There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass. It is that instinctive need of having a worship in common that is the chief suffering of every man, the chief concern of mankind from the beginning of times.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Grand Inquisitor
The term “intelligent design” in its common use betrays a lack of understanding of both intelligence and design. A lot of our thinking is done in ways that we don’t consider thinking, for example, when we converse we aren’t doing willful calculations to speak. The impulse to contribute in conversation often occurs too quickly to register at the moment, subjectively it can feel almost like a ventriloquist effect. We can surprise ourselves when we speak to others. Similarly, writing has been said to be a means of clarifying thought. Physical movement, specifically walking, has been extolled by many of our greatest thinkers as an essential part of their cognition.
Our body is a part of our mind, our emotions all arise as physical bodily sensations first and foremost. We know now that there are neurons in the heart and the stomach that contribute to our thinking. Research shows us that movement is essential to our thinking, for example, people who are blind from birth use the same language of gestures as people with normal eyesight, despite never having seen people gesture. Gestures have been shown to not just be an expression of thought, but a facilitator of thought, an ingredient of thought. The famous thought experiment derived from Descartes of a disembodied brain having the world simulated to it with the pretense that we wouldn’t know the difference is not useful anymore. Even in dreaming, as direct a manifestation of untethered free-associative thought as many of us experience, our emotions as felt in the body are an essential component of the dream content.
When we’ve applied the idea of design to God in the religious context, it’s historically common to think of a completely articulated idea that is magicked into existence. Yet in our experience, we understand design to be manifested by a process of trial and error. We understand that what exists in imagination is never precisely what emerges in practice. There is a perpetual period of iteration or refinement, creation is an act defined by doing, not thinking. Any creator can tell you that nothing emerges fully formed, either there’s an abundance of practice leading to muscle memory, like Picasso famously spoke to, or there’s a process of rewrites, revisions, and “takes”.
Marshal McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message”, how content is delivered to us is just as pertinent to what we experience as the content itself. How we express an idea is just as much an expression of ourselves as the idea itself. There are no scriptures of major religions that were written by one person all in one go. All of them were written incrementally by multiple people over long periods of time, sometimes a few decades, sometimes centuries. The writing of Buddhist texts, the Vedas, the Quran, the Old and New Testaments, all followed a period of time where the stories were sung or told orally as a means of preservation. All of them are purporting to represent transcendent truth, some the literal mind or word of God. What do the means by which the holy books have been written and given to us tell us about transcendent truth or God?
Evolution is an idea that has its roots in the ancient world. In ancient times a teleological view of life predominated, nature and animals were thought to be as they were for a purpose, by design. While western thinkers like Aristotle and Plato generally believed in static iterations of animals, there were exceptions in pre-socratics like Anaximander and Empedocles. Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi described the idea of transmutation of species in his writing. Christian theology was greatly influenced by the ideas of Plato and Aristotle; Plato’s idea of perfect forms and Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being were incorporated into a Christian model of the world.
The advances in understanding nature that occurred during the enlightenment were facilitated by Descartes's conception of a world that worked like a machine and Francis Bacon’s relentless promotional campaign for empiricism. Of the thinkers advancing new ideas about the mechanisms of evolution was Erasmus Darwin, Grandfather to Charles, who shared a lot of thought in common with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, though they didn’t know one another.
Of Lamarck, Charles Darwin wrote in 1861: Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801. . . he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.
Lamarck coined the term “invertebrates” while he was a professor at the National Museum of Natural History and contributed a lot to our understanding and classification of them, 116 plant species and 103 animal species carry Lamarck’s name. Beginning in 1801 Lamarck began publishing his ideas that animals evolved over time, inspired by observing mollusk fossils that were older, were simpler. The approach that Lamarck is infamous for is his conception of inheritance of acquired traits; characteristics that we pick up in our lifetime can be passed on to our offspring. Intention, or “felt needs” was crucial to Lamarck’s thinking, he didn’t think a mouse with its tail cut off would have baby mice without tails, he thought in terms of a giraffe with a short neck striving to get leaves in tall trees over successive generations giving birth to giraffes with increasingly long necks. The mechanism Lamarck envisioned has not been borne out by evidence, and more damningly, Lamarck’s ideas have been invoked in a number of career-destroying experiments, outright fraud, and associations with “intelligent design” proponents who refute solid data with no evidence at all. Through association with numerous failures, Lamarckism became a derogatory term for decades.
Georges Cuvier never believed Lamarck’s ideas or evolution at all. He was a devout believer in Lutheranism, believing that Adam and Eve were Caucasian; every Caucasian descended from Adam and Eve and the world was a few thousand years old. He believed that evolution was impossible because animals were perfectly adapted to their environment; any change would render them unable to survive. Cuvier was a famous paleontologist, considered by many to be the father of paleontology. He presented the theory of extinction, developed after discovering mammoth and mastodon fossils and identifying them as distinct from elephants. Cuvier served as a perpetual secretary of the Imperial Institute under Napoleon, chancellor of the University of Paris, and president of the Council of State among many other positions. Cuvier had authority and power.
When Napoleon’s army invaded Egypt in 1798, a number of mummified animals were taken and sent to France for study. The mummies and other treasures captured the French imagination at the time. The Sacred Ibis was especially important to Egyptians as a manifestation of Thoth, the god of science, so they mummified many of the birds as offerings to Thoth. Cuvier was able to access some of the birds at the museum for study. Working with his assistant he assembled a skeleton from the mummies and compared it to birds they had at the museum already. There was little difference between the skeletons of antiquity and those at the museum, which Cuvier took as evidence that nothing evolves.
Cuvier presented the findings with Lamarck to the French Academy in 1802. Responding to his conclusion Lamarck said that the climate in Egypt was the same as it was 3000 years ago, so it would be odd to see a change over that time. Cuvier countered that nothing would change in a longer time frame, longer time frames are just accumulations of shorter time frames. Cuvier was more famous and had more political power than Lamarck; as far as the public was concerned Cuvier was right. He continually refined his arguments over several decades, very publically and harshly refuting evolution, which discouraged other scientists.
Lamarck continued to publish his ideas but they weren’t well received. In the last decade of his life he went blind and was cared for by one of his daughters. When he died in 1829 he was buried in a rented grave, five years later his body was moved; nobody knows where his remains ended up. Decades after Lamarck and Cuvier had died, Darwin published Origin of the Species.
Among the more liberal-minded there can be a tendency to speak of Christians as a group united in belief. Writing in 2005, Bill McKibben described the US as spiritually homogeneous, “ About 85 percent of us call ourselves Christians”. However, this has never been the case in this country from the earliest colonies. There have always been deep divisions in matters of faith in the US.
The earliest colonies in America brought with them customs of social stratification and religious piety that were conservatively held due to the harsh conditions and challenges inherent to the activity of colonization. In Puritan communities non-conformity to their beliefs could have dire consequences like banishment, or a violent public execution. “Novelty” was a derogatory term, Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for opinions that were “new and dangerous”.
Within the first century of colonization, the idea developed among American Puritans that converting to the faith had to be a big emotional moment. There isn’t a predecessor to this idea of conversion to a faith necessitating some dramatic story, English Protestants didn’t think this way. It’s an idea that Puritan New Englanders got in their heads over time as the means to justify their Christian faith; a means of proving that people were serious about joining their church; if a person was a legit Christian they had a conversion story. Periodically they would have “covenant revivals” where large groups of people would gather and recommit to their faith at which many people would be converted at the same time.
In the 1720s there were a lot of increasing challenges to the orthodox Puritan faith. Large waves of Scots-Irish were settling in the colonies who had a much more experiential and emotional understanding of faith. The colonies had become prosperous. Colonial colleges had become hotbeds of theological novelty. Perhaps most importantly, it was now several generations after the initial arrivals, the children and grandchildren of the initial colonists. Communities were blending together, exchanging ideas, and not taking religion as seriously. Pastors were very concerned about reviving enthusiasm in the church.
John Edwards was a pastor in Northampton Massachusetts and sometimes credited as the most influential theologian in North America, though with the caveat that influential in this context solely denotes consequential. His preaching is full of descriptions of the evils of sin and the tortures of hell, a work said to be representative is titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Many people characterized his revivals as religious frenzy or mass hysteria. Following a revival, Joseph Hawley, Edwards Uncle, fearing his own damnation in hell over the depth of his sinfulness, killed himself. Edwards blamed the devil.
Edwards wrote about the effects of the religious awakenings God inspired in the widely read A Faithful Narrative. The account made him a star in the Evangelical community; some Evangelicals to this day refer to A Faithful Narrative as a model for their ministry. In his time he inspired many other preachers, one of whom was George Whitefield. Born in England and trained in theater, Whitefield became the first celebrity preacher in American history. He preached Calvinist dogma including predestination, the idea that salvation or damnation in the afterlife is predetermined. At the height of his popularity, he drew tens of thousands of people to hear his powerful voice and experience his unique presentation. A defining feature of the revival movement was egalitarianism. Contrary to the hierarchical structure of much of the American church experience up to that point, everyone was equal under God at a revival. Whitefield was a big part of that, he was noted for his concern about the spiritual salvation of slaves.
Whitefield never preached against the institution of slavery, but he did admonish members of the southern colonies for treating their slaves poorly in 1740. In that same year, Whitefield reached a lifelong goal of founding an orphanage, which he placed in Georgia and named Bethesda. In 1747 he became friendly with Hugh and Jonathan Bryan who gave him a plantation and some slaves which he joyously accepted with the intent of investing the proceeds in Bethesda. Slavery was illegal in Georgia at the time. Wishing to use slaves at the orphanage, Whitefield threw his influence behind the ongoing campaign to permit slavery in the state. The pressure was kept up until 1751 when slavery was legalized in Georgia at which point Whitefield purchased more slaves to work at his orphanage.
Quakers were observed in the writings of both Edwards and Whitfield to be unmoved by the revival spirit. Whitefield wrote in a journal entry during a stay with a Quaker, “… seemed to make the light of conscience and the Holy Spirit one and the same thing, and represented Christ within, and not Christ without as the foundation of our faith”. Historian Babette M. Levy wrote of them, “For members of the Society of Friends … the Bible as interpreted by any minister assumed second place to the doctrine of the Inner Light.”
William Bell Riley graduated from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1888, becoming the pastor of First Baptist Church in Minneapolis that year. Riley was a tireless champion for a literal interpretation of the bible, eventually earning the nickname “The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism". He founded several anti-evolution organizations, denouncing the teaching of evolution as pushing “anarchistic socialist propaganda”. Riley was instrumental in getting the Butler act passed in Tennessee and was very emboldened by the outcome of the Scopes trial, certain that it was only a matter of time before every state in the union would be anti-evolution. Despite the best efforts of Riley and his followers, his home state of Minnesota rejected a bill that banned the teaching of evolution by an 8 to 1 margin. The defeat was a big blow to the anti-evolution movement and the perception of public support; by the 1930s Riley was blaming modernism on anti-semitic conspiracies.
Harry Emerson Fosdick was also a Baptist minister, though he served at a Presbyterian church, and then eventually at a non-denominational church. He rejected Calvinism which he said produced “A God who is a devil”. Like the Quakers, Fosdick believed personal experiences to be more spiritually relevant than dogma or creed. He came to national attention in 1922 initially from conflict with fundamentalists resulting from a famous sermon named, “Shall The Fundamentalists Win?”, in which he made a charitable, well-expressed defense of tolerance and intellectual integrity. The following year he debated with William Jennings Bryan in the New York Times over the subject of evolution. Fosdick was on the cover of Time magazine twice, the second time for a story on the church he would minister in Manhattan until 1947. He wrote over 40 books, numerous articles, and has been said to be the most impactful preacher of his generation.
“lf I were called upon to select the greatest preacher of this century, I would choose your name. If I were called upon to select the foremost prophets of our generation, I would choose you to head the list. If I were called upon to select the Christian saints of our day, again I would have to place you on the list. Because of all these things and the inspiration that you’ve been to me, I present you with this book.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr inscription on a copy of his book Stride Toward Freedom given to Harry Emerson Fosdick.
The understanding of evolution has continued to grow since these early conflicts. Many ideas that resemble Lamarck’s observation of inheritance of acquired traits continue to become part of the data, with some researchers more willing to say Lamarck is vindicated than others. Epigenetic inheritance is now well observed in an increasing amount of animals while in plants it’s an established reality. Throughout our lives how we live and think and the environment we live and think within change our genetic expression; advances in technology are now able to show us that some of these epigenetic changes may persist to offspring.
How acquired characteristics are passed on is still being actively investigated. A 2013 study of mice illustrated an intergenerational inheritance of traumatic conditioning associated with scent. Researchers exposed mice to the scent of cherry blossoms while they simultaneously zapped their feet with electricity which led the mice to associate the scent with pain. When these conditioned mice were bred, their offspring were more anxious around the scent of cherry blossoms, even when controlling for learning from kin by having them raised by unrelated mice who hadn’t been conditioned. The third generation from the conditioned mice also showed sensitivity to the smell of cherry blossoms. The reaction was linked to epigenetic modification in the DNA, chemical markers on the gene encoding the smell receptor involved in picking up the cherry blossom scent. Additionally, when the brains of the mice were dissected a greater number of neurons associated with detecting cherry blossom scent were observed relative to the control group.
How this occurs is not yet understood. Epigenetic changes to us throughout our lives happen in part by a process called methylation wherein clumps of protein are attached to the DNA which changes gene expression. However, as soon as the sperm meets the egg in fertilization, those changes to the DNA are largely wiped away. Another possible mechanism that’s being studied is the change in RNA length, which has been shown to persist through fertilization. Research into the RNA strands of mice and men has shown that different lengths correspond to different behaviors; when the RNA molecules of mice who had been traumatized were injected into the embryos of mice who had not, the mice showed behavior consistent with having a parent who’d been traumatized.
The effects that environmental and traumatic conditions have on children and grandchildren are currently being studied. Differences in cortisol levels were observed in children of Holocaust survivors and epigenetic modifications associated with PTSD were observed in the descendants of survivors of the Tutsi genocide. The progeny of Union soldiers held as POWs during the Civil War have been observed to have higher rates of mortality across the male lineage.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not represented throughout the world that Christians are antagonistic to science. Previous studies of the subject have been conducted within the US, outside of the US there’s far less of a correlation between being Christian and animosity towards science. The separation of church and state historically has not been a principle of this country as it’s understood today. From the 18th to the early 20th centuries it was common for public schools to open with a prayer or bible reading. In some states, it was required by state law. This changed when two challenges to the practice were brought before the Supreme Court, [Engel vs Vitale] and Abington School District vs Schempp in 1962-63.
24 states in the country have some allowances for miseducation on the subject of evolution as of 2021. Most of the legislation to make this a reality has occurred in the last two decades. The majority of attempts to legally restrict or question evolution in education die in committee or through turnover, but it’s been a constant fight. Sometimes legislation like Louisiana’s bill in 2008 has succeeded in becoming state law. Outside the matter of law, many teachers are inhibited from teaching evolution by simple social pressure or lack of knowledge on their part. Writing in 2011 Micheal Berkman and Eric Plutzer found that 13 percent of teachers explicitly teach creationism and often think they’re scientifically literate for doing so. Out of a survey of 926 public school biology teachers, a full 60 percent majority simply wanted to avoid controversy, teaching evolution as a “necessary evil”, distancing themselves from what they teach out of simple discomfort, or teaching “all sides”.
Interviewed for a 2019 article by Olga Khazan where she writes about not being taught evolution, Plutzer said,” The broader consequence is that students will come away with the idea that important elements of science are based in values and not evidence, and that gives them license to reject other kinds of science”.
In the past year, people have gone to their death loudly proclaiming that the virus killing them is a hoax. Conspiratorial thinking is long understood to be an epistemic problem and it’s in the evangelical community where conspiratorial thinking has been most evident. If something as fundamental to our day-to-day reality as evolution is taught on an equal footing with ancient suppositions, we are modeling by example that nothing is true. By accommodating the desires of evangelicals to have their false beliefs mirrored back to them we aren’t doing anyone any favor, we are hindering their ability to survive, literally. The accommodation of belief in a creation myth conditions people to expect the accommodation of whatever belief can be insisted on. Nature isn’t being negotiated with.
In the process of writing this essay one of my google searches was, “what if Jesus wasn’t resurrected?”. This is one response that gave me some optimism: “If the bones of Jesus were to be discovered, it would be a big finding! It would cause us to adjust our understanding of Christianity, yes. But ultimately, the truth and power of Christianity would remain undisturbed. We would still have all of Jesus’s teachings and we would have all of his stories and we would have his wonderful example of love for the outcast. . . . And even though Easter wouldn’t be about the physical resurrection of Jesus, we would go on celebrating the example and testimony of this great Man of God, who lives on in our hearts, and who inspires us to be kind to others. Even if the tomb wasn’t empty, our hearts would still be full.”
Unfortunately, it was a fake-out, as the pastor behind that blog proceeds to explain why the above quote is completely wrong and everything in Christianity is “pointless and meaningless” without the idea that literal bodily resurrection is true. It’s a depressing claim because for many of us the values expressed by the life of Jesus are a lot more relevant than the supernatural elements of the story. Belief in the resurrection is egocentric in focus, “what’s going to happen to ME”. It’s nothing to do with morality.
Writing about Christian persecution in America, essayist Mary Eberstadt offers, “ the Supreme Court decision overruling Texas’ restrictions on abortion clinics and the mandate that employers provide access to contraception”, which are simply not acts of persecution. The whole article only offers examples where a believer isn’t able to foist their beliefs onto others. There is nothing moral about that drive. It’s not a concern for the other, it’s a desire to see oneself reflected in the external world, a desire to think other people agree with your beliefs.
Nothing in this world exists in isolation, everything is interconnected and part of a system. This dogmatic system of belief endemic to America is consequential to the whole culture. Scientific thinking is impacted, it’s not so long ago that all science was at the pleasure of the church and inexorably tied with alchemy. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted, “The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it”, which is a religious statement. Science is a method for learning what’s true about the world, not a religion, not a set of conclusions. In a recent refutation of a review of psi research (which has an admittedly shoddy history with rigor much like early attempts at proving inheritance of acquired traits), the writers openly confessed to their own religious thinking, refusing to look at the data and saying psi effects “can’t be true”. This is sheer dogmatic devotion to established beliefs.
Physicist Nicholas Gisin has been publishing a series of papers making the case that the formal mathematical structure we use to do physics calculations is misleading, resulting in misconceptions about the nature of time. He posits that using different theoretical conceptions of math, namely those that are part of intuitionist math, would bridge the divide between quantum indeterminism and classical mechanics. The work is well beyond the scope of this essay, the point in bringing it up is the idea that mathematics is a language that has its own conventions which have evolved over time. Every language has an easier time expressing some ideas over others. Within classical mathematics are assumptions that are made in order to facilitate completing equations at the cost of taking mathematics away from an understanding of empirical reality. If those assumptions are taken at face value, we end up with ideas that don’t resemble our experience of life.
Gisin observes, “I have always been amazed by the huge difficulties that my fellow physicists seem to encounter when contemplating indeterminism and the highly sophisticated circumlocutions they are ready to swallow to avoid the straightforward conclusion that physics does not necessarily present us a deterministic worldview. But even more surprising to me is the attitude of most philosophers, especially philosophers of science. Indeed, most philosophers who care about quantum physics adopt either Bohmian mechanics (become a Bohmian, as one says) or the many-worlds interpretation. Apparently, to most of them adding inaccessible particle positions or inaccessible parallel worlds to their ontology is a reasonable price to pay in order to avoid indeterminism.”
Recently a number of theoretical physicists working with Microsoft released a pre-print paper onto arXiv offering the theory that the universe is an autodidactic algorithm that learns the laws of physics in a manner comparable to machine learning. The idea of the laws of physics evolving via a process like natural selection was first articulated by Charles Sanders Pierce in 1893. The paper is a rare attempt at answering the question, “why do we have the physical laws that we do”, as they summarize: “To ask the question is to suppose that, for instance, the constants could have been different, but not randomly so. A scientific explanation would suggest that their values are set as the result of a dynamical process, which means it can be modeled analogously to all the other time-dependent processes we are familiar with. Here we consider a wide class of mechanisms based on the idea of learning. We ask whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world, by means of which the universe could learn its laws.”
One of the most fundamental qualities of our species is the transmission of ideas between one another in service of sharing knowledge, which inevitably contributes to the evolution of ideas. We have genes that facilitate a more robust variety of vocalizations than any other animal, we are the most well-equipped species to communicate ideas in the animal kingdom. To be teleological about it, communication of ideas is arguably the most important thing that we are doing here. From this perspective, dogmatism undermines a fundamental purpose of our existence, the sharing and subsequent evolution of ideas.
In Arkansas earlier this month a bill sponsored by Rep Mary Bentley passed the house with 72 people voting in favor which, if signed into law, would allow teachers to teach creationism in science class. It wouldn’t be mandated, it would just be an option they could exercise. This is a road Arkansas has been down before, 1982 saw an Arkansas state law mandating the teaching of creationism struck down by a judge; later that decade a similar case from Louisiana mandating that creation be taught alongside evolution was struck down by the Supreme Court. When this history was brought to Representative Bentley’s attention, she responded that the Supreme Court might rule differently this time.