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Monkey business
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Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors; they will also smoke tobacco with pleasure.
-- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
I'm 1/3 of the way through Darwin (Norton Critical Edition) and that's probably my favorite line so far. Growing up in the church, Charles Darwin was presented as a dark figure, a shoddy scientist who somehow duped the entire scientific community into agreeing with him. I've always been very interested in science and so after learning about evolution in school I thought about it a lot. I knew that it was heresy on some level, but it also made a lot of sense to me and it fit in with what I saw in the world. In time I did my best to compartmentalize my thoughts about science and faith. As long as I kept them separate I could enjoy the benefits of both. It's hard for me to say for sure what my opinion on this has been historically. I know that I read and probably even espoused the idea that evolution is just too unlikely to have occurred. But I've never lost my respect for science.
It has been nice to read about Darwin on my own time and with no agenda. I don't feel the need to take sides for any political or religious reason. There's no longer doubt in my mind that living things have been modified by natural selection over time and that's how the great diversity of life on earth has reached the point it's at now. There are questions that remain unanswered, but that much, at least, makes sense to me.
5 comments
This is chock full of contradictions….
Way to be specific there Jman.
Growing up in the church, Charles Darwin was presented as a dark figure, a shoddy scientist who somehow duped the entire scientific community into agreeing with him.
Don’t you hate that? It really prevents one from trying to come to find a way to reconcile the two ideas.
The day theology freezes its view of science is (was) the day it became bad theology.
It is good to see people in the church be open to these ideas. I really don’t know where I am going here, but posts like this give me hope for a body of believers with their heads not up their asses.
I’m reading Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, which is basically a transcript of a series of lectures he gave.
At the end of the first chapter he says something I really like:
If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its inticracy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship.
Have you ever read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn? It is work of fiction about a teacher/gorilla, but don’t let that scare you off. It offers a different interpretation of parts of the Old Testament. Again, it’s fiction, so I’m not sure how much research was done, but it is a completely different perspective from anything I had ever heard before.
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