Fundamentalist Faith and Evolution
The right-wing Christian opposition to science and especially to evolution has always puzzled me. I never bought the whole ‘contrary to the Bible’ spiel because, frankly, so many other things in the Bible are completely ignored. We will get beyond the ‘love thy neighbors’ which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is a tenet that fundamentalist seem to believe applies only to everyone else. And only if they themselves are the neighbors in question. Moderate Catholics don’t go shooting Doctors over abortion, for example. There are probably hundreds of verses in the Bible dealing with slavery and I’ve yet to meet a fundamentalist who’s in favor of slavery. Or at least who is willing to admit it.
But then it struck me, evolution, more than any other scientific fact, strikes at the very core of all fundamentalist faith, and it’s not because it’s contrary to the Bible, but because it is contrary to the very concept of religious faith.
The primary tenet of fundamentalist faith, and indeed of all faith—the one linchpin on which the whole of all religious belief hangs; so basic that it is not even acknowledged because it is so obvious—is simply that the world used to be a better place and it’s been going downhill since the creation. Fundamentalists don’t believe in evolution because they believe in DE-evolution and, by the very nature of being fundamentalists, cannot harbor two contradictory thoughts.
Evolution proves that organisms adapt. Adapt implies improvement, and if things are improving then they can’t have been better in the past. Ergo, evolution is contrary to the fundamentalist way of thinking.
People have a seemingly natural way of glossing over their own past and remembering their youth and childhood with deftly contorted memories that highlight the good, often at the cost of any reality. They then transfer this tendency to history itself.
And it’s not just Christians. Astrologers, so-called New Age Pagans, and even most people who are not particularly imbued with religious fervor are tainted by the illusion of nostalgia. The past was better than the present, and everything is going to hell. “Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” We can imagine this being said 10 years ago, and perhaps even 100 years ago, but in fact this was said a century before Christ.
Neo-pagans carping about how ‘advanced’ the Druids and Celts are casually ignore the human sacrifice aspects of the Celtic religion, to say nothing of the fact that we know practically nothing about their religion (the Romans were very effective at stomping it out). Christians or Jews who try to discover the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ ignore the 30-35 year life expectancy of 3,000 years ago. To say nothing of child birth risks, or, say, the risk of being sold into slavery and shipped off to Athens.
And speaking of Athens, that is where the idea of biological evolutionary theory first occurred, by the way. So, on the basis of that ‘Wisdom of the Ancients’ crap, we should accept it as gospel, right?
The vast chasm that separates rational thought from faith is one simple thought, is the world getting better or worse?
Or, in other words, for all their faith and evangelism, fundamentalists are pessimists. After all, they know the world is going to end in some hellish apocalypse.
If you are a scientist you have empirical evidence that the world is getting better, and that the lives of nearly every human being on the planet are noticeably improved over their lives a century ago. Once you accept that, then the whole foundation of fundamentalism slides away.
Can you be religious and be a scientist? Certainly. In fact, most physicists seem to have some sort of faith, but I don’t think it’s the sort of faith that fundamentalists would consider any kind of religion, and probably not even a faith. But can you be a fundamentalist and be a scientist? No, you can’t. You can’t be a doctor and discard biology. You can’t dismiss evolution while treating drug-resistant infections. You don’t get to be a doctor if your prescriptions include phrases like ‘Prayer Circle’ any more than if your recommended treatment for fever is blood-letting. See, medicine has evolved too.