Why Evolutionary Biology is so Threatening

Jacob Weisberg (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite columnists) has another provocative article posted at Slate, in which he argues, essentially, that evolution is threatening to religion, and we should stop pretending otherwise. The article is worth quoting at length, so here goes:

"Being right and yet so unpopular presents an
interesting problem for evolutionists. Their theory
has won over the world scientific community but
very few of the citizens of red-state America, who
decide what gets taught in their own public schools.
How can followers of Darwin prevent the propagation
of ignorance in places like Kansas, whose board of
education just voted to rewrite its biology curriculum
to do what President Bush suggests?

Many biologists believe the answer is to present
evolution as less menacing to religious belief than it
really is. In much the same way that intelligent-design
advocates try to assert that a creator must be
compatible with evolution in order to shoehorn God
into science classrooms, evolutionists claim Darwin is
compatible with religion in order to keep God out.
Don't worry, they insist, there's no conflict between
evolution and religion; they simply belong to different
realms. Evolution should be taught in the secular
classroom, along with other hypotheses that can be
verified or falsified. Intelligent design belongs in
Sunday schools, with stuff that can't. . . .

In a state like Kansas, where public opinion remains
overwhelmingly hostile to evolution, one sees the
political logic of this kind of tap-dance. But let's
be serious: Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible
with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does
undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the
world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well).
Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States,
63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent
believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison,
24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent
believed in evolution. You can believe in both, but not
many people do.

That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too
obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of
Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to
agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was
immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent
contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in
1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote
that the religious view of man as a creature with free will
was 'utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of
the brute origin of him who was created in the image of
God.' . . .

To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in
God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians.
But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief
in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better
answer to the question of how we got here than religion
does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more
plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous
body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory,
which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria,
doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose
minimal role might have been to flick the first switch."

I think Weisberg overstates his case a bit, particularly in that last sentence, but he has a point. There is a reason why people who understand evolutionary theory are more likely to be agnostic. Throughout most of human history, one simple bit of logic was enormously compelling. People looked around them and observed a world of extraordinary complexity; quite naturally they concluded that it must be the work of some creator. In the absence of any compelling alternative explanation, this was an entirely reasonable and proper inference to make, and it naturally drove people toward religion.

But then Darwin came along and offered a way out of this logical bind. He offered, for the first time, a compelling alternative explanation, one that not only made a lot of sense, but has subsequently been overwhelmingly confirmed by evidence from nearly every field of science. Now it is no longer necessary to postulate a creator in order to explain how the world around us came to be. To be sure, there is nothing preventing someone from believing in a creator and accepting evolution at the same time. Many people do. But what Darwin did was make religion truly optional. One may still believe in God, but one is no longer logically compelled to do so. Such belief is now truly an act of faith.

This, more than anything else, is why evolution so threatens established religion. Those who truly understand evolutionary theory are less likely to be drawn to religion for the simple reason that they have less of an explanatory void for religion to fill. Belief in evolution makes religion a tougher sell. To win over the hearts and minds of people who understand and accept evolutionary biology, a religion must 1) offer a belief system that does not contradict established scientific knowledge and 2) fill some other void than simply the need to understand where we came from. The reason that belief in evolution correlates so heavily with agnosticism these days is because those who preach religion have all too often failed on both these counts.