Sam Brownback, U.S. Senator from Kansas and long-shot presidential contender, recently created some difficulties for himself when he answered a simple question on evolution. In an essay published by the New York Times, he takes another stab at the question.
IN our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.
What follows is a thoughtful attempt to reconcile the demands of rational science and Biblical faith.
I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.
The task of reconciling these two claims to wisdom goes back at least to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas in the early thirteenth century. Leo Strauss argued that this debate was one of the sources of vitality in Western Civilization, a gadfly that kept the mind of Christendom from ever going to sleep. Here is the core of Brownback's personal neo-Thomism.
If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
That is a shrewd answer because leaves a very important question unanswered. Brownback accepts micro-evolution, the view that species change gradually over time in order to adapt to new or changed environments. He rejects materialism and determinism, the view that the world consists of nothing but material particles and the view that each moment in time is rigidly determined by the position and momentum of particles in the preceding moment. But what about macro-evolution? That is the view that new species emerge from existing species. What about common descent, the view that human beings and chimpanzees, and indeed any two organisms on earth today, share a common ancestor at some point in the past? The most reasonable inference is that Brownback is unwilling to agree to that view, but he has in fact left the matter open for debate.
I am quite certain that macro-evolution is the right account of the history of the various species. When you look at a chimpanzee in the zoo, you are looking at a very distant cousin. I do not believe that this view commits one to materialism or determinism. In Darwinian theory, information trumps material. Only the form of a horse, or two horses to be precise, can give rise to a third. The material alone cannot generate the form. Moreover, the theory is probabilistic rather than deterministic. Evolution works by trial and error. The organisms in any environment are only more or less likely to flourish; their flourishing or decline is never determined by the theory.
While Brownback leaves room for the possibility of macro-evolution, his faith clearly places some limits on what he will accept.
While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.
Now I am a man of science. What reason and evidence tell me I will believe, whether I like it or not. Senator Brownback is a man of faith, and if science contradicts faith he will regard that science as illegitimate. I have no quarrel with this. Science needs an honorable opposition. I think that Senator Brownback has shown that he is friendly toward science, and that his reservations are both reasonable and honorable. That is all that it is reasonable to ask.
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