Evolution in debate on God and origins of life

Published on Tuesday 14 March 2006 01:30

I STOOD in John Knox's pulpit in front of a silent (and empty) St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews, last Friday. According to legend, it was from this suitably austere wooden structure, albeit then in nearby Holy Trinity Church, that the great puritan and "animating spirit" of the Reformation, as Allan Massie has described him, incited crowds to ransack the town's cathedral in 1559.

In the end, unlike the Borders abbeys which were destroyed, St Andrews Cathedral eventually fell down due to neglect, my superb "tour guide", John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at St Andrews University, was able to point out.

On my way home in the car, the radio news was reporting that an exam board in England had decided to introduce creationist and intelligent-design theories about the origins of the universe into the GCSE biology exam syllabus.

When a group of teachers in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, tried to introduce a statement - a statement, not a chapter in a textbook or a lesson - for biology classes endorsing intelligent design and alleging that evolution was merely a theory, the United States was convulsed. The case went to court, a national debate echoed the arguments of the lawyers on either side, and in December last year the judge, John Jones, ruled that intelligent design was a religious theory, not a scientific one, and therefore could not be taught in US public schools, which are banned from promoting religion.

I HAD expected, then, that Saturday's papers would carry stories and opinion pieces about the GCSE biology syllabus. The story received virtually no coverage.

Apart from the obvious matter of the absence of implications for the UK constitution, why was this?

Was it that trusty old British sense of fair play: yes, yes, intelligent design is a cover for religious explanations of the origin of life, but I guess evolutionary biology can't explain everything, can it, old chap? We've got to let them have their say.

Or perhaps the decline of churchgoing means we are so godless as a nation that we think a few intelligent-design lessons won't make any difference anyway.

None of these explanations really washes. I suspect that, paradoxically, unlike America, where the strength of religion is a function of family and community, which in turn helps to strengthen and unify these social groups, in Britain it has become a matter for the individual's conscience (while churchgoing may have declined, the number of people reporting religious or spiritual identification of one kind or another is growing).

All of which makes me wonder how the scientific backlash against intelligent design, which is now beginning to show green shoots, will fare, especially in this country.

THE tactics of those fighting back are fascinating. The American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who will give a lecture tonight at Edinburgh University, is leading the charge of the bright brigade - "bright" being the noun now applied (in an article by him) to agnostics, atheists and naturalists. This bushy-bearded man, who looks like a cross between Darwin and an Old Testament prophet, is America's Richard Dawkins.

But unlike Dawkins, he is now attempting to adopt a conciliatory approach. In his new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, he calls for a huge, multidisciplinary exploration of the phenomenon of religion in order to test its foundations scientifically. "Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meaning we find in our lives." Yes, but also because he hopes to be able to persuade religious people that they are deluding themselves.

I sympathise greatly with Dennett's plight; by trying to move on to religion's ground rather than lobbing philosophical and scientific grenades from behind the barricades of evolutionary biology, he is at least attempting to move this most ancient of debates on.

Probably subconsciously, he is evoking Knox himself, who said: "You cannot antagonise and influence at the same time."

Yet I cannot believe he will succeed in improving dialogue between what are essentially two competing versions of objective reality. You don't need to go to St Andrews to realise that.