Has Science Disproved Religion?

In a contemporary cartoon, a woman argues with Darwin that men may be descended from monkeys, but women's emotions are of a higher order.

Many folks, I come to discover, are under the impression that “religion” is something that has been supplanted by “science.” More specifically, they think the current controversy between “creationists” and “evolutionists,” came about because Darwin’s theory of evolution disproved the literal teaching of the Bible in Genesis, about Adam being formed from the mud, Eve from his rib, and so forth. Hence, they think, in sum, religion has been disproved by science.

They have this upside down. To being with, evolution—the idea that animals might develop over time into other animals-- did not originate with Darwin. It was one of the oldest ideas known to Western Civilization, dating back to pre-Classical Greece; it was a live hypothesis throughout the history of Christianity. Nor had the Christian Church ever taken a stand for or against the idea, before Darwin. Most of the Christian Church, of course, still hasn’t. St. Augustine, for example, was perfectly comfortable with the idea that animals evolved over a long period.

For Augustine did not assume that the Genesis account was literal. Nobody seems to have assumed that until relatively recently—in fact, until after Darwin. I mean, seriously, folks: it features talking animals. At least since ancient Greece, this has been a clear literary signal that the events described are allegorical or symbolic; or, more specifically, moral. See Fables, Aesop. Then there is the obvious clue of referring to days before the sun and moon are created. Don’t imagine the ancients would not have noticed this: they were a lot more sensitive to events in the sky than we are. There are other clues: the narrative, if read strictly literally, describes Adam as being created twice. Nearby tribes are referred to as existing both before and after the supposed universal flood.

There were some Biblical literalists before Darwin, although not much before Darwin. These were the “premillenialists,” those looking for signs of the Second Coming in contemporary events. That is, they believed that Jesus was about to return; they relied on a literal reading of parts of the Bible in their efforts to calculate a date. “They were,” Wikipedia observes, “not as concerned about the new findings in geology or biology, freely granting scientists any time they needed before the Garden of Eden to account for scientific observations, such as the fossil sequence and geological findings.” According to Wikipedia, even “in the immediate post-Darwinian era, few scientists or clerics rejected the antiquity of the earth or the progressive nature of the fossil record. Likewise, few attached geological significance to the Biblical flood, unlike subsequent creationists. Evolutionary skeptics, creationist leaders and skeptical scientists were usually willing either to adopt a figurative reading of the first chapter of Genesis, or to allow that the six days of creation were not necessarily 24-hour days.”

The idea that Genesis specifically must be read literally appeared with that group of Protestants called “Fundamentalists.” And they showed up only in the late 19th/ early 20th century. In other words, this new dogma appeared in reaction to Darwin.

Let’s be clear, then: Darwin did not disprove religion. This new dogma, rather, was created to disprove Darwin.

In Britain, the main “creationist” movement, the “Evolution Protest Movement,” popped up in the 1930s.

Any idea what other intellectual currents were getting stronger in the 1930s?

There's your clue to the source of this delayed reaction against Darwinism among the religious.

William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State during WWI, reading the war news.

William Jennings Bryan--he of the "Scopes Monkey Trial"--is the true father of the anti-Darwin movement. He campaigned across America, in the early 1920s, urging that Darwinism not be taught in schools. And, although personally religious, he was not a cleric. He was a lawyer and a politician; a three-time Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. In a famous speech, delivered across America, he argued that “the Darwinian theory represents man reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate, the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. If this is the law of our development then, if there is any logic that can bind the human mind, we shall turn backward to the beast in proportion as we substitute the law of love. I choose to believe that love rather than hatred is the law of development."

Bryan, in turn, was brought to this view by a book, Headquarters Nights, famous at the time, that traced the views of the German intelligentsia and the German high command, during World War I, to Darwin's theories. Bryan, a determined pacifist, saw that this was antithetical to world peace, to the doctrine of human equality, and to human rights. And, of course, the events of the 1930s and 1940s proved him right.

This is why, in turn, there was a resistance to teaching Darwin in the schools. Wikipedia: in the early to mid 20th century, “The numbers of children taking secondary education increased rapidly, and parents who were fundamentalist or opposed to social ideas of what was called survival of the fittest had real concerns about what their children were learning about evolution.”

Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and colleague, the father of eugenics.

Even the earliest reviewers of Darwin saw this problem with his theory. Richard Owen, the most prominent biologist of the day, the man who named the dinosaur, wrote that Darwinism was the sort of "abuse of science... to which a neighbouring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation." He was referring to the French Revolution. Darwin described approvingly an early review in the Manchester Guardian: “received in a Manchester Newspaper a rather a good squib, showing that I have proved 'might is right', & therefore that Napoleon is right & every cheating Tradesman is also right." Even in approving of the theory, liberal academics saw it: a Unitarian reviewer noted that Darwinian evolution led "inevitably... towards the progressive exaltation of the races engaged in it."

That was the concern. Demanding a literal reading of Genesis was only a weapon in the fight. The problem was and is that, in the mechanism he proposed for how evolution took place, Darwin depicted nature as a state of permanent struggle in which the strong must kill the weak. And make no mistake: the post-Nazi claim that “Social Darwinism” is a misapplication of the original theory, that the mechanics of natural selection somehow end in the case of man and the races of man, would have been a surprise to Darwin. Darwin made clear in his second magnum opus, The Descent of Man, that the mechanism applied as much to man as to any other animal.

This is the problem, the issue underlying the conflict between Creationists or Intelligent Designers and Darwinists. True, it is not a scientific problem. Nor is it really a religious problem. The problem is not religious, per se, but moral.

It seems sinister to seek to obscure, or even to ignore or deny, this issue. As the advocates of Darwinism seem to be doing today.