08/20/05

Some thoughts that occurred to me as I was winging my way home from Billings after having shared her birthday with my sister:

On Friday, May 13, 2005 (yes, Friday the 13th) I was diagnosed with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Under the care of an oncologist whom, in that brief period of time, I have come to greatly respect, I have been prescribed a “miracle” drug, Gleevec, which has already put the disease into remission. But the experience has caused me to reflect even more seriously upon my own mortality than I already had, and has justified in a very real way my profound interest—perhaps even a magnificent obsession—with the meaning and purpose of this thing called life.

As has been the case with others who have in one way or another been confronted with their finitude, the most immediate effect for me has been an even greater appreciation for the precious nature of the present. This has been in the context of the realization of how insidiously easy it is to take the present moment for granted by dwelling upon a past that has already happened or upon a future that has yet to manifest itself in the now. It has increased my consciousness of how utterly mistaken it is to think of myself as immortal with unlimited time to realize my dreams and aspirations.

To some this may be perceived as a mid-life crisis. But more to the point this experience has informed me that even the notion of mid-life is ridiculously presumptuous. It’s like trying to determine where the center of the universe is. The process itself eventually reveals that such a thing is impossible, just as it is impossible to point to the present moment as the middle of my life. The wisdom of the ages has always stated that the only certainty is the present now, and that it must be accepted and acted upon as such without fruitlessly attempting to pinpoint its location on an imaginary timeline.

To be sure, I am nearer to that ultimate transformation labeled “death” than I was yesterday, but that is all that can be said. I know that I am going to die, but I do not know when. The certainty of my death has been made no greater by the diagnosis, but my awareness and acceptance of the fact has been. Where I once may have deluded myself with the thought that my death was an abstract uncertainty to be put off indefinitely through “good clean living”, the stark truth has now imposed itself upon my consciousness that no kind of living can avoid my ultimate mortal destiny.

Let's Have No More Monkey Trials by Charles Krauthammer

To teach faith as science is to undermine both

The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.

But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.

This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.

How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.

To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.




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