Kurt Wise, Young Earth biologist

LISTEN. In our Evolution in America course last night we discussed the encounter between Darwin descendant Matthew Chapman and Kurt Wise, the Harvard-trained student of Stephen Jay Gould who somehow got his degree and retained his Young Earth Creationist/anti-evolutionist views, and became Bryan College's biology prof. It is, for our purposes, a focal point of the book. I'm particularly interested in what Wise says about his precocious childhood encounter with "deconstructionist philosophy" and his youthful perception of evil.

"I concluded I didn't know that anything in the universe existed for sure. All I really knew was that evil existed..." And then he offers the example of a dog eating baby rabbits.

What strikes me about this is the way it parallels what Darwin had said about the ichneumonidae, and his inability to fathom a divinely-good creation in which organisms are designed specifically to consume other organisms from the inside.

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

Darwin "solved" the problem of evil by turning to science and agnosticism, and judging ultimate religious truth as beyond human comprehension.

Wise's solution, evidently, is to embrace fundamentalist biblical literalism and somehow try to square that with his vocation as a professor of biology. (!)

Neither solution can be "proved" exclusively correct, though each offers its proponent a strategy for moving forward in life.

I happen to find Darwin's solution far more appealing, and I find Wise's Young Earth Creationism irreconcilable with biology and science generally. I think his pre-commitment to the Bible and willingness to flatly reject evolution if the former did not literally "hold together" in light of it is dogmatic. And I think Wise's statement that science never proves anything is misleading, since science definitely establishes probable truth much more reliably and testably than any other method we've found for generating knowledge. And as I noted last week, I find belief in Hell ethically problematic (and implausible in the extreme).

And, who ever heard of a nine year old contemplating suicide for philosophical reasons?! (But notice, Chapman tells us he lost his faith in God by age 10. Interesting coincidence. 183)

And, I entirely share Chapman's concern about people and cultures that cultivate a "habit of credulity".. it's of a piece with ant-intellectualism, science denialism, and the "fantasyland" rabbit-hole of alternative facts we've fallen into lately.

But...

I also find Chapman's and Wise's mutual amiability and openness to this conversation refreshing.  Chapman's statement at the end of chapter 14 indicates to me a measure of kindness, decency, and generosity of spirit that I wish more of us could emulate:

"My intellectual views remain the same, but... my feelings have changed. Faith in God... may be absurd, but the need for faith is anything but." 

This is very close to something William James said about religion and its creeds (I think I've mentioned this before), that they may be absurd but the life of religion as a whole is still "mankind's most important function." I wouldn't go that far myself, personally, but I do think the focus on individuals' experience of faith (or its absence), and de-emphasis of "creeds and theories," is right.