A Question for Presidential Candidates

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.