Oh God, it's Darwin

18 Feb 2009, Jug Suraiya

Two hundred years after he was born, Charles Darwin has been given an unexpected birthday present from his bitterest foe: the Roman Catholic church. In a surprise statement, the Vatican has pronounced that Darwin's theory of evolution that has done for biology what Newtonian gravity did for physics is not incompatible with religion. A church spokesperson said that it wasn't against the Catholic credo that 'forms of life' had changed 'slowly over time'.
it is this half hearted admission of evolution the back door is unlikely to end the escalating war in mainly Christian countries between 'creationists', or subscribers to the idea of 'intelligent design', who believe that the complexity of the world proves the existence of a supreme Creator, and Darwinists who claim that the process of natural selection that species best adapted to their environment survive and multiply, others die out is sufficient to understand and explain the myriad marvels of life. Though Darwin himself was not an avowed atheist, today more than ever his theory represents the embattled front line in the confrontation between religion and atheism, as espoused by neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others.

In India, Darwin is not the bogey man as he is in the West. The Indic tradition which accommodates both atheism as well as a well-stocked pantheon of 33 million gods (including a monkey god) should have little problem playing host to evolution. However, many in India and not just those belonging to the Christian faith find themselves uncomfortable with the either/or position of the radical neo-Darwinists: choose between a Creator and Darwin; you can't have your God and believe in evolution too.

Creationists or Godists ask how all the marvellous complexities of life could have come to be without a Creator. An often used analogy borrowed from a remark by physicist Fred Hoyle is that of a hurricane sweeping through a junk yard and by random chance assembling a Boeing 747: it just can't happen. Therefore, there has to be a Boeing Engineer, a God working His intelligent design from behind the scenes. The neo-Darwinists retort: Oh, yes? And who created the Boeing Engineer who created the Boeing 747; another, an even more complex Engineer, and so on into infinite regress?

In the balance sheet of life, Darwinian natural selection is seen to be the most thrifty of accountants, rewarding economy of expenditure and punishing waste: competence survives at the expense of incompetence; as much a shibboleth of free market economics as of biology. On the other hand, God or God as manifest in organised religion is accused by neo-Darwinists of criminal wastefulness, being the cause of murderous wars and the source of superstitious mumbo-jumbo that often prevents scientific progress.

But if religion is really such a literally bankrupt idea, how come it's been around for so long, and in so many different forms, without being finished off by Darwinian natural selection? The 'feel good' factor of religion (There is a God looking after me, and when i die i'll go to heaven) won't work. Something that makes you 'feel good' but makes you act irrationally like alcohol, or drugs tends to diminish rather than increase your chances of survival and genetic self-propagation.

So how does religion any religion contribute to our survival (and so to its own survival) as it has obviously done over the millennia? The neo-Darwinists answer is that religion, itself wasteful, is the useful by-product of genetic encoding which makes children obey the voice of authority of their parents: children who heed advice to stay away from fire survive; those who don't, don't. God or religion is nothing more, or less, than the protective, survival-enhancing, voice of Authority which our brains are 'wired' to obey since infancy.

But which Authority?
God's or Darwin's?
Take your pick. And your consequent chances of survival.

secondopinion@timesgroup.com
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