Evolution and Religion don't mix

I was greeted at my front door early last weekend by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses. They asked me if God was important to me. I replied with a smile, 'no', and politely took the obligatory 'Watchtower' magazine.

I'm never rude to religious canvassers, despite the juxtaposition of our beliefs. I do not take offence when somebody holds an opinion different from that of my own, but I wonder if I would be greeted with the same politeness if I was to knock on people's doors in an effort to canvass atheist comrades. I am always tempted to invite religious advertisers in for a coffee and a chat about their beliefs. I suppose that in my fantasy I would strip them of their supernatural explanations, with powerful reason and convincing logic. Unfortunately, powerful tools as logic and reason are, they are often rendered useless when used to argue against someone of a faith position. The very nature of religious belief requires a suspension of any natural scepticism and a willingness to believe in things for which there is no or very little evidence, hence 'faith' is required.

Anyway, I flicked through Watchtower and became increasingly irritated. It's clear that Jehovah's Witnesses aren't happy with the theory of evolution, and nor should they be. However, the way they try and deal with this inconvenient (for them) fact, is to completely misrepresent evolution and try and claim their religion as the more rational alternative. They construct a flimsy straw man and then knock it down.

Their position seems to rely heavily on the argument from design. Of all the arguments for religion this may be the most appealing, at least on first inspection. The argument is usually presented as such: Look at this beautiful butterfly (or majestic elephant, or giant redwood, or the human eye or any other complex or beautiful creature or entity), do you believe that this has just sprung into existence, by random chance, rather than designed by god? The answer should be a firm no. Evolution in the form of Darwinian natural selection is not well described by this question, which seeks to misrepresent it entirely.

The argument is really an appeal to ignorance; as soon as one begins to learn about evolution and has a grasp of the basic concept, it is apparent that 'blind chance' is not an accurate description. To see natural selection as the answer to how complex and beautiful animals and organs have come to be, we need only accept that small incremental, adaptive changes have taken place over a huge period of time. Genetic mutations that endow a life form with a competitive advantage mean that the life form is more likely to survive, at least until it has reproduced, and therefore its genes will become disproportionately represented in the gene pool. This is how changes in the characteristics of animals come about and consequently evolution occurs. A complete dissection of evolution would of course require a more thorough explanation, but would also transform this blog into a book. I would recommend 'The Blind Watchmaker', by Richard Dawkins as a good place to start.

The key to evolution is the non-random death of animals as determined by natural selection- as I said, blind chance does not describe the process at work and is a patent mis-selling of the theory.

So, I don't think placing evolution at the unlikely end of the spectrum vs the proposed alternative of a creator god, who punishes sin, answers prayer, cares with whom you have sex, what you eat and so on, is reasonable. With the application of common sense and reasoning alone, it is clear which of the two propositions is the more rational.

Of course, there are religious people who claim that evolution and god are compatible. Or even that evolution is god's work; it is the process god kicked off in order to create us. I don't buy this. Reworking the creation story, Noah's ark and other accounts outlined in the bible in order to accommodate evolution seems too much of a stretch. Why would god 'make man in his image' by a process of natural selection over a period of over 4 billion years?

If a religious person sees evolution as being compatible with their faith and believes that god simply set in place the wheels of motion that started evolution, why is natural selection so merciless? Why do the strong, the predatory and the bullying survive at the expense of the sick, the weak and the lame? If god is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, then why did he, she or it create humans with the potential to kill, steal etc? Surely one has to accept that god either doesn’t exist, or may not be as benevolent as the believer would like to think. Certainly if god has the all-seeing, all-knowing characteristics that we are led to believe, then god must be morally culpable for human sins.

Evolution shows us how organised complexity may develop from very simple beginnings given enough time and because of its cumulative effect. To place a very complex, infinitely intelligent being as the pre-cursor to this process is to skew the argument entirely. It means that god must require an even bigger explanation. Who made god? An infinite regress is the result of this conundrum.

Some religious people will deny almost all of the literal interpretations of the bible stories and obfuscate their definition of god into something that is less substantial than thin air. But this seems like a tactic designed only to allow a version of god to exist in these enlightened times, it certainly does not seem like the god that was described to me as a child and certainly isn't the god projected from the pulpit. Even with the most vague of god interpretations, the least we can claim is that they are unnecessary. God has become superfluous when explaining the natural world.

For me, the understanding of evolution was a mortal blow for religion. I cannot find a satisfactory way of linking the two.