Part of evolution’s upshot, of course, is that living things forever remain mere works in progress, which lends the hoopla over Darwin a tasty irony, since precisely the same is true about science. Even as seemingly perfect a system as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed, subtly but conclusively, by Einstein. Yet those who elevate Darwin’s theory to an article of faith seem unwilling to even consider that the current understanding of how species came about might one day be explained by a different and grander, if currently unimagined, conclusion than the one reached by the famed biologist. The idea that earth’s astounding array of life may owe itself to something other than the random mutation of species into others – a metamorphosis never reproduced in any laboratory – is a forbidden thought. Imagining “a biological Einstein,” to borrow Verlyn Klinkenborg’s phrase, has become heresy.Shafran, to his credit, doesn't try to debunk evolution so much as to rail against those who accept it uncritically. However, we know that this is a thin veil for the type of pseudo-scientific rantings of the religious right who try to take scripture and turn it into a science textbook.
Shafran writes:
Thus, efforts to permit open discussion of Darwinism are derided as a “war on science.” And a leading scientific group is boycotting Louisiana because a law there permits teachers to use supplemental texts to “help students critique and review scientific theories.” And the Texas Board of Education is being petitioned to amend the state curriculum so that students are no longer encouraged to explore “the strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories – words, the petitioners say, that dangerously suggest that Darwinism could be wrong.What he fails to say is that the Louisiana and Texas issues are the maddening attempt by the religious right to inject religious belief into the science lab. To suggest that religious belief can substitute for or be used to critique science to fail to understand both science and religion. Science is the attempt to explain physical behavior through verifiable and testable models. Religion is an attempt to explain the metaphysical and inherently unknowable reasons behind the physical world. The two have no place side by side because they explore entirely different propositions.
Shafran calls for humility among those who accept the theory of evolution:
A little humility would help us recognize that, no matter our scientific progress, we humans resemble nothing so much as the proverbial blind men first contemplating an elephant, each touching a different part of the pachyderm and concluding that the beast is shaped, variously, like a tree, or a snake, or a sail or a wall. No, not an elephant; we are blind men confronting a rainbow.Perhaps some humility among the religous right, acknowledging their limited ability to comprehend the will and working of G-d, would be similarly welcome
