Science and God and FF is simply not a good combination

Date Published: {J}

Oh God, Fianna Fáil and Creationism. The perfect shitstorm. Let’s get one thing straight. The theory of evolution is not a sort of religious dogma held by atheists. It’s an attempt to explain why some things in nature are the way they are. The only reason it’s scientific ‘orthodoxy’ is that no one has come up with a better explanation yet.

Some people want us to believe that there’s controversy about it, that it makes outlandish claims. That’s the opposite of the truth. Darwin’s idea is one of those simple strokes of genius that seem almost obvious in retrospect.

Any animal breeder can tell you that new traits arise in living things and that these changes can be passed on to the next generation. His insight was that this process occurred in nature too and, if the world really was as old as geologists were then beginning to think, that tiny changes accumulating over millions of years might explain the incredible variety of life on Earth.

Was he right? All we have learned in the century or so since has backed him up. For example he was the first to admit that he couldn’t explain how those changes were passed on. Since the discovery of DNA, we can.

This is not to say that the theory is perfect or that it answers every question. Science doesn’t work that way. There are still controversies among biologists, over everything from tiny details to major aspects. Exactly how life began, for example, remains an important question.

But “is evolution completely wrong?” does not. Just about the only people who want to debate that come from outside science – and bring an axe to grind.

They always say they find it hard to believe that a blind, random process can be responsible for the vast complexity of nature. That’s fair enough; I find it hard to believe anyone still votes for Fianna Fáil. Many true things are hard to believe. But it’s the best explanation we have of the evidence. These people don’t have a better explanation, they just desperately want to reject evolution.

It’s religion of course. Some of them deny it; the minister’s friend says that he is not religious but “spiritual” – a distinction without a difference, I suspect. The American right claim, quite disingenuously, that they don’t want schools to teach that God created everything, just that it was done by some “intelligent designer” whose name they couldn’t even begin to guess.

Why do they always pick on evolutionary biology? Sure, it disagrees with the description of creation in the Bible. But then so do history, archaeology, palaeontology, geology, astronomy, physics, anthropology, hydrology, meteorology, chemistry, geography and maths.

Perhaps they just haven’t got round to those yet. More likely, it’s simply because the theory of evolution sounds a bit like a creation story. In spite – or perhaps because – of the fact that science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God, they cannot help but understand it as an alternative “godless” Genesis. If they can prove this idol to be false, they believe, all those agnostics and sceptics and atheists will go back to worshipping the one true God again.

Yes, they are a bit mad.