I have always been interested in biology and genetics in particular. I’m currently in a genetics class, and every day I learn something mind-boggling about our genome or the multitude of gene products that help it function. With every new thing I learn, the more astounded I am by how simple, and yet how amazingly functional, the mechanics of life are. I have also never been a particularly religious person, associating Christianity more with feeling uncomfortable and awkward around my Bible-thumping grandparents than anything else. So coming from this context, I had a difficult time approaching the topic of evolution and religion in this discussion from any type of middle ground.
However, though I had trouble trying to see from the perspectives of John Studebaker or Olasky and Perry, I could identify strongly with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s somewhat uneasy questioning. After recognizing that the earth could care less about the species that inhabit it, he queries “And he, shall he,/ Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,/…Be blown about the desert dust,/ Or sealed within the iron hills?” (Tennyson lines 8-20, Bump 251). Though we believe that our species is special, can we stand up to the test of time? I saw in Tennyson’s poem an underlying question with which we have all struggled and which I also think plays a significant role in the evolution and religion debate – what meaning is there to life? How does our individual life, full of struggle and pain, and our inevitable death mean
anything? If we are essentially no different from any of the other species on the planet and we, too, will eventually be “sealed within the iron hills,” how do we live our lives with that knowledge?
It seems to me that religion provides a significant amount of the meaning we are all searching for. It instructs us on how to live our lives in a way that is good and it reassures us that there is more to all this than a simple struggle to survive. I admire that. However, the issues arise when we try to understand both religion and our struggle for survival in the same context.
I can understand the need to reconcile the scientific theories with Christian ideas. The one holds little deeper meaning for many but has a significant amount of evidence; the other is extremely meaningful to many but has little solid “proof.” However, both ideas are so powerful that there must be some sort of reconciliation between the two. I admired John Studebaker’s emphasis on the importance of both sides reaching out to “build a bridge,” (260) and I think this is a crucial step.
However, the way Studebaker went about it seemed to me to be insultingly simplistic. Though many parts of his argument irked the student of genetics in me, I was most upset by his discussion about how “our universe [has] been fine tuned for biological life” (261). He lists a number of factors, including the force of gravity, the speed of light, the tilt of the earth, and insists that, had these been any other way, biological life could not have existed. Therefore, since these factors are so fine tuned, there must be an intelligent designer. Of course, I am not an expert on the origins of life, but it seemed to me like he was approaching the idea completely backwards. If the theory he is arguing against is evolution, the “strong evidence” (262) he uses is entirely beside the point. He assumes that life as it evolved in our situation would have tried to evolve in the same way had the circumstances on our planet been different. But if the planet had been arranged in some other way, then life would have evolved differently around those new factors! Studebaker uses similar “reasonable deductions about the design of the universe, or history, and of morality” to cheerfully conclude that such evidence will “bring non-believers to the point of seeing the need for Christ and placing their faith in him” (263).
As someone with whom science resonates more strongly than religion, I was frustrated by Studebaker’s oversimplifications of genetics and evolution. Though I admire the underlying desire to reconcile religion and science, the way he reduced the science to such simple and, I would argue, distorted representations of the actual scientific facts left me angrily wishing he had just left the two ideas separate rather than doing such a sloppy job trying to connect them.
