Avoiding Conflict At All Costs

2008.07.16   prev     next

REV. Michael Dowd is making waves with his book and website, Thank God For Evolution. I, as a person who believes in neither religion nor evolution, have to be interested in Dowd, and the people he represents, as possibly my most natural opponents.

So I read through his website, and what do I find? No arguments of any kind. No mention of Intelligent Design. (FYI, I didn’t read all the included newspaper articles about Dowd and his book.) Nothing but repeated assertions that one’s spiritual life as a religious believer is enhanced, not damaged, by acceptance of evolution. The site’s message is summarized, or perhaps entirely contained, in this sentence:

My message: faith can be strengthened and difficulties in life surmounted — all by bringing a mainstream scientific understanding of evolution into our religious lives.

I’m not seeing much substance here, so I watch Dowd on “Lou Dobbs Tonight:”

There’s a huge body of people in the middle, it’s the millions in the middle, who are not being reported on. If you just pay attention to mainstream media, what you get is the idea that there’s just the new atheists on the one end, there’s the young-earth creationists and intelligent design folks on the other. But if you ask most Americans, do they see a conflict between science and religion, they’d say no.

In fact, I’d love y’all to do a poll on that one, because there’s so many people, there’s eleven thousand clergy for example, that signed a clergy letter — it’s called a clergy letter project — and they’ve signed a letter saying that they see no conflict between the mainstream scientific understanding of evolution and their faith.

Dowd is making it very clear here that he represents theistic evolutionism, the huge group I called “B; Both” in my attempt to turn this subject into a population Venn diagram. I can only agree with Dowd that his position is likely the most popular in the whole controversy. But what I want to know is — is his position actually true?

Before Dowd got a chance to speak on “Lou Dobbs,” CNN played a lead-in story that made heavy mention of ID, so Dowd, I think, felt obligated to at least mention it (as quoted above) — but nothing more than a mention, and even that lumped together with young-earth creationism as a single category of thought. If Dowd’s website and his CNN appearance are any indication, he is either ignorant of, or just doesn’t care, what the arguments for ID are. He is interested in ID only as a psychological phenomenon, and he gauges the reasons someone might doubt evolution thusly:

Most conservatives have only been exposed to a way of thinking about evolution that’s [a] meaningless, chance, purposeless, directionless, Godless process, and of course they’re not going to accept that.

But constrast this with Michael Behe’s explanation, on “Point of Inquiry,” of his participation in ID:

I am a Roman Catholic, but I was taught Darwin’s theory in parochial school. And we were taught that God created the universe, and he could create laws any way he liked, and if he wanted to use secondary causes to make life, then who were we to tell him differently. And I always thought that was a fine explanation; I didn’t give two hoots about evolution.

It was only later, when I started to doubt that Darwinian processes could actually do what was claimed for them, that I began to become more interested in intelligent design. ... If I was shown to be wrong tomorrow with my ID ideas, then I could comfortably go back to say, a position like Kenneth Miller, Brown University biology professor, who is a theistic evolutionist and, kind of the way I was, thinks God made the laws of nature, and then everything unfolded from there.

Dowd seems disinterested not only with the content of ID argument, but even with the existence of people of Behe’s above-described experience — instead he frames the issue entirely as “conservatives” rejecting evolution for no reason other than that they think it threatens their religious faith.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that a committed Christian like Rev. Dowd sees conflict resolution and peaceful coexistence as the overriding priority. After all, that’s a major theme of his religion. But science generally isn’t advanced by committed conflict-easers. Conflict is an important part of science. It’s an essential part of how humanity finds truth. Resolving conflict in the most expedient way possible is not science — it’s a hindrance to scientific progress. Scientists necessarily are people who want to find out what’s true, even if it leads to conflict that would positively horrify Dowd and his “millions in the middle.”

And the only faith the scientific really need is faith that humanity, as a whole, can easily survive such conflict — faith that conflict doesn’t kill humanity, it makes it stronger.

Update 2009.03.03 — Just listened to Dowd on “Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe.” It was virtually identical to his appearance on “Dobbs” — just one brief mention of ID, lumped together with young-Earth creationism, and no engagement of ID arguments at all. Dowd spent 25 minutes talking with Grothe, and though he used the word “evidence” multiple times, he never offered any evidence, arguments, or reasons why anyone should think as he does. He just talked about how he used to be Christian and anti-evolutionist, but now believes in both Christianity and evolution.

The closest Dowd came to telling me why I should agree with him was in his use of, and subsequent explanation of, the word “sacred” in reference to evolution:

What I mean by “sacred” is that which is worthy of our deepest honor, respect, cherishing, reverence. It’s a sense of the holy, or that which is worthy of our highest commitment.

That doesn’t sound like an evidence-based position to me — it sounds like emotion-based faith of the highest order.

A bit later in the interview, Dowd casually refers to the “fourteen billion years of evolution” that have occurred. Fourteen? Our planet has supported life of any kind for only about 3.5 to 4 billion years. 14 billion years is a rough estimate of the age of our universe. Did Dowd just accidentally say fourteen when he meant four? Maybe.

But another possibility is that he finds it convenient to call everything that’s happened in this universe, since its inception, the process of “evolution” — and by doing so to imply (without stating directly) that if you doubt the ability of random mutation and natural selection to generate cats from bacteria, or flagella-bearing bacteria from flagella-less bacteria, you must also arbitrarily doubt many scientifically established facts about the history of our universe.

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