lpetrich

From the II Newswire, the title of a <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n09/coyn2409.htm" target="_blank">review of Michael Ruse's most recent book, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion</a>, attempting to reconcile science and traditional Christian theology.

The reviewer started out by noting the case of a geneticist who tried to account for the (supposed) virgin birth of Jesus Christ, complete with the familiar sex-chromosome difficulty (JC was XY, his mother was XX). He proposed that Mary had a bit of a Y on one of her X's, but that would have made her a sterile male. This sort of absurdity is common among those who try to go beyond Stephen Jay Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) -- which is as old as Galileo (the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go).

And Michael Ruse does try to go beyond NOMA, arguing that original sin, the immortality of the soul, etc. are results of natural evolution. The reviewer found his "logic" very hard to follow, most likely because so much simply does not fit.

MR insists on the literal truth of Genesis 1:26-28, which suggests that the Biblical God is specially concerned about humanity -- which makes one wonder why essentially all of the Universe is inhospitable to our species, and why our species only appeared very recently by geological standards. In fairness, Genesis 1 is correct about the relatively late appearance of our species, though Genesis 2 fails miserably there, with the additional biological illogic of the first of our species created being male, rather than a parthenogenetic female (yes, virgin birth).

The reviewer notes that MR tries to wiggle out of the question of where one goes after death; "matter over mind" is much better supported than the idea of some mind-stuff or soul-stuff.

He also identifies original sin with a genetic tendency to act selfishly; however, there are also genetic tendencies to act unselfishly, which are propagated because they help copies of one's genes that reside elsewhere, and because assistance to others may be reciprocated.

He seems to think that altruistic behavior is something imposed by a society; however, that need not be the case. But the evolution of social forms is an interesting subject in itself, especially as it does not require any genetic changes among the societies' members.

My patience ends here, however.

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>