Preface

      There is a joke that goes, “What’s the difference between a biblical literalist and a kleptomaniac?” – “The biblical literalist takes things literally, and the kleptomaniac takes things, literally.”

      The biblical literalist, however, also rejects what science says about where we came from, whereas the kleptomaniac, or at least the educated kleptomaniac, acknowledges that our bodies and genes are very similar to those of apes, and that a couple of million years ago in Africa, there were no people, but there were apes that had some key human features. The key features were small canine teeth, long thumbs, and a lower body that provided a range of movements like a human’s; that is to say, standing up, walking, and running.

A creationist is someone who accepts a literalist reading of the beginning of the Bible in lieu of the scientific narrative that our species has descended from other, earlier species over the course of hundreds of millions of years.¹ There are of course many scholars who understand evolution, and science more generally, to refer to a set of secondary causes and processes, while simultaneously maintaining faith in a transcendent primary cause, who is in essence God-the-Evolver.² Or, as theologian Sarah Coakley puts is, “God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all.”³ Whether life is ultimately meaningful is an interesting question, but not a scientific one – since science concerns itself with empirically based inferences, not with spiritual or moral propositions. At issue here is simply whether the origin of people involves apes as ancestors a few million years ago, as the comparative anatomical, genetic, and fossil evidence strongly seems to indicate.

      Every generation of evolutionists, however, also inscribes their values into their science. That is not an adulteration of the science, but simply a consequence of being a cogitating social animal. Sometimes those values are sexist (see Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 1871), racist (see Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation, 1876), cooperative (see Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, 1902), xenophobic (see Charles Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1911), colonialist (see William J. Sollas’s Ancient Hunters, 1911), egalitarian (see Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Mankind Evolving, 1961), hereditarian (see E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975), or reductive (see Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, 1976).

      Some scientists try to link their evolution to their atheism. That troubles me, because it makes a positive assertion – “God does not exist” – in the absence of appropriate scientific evidence and inference. Although that assertion is a reasonable hypothesis, I don’t think it is mandated by science.

So let me position myself. I am agnostic about God. I capitalize Him out of politeness and custom. But I do not know whether supernatural beings of any sort exist. If they do, that would be nice; and if they don’t, that also works. I find it difficult to believe that if they do exist, they would care whether or not I believe that they exist, when it would actually be very easy to convince me, if they really did exist and care. The only beings that I am aware of interacting with are the ones inhabiting the natural realm, not the supernatural.

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