God Love Darwin

    Endlessly we debate: Darwin or the Bible? And endlessly the debate is full of caricature.  The Bible is freighted with claims it does not make.  Hearsay versions of 150-year-old science are proclaimed as if they were holy writ.  Fact goes wanting.
    An open and literate society ought to do better.
    For starters, the theory of natural selection was never seamless.  With Newton and other pioneers, Charles Darwin explained much but not all in his field of inquiry.  He himself noted the failure of some phenomena to fit where his grid said they ought.
    Critiques, caveats and elaborations from other scientists soon followed publication of  "The Origin of Species" in 1859. They have followed plentifully ever since. Today's evolutionary thinking is far more varied than Darwin's. And around it even yet remain puzzles, anomalies and disagreements.
    The biblical side of the debate is compromised by America's culture of scriptural ignorance. The constitutional idea of church-state separation has spread widely into aspects of thought and attitude it was never meant to govern.  In our popular mindset, freedom of religion has morphed into freedom from religion.
     Even among observant Americans, the Bible is far more often cited than actually read. It may never be directly encountered in the completion of  a so-called liberal education. Ostensibly literate people may be little aware of its broad impact on Western culture.
    And what a pity for them to miss, say, the grandeur of Job:

    "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
    'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
    'Gird up your loins like a man.  I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
    'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?
    'Tell me, if you have understanding.
    'Who determined its measurements -- surely you know!
    'Or who stretched the line upon it?
    'On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
    'Or who shut the sea in with doors when it burst out from the womb?
    'When I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band
    'And prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors
    'And said, "This far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped?"
    'Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
    'And caused the dawn to know its place,
    'So that it might take hold of the skirts of the Earth
    'And the wicked be shaken out of it? ' "

    Or how about Paul at his best?

    "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
    "Love is patient, love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist
on its own way;  it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
    "Love never ends ... ."

    A greater pity is this:  The Bible's confinement at the outskirts of cultural literacy makes Americans sitting ducks for quackery, chicanery  and foolishness -- for televangelist hucksters; for opportunists with a taste for political influence;  for all sorts of  glib nonsense about what the Bible is, and about what it actually says.
    Take, for example, the idea of measuring the Bible by the standards of a modern history  book -- a model that cannot be sensibly applied if only because the form was unknown at the time of the biblical writings.
    In this light, what of Genesis?
    It is nearer to being a sermon or, more precisely, a conflation of sermons.  Also, it is a treasury of artful communication.  Imagine being a writer-editor working in the context of an ancient and marginally literate theocracy. Imagine wanting to articulate the idea that humans had broken with God by arrogating to themselves the definition of good and evil.  Toward this end, the image of stealing fruit from the tree of knowledge is marvelously effective.
    And where outside of Genesis do seven words better capture a descent from innocence into worldly shame:  "Who told you that you were naked?"
    Or consider the example of Jonah.  If we are to take the Bible seriously, must we believe that a big fish literally swallowed a man whole and then spit him out, alive, days later?
    The question is without worthwhile point.
    In the story, God tells Jonah to take His word to Nineveh, where a great deal of sinning has been going on.  Jonah feels the people of Nineveh don't deserve that kind of attention.  He tries to run away, and in the process lands in the belly of the fish.
    Three days and three nights later he is back on dry land, hearing again the divine command to go and preach in Nineveh.   Reluctantly, Jonah complies.  He admonishes the Ninevites to repent -- and in a trice, they all do.  God sees their repentance and forgives them.
    Jonah's reaction?  He is sullen and resentful.  He thinks the Almighty should have handed out more justice and less mercy.  As the brief story ends, God leaves a still-sulking Jonah to ponder its real point: Why should God not cherish all His creatures?
    Understood in the context of its time, place and culture, this is a teaching story and a good one.  It is about obedience and the abundance of divine love. The business about the fish is peripheral to the spirit and the purpose of the tale.
    Even so, we moderns say, we are moderns, after all.  What might be something nearer to our own experience?
    Examples of teaching stories abound in our literature. I think of Harper Lee's classic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."  It is a story about values, and about the potentially high cost of being faithful to them.  The human issues it portrays are quite real.  The lessons it advances are quite real.  Worrying about the historicity of Atticus Finch would be as useful as worrying that Lewis Carroll might never actually have seen a Bandersnatch.
    The Bible is a wonderfully diverse and sophisticated collection of books, poems, songs, letters and other forms of literature not seen today.  It is a record across centuries of how individuals, groups and whole cultures have lived out their need to express their experience of God.
    And nothing in it requires us to suppose that God could not have chosen evolutionary tools to bring the human race to the forefront of His creation.  There is no necessary conflict between science and faith.
    But American culture has traveled to an ironic extreme.  Reverence is reserved for technology, while religious faith is elbowed out of sight.  Nowadays you may be deemed merely colorful if, in polite conversation, you tell a naughty story or drop an expletive. But venture aloud a serious mention of God, and you may be charged with a true breach of manners.
    Yes, prudent minimums of courtesy do recommend that we refrain from pushing values on each other willy-nilly.  But when did we decide that Americans must be guaranteed of living beyond sight or sound of any manifestation of faith?
    And where did we lose the intellectual rigor to recognize that our culture has rigged the discussion of faith and reason?
    C.S. Lewis is helpful on this point.  He wrote of being in a dark tool shed on a bright afternoon.  A shaft of sunlight angled through a crack above the door.  From a position to one side he could see the sunbeam, the motes drifting in it, and the objects it fell upon.  Standing in the sunbeam and looking upward along it, he could see nothing inside the shed, only a framed view of leaves, branches and the sky beyond.
    We would quickly demur if someone claimed that one of these perspectives was inherently more "real" than the other, that one was objective in ways that the other was not.  So, too, we must demur from suggestions that the engagement of faithful people in the "real world" is not "impartial,"  that it is compromised ipso facto by their very faith.
    Yet our culture makes the claim nonetheless, and even hijacks the definition of terms.  Faith is characterized as chosen belief, in the way that one might choose to accept the word of a trusted friend.  Our cultural vocabulary does not credit the possibility of faith being an objectively real experience -- as can the experience of beauty, in a very pale analogy.
    Our idiom does not bother to assail the proposition but simply ignores it.  This mode of thinking is not rationalism or even skepticism.  It is intellectual dishonesty in expedient disguise. But it does simplify discussion by evading the essential questions.
    An open and literate society ought to do better.