Last Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed a matinee performance of San
Jose Stage’s production of
”
Inherit the Wind.
”
The play is particularly topical as our nation faces a heated
debate on whether
”
intelligent design
”
should be taught along with evolution in public school biology
classes.
Last Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed a matinee performance of San Jose Stage’s production of “Inherit the Wind.” The play is particularly topical as our nation faces a heated debate on whether “intelligent design” should be taught along with evolution in public school biology classes.
The play was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in the 1950s. It’s based on the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” that took place in a small Tennessee town in 1925. The trial became a national media event, focusing on the science of evolution versus the biblical story of creation.
Watching the play, I was particularly struck by the reaction of the rigidly righteous towns people who uphold creationism. As portrayed by the actors, they were filled with a blind faith that prevented them from considering any scientific thought that earth’s biological diversity came through the process of natural selection. Their knee-jerk reaction was to call Charles Darwin’s theory the work of the devil.
There was a time in my life when I was a creationist and was very similarly minded to the ardent believers in “Inherit the Wind.” My belief in creationism started with the “Monkey Song,” which I learned in fifth grade when I attended the fundamentalist Calvary Christian School in Hollister.
The little ditty we were taught flatly mocked evolution. The song began with the lyrics: “It seems so unbelievable/And yet they say that it’s true/They’re teaching our children in school now/That humans were monkeys once, too.”
Then the chorus cheerily sings: “I’m no kin to the monkey (no no no)/ The monkey’s no kin to me (yeah yeah yeah)/ I don’t know much about his ancestors, but mine didn’t swing from a tree.”
The pastor at the school told us about the evils of evolution. He told us how we’d end up if we accepted Darwin’s idea of the origin of life. Mr. Darwin, we were told, was Satan’s agent of artifice, deceiving the world with the “unrighteous” idea that humans originated through gradual genetic mutations over 3.5 billion years.
My impressionable fifth-grader’s mind quickly accepted the creationist ideology – that in about the year 4000 B.C., God formed man out of dust on Genesis’s sixth day. I feared believing anything else. My very soul was imperiled if I dared doubt the biblical account.
As I matured, I grew brave enough to learn more about evolution. In high school and particularly in college, I studied what Darwin and other scientists had said about life’s origin. My heartfelt search for the truth eventually led my conscience to reject my fifth-grader’s belief in creationism.
It wasn’t easy. I feared I might be joining the devil’s league. But from the overwhelming evidence in many branches of science, I came to my own personal conclusion that evolution explained the process of life’s creation much better than a biblical myth in which a deity spoke and animals and plants spontaneously generated.
The more I studied evolution, the more beautiful it became to me as a description of where we came from. It felt almost spiritual to see that I and all life are connected by a common genetic thread.
If you believe in evolution, you believe that all life is kin. We’re cousins not only to the monkeys, but also to the frogs, fish, trees, flowers, birds, bugs and bacteria. We’re all family. And that notion should make us feel the weight of our responsibility in caring for our planet’s environment.
In no way does evolution deny the existence of any divine creator. But it does threaten biblical authority. Darwin understood that fact. That’s why he waited more than two decades to publish his ground-breaking theory.
Evolution and creationism do share something profound in common. In Genesis, life is shown to be a miracle. God spoke and the flora and fauna – including human beings – materialized from dead dust.
Evolution presents to us a similar miracle. Our world formed 4.5 billion years ago out of the dust of stars that exploded in the early universe. Through chemical and physical processes, biological life in the form of single cells was sparked from that star dust.
Through eons and the filter of nature’s selection, the descendants of those simple cells adapted into a kaleidoscopic complexity of shapes and sizes – including a bipedal primate species with the courage to consider its own origin.
If someone ever “proves” intelligent design is a fact, they would accomplish a feat far greater than Galileo and Darwin’s combined. They would confirm the scientifically verifiable existence of God. But ironically, such “proof” would destroy religious belief. As St. Paul said, “Faith is the guarantee of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”
Perhaps the debate of evolution versus creationism will continue until Americans realize that Darwin’s explanation of life’s origins doesn’t declare the nonexistence of God. It doesn’t invalidate our spiritual quest. We still have far to travel to get to that realization. Like living organisms, society gradually evolves over time.
