In a blog entry on the Huffington Post Daniel Darling, the Vice President of
Communications, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist
Convention shares with readers the question he hopes every presidential
candidate is asked. From the outset, he
clearly has an agenda, complaining about the “unfair” treatment conservatives
seem to receive from the media, mentioning Scott Walker of Wisconsin by name
and referring, one assumes, to his being question about his stance on
evolution. Darling’s question for candidates is as tendentious as the rest of
the piece, and question-begging to boot:
Do you recognize the intrinsic value of every human life, from
conception to natural death?
Darling then proceeds to talk about the Christian tradition
of respect for life, never once pausing to consider that the premise that a
fertilized egg is “human life” is one for philosophers, not scientists, and so
cannot be treated as proven. Towards the
end he proposes a series of questions, arising from the first, many of them
showing laudable concern for outsiders and the poor. I will take him at his word that his concern
for such people is genuine.
Still, he is far too dismissive of the evolution question,
and this leads to the question I’d like candidates to answer:
Do you accept the
conclusion of the world community of scientists that life on Earth, including
humans, evolved from earlier forms of life over a period of billions of years?
It will be easy now to throw the charge of tendentiousness
back in my face, so I am going to pre-empt that and plead guilty; I do have an axe to grind here. And it’s not just because I am on
the record as a accepting
the fact of evolution and the theory
of evolution by natural selection that explains the fact. It’s because acceptance of evolution is the
acceptance of a way of thinking that has proven the best method of determining
truth about the physical world…and it means following the facts wherever they
lead and no matter how uncomfortable they might make us. It means following reason and not magical
thinking.
Why does it matter?
It matters because the epistemology embraced by the leaders of our
nation, of any nation, has to be one that is equipped to deal with the
challenges we face. Most often when
rejecting evolution, religious belief is cited as the prime motivation—the
Bible says that God created the world in six days and created Man as a creature
apart in the divine image.
But it is a peculiarly modern innovation that this has to be
taken literally, a reaction to the rise of modern science as a competitive
explanation for existence. That some
continue to use a literal account of creation, whatever the source, as a
substitute for what the sciences have revealed to us, ought to be
troubling. It tells us that, when faced
with uncertainty, such people will react with belief rather than with knowledge. If all of the problems that needed dealing
with were philosophical, this might be tenable.
But the problems we face are, in large part, not philosophical. They can be addressed only through evaluation
of the evidence. Nowhere is this more
evident than in the challenge of climate change, a truly existential threat. In
scientific circles there is no debate that rising temperatures are the result
of human activity. There are numerous
reasons some, especially here in the United States, deny this reality. Most of them hinge on denial of the
science. A leader who accepts the
reality of evolution is more likely to see climate change for what it really is
and to make smart policy based on facts.
Beyond the scientific challenges, there are the great moral
and international challenges we face, and these, too, will be better addressed by
a leader steeped in empiricism. Such a
view of the world tells us that, as humans, we are fundamentally the same,
therefore discrimination based on gender, race, or sexual orientation can be
based only on prejudice, not on fact. It
tells us that medical decisions should be made on sound science, not on philosophical
considerations, and to err in the favor of what is known rather than what is
believed. It tells us that policies
ought to be evidence-based, rather than hewing to closely-held and cherished
ideas about how the world ought to work that fly in the face of the way it
actually does.
We are called to revise the exalted sense of ourselves that
has come from the idea of American exceptionalism, that this nation is, as John
Winthrop put it and Ronald Reagan loved to repeat, “a shining city on a hill,”
somehow blessed by Providence with a unique mission to spread freedom and
democracy, has to fall by the wayside.
This belief has allowed us to avoid self-criticism, to ignore the
progress of other nations against problems that bedevil us, to assume that
things will simply work out right. This
sense of exemption from the grip of history is a tenet of our civil religion…an
article of faith with no basis in fact, and so a poor basis for action.
Some will suggest that the very brief course I have outlined
above will require candidates who reject religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Believers the world over have found ways to
accommodate empirical facts within their religious frameworks. They tend to place religion and science in
separate spheres, following the examples of Galileo and Newton who argued that
religious opinions had no place in the sciences, just as science has no bearing
on religious truths.
By accepting the fact of evolution and the methods used to
explain it, the candidate affirms the importance of humility in the face of
uncertainty, rather than the hubris of pseudo-certainty. He or she reminds us that facts—even, or
perhaps especially, uncomfortable facts—matter.
And the ability to face such facts, accept them for what they are, and
proceed based on knowledge and reason, is a faculty worthy of a leader.
We can afford no less.
