The hallmark of a 19th or 20th century (or 21st century) debate about religion is a focus on origins. This began with Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in relation to people, but over the 20th century, this fixation on origins spread to the universe itself.
It seems to us, today, like a central religious or existential point: Who made us/How did we come about? Who made the universe/How did that come about? The two fields, religion and science, pose the questions differently to themselves, in ways that reflects their assumptions about the issues. Religions posit will and agency; science posits a passive and gradual (evolution) or spontaneous and violent (Big Bang) process behind what we see (and are) today.
But it’s important to gain some perspective on this—specifically, to understand just how trivial the creation of the universe and of man have been for centuries. It remains trivial to this day, depending on the religious tradition. The Buddha, most notably, expressed zero interest in either question. Hinduism has a Creator God, Brahma, as one of its three principle Gods—but unlike Vishnu and Shiva, Brahma has no temples dedicated to him, and has never been an actively worshipped God in the long, long history of Indian religion.
But even in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the emphasis is rather new. Moses and Christ, in their recorded statements, do not fixate on this point. Not because it was taken for granted: At the times they lived, remember, more people throughout Europe and the Near East believed in various pagan origin myths. Note, also, that the actual creation of the universe and man takes up a page or so (naturally, the first page) of the Bible. People say these debates are about “the Book of Genesis,” but what they really mean is “two pages in the Book of Genesis.” Scientists don’t attack, and religious firebrands don’t defend, the talking snake, the sun stopped in mid course, the angels disguised as visitors, the biological impossibility of a bush talking (and a bush that’s curiously unburned by the fire on it), and so on, and so forth. It’s all focused on the origin myth, as if this were some matter of perennial metaphysical concern—when, historically, it has been a matter of metaphysical indifference.
To this day, in fact, the origin questions mostly exercise theologians and scientists in the West, while Hindus and Buddhists, in my readings, don’t seem to regard evolutionary theory or theoretical physics as metaphysical villains, or threats. (Buddhism’s focus, granted, has always been ethical; the Buddha always focused on how people should live, rather than where they originated.)
Several factors play into this: First of all, a totalitarian monotheistic tradition can’t stand upstart branches of human knowledge infringing on its territory (and its territory is supposed to be everywhere). Then there’s the supposed infallibility of the Bible—some believers really think that undermining even a single page of the Bible, as Darwin does, undermines the entirety of the Bible, the whole claim of its divinely revealed status. All the eggs are in a single basket, as it were. Finally, there’s the strength and widespread prestige of the sciences—they are a rival today as they never were before—all in the context of a culture that accepts free speech in these subjects. Notice that Islam shares a sense of total sufficiency and a scientifically pre-modern Infallible Book, but no such debate takes place in the Islamic world; no one is safe to take the other side.
Some try to “reconcile” the two perspectives, trying to find “evidence” for intelligent design, as if the design of the human body were intelligent. The human body is set up in stupid ways. What does your appendix do, other than get infected and potentially kill you? Was it really all that intelligent to pack the brain’s major blood vessels and the windpipe into something so easily slit as a throat?
The real question, after we consider the long history of the marginal relevance of origin myths, and the increasing impossibility of reconciling these two systems, is whether there has to be a conflict at all. And that’s the really interesting aspect of all this. There are a considerable number of people who entertain two origin myths, indeed two entire world-outlooks, depending on the context—nonrigid thinkers, capable of switching between way of thinking and another, without experiencing a tension between the two. I myself seem to be one of them—from one angle, yes, Shiva does sit atop Mount Kailasa, but from a Google Earth perspective, no, he doesn’t.
Beliefs may well exist in the same manner as “roles” in sociology. You don’t speak or behave the same way around your college friends as you do around your grandmother. You don’t behave the same way at home as you do in the workplace. These are drastic changes of behavior, dress, and speech—externals, essentially. Psychologists describe how normal people quite routinely slip effortlessly among these roles in life. Is it possible that the internals can alter just as drastically, based on context? That the same person can believe in a Providential ordering of every last event, down to the fall of the sparrow, when in a house of worship—but still buckle his seatbelt against the off chance of a car crash, as soon as he’s in the parking lot?
Well, clearly Providence is controlling your seatbelt-buckling, too…. These speculations spiral into the circular or trivial rather quickly. But it’s not a digression: That Calvinist idea about determinism prompted great sectarian squabbles back in the day in Christendom. Plenty of breath and ink were spilt in the arguing of it! And yet today the question about whether God predetermined your salvation or not, though technically never resolved, seems irrelevant to the real questions of our lives—and when I say “our,” I believe I can include the descendants of the Protestants and Catholics, practicing or nonpracticing, who chewed that over back in the 16th century.
So human thought is not alien to spurious and irrelevant debates, false antagonisms, and obsessive fixations. Creationism versus evolutionary theory, and its parent antagonism, religion versus science, strikes me as just such an argument. In fact, the two disciplines could just as readily be seen as complementary. Religious people, among whom I count myself, usually care less about how old dirt is, and more about how they can, to put it bluntly, do the good. They create communities, often in hostile environments, where people treat each other with trust and nobility, they run soup kitchens, they run drives to collect toys for sick kids. Scientists, among whom I count myself, usually don’t care how old dirt is—they are busy running clinical trials on new disease treatments, and sequencing the human genome, and making seeds grow better so those seeds can feed more people. God’s work, indeed.