Dude, What Are We Thinking?: Darwinian Religion Versus the Faith of Our Fathers

By Keith Simpson

In this consideration of religious and scientific beliefs, Keith Simpson offers a provocative challenge to Darwinian thinking through conversations with a close friend.

An important tool for parenting and college preparation. Having taught on all levels of academia, I am convinced that it takes great wisdom to take complex and sophisticated issues and present them in a way that the non-expert can comprehend and evaluate. Simpson has done a masterful job of synthesizing, exposing, and presentingin an understandable and engaging way for our evaluationthe embedded philosophies of Darwinism that intertwine our cultural thinking.
David P. Ferreira, Ph.D.

Keith Simpson provides an enjoyable and highly personal account of how respectful and well-informed interactions with atheists can change hearts and minds for the better.
Casey Luskin, Discovery Institute

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469761374

Keith Simpson

Keith Simpson trained to enter the Christian ministry before joining the Navy and becoming an aviator. He went on to be an airline captain, labor union leader, community planner, and writer. His diverse experiences and love of the United States of America shine through in New Mayflower.

Book preview

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION:

AN UNLIKELY CONVERSATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

FOR SAM, AND OUR JOURNEY AHEAD.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

—Max Planck (1949, 33–34)

PREFACE

San Diego—it’s difficult to imagine a better place to grow up. The Pacific Ocean was a perfect playground. Diving. Surfing. Sun. Majestic mountains invited adventure. Hiking. Riding. Guns. Even Tom Sawyer would be jealous. As a kid, I experienced some of the best America had to offer, and Golden State activities color my memories. It seems strange to me, therefore, with so many pleasant diversions, that I should have gravitated toward Darwinism as a lifelong interest. But that’s the thing about passion. You can’t always control it.

After school on Tuesday afternoons, I rode my bike with a bunch of other elementary school kids to St. Thérèse Parish, where I learned about God, memorized prayers, and confessed my sins to a fatherly voice on the other side of a wooden partition. The Catholic Church didn’t contest Darwinian explanations, and I remember thinking, even then, that forming man from the dust of the ground sounded a lot like evolution (Genesis 2:7). If that was the way God wanted to create humankind, hey, that was fine with me.

But in junior high school, after careful deliberation, I decided to become a Protestant, which is to say friends invited me to their Presbyterian youth group, which had lots of cute girls and cool activities. I loved my new church. But as I became more familiar with its teachings, I noticed that belief in Darwinism was something akin to heresy. What is the truth? I wondered. Was the Bible bogus? Was the science wrong? Or was my new church family too dogmatic? These questions possessed me like a demon, so I started to read everything I could about evolution and Darwinism.

My faith grew, and I trained to go into Christian service. But when I graduated from Biola University in 1981, I changed my mind, joined the navy, and became a Naval Aviator. For some reason, this surprised family and friends. Are you crazy? they said, and, Is it too late to quit? It was a big change, of course, but I’d always wanted to fly, the Cold War was raging, and I could always go into the ministry later. During my navy career, I flew hundreds of missions from seven different aircraft carriers into thirty-five countries.

But even in the world of naval aviation, where immediate and tangible realities like fuel, airspeed, and pitching decks dominated my consciousness, Darwinism found me. My squadron mates invoked survival of the fittest to describe communism and capitalism. That analogy seemed inadequate, somehow, and out of place.

Around that time, I read a book about selfish genes that seemed to indicate love, kindness, and loyalty were manifestations of purposeless particles that were, according to Darwinian champions, the ultimate unit of existence. Were virtue and altruism dead?

Then I saw a debate between creationists and Darwinists, which really threw me for a loop. The creationists spoke of protein structure, mutations, and fossils. The scientists engaged in political-style ridicule. And the audience cheered like football fans when their team scored a touchdown. Something was amiss in the world of evolution, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

Eventually, I joined the airlines and became active in union politics. I was elected as a representative in the Air Line Pilots Association, where I still supposed—naively, it turns out—that certain activities were free from the influences of Darwinian philosophy. I was wrong. One day, for example, right in the middle of a strategy session, one of our high-powered New York lawyers gave us a mini-lecture on how the labor movement was in fact a Darwinian mechanism that helps human beings evolve to a higher state.

On another occasion, during a particularly vicious negotiating campaign, I challenged a fellow representative about stretching the truth in a communiqué to his constituents. (Actually, he was lying through his teeth!) He told me that there is no such thing as truth. There was only adaptation, perception, and survival. Then he chided me for being a simpleton.

Years later, I became involved in community planning and discovered that Darwinian philosophy had infiltrated that part of our culture too. I remember one exchange with a county planning official. We were engaged in a multiyear effort to update community plans, and in one particular workshop, he told me that we must take human evolution into account when designing roads, zoning property, and approving developments. I wondered where he got his crystal ball and how he knew which way evolution was going. After all, Darwinists have been assuring us for decades that evolution is blind and undirected. How can we know, therefore, if we will need less open space? Wider roads? More commercial property? This guy was particularly well versed, however, in the nuances of Darwinian thinking and with passion explained that we are now self-aware of our evolution and have the power to control human destiny. He seemed intoxicated with the power of that insight.

Through the decades, as an airline pilot, union leader, and community planner, I’ve had opportunities to talk with diverse groups of people all around the world. If I’ve had one conversation about Darwinism in noisy cockpits and glitzy hotel bars, I’ve had a thousand. On one occasion, as we were killing time in the ready room, a fellow captain told me that life is completely without design and purpose. He repeated that dogma again and again—between his assertions that science disproves God.

As we enjoyed a pint together in Osaka, Japan—there’s usually an Irish pub in every big city—a business guy informed me Darwinism is all there is and all there ever will be. I think he got his idea from Carl Sagan, who said the same thing about the cosmos on his famous TV series (Sagan 1980). Another married guy assured me that his Darwinian urges to reproduce justified his philandering. He was married and a father of two little boys, but his ideals of marriage, family, and romance had devolved into amoral biochemical urges.

From these experiences, and many more like them, I began to appreciate how deeply Darwinian orthodoxy was affecting the world around me. Now, after decades of reading, pondering, and interacting, the essential thrust of Darwinism seems clear. In fact, it seems so simple and obvious that it’s easy to overlook. It’s like the blue sky or the wallpaper in the kitchen; we’re surrounded by those things every day, but we don’t always notice them. And it seems unavoidable, too, like gravity.

The truth is, Darwinism functions like religion, and its doctrines have seeped into every corner of our culture. Many use it as an all-encompassing philosophy of life and the foundation for all knowledge and understanding. True believers place their faith in Darwinian reality and interpret life through its precepts. As a worldview, Darwinism is used to explain life and death, war and peace, politics, economics, marriage, education, art, and consciousness. Devout Darwinists may reject God, but they preach absolute Darwinian truth.

Of course, saying that Darwinism is religion can be like rooting for the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium. You may not win lots of friends or influence many people. But that idea shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, when we look back into its history, we see that early Darwinian champions—from T. H. Huxley to G. G. Simpson to Jacques Monod—were passionate atheists. And current Darwinian leaders are even more zealous. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and other prominent Darwinists attack traditional religion and preach their own atheistic gospel … only with greater ferocity.

These guys are not on the fringes; they are the leaders of Darwinian thinking. They are the ones who have shaped the paradigms, crafted the language, and interpreted the meaning of evolution for pop culture. Every one of these leaders have—each in his own time and with his own words—assured us that life is random and unguided, without design and purpose.

This is the aspect of Darwinism that has gripped me for so many years. Everyone, as it turns out, has faith. There is no void. At the center of every person—even people who believe in Darwinism—is faith. And through subtle use of language, Darwinian disciples have successfully enmeshed their metaphysical beliefs into the science of evolution. In our times, Darwinism comes as a package deal. It has two components: science and religion.

And this is where, it seems to me, we need to focus our attention because the language of Darwinian leaders is not scientific. Their descriptions are metaphysical, philosophical, and religious. After all, physicists can’t weigh unguidedness on a scale. Mathematicians can’t plot purposelessness on a graph. And genetic engineers can’t detect the absence of design with electron microscopes.

We could spend a thousand years, of course, arguing about the definition of religion, and that may not even be enough time to reach agreement or clarity. Some will insist atheism is only a philosophy. Some will say it is scientific. Some will say it is a religion. The essential point, however, is undeniable. Atheism is a belief system based on faith, which means it functions like religion. When people buy into Darwinism, therefore, they should exercise caution because they may be getting a lot more than they bargained for.

In his book The Believing Primate, Jeffrey Schloss gathers together a group of academics to consider the evolutionary origins of religion. The contributors don’t question the premise that religion evolved as much as they examine how religion evolved. In the preface, Professor Schloss, who is a theist, notes, After more than a century of debate over religious understandings of evolution, the tables have turned, and we are posed with evolutionary understandings of religion (2009, vi). Unfortunately, he is correct. According to many academics, religion is only a by-product of evolution. All truth is Darwinian truth. But now we need to turn the tables completely upside down. To properly understand it, we need to recognize that Darwinism, itself, can function as religion.

Critics may note, correctly, that I have no academic credentials in paleontology, molecular biology, or zoology. But if Darwinism has drifted into the realm of metaphysics, scientific credentials may have limited value, and critics, outsiders, and nonexperts may have important contributions to make.

Although his name is fictitious, this book is based on