“The Talk”

In a New York Times opinion article Professor David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist, sketches “the talk” he has to give to his college students at the beginning of every semester.  The foundational creed of modern biological science, evolution by natural selection, cannot be harmonized with contemporary religion –at least those religions that believe in a creator God, he says.  “It (Biological Science) has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.”  For such a weighty claim being rehearsed every year to a very uncomfortable classroom, I was expecting some new and exciting robust scientific insights that I have not come across.  But instead of robust science from a well-respected biologist, the case being made for these weighty claims is strangely the reflections of amateur philosophy.

Oddly, I agree with Professor Barash that the tenants of religion and science cannot be harmonized by safely compartmentalizing them into their own spheres of influence –or magisteria as Gould calls them. (Gould argues that religion is about values and science is about facts, and so as long as they don't attempt to go pass their allotted boundaries, they can live in harmony.)  It is obvious to both of us that religion wants to talk about facts, and that values are inescapable, even for the irreligious biologist.  But what seems to escape Professor Barash is that this –along with most of his other reasons– are not actually scientific arguments.  They are philosophical ones.

The most obvious is his last reason.  Biological science shows there is loads of painful suffering in the world (do you need to take a biology course to know that?), and therefore the most important theological explanations for this are grossly inadequate.  Again, that would take a theological argument not a scientific one.  And that is actually what he stumbles to attempt:  “Theological answers range from claiming that suffering provides the option of free will to announcing (as in the Book of Job) that God is so great and we so insignificant that we have no right to ask.”  Again, besides the fact he grossly distorts or just plainly misunderstands the theological arguments here, Barash is still under the assumption that his rebuttal to this is actually a scientific argument, not his own philosophical spin-off.  He certainly has a right to his own philosophical spin-offs, but to do them under the banner of “science” is grossly misleading.  His entire reasoning is based on assumptions about moral evils, what a good God would allow, his own truncated definition of “benevolence,” etc…  However substantive these assumptions might be, the one thing that should be quite apparent is that these arguments are philosophical, not scientific.

The same is more subtly true for his other “scientific” reason as to how the uniqueness of man as a pillar of religion has been “demolished.”  I’m not sure what Prof. Barash thinks theologians mean by “image of God” in mankind… but it would seem obvious that it probably has nothing to do with science searching for some supernatural divine trait within human genetics.  While apparently this is not as obvious to Barash, the more important point here is that the entire discussion itself of what it truly means “to be like God” –again– is a theological discussion that Barash is proving to have only a Sunday school level of awareness.

As he mentions in the beginning, the reason for his “talk” is because some of his religious students have communicated a certain level of discomfort as they work through some of the findings of modern biology.  I'm all for interdisciplinary interaction, even if its up front.  But one wonders by the treatment he rehearses in his article if the level of philosophical and theological interaction that he brings to the table goes beyond the troubled reflections of the deep, well-resourced, religiously-inclined 19-year old's who walk into his classroom.