Our local newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, today has an article about local clergy who support evolutionary theory, seeing it as evidence of God at work in the world. (I would link to the article, but the Dispatch has become a pay site, so unless you subscribe you can’t read it.)
I cringe whenever I read this type of article.
It’s a great moral dilemma for me. We must teach gently. We must approach our learners with humility. We must never rise above. But we must also teach truth. And sometimes truth is hard.
When a male gorilla takes over a band from an aging silverback, the first thing the new alpha does is grab all the gorilla babies from their mothers and bash the infants’ heads against the nearest tree until they are dead. Lions also kill the babies when they take over a pride. This behavior is not unusual in the animal world. From the vantage point of Darwin, this action makes horrible good sense. The male gorilla must get his DNA into the next generation, and infanticide is the quickest and surest way. Those silverbacks who did not perform in this way didn’t pass their DNA on. The genes that cause (or at least encourage) this behavior have a selective advantage.
If one sees God in the beauty of a flower, in the elegance of a spiderweb, in the complexity of a rain forest, then surely one must also see God in the selective advantage provided by infanticide. Yet if a human being did such a thing, we would all condemn the murderer and demand justice, or at least protection. If you believe that evolution is “how God did it,” then if I am truly a corageous teacher I must ask you, gently, what do the cruelest aspects of evolution say about the nature of God?
It is a difficult puzzle for me, one I do not know how to solve. How do we teach gently, yet not shy away from unpleasant, jarring, important truths?
Symphony 
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February 11, 2009 at 10:40 am
Beto Pimentel
As a colleague (Physics and Science Teacher), I am sorry to say that I have no profound insight to sooth your soul in matters like this. However, I do believe it is our duty to show students how Science changed the way mankind saw and related to the world and to itself. It is something we can only accomplish by teaching both the facts that people found out along the history of science and the interpretation people gave to them.
Something interesting I just read about (within the overwhelming Darwin readings we are bombed with these last weeks due to the occasion) that touch upon your issue is that the same way one can see the work of God in evolution one can see the work of evolution in the idea of God, i. e., one can ask oneself what would have been the evolutionary advantage of creating religion and such a concept as God itself for a group of early pre-historic men.
Perhaps it is not exactly “the same way”, but you got the point.
In my opinion the point where we lose our reticent students is when we claim “truth” over usefulness or “reasonableness”. The very same teaching without the claim for truth alone might do a better job in inspiring the sense of truth of Science.
By the way, not sure if this opinion of mine has any part of truth in it, but it has proved useful and, most of the times, reasonable. 🙂
Thanks for the always inspiring posts of your blog.
February 11, 2009 at 1:43 pm
stephenwhitt
Thank you for that, Beto. You’re right; the distinguishing characteristic of science is humility. We can be proud of the accomplishments of human beings, using only their wits and imaginations, discovering the truths all around us. But these truths are always provisional, inductive, perhaps only part of a larger story we don’t know yet.
In so many fields, the exciting parts of science are those parts we don’t yet understand. Are strings real? What caused the amazingly low entropy of the early universe? Why do electrons have the charge they have? What is dark matter? Why is universal expansion accelerating?
There are exciting, unanswered questions in every field. But in evolutionary biology, we rarely get to hear about such things, for the fear that the moment the “unknown” door is opened even a crack, those pushing their non-scientific agenda will press themselves in. The result is that evolutionary biology often sounds authoritative, dogmatic, absent the wonder and mystery that make science worth studying and doing. We have to find a way to take back the wonder.