How Can We Believe in Both God and Darwin?

It would be hard to think of a question that, at a deep level, more troubles our age than that of how — or even whether — we can believe in both God and the theory of biological evolution, principally by means of "blind" natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin.

The question has confronted us ever since Darwin published The Origin of Species almost 150 years ago. But, today, how it is answered — "conservatively" or not — helps stoke the "culutre wars" that so sorely divide America.

Firefly: The Complete Series

To sneak up on one possible answer to the question, consider a scene from a recent television series. Firefly was a short-lived show which, though quite good in this blogger’s humble opinion, got canceled partway through its first season. It was a quirky “space western” set nearly five centuries in the future. Those who are interested can buy the entire truncated series on DVD.

Imagine an oddball band of humans, smugglers running stolen cattle and the like across the vastness of the 25th-century universe. Their home is Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship. Our heroes, when they’re not taking on booty, generally get in the hair of the tyrannical Alliance which runs the cosmos’s affairs 500 years hence. The Alliance is not only repressive of human liberty, it’s also stupid and cruel in the way that British colonials were, in film, depicted as stupid and cruel. That’s precisely why it’s OK for our heroes to be lawbreakers … though they prefer to call themselves “independents.”

Two of our unlikely band of independents are River, a girl in her late teens who has escaped from an Alliance torture prison. She’s now post-traumatic and schizoid. Yet her condition has given her preternatural insight as well, to add to her stratospheric I.Q.

Second, there’s the priestly Shepherd Book, a man of faith who acts as the conscience of Serenity. He is the only crew member old enough to have gray hair and great wisdom.

In the episode called “Jaynestown,” Book is left on Serenity in charge of River while the rest of the crew are off taking care of business elsewhere. In one scene, Book comes upon River editing his Bible: revising passages with a marking pen and ripping pages out. She says it’s full of “contradictions, false logistics — doesn’t make sense.” She intends to revise Holy Writ to eliminate the impossibilities.

From there the scene progresses:

Book: No, no. Y-You can’t.

River (ignoring him): So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden … Eleven inherent meta-phoric parallels already there. (She mumbles something about prime numbers, then looks up at Book.) Noah’s ark is a problem.

Book (incredulous): Really?

River: We’ll have to call it “early quantum state phenomenon.” … Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammal on the same boat.

Book (angry, snatching Bible): Give me that. River, you don’t … fix the Bible.

River (as if Book were a simpleton): It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.

Book (recovering his aplomb): It’s not about … making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. (Gaining confidence in his own words now.) You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.

The Bible does not have to pan out scientifically, in other words, and if it does not pan out, it does not need to be fixed. Holy Writ is fine as it is, a symbol system about a faith which can “fix” us. And we are all in some way or ways in desperate need of fixing.

This scene suggests how we can continue to believe in the God of the Bible and in what River calls “non-progressional evolution theory,” by which she presumably means a biohistory in which the driving force, natural selection, has no idea what “making progress” is. If the result of that evolutionary process looks like “progress” to us – because it has led to us – it wasn’t because evolution’s driving force “knew what it was doing.” Natural selection has only one “goal”: to weed out the least fit varieties in favor of the most fit.

That doesn’t mean there’s no God, or that the Bible is bunk. It just means we have to take God and the Bible for what they are: receptacles in which we may place our faith, if we need to be “fixed.”