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WHY CHRISTIANS AND

CONSERVATIVES

SHOULD ACCEPT EVOLUTION

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feeling of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms, capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of His laws.”

—Charles Darwin, 2nd edition of On the Origin of Species, 1860

During the cultural brouhaha whipped up by the media frenzy over President George W. Bush’s 2005 comments on Intelligent Design and evolution, a reporter from Time magazine solicited my opinion about whether one can believe in both God and evolution.

I replied that, empirically speaking, apparently so, because lots of people do—a 1996 survey found that 39 percent of American scientists profess belief in God, and a 1997 poll found that 99 percent of American scientists accept the theory of evolution. More recently, preliminary results from a long-term survey of 1,600 scientists from twenty-one elite universities revealed that over half consider themselves “moderately spiritual” to “very spiritual,” and about a third hold formal religious affiliations.1 So either a third of my colleagues live in a cognitive fantasyland of logic-tight compartments, or there is a way to find that separate-worlds harmony between science and religion.

If scientists can believe in God and evolution, can Christians? Using the same empirical standards, evidently so, because approximately 96 million American Christians do: In a 2001 Gallup poll, 37 percent of Americans (107 million people) agreed with the statement “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Since about 90 percent of Americans are Christians, approximately 96 million Christians believe that God used evolution to guide the process of creating advanced forms of life.2

Even many evangelical Christians—the religious cohort most outspoken against the theory—accept evolution. Consider the statement by former president Jimmy Carter—who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian—in response to a measure passed in Georgia in 2004 that required all public school biology textbooks to include a sticker proclaiming:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

President Carter was outraged. “As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox’s attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia’s students,” he wrote. “The existing and long-standing use of the word ‘evolution’ in our state’s textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians’ belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe. There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”3 The requirement was subsequently repealed, though not before it served as fodder for other state legislatures as well as for political cartoonists.

And as seen in the previous chapter, the compatibility of God and Darwin finds evidence in the one billion Catholics who embraced Pope John Paul II’s 1996 Pontifical Academy of Sciences Encyclical. He asserts that evolution happened, that it is okay