The Theology of Marine Biology

I was sleepily skimming my biology text a few weeks ago when something I read startled me into full consciousness:

We see, then, that organisms are not perfect. In many ways, they are not even efficient. However, they were not designed in a purposeful way. They are what a long, blind, unplanned evolutionary history has made them. (Beck, Liem & Simpson, Life, 644).

I blinked, thought for a moment, and then checked the cover of the book to make sure I hadn't accidentally opened one of my roommate's philosophy texts. But the book I was holding was indeed my biology text, and I had been reading about excretion in marine bony fishes. At least, that is, until this sermon suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

My roommate Bill would probably have scanned these few sentences, sighed in relief that there were no boldfaced terms to cram into an already over-stuffed memory, and then sedately continued reading, without further thought. And so would many a tired Harvard student, perhaps not realizing the ideological assumption lying behind that description. One hardly expects to encounter religious dogma along side a discussion of fish kidneys.

The theological aspects of marine biology may not be immediately apparent to most people. To someone with a devout belief in God, however, the assertion that life "was not designed in a purposeful way" is a rejection of a universal religious truth. Saying that evolutionary history was "blind" and unplanned" contradicts one of the most fundamental elements of faith: the existence of an omnipotent Creator.

Relax, I'm not going to rehash the moribund evolution vs. creationism debate. Evolutionary theory is based on empiricism, and thus there can be no argument that it belongs in a science class. Assertions of the type made in the text book, though, go beyond facts. In describing the development of life as "unplanned" and without purposeful design, the book tries to explain the forces ultimately behind evolution. It thus exceeds the bounds of observation and objectivity, and falls into the realm of subjective truth. By implying that no higher consciousness was behind the design of the universe, the book makes a claim that is nothing short of religious dogma.

Not that fundamental existential questions are beyond the pale of academic discussion. That's what the Philosophy department is for, after all. What I found unsettling about this particular statement, however, was less its content than where I ran across it--in a science text. In a philosophy class one is prepared to be fed mataphysical must. But I have always been under the impression that the sciences were the bastion of objectivity Evangelism, I thought, had been relegated to the humanities.

Even if it is inadvertent, implying that the non-existence of God is a scientific fact constitutes preaching. Such a statement has no more foundation than one maintaining the divine origin of the universe. Imagine reading in a biology text: "The intricacies of nature are a clear sign that the universe was designed by some superior intellect." Any science professor arguing such a notion would probably be laughed out of Bio 2. Yet this statement is no less substantiated than the actual assertion made in the biology text. Each view simply reflects a different method of interpreting the same natural phenomena.

In public institutions, the crusade to remove even the most oblique religious allusions from the classroom has been waged for quite a while. But this has not always been the case.

At the end of the last century, for example, there were leaders of academia in this country who opposed allowing the infiltration of Darwin's ideas into American education, out of a misplaced fear that the theory of natural selection undermined belief in a Creator. And until the dramatic court-room duel between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evolution was still contestable subject matter for the classroom.

As the movement to remove religion from school developed, the tables turned. Private universities such as Harvard, self-consciously following behind the "anti-establishment of religion" banner, have in some cases secularized to the point of becoming anti-God. The quote from my biology text gives a clear example in which instead of simply not preaching about God, some have started preaching against God.

A theism constitutes as much a religious creed as Islam, Christianity or Judaism. All religion is fundamentally an attempt to explain the reasons behind and origins of the universe. Just as monotheists and polytheists believe on faith that one or more divine beings created the universe, atheists, just as much on faith, believe that no higher plan is behind the cosmos. Atheism is no more an objective truth than any other existential theory.

Thus, if acknowledgement of the existence of God in school has been interpreted to be a violation of the First Amendment, shouldn't the same logic judge the teaching of the non-existence of God as also unacceptable in the classroom?

There is a double-standard in today's academia. While faith on God has been purged from education in the name of religious freedom, disbelief in God has been evangelicized in its place. Science classes, once the haven of facts and theories backed by empirical evidence, should not become the pulpit, even inadvertently, for the preaching of atheism. Purely subjective arguments, like those that the evolution of life was "unplanned" and without purposeful design, should be recognized for what they are: religious theories, not scientific facts.