose to consider the so-called religious views of Hitler over those of whole groups of people like the Quakers.
Ironically, then, the New Atheists end up sharing the same belief as many hardcore conservative evangelicals: that Darwinian evolution is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian view of the world.
Yes, and you see the same phenomenon in the political sphere, with fascism and communism coming together to bear a surprising resemblance to each other. But anyone who makes an effort to branch out from the nineteenth-century American Protestantism of the modern Christian conservative movement will learn that there is a lengthy theological tradition of scientific inquiry. Pat Robertson is not the only form of Christianity. If you look at Augustine, Aquinas, even Calvin, that's very evident.
Speaking of Pat Robertson, do you think that one can be a Darwinian and maintain a literal reading of the Bible?
No, I don't. I think that if you insist on taking every word of the Bible literally, there isn't much hope for you from a scientific perspective. But I also think that it's easy to forget, especially in America, that a traditional Christian is not the same as an American Christian, and that theologians and scholars have warned against a literal reading of the Bible since about 400 A.D. Personally, I find it hubristic, almost irreligious, to read it literally.
It's also easy to forget in America that the rest of the world, with the exception of certain places in the Middle East like Turkey, does not take this whole thing as seriously as it's taken in the United States. In England, for example, where I'm from, religion just is not an organizing principle of society or culture anymore. If you want to see your friends in England, you go the pub. In many parts of America, if you want to see your friends, you go to your church, and that's a very significant difference.
On multiple occasions, you've referred to Darwinism as "the bastard child of Christianity." What do you think are some of the family similarities?
The biggest similarity, I think, is having an interest in origins at all. The Greeks saw the world as eternal and therefore were never concerned with origin stories or questions about where they came from. But the Genesis myth and The Origin of Species are both centered on answering those kinds of questions, and I think that reflects a distinctly Judeo-Christian way of thinking on Darwin's part. Another similarity is the emphasis on design-- believers take very seriously the notion of God's design in the universe, and it's also one of Darwin's primary interests. Thanks to Darwin, scientists now spend entire careers searching for new examples of design through natural selection.
If Christianity is one parent of Darwinism, do you think there is another? In other words, do you think any other social institution or philosophy exerted a comparable degree of influence over Darwin?
I don't think Darwin could have succeeded in the way he did without the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The thinkers of that time period presented a very mechanistic and organized way of looking at the world that is still the foundation for much of the scientific research that takes place today-- for example, the metaphor of the world as a machine that we're trying to understand, or modern psychology's analogy of the brain as a computer. So I would say that Darwin's work represents the triumph in the biological sciences of an approach that had already been integrated by his time into philosophy, religion, engineering.
And rather than seeing that triumph as a repudiation of Christianity, I think Darwinism is a reflection of Christianity-- a strange reflection, perhaps, but a reflection nonetheless. That's why the battles between the two factions can be so ferocious: because they're arguing about the same thing, arguing minor differences within two worldviews that are fundamentally alike.
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