c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Huston Smith, author of”The World’s Religions,”taught philosophy and religion at the University of California-Berkeley, Syracuse University, M.I.T. and Washington University.)
UNDATED _ The decision of the Kansas Board of Education to limit the teaching of evolution shows once again that this issue isn’t going to go away until we handle it more responsibly than we are now doing. Epithet-slinging only hardens the polarization. What we need is to see more clearly what the fuss is about; which is to say, what the real issue is.
More than origins, the issue concerns anthropology _ who we human beings think we are. Origins become important because of their bearing on anthropology. A historical reference can help make this clear.
When, under the Romans, the Jews faced dispersion, they often asked their rabbis to condense the Torah into a single assertion which, if repeated like a mantra, might help to get them through their tribulations.
Rabbi Akiba’s,”You shall love your neighbor as yourself,”proved to be the favorite, but there were other candidates, the most curious of which (until we understand it) was Rabbi Ben-Azzai’s nomination,”This is the book of the generations of Adam.”That sounds flat until we remember that”Adam”in Hebrew means”man,”which makes the Bible the book of how we got here.
The issue relates directly to self-understanding, because the Torah/Bible teaches, not just that God made us, but that He/She/It (the pronouns never work) created us in”his”own image.
Thus seen, the foundation of the human self is not sex and aggression, as Freud posited; it is Godlike. Human weaknesses aplenty overlay our divinity, but it is there to be accessed.
As there is no way to derive a divine essence from natural selection, our society presents us with two clashing anthropologies, one taught in our schools on weekdays, the other preached from pulpits on weekends. The difference becomes important when we note that the consequences of the two views are not the same if psychologists are right in reporting that the most consistent contributor to (improved) behavior change is an improved self-image.
This fact (if it be such) may have been a contributing reason for why all traditional societies _ in contrast to our science-driven contemporary culture _ opted for the nobler view.”We are the only people who think themselves risen from savages,”the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins writes.”Everyone else believes they descended from gods.” This grasp of the matter might help us understand why the evolution issue isn’t cooling down. If we are thoughtful, it might even lead us to ask if we want it to cool down until we get our collective thinking on the matter in better shape.
What might be done to that end?
Some propose that evolution be taught without skirting the hard issues, by which they mean the facts that presently known evolutionary mechanisms cannot explain. Others propose that creationism be considered along with evolution, and students be challenged to give reasons for why one or the other has the stronger case.
As a friendly amendment to these, I suggest that the National Association of Biology Teachers recommend to its membership that at the first session of every course that deals with evolution, the teacher distribute a handout that would read something like this:”This is a course in science, and as your instructor it is my responsibility to teach you what science has empirically discovered about the mechanisms by which life emerged, and has developed, on this planet. We scientists believe that we know an important part of that story, and I will do my best to inform you of it.”However, there is so much that we do not know about the story that there is plenty of room for you to fill in the gaps with your own philosophic or religious convictions.” The phrase,”so much we don’t know”is drawn from Stephen Jay Gould’s program in the 1996 PBS series on evolution,”The Glorious Accident,”where it stands in my memory as the program’s refrain.
IR END SMITH
