I’m lucky I’m a religious liberal, because religious liberals find absolutely no contradiction between the poetic truth of the Bible and the scientific truth of evolution. However, as reported in the New York Times on May 5, in an article titled “A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin,” that is not true for some of the candidates for the Republican nomination for President:
[T]he [Republican] party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.
Silly boys:– saying they do not “believe” in evolution because their religion forbids them to. Yet their religion tells them that their God is omniscient and omnipotent. If their God is omniscient, then that God understands the difference between scientific evidence and metaphor; and if their God is omnipotent, then that God knows how to use metaphor in the Bible to communicate eternal truths.
Silly Sam Brownback. Silly Mike Huckabee. Silly Tom Tancredo. Don’t you think your God is smart enough to understand science and metaphor both? (And don’t you know that you’re embarrassing many of your politically conservative friends whose God is smart enough to understand that?)
In the comments, Philocrites, a.k.a. Chris, shows me where I’m wrong. I reply, admit he’s right, and try to recover my balance. Although I still say you should vote for one of the other Republican candidates.
I read the same article and had a brief but essentially cheap moment of Schadenfreude. After all, Darwin and his interpreters are not necessarily easier to integrate into a liberal religious viewpoint than into a conservative one. (Herbert Spencer? Richard Dawkins?) On the left, for example, some science champions have attacked humanism for taking a leap of faith toward notions of human value or ethical good. I’ve written about this here. The more basic point is that a worldview that reduces its value system to something “proven” by science is going to run into real trouble. I wrote about that problem in my essay “Science and its metaphors.”
Philocrites — Yeah, so I tried to get some cheap laughs from what could be a serious debate. My point about religious liberalism should have been that it is a religious stance which can be content with ambiguity, and which is open to the possibility of more than one way to access Truth (or “truth” depending on how post-modern you happen to be).
As a religious liberal, I want to be able to hold on to both the poetic truth of the Bible (and other sources of religious inspiration, as applicable) and the scientific truth of evolution (and other science goodies such as contemporary cosmology, etc.). I don’t feel the need to integrate contemporary evolutionary theory into liberal religion such that they are fully consistent. That would be like trying to convert the church organ to just intonation so that we can hear music by Harry Partch (but then what about the Well-Tempered Clavier?), or adding video terminals to the worship space so we can integrate video art by Nam June Paik in the church building. There’s no need to integrate absolutely everything into religion, nor to have complete consistency across all areas of life.
What am I trying to say here? Maybe I should just quote that great religious liberal, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen [ahem…] and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo simply strike me as persons who haven’t the personal courage born of self-reliance, in the good old Emersonian sense of that term.
Ant thanks for your link to your essay on science fundamentalism — a kind of fundamentalism which is equally guilty of a foolish consistency.