VATICAN ON DARWIN

BY SAMUEL
Not surprising at all. If I am alive to live up to 65, this world will be a significantly different place. As the scope of scientific explanation expands, the domain of purely religious explanation shrinks or at least accommodates. Galileo was treated very badly by the church. But the church later apologized. Recently, Bob Jones University apologized for treating Black students differently on grounds of its biblical theology. They now realized that they got the theology wrong. Organized religion has a track record of getting things wrong too. The world is changing and the most serious challenge for religion is its desire to come up with fixed absolute answers. Religion will continue to play a fundamental role in human societies, but the nature of religion will be changing.

I am not too impressed that simply because the church can link the idea of evolution to St. Augustine or St. Aquinas that makes the case acceptable. After all, both Aquinas and Augustine were profoundly influenced by pagan philosophers i.e., Plato for Augustine and Aristotle for Aquinas. Thus while that may close one front of the discussion it opens another wide flank that might even make the church more distressed. If pagan ideas from ancient Greece have been integrated to Christian worldview by the Church fathers, what is wrong with other worldviews that are pagan in Africa or other parts of the world that have something to meaningful contribute to life. Is it just ancient Greek paganism that is of value to humanity? Unfortunately most African universities do not even care about the deeper implications of this kind of discussion for what it means for Africa to take her rightful place in the world.

Yes, we do not seem to seriously consider these kinds of debates in Nigerian universities. That is one of the things I regret so much about Nigerian and African education. Moreover, the issue with Darwin is not just his ideas but the logic of reasoning that informed his work. The methodology has some implications that are not consistent with religious ethics except of course in situations where religion has compromised its ethics. Global market or economic fundamentalism, the terrible idea of "survival of the fittest" or "Social Darwinism" might not be attributed to Darwin proper but the logic of his reasoning. To draw conclusions based on empirical observations is a challenged to conservatively religious society like Nigeria where people ascribed everything to predestination. The idea of predestination is a central obstacle to the development of science in Africa. Even educated people in Africa find it difficult to meaningfully resolve the tension between rational and logical explanation and a mystical mode of explanation based on religion. Unfortunately religion in most African universities (not all) is taught more as apologetics so it is difficult for any divinity schools to embark on a serious project of developing a worldview that systematically tries to integrate religion and modernity, if at all this is possible. We have a long way to go.

It would be very relevant to organize a conference on the implications of Darwin for Africa. We have too long ignored the implications of ideas for life. Africa needs to catch up. We need to deeply self-examine the nature of our institutions and ask whether they can take us anywhere given the way they function. There is no scientific evidence to support any group of people are inherently inferior. So this issue is not about some kind of inherent inferiority, it is about organization.

Samuel
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive #24
Saint Paul, MN 55112. (651-638-6023)