Given all the Sturm und Drang of the past few weeks — somewhere between Mussolini’s overthrow of Italy’s democratic institutions and gathering of high school drama queens – I missed one of my favorite, if private, days to celebrate: the birth of Charles Darwin on Feb. 12.
It was his publication of “On the Origin of Species” almost 250 years ago that began the first “War on Religion” (not to be confused with the later, and lamer, “War on Christmas,” nor the “War on Men,” nor the “War on Christians”). Yet it remains one of the pillars of the phony battle in the so-called “culture war” between the theory of evolution and creationism.
And it is time to end that phony battle in that phony war: Because God is a Darwinian, and Darwin was a believer.
Anyone with an honest heart and a passing familiarity of the theory of evolution and the Old Testament book of Genesis can see right off that the differences between the two, while clear, are nevertheless so slight as to pale to insignificance when compared to their agreement. Especially in a book written some 3,000 years ago.
That’s right, the Bible agrees with Darwin.
So, let’s be clear: Darwin’s theory of evolution was correct — in a ball park kind of way. But the Bible writers got there first, because Genesis was the first clue to our evolutionary past.
And a quick comparison with other cultures’ creation stories shows how uncannily similar Genesis is to evolution.
The vaunted ancient Greeks believed creation began when a giant black bird, Nyx, mothered an egg with the Wind that she sat on for ages before giving birth to Eros, and the two halves of that egg created heaven and Earth.
The ancient Chinese believed the universe was a black egg, in which heaven and Earth were mixed until the god Pangu split the egg to create the universe.
Yet there are no other creation “theories” which approach Darwin’s quite like Genesis.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep.” (Genesis 1:2)
That is as fine a writerly description of the Earth which existed billions of years ago as Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould might have penned.
In verse 3 God said, “Let there be light.” And what else does “Let there be light” bring to mind but the Big Bang – the light which ended all darkness.
Genesis goes on to support what the honest citizen (or voter) would agree is the overwhelming logic of evolution, if not the exact sequence.
One the third day, Genesis asserts, the waters were separated from the land as evolution posits happened as the gaseous ball the Earth was cooled into a solid. Further on that momentous third day, the Earth developed grass, “herb yielding seed and the fruit tree … whose seed is in itself.” Clearly Genesis agrees with Darwin that simple life forms develop into more complex ones: grass into fruit trees.
Most Darwinian of Genesis is verse 20, the fifth day: “…Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life…” Our best science suggests that life began in the seas and then colonized the land. Verse 24 agrees with science that on the sixth day after the fishes of the seas, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.”
And of course, on that momentous sixth day, in verse 27 also came man, “Male and female created he them.” That humans evolved last over billions of years is an absolute of evolution, too.
Does all this square precisely with evolution? No. But for a text written some 3,000 years ago, it is a remarkably prescient description of what Darwin theorized when he published “On the Origin of Species”.
Indeed, not only does Genesis mark God as a Darwinian, but an ecologist too.
In verse 28, as soon as the male and female are created, God admonishes them to be “fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth …”
So Genesis clearly marks our roles on Earth as its shepherds, its replenishers, not despoilers who suck it dry of resources, poison its atmosphere and drive to extinction the very creatures created on the same day as humanity.
I am not making a case here for intelligent design — the Trojan horse for creationists’ attack on science.
Rather, it is a plea for the return of doubt — which is supposed to be the basis for both faith and the scientific method. The opposite of doubt is not certainty, but curiosity. And curiosity makes us constantly ask why, and formulate theories. Certainty only leads to ideologies, and ideologies lead to strife.
Indeed, the writers of Genesis, having deduced the essence of evolution long before there was evidence, can be said to have engaged in the same kind of thought experiment that allowed Einstein to imagine his theory of relativity before there was a proof.
So 2½ centuries after its publication, let us pay tribute to Darwin (who like Galileo and Newton was a believer) by declaring an end to the phony war over creationism.
Genesis got it right, just ask Darwin.
Joe Gannon, writer and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at jgannonoped@gmail.com. Or visit his Facebook page, Joe Gannon, author.