Bicentennial of the Botanist

Share this article

Last week, Charles Darwin would have turned 200. To celebrate the occasion, the Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted a panel of experts to discuss the impact that Darwin has made on society and how to reconcile faith and evolution. The discussion was founded on the premise that in order for the U.S. to compete globally, we must teach our children science at home, including evolution.

Susan Thistlethwaite, a senior fellow at CAP, opened the discussion by insisting, “Whether or not you believe in evolution…it is not a belief system. Evolution is happening to you whether you like it or not, and so the question is how do we interpret that. It is not a question of whether or not one believes it.”

The different interpretations of the panel were representative of the wider debate between science and faith. This debate often takes shape as creationism and intelligent design vs. Darwinism and evolution. There is a range of questions, however, that provoke conflict between the empirical and the spiritual.

According to Arthur Caplan, the Director of the Center of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, “Science doesn’t have oodles of room for faith.” He explained that a major concern among religious opponents of evolution is that they believe evolution diminishes the dignity of the human race, which was created in God’s image.

Rick Weiss, a senior fellow at CAP, agreed with Caplan, and explained, “The more research that gets done on animal behavior, the more evidence there seems to be that animals—many animals, not just primates—are capable of expressing sympathy, of caring for each other. Does it matter, in the end, if we’re not so special?” The panel cited the well-known study that humans share 90 percent of their genes with mice.

The CAP discussion was hesitant to reject the existence of God, but instead focused on whether or not his existence even mattered. Thistlethwaite articulated the panel’s feeling: “You’re never going to prove or disprove the existence of God in human experience…if you just get past that I think it opens up very much more a one-world approach.”

A discussion that must inevitably take place when attempting to reconcile faith and religion is the Big Bang theory, and the idea that perhaps God, as one of the panelists described it, simply knocked down the first domino and let things go from there. If God is that far “upstream,” Weiss wondered, does he really mean anything? No one can explain the creation—it goes too far back, farther, even, than science has reached. Did God cease to direct the universe at some point? Did he ever direct it to begin with?

The discussion ended with the following quote from Charles Darwin, which effectively summed up the panel’s feeling that life is complex, and beautiful and evolving successfully without any intervention by God: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And whilst the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and wonderful, have been and are being evolved.”

Though this argument has carried on for years, it is ultimately impossible to prove beyond contestation the validity of either side. That decision must be left up to each individual. Fortunately, Americans appear to favor a system in which children are taught both sides and allowed to choose for themselves. A new Zogby poll of voters nationwide indicates that Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching evidence both for and against Darwin’s theory, rather than only evidence for his theory.

As Weiss said, “Even science can’t deal with creation.” For many, neither can religion. Perhaps this is a question that deserves more than the repeated words of never-ending debates. Questions such as this must, in the end, be decided in the confines of one’s own mind.

Daniel Allen is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.