God and Evolution at Lone Star College

The debate over the moral and religious implications of Darwin's theory of evolution continues to stir deep emotions in young people. 

I saw that when I lectured yesterday at Lone Star College-Kingwood in Houston.  I met with some faculty members in the afternoon for a discussion of my Darwinian Conservatism book.  I then lectured in the evening on "Does Darwin Subvert or Support Morality?"  There was a standing-room-only audience of 200 or more for the lecture, and we had a lively discussion after the lecture. 

I was very pleased to meet Kent Guida there.  We have been--as he says--"pen pals" for over 14 years, but we had never met.

I was impressed by the intellectual energy of both the faculty and the students at Lone Star.  They represented many disciplines--history, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, and others--and they were able to speak with one another in a vigorous and thoughtful way.  At Lone Star, the faculty encourage this kind of interdisciplinary discussion by adopting one book that is to be discussed across the courses for a year. This is what every program in liberal education should be doing, but it's rare.

Another example of this stimulating interdisciplinary work at Lone Star is the course being taught this semester by John Barr on comparing Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

In the small group discussion with faculty members, one objection to my argument for Darwinian conservatism was that I was attacking a "straw man" in dismissing the tradition of the left as "utopian" in contrast to the "realism" of conservatism.  I admitted that this is one of the best criticisms of my argument.  I think it is true that the history of leftist thought has been largely utopian in aspiring for a total transformation of the human condition to achieve an equality of outcome in social life.  But in recent decades, especially since the collapse of the Marxist regimes in 1989, the left has largely given up its utopian aspirations as it has settled into a conservative left proposing moderate social reforms.  So, for example, socialists no longer argue for public ownership of the means of production or for confiscatory tax rates for the rich.  Similarly, as I have indicated in Darwinian Natural Right, the Israeli kibbutzim were originally utopian in trying to abolish private families and private property for the sake of complete equality, but now the kibbutzim have largely thrown out these radical aims because the people in the kibbutzim found them unbearable.  For me, this shows that the emotional costs of utopian projects are too high when they deny our evolved natural desires.

Clearly, the primary reason for the large turnout of students at the lecture was the interest in my argument for applying Darwinian reasoning to morality and religion.  Many of the students at Lone Star are serious Christians who have adopted a Biblical creationism as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.  Some of them were homeschooled by their parents, so that they could be taught Biblical science rather than evolutionary science.  But there were also some students who see no necessary conflict between their Christian beliefs and accepting Darwin's theory.  And there are others who are skeptics or atheists who embrace Darwinian science as supporting human morality without any need for appeal to the divine.

I criticized both "scientific creationism" and "intelligent design theory" for not explaining exactly where, when, and how the Creator or Intelligent Designer created all forms of life.  Actually, as some students pointed out to me, the creationists who defend a literal six-days-of-creation Biblical story actually do propose a potentially testable theory.  But do they really believe that we should be able to find evidence that all species of life were created in six days?  If so, then we should see evidence that human beings existed contemporaneously with dinosaurs and many other species of life that seem to have gone extinct before the emergence of Homo sapiens. 

The primary concern of the students, however, was not so much the scientific debate over origins but the moral debate over whether a Darwinian account of the evolution of the moral sense could sustain moral order based on a purely natural ground without any necessary appeal to supernatural religious doctrines.  My argument was that while religious belief could often provide helpful support for our morality, it was not absolutely necessary, and that when religious traditions cannot resolve great moral issues--like slavery, for example--we must turn to our evolved natural moral sense.

Some of the students thought that relying on the purely human grounds of morality--human nature, human culture, and human judgment--deprived us of any "objective" standard of right and wrong that could only come from the divine law of the Bible.  I used the illustration of the debate over slavery to suggest that sometimes the Bible is either unclear or unreliable in its moral teaching, which forces us to pass the Bible through our naturally evolved moral sense.  Before the Civil War, many American Christians read the Bible as supporting slavery as a dictate of divine law.  After the Civil War, most Christians assumed that the Bible clearly condemns slavery as wrong, despite the fact that all of the passages of the Bible specifically on slavery seem to support it.

In the discussion, I indicated that I have argued for introducing this debate into our high school and college classrooms.  Why shouldn't high school biology students be able to read texts representing all sides of this debate so that they can make up their own minds based on their weighing of the evidence and arguments?  Why shouldn't all students have the sort of open discussion that we had at Lone Star College? 

If they did have such discussions, students might discover the inescapability of the Reason/Revelation debate, and the difficulty--perhaps impossibility--of either side in that debate refuting the other.  Unfortunately, I suspect that most high school and college teachers are not prepared to handle such a discussion.  But it's good to see that such a discussion is possible at places like Lone Star College.

A few of my many posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., and here.

For the opponents of evolution, a good theme song might be Tecumseh Fitch's "I Don't Believe in Evolution"