GHOSTS OF EVOLUTION: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms - Review

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2001 by Gregg Easterbrook

Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? suggests the debate on natural selection as fact is about to end, to be supplanted by a debate regarding how biology and faith should modify each other. Ruse's conclusion: "The Christian would be foolish to think that Darwinianism insists that humans are uniquely significant and bound to appear. However, the Christian can find in Darwinianism some support for the belief about the special significance of humans and the probability of their appearance." Substitute "believer" for Christian and the meaning remains the same.

Not only are religious leaders making their peace with natural selection; on the flip side, as the biotechnology era begins, science increasingly finds itself facing ethical quandaries that sound very much like spiritual questions. If you create an artificial human embryo, for example--as a Massachusetts company did last month--have you created something sacred or a research tool? Science just can't answer that; it's going to need help from theology.

David Lack, the 1940s biologist who did the definitive work on Galapagos finches once said that neither scientific materialism nor religious devotion can alone explain the living world, as both entail "unexplained gaps and contradictions." Today it is fashionable to assume that science and faith are bent on each other's destruction. Both ways of knowing may be necessary if we are ever to understand why we are here.

GREGG EASTERBROOK is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and a senior editor of The New Republic and Beliefnet.com.