Verified by 
One month ago, The New York Times published an op-ed that I wrote, describing my feelings about the interface between evolutionary science and traditional Judeo-Christian belief. It generated an avalanche of literally hundreds of emails, most of them congratulatory, although a significant number were critical (even abusive). The great majority, in any event, misunderstood my point, thinking I was claiming that evolution makes religious belief impossible, whereas in fact my argument is that faith and evolution can co-exist, although the latter deprives the former of some pre-evolutionary supports, making faith more difficult than in pre-Darwinian days.
In any event, here is that op-ed piece, unchanged from the original. Make up your own mind:
By David Barash
EVERY year around this time — with summer ending and the college year starting — I present my students with “The Talk.” It isn’t, as you might expect, about sex, but rather about evolution and religion, and how the two get along. More to the point, how they don’t.
I’m a biologist, or more precisely an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist can help being “evolutionary.” My animal behavior class, with 200 undergraduates, is built on a solid scaffolding of evolutionary biology.
And that’s where The Talk comes in. It’s irresponsible to teach biology without evolution, and yet — even in Seattle, where I teach and which has the lowest church attendance of any major American city — there are many students who worry about reconciling their religious beliefs with evolutionary science. Just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of my students seem surprised and troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material.
Until recently, I had pretty much ignored student discomfort about evolution, assuming (perhaps correctly) that it was their problem, not mine. Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry without molecules, or physics without mass and energy. But instead of students growing more comfortable with the tension between evolution and religion over time, the opposite seems to have happened. Hence The Talk.
There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion. The least controversial is to suggest that evolution and religion are in fact compatible, harkening to the late Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that religion and science generally are “non-overlapping magistera,” often known by its acronym Noma, with the former concerned with values and the latter, with facts. Steve and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather loudly); he claimed that I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he was misrepresenting both science and religion.
In some ways, Steve has been winning. Noma is currently the received wisdom in the scientific establishment, insofar as there is such a thing; for example, it is the perspective recommended by the National Center for Science Education, which has done much of the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution. According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation; hence, no mandated disconnect and no worries.
This is undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything under the sun — or beyond it — to work his will. Hence, there is nothing in evolutionary biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for most religious fundamentalisms (everything that we know about biology and geology, for example, proclaims that the Earth was not literally produced in a day).
But in reality, Noma is not nearly as non-overlapping as some of my own students might wish.
Most importantly, as evolutionary science progresses, the available space for religious faith has narrowed. In short, and even though worthy organizations like the National Center for Science Education would rather keep this quiet, evolutionary science has made religious belief progressively more difficult: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith, while strengthening yet another that undermines belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.
And so, as The Talk develops, I point out how the two-fold demolition begins with the defeat of what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. This once seemed persuasive, best known from William Paley’s 19th-century claim that, just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watch-maker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator. Increasingly since Darwin, however, we now understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon.
Next to go is the illusion of centrality. In pre-Darwinian days, it was possible to believe that human beings are unique, altogether distinct from other life forms, chips off the old Divine Block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is continuity, the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism.
Deprived of both the argument from complexity and the illusion of centrality, devout believers aren’t obliged to give up their faith, but they can no longer lean on two supports that, in pre-evolutionary times, seemed quite sturdy. Adding to their current intellectual instability is a third consequence of evolutionary insights, a reiteration of theodicy, which makes traditional religious belief more challenging yet.
Theodicy is the scholarly effort to resolve an old conundrum, long troublesome for the devout: how to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering. Theological answers range from claiming that such suffering provides the option of free will to announcing (as in the Book of Job), that God is so great and we, so insignificant, that we have no right to ask.
In any event, just a smidgeon of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelously beautiful, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, siblicide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things. The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.
I conclude The Talk by suggesting to my students that although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass my course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastics.
Nonetheless, despite evolution’s three strikes against religious belief, God hasn’t necessarily struck out. At the end of the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial over a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, Spencer Tracy’s character (fashioned after defense attorney Clarence Darrow), stands in the empty courtroom, picks up a Bible in one hand and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the other, gives a knowing smile and claps them together before putting both under his arm. Would that it were so simple.
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington; his most recent book is Buddhist Biology: ancient Eastern wisdom meets modern Western science (Oxford University Press, 2014).
