Theology, the evolution of reason and popular science
When I was doing zoological research up at James Cook University, sharing a lab with a variety of post-grad students, I got weary of the God/science, creation/evolution discussion, to the point that I have lost interest in it altogether, as one of life’s more fruitless discussions – though not before I nutted it out to my own satisfaction. I remember on one occasion coming home from a field trip with one Ph.D student and he was making me listen to Stephen Jay Gould in the car (he was doing his Ph.D on Northern Bettongs, and I was working on Rufous Bettongs, so he decided to come on my trip – then about 3:30 am into the first night of clearing traps, trudging up a rocky slope as it started to rain he said “well Ali, this is bloody ridiculous”, because my field trips were a lot of hard work). Anyway, so we were engaged in one of our friendly arguments in the car on the way home, when neither or us were perhaps at our sharpest. I recall Stephen Jay Gould saying “science is stripping man off his every last pedestal”, which my colleague seemed to think was particularly pertinent to "religion" and it’s arrogance, to which I think I replied with something along the lines of ‘yes but Stephen Jay Gould, a self-declared accidental speck of dust in the timeline, thinks he can rise up out of the primordial slime and tell us he knows how it all began and how we all got here’ – is that not also arrogant?
Even though I have since lost interest in that “issue” I was reading one of CS Lewis’s essays the other night, in which he had something to say about this very thing. I have a book with 67 essays in it, and sometimes I just pick one with an interesting title, and as is Lewis’s want, you just never know what else you’re going to get thrown in on any particular topic, because this one was called ‘Is Theology Poetry?’. Without further ado, here is what I found in this essay (and I've added the emphasis):
Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory – all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not to even understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it.
Hear, hear. Lewis says it better. And he goes on in his essay with more fascinating things, but I shall leave it there for now.
(Note: I don't think this is about how much of the scientific process of evolution you believe in - I don't actually care anymore - but about challenging popular scientists to think about the inconsistencies in their own system.)