From Peck (2010):

Wesley J. Wildman, a liberal evangelical Christian, contributed this issue’s sermon as part of the ongoing “From the Pulpit” series. Provocatively titled “Narnia’s Aslan, Earth’s Darwin, and Heaven’s God” (see pp. 210–17), it details some of the waste and brutality of natural selection that are inevitable accompaniments of evolution. “Surely such a loving, personal Deity would have created in another way,” he queries, “a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinctions, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit” (214). In conclusion, he poses the far-from-rhetorical question: “What sort of God could, would, and did create the world through evolution?” (217). He shows that evolution has striking implications for theology—including LDS theology, I would add.

And in fact, what might it mean that God “used” evolution to create life’s diversity? Was this a choice for God among other alternatives? Do Wildman’s pessimistic conclusions hold for Mormonism? Does evolution imply a noninterventionist Deity? Are there more optimistic views possible, some of which may actually suggest that evolution enhances and expands our view of God? Are adjustments necessary to our key doctrines of the Creation, Fall, and Atonement to accommodate an evolutionary perspective? And why should we make this accommodation? What is lost and what is gained if our faith community fully and without compromise embraces evolution? There are deep and unavoidable theological implications for incorporating into our theology the belief that natural selection structured the way life evolved on our planet.

I would like to sketch some of these implications. By “sketch,” I mean that I intend to rough out some of the potential problems and perplexities that will need to be sorted through in embracing a fully compatible perspective between evolution through natural selection and our faith. In this conspectus, I hope to gesture to possible solutions to the perplexities that merging evolution and theology may bring to LDS thought. There are many sticking points, and I mean only to make a beginning and to seed conversation. I make no claims that the results are either complete or thorough, but I hope that making such a start will be useful.

Another potential difficulty is that some of the proposed solutions to the identified problems cannot be sorted out except through further revelation. Since we Mormons fully believe that further light and knowledge await bestowal, its current incompleteness should neither surprise nor disturb us. Ruminations such as these might serve as a catalyst for the kinds of questions that must be asked before revelation can be given. In scriptural and LDS history, questions are well known to have opened every major revelation from the First Vision to the 1978 revelation on priesthood ordination for worthy black men. Questions such as those orbiting a reconciliation of evolution and our faith are difficult and will sometimes remain without answers, yet that does not mean we should not ask them. Elie Wiesel captures this need nicely in a conversation with a friend:

“Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies.
But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them.
Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until
we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.”
“And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him.
“I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real
questions.”

For the purposes of this paper I will assume that evolution through natural selection is a true description of how life arose on this planet and that life on Earth has emerged through a completely Darwinian process; furthermore, throughout this paper, by “Darwinian,” I mean evolution through natural selection. Much has been written on the nature of the evidence supporting these claims, including the evidence found in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, geological stratigraphic analysis, DNA molecular studies, the physics of radiometric data, etc., and I will not here debate the nature of the evidence nor the conclusions drawn from inferences made from that evidence. Here, I accept them as accurate according to the current understandings in contemporary evolutionary science. The LDS tradition also has a rich history of attempts at legitimizing and reconciling evolutionary science to the faith and tracing views of evolution within Mormonism, historically and contemporaneously. This project is different in that I assume from the outset that evolution through natural selection has been established as true (and I use that word very deliberately) and that there is a legitimate, faithful response both to doctrine and to our best understanding of how life on Earth unfolds.

The tiny minority of scientists who are questioning the scientific consensus that CC is real and human caused (less than three percent) can be safely ignored until they come up with some sort of data that supports their view (interestingly many CC deniers are former cigarette company researchers contesting cigarette-cancer connections (check this out from the Guardian in the UK for more info)—It may be you may want to reflect on the ‘evil and designing men’ the scriptures talk about arising in the Last Days). And the warming keeps coming. (Some of you will probably send me websites that show a cooling trend over the last few years. I file these with my alien abduction, astrology and moon landing conspiracy websites. Keep them coming because I need these examples for my “Misunderstanding how science works” lecture).

But let’s return to what I learned in Bali. Wohlfahrtia magnifica, is a nasty fly that lays its eggs in the wounds of animals and people. It is destructive pest in areas around the Mediterranean. It can cripple or even take out up to 80% of a herder’s livestock. Very bad beasts. But it’s moving north into Poland. A range it’s never had before. We know it’s never been there before because the animals native to the area are not adapted to its presence. When predator-pest/ prey-host animals have been together over evolutionary timescales, they tend to develop an equilibrium in which the parasite or pest is not as good at attacking its host. This is because natural selection has favored those who show some resistance to their attacker. But when a disease or pest moves into a new area it usually has a field day because the new host creatures in that place have no natural resistance. This is why, for example, European diseases were so devastating to Native American populations, they had not been challenged with these organisms before. That’s how we know that Poland has warmed to levels not seen in evolutionary time scales, W. Magnifica is wrecking havoc. The climate has never been such that these flies could survive that far north before. The story is being told in many ecosystems. The same climate expansions are being seen in tsetse fly in Africa. Many insect species in Britain. Worldwide, pests are expanding.

People keep talking about the economic cost of doing something and fear that in trying to stop climate change, we may be spending on something that we might not need. The problem as been that that most economists when they look at the world, had a big black box that said ‘resources’ that feed the models they are using to analyze the warp and woof of economic dynamics. These resources appear into the models as if by magic. However, the more recently established field of ecological economics has realized that that resource box that drives the economy is dependent on ecological services for its maintenance. I mentioned the flies above but let’s take another example. Much of the world depends on bees. For example, the California fruit and nut growers are completely dependent on beekeepers to move bees into their area. Economists estimate that bees provide between 8 to 13 billion dollars in services just to the fruit and nut growers. Yet bees are in crisis. (This is not the time or place to talk about Colony Collapse Disease, but CC is implicated, however, there is not enough evidence to scientifically hang your hat on CC yet—just some nice correlation). But climate change is affecting ecosystem services now. The little things that run the world, are shifting their behavior and range. In Bali we talked about the changes playing out into real pest and disease expansions.

In the rhetoric so common to the deniers, they seem to miss the point that the changes in climate are going to mean more than a little warmer weather. Growers and ranchers are likely to see disease expansions such as those detailed above. CC rearranges fundamental ecological relationships that affect support processes upon which we all rely. Europe will face costs of hundreds of millions of dollars based on one fly alone. What this will do to natural populations of animals will not yet be counted by the economists, because they will not matter until those changes start to affect people’s pocketbooks, but everything we know about ecosystem services suggests that the costs will be staggering because the individual pieces are networks of interacting webs. Like a game of Jenga you can only pull out so many sticks before the ball tumbles to the bottom.

The effects are real. You may not think CC will affect you, but as disease and pests expand, your food will cost more. There will be resource wars as we’ve seen in the Middle East and Africa. These do affect us. CC is a threat to your way of life. If you think the costs of climate change are going to be a few more dollars at the pump you are missing the point. This will change the world as we know it, including world cropping systems through increases in plant and animal diseases, missing ecosystem services, and changes in the biological world as we know it. For example, look at the change in just the last 20 years of hardiness zones (when to plant trees) in the US. These effects are real and have huge economic implications.

For example, in not understanding this, the recent Utah State Legislature’s decision to formally ignore and down play the importance of CC, are doing the people (especially ranchers and growers) terrible damage. Get ready for some cost adjustments in the cost of plant and animal production as new a new world of pest management opens due to CC. Of course how could that affect us?

This is not the kind of environment where conspiracy flourishes. Nay, I’ll say it more strongly, this is not the kind of place where conspiracy could even get a foothold. Consider the following exchange reported in the Feb 5th, 2010 Salt Lake Tribune (linked at beginning):

Rep. Phil Riesen, D-Holladay, questioned Gibson about the “conspiracy” wording in the resolution. “A conspiracy?” he asked. “By whom? To what end?”

“I’m not sure we’ll ever know the depths of it,” said Gibson, adding that it was hard to separate the hype because “we only hear one side of the argument.”

Shocking. Science has no hierarchy as such. There is no one who could organize such silence or widespread agreement such as conspiracy demands. Sometimes those who have failed in promoting certain scientific ideas that have been deemed to have no merit (The Discovery Institute’s Intelligent Design trickiness comes to mind) take to the airwaves (or Internet) to cry that they were suppressed or that they didn’t get a fare hearing.

So let me conclude this quoting myself in my very first blog:

“Many people think scientists are in a grand conspiracy together—that we all secretly agree on some cabalistic agenda, including, but not limited to evolution, global warming, the cell theory of organisms (it’s still only a theory we are made of cells, you know, but I find the evidence compelling), etc. They then think we defend its boarders against those who aren’t part of the club. Well, it’s sort of true. Scientists are not likely to let the new kids on the block play with the regulars until the supplicant proves him or herself in the crucible of the playing field. But conspiracy? Heavens no. Scientists are a bloodthirsty lot. Their currency of exchange is fame and glory. Eternal life in the pages of history. To have your ideas spread are the passion that motivates every scientist I know. Truth is the playing field, the goal of the game though is to get ahead; to become the next Einstein, Darwin or the professor on Gilligan’s Island (The greatest scientist I know). And it is bloody. Reputations are made and broken. Pedestals are erected and smashed. Lives ruined, tenure denied, papers rocketed into the sky only to be shot down with anti-ballistic missiles in the form of data that doesn’t fit your project. It is an ugly world of fierce competition. Only the fittest ideas persist.
 
Here is a metaphor: The public picture of science is the Dog Party in the children’s book Go Dog Go, up in the tree all toasting one another’s success (as a side note I have read this little treasure more times than any other book ever). The more accurate view of science is to move the dog party to the Roman Coliseum. Now turn them into pit bulls, Rottweilers, Doberman pinschers, and German shepherds. Maybe throw in one of those wolf hybrids if you want. Now set them at each others throats. That is science. Scientists are like a great gladiatorial arena of fighting dogs. Each scientist quickly assesses the strength of their opponent then goes for the throat. A quick kill is the surest way to dislodge a weak and insubstantial enemy. This arena is fierce and unrelentingly competitive. The best way to get ahead in the game is to focus your attack on the top dogs and take them down. If you can replace the alpha theory-hypothesis-notion with your own you have the won the contest. So scientists scrutinize each other carefully, try hard to understand what others are saying so they can throttle those ideas if they can. It is not a conspiracy, it’s not a dog party, it is a Hobbesian war of all against all.
 
Most people don’t understand this. That’s because there are usually a few whiners whose ideas haven’t survived the bloodfest and cry, ‘We didn’t get a fair hearing!’ Ideas like Intelligent Design (ID), or ESP try to enter the arena, then fail in the fray and so these little high-pitched barking Chihuahuas take the case to the ever kind and gentle public. The defeated little dogs paint the event like this scientific hegemony has formed a wall that won’t let there ideas in. The truth is it’s a free for all. There are lots of causalities. That wall is the wall of the battles and skirmishes formed by the fighting dogs. If you’re driven out, the easiest and cheapest claim is that ‘The dogs wouldn’t let me in.” True enough. If you aren’t willing to scrap with them, and not tough enough to compete, they aren’t going to give you a ‘bye.’ And they are not kind. These whooped types, with tail between their legs, start appealing to the public who are much more fair-minded, less critical in the judgments and much nicer when it comes to that noble sense of being fair. Science has no sense of fairness. Ideas are tested, fought over, and are kept or discard in competitive contests with reality. The fight has rules, but like in my dog analogy, these are more about the teeth, claws and sinew of the fighting beasts. To be accepted you must survive. There are occasional alliances but they are short lived and easily subverted.
 
The fact is things like Evolution and Global warming have survived. Evolution has survived some of the bloodiest battles in the history of science (and I don’t mean between creationists and evolutionists, I mean among evolutionists). It’s as solid as anything I know. There are a few yapping toy breeds still barking at it from the outskirts of the battlefield, like ID, but the second they enter the fight, they are bitten bad and they go yelping back to the safety of public opinion’s lap. In the fray itself they are seen as non-combatants. If their ideas didn’t keep slipping away into the security of their masters, those ideas would be killed without mercy.”

Conspiracy? Not a chance.

Moreover, I wasn’t nominated for a Niblet, this year. While the Niblets are not the end-all mark of blogging excellence, there is something unsettling in realizing that nothing I’ve written was remembered or marked as notable. Plus, I like the Niblets. I find them fun. That my energies have not produced anything memorable this year adds to a sense of abject lameness.

When these rejections pile up in mounds so high that to climb them requires technical gear to make the accent, I suddenly go through periods when I cannot help but feel forsaken of talent and blessed with mediocrity. I feel the rejection so clearly that I wonder why I should even go though the motions of trying and I think, “Why not save myself and the world the bother?” I become lamified with a lameness that lames me all the way down: lamification.

How do you handle rejection?

Also, teaching a new class has slowed me down a bit in my blogging. I should be back to posting in full form shortly. In the meantime check out my post at By Common Consent.

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.

. . . she continues naming mysteries in us and nature and then concludes:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
Who think they have the answers,

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

There are still those trying to separate science and religion. Who try desperately to dichotomize and put up barriers between the two. To rank order ‘ways of knowing’ into absurd hierarchies in which one trumps the other, or one is more important than the other, or where one wins always and the other loses always. Certainly science will never teach us all truth, but to ignore the things it does teach is a descent into superstition and foolishness. Likewise religion has taught us little about how the universe is constituted or provided models and theories of how material things work in the universe, yet it has provided the source of the reasons that such a universe exists, our place in it and what is expected of us.

These little minds that understand neither science nor religion are ever drawing lines trying to convince people that they must choose between the two and that one should hold one or the other in suspicion and doubt. These attitudes are based at their root, in a kind of fear that drives out faith. On the one side of the coin there are the vocal atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens who try to argue that they ‘know’ and have all the ‘answers’ and draw their lines in ignorance of genuine spiritual attunings. However, to me they are of little concern. I’ve seen few persuaded by their arguments. They misunderstand faith so badly that those who have experienced God in their lives find their arguments uninformed and based on hackneyed stereotypes and caricature. They poise little danger to those who have experienced the richness and depth of lived religion.

On the other side of the coin however are those that I’ve seen do much damage to faith. Like the ‘Judaizers’ of the apostle Paul’s time, who followed him around proclaiming that new Christians must be circumcised and follow the laws of Moses, these scientific decriers suggest that we should be afraid of science and that we need to choose between science and religion. They hold deep suspicions about science and suggest that scientists are in deep conspiracies out to destroy faith and undermine spirituality.

This hermeneutic of fear is uncalled for. We can embrace science in its fullness. We do not need to equivocate and talk about who beats who in the game of truth, or fear that science will undermine our faith. Nonsense. Science is a method to discover how the laws and patterns of nature are constituted. It is powerful. But it is nothing to fear. And it does not set itself in opposition to religion (although there are those who do, as noted above). Yet those who fear it, are acting out of a false dichotomy rooted in that very same fear.

It is a weak and immature faith that finds a threat in science. Fear can never produce faith and this is the danger. Time and time again I see those fear mongers who old up science like it was a graveyard ghost and proclaim that it is dangerous to faith actually undo tender faith struggling to find new growth. They squash that faith by demanding that one must be chosen over the other.

I hold both science and religion in a dynamic tension. Both reveal things about the universe—one exploring the material aspects the other revealing the author of that universe and His intents and purposes.

Those who go about proclaiming that we should be afraid of science do great harm. Reject these dichotomiziers. Join with the lovers of discovery, the probers of the universe who hold both faith and science as objects of wonder and delight and who say,

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Oliver Mary, 2009, Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. p. 62

“Perhaps you desire to know the manner in which God’s light is ascribed to the heavens and the earth—or, rather, the manner in which God is the light of the heavens and the earth in His own essence. It is not appropriate to keep this knowledge hidden from you, since you already know that God is light, that there is no light other than He, and that He is the totality of lights and the Universal Light.” Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights

We live in light. Before me now, the satiny white curtains of my living room have been transformed into a patchwork of bright silver where the morning sun strikes certain places in the fabric’s undulations. Darker areas (still colored white), are created in places where some of the vertical furrows of the drapes shy away from the radiance enjoyed by the alternating sunlit folds. These create striations and dappling that catch my eye and which I experience directly. I notice it more so this morning because I’ve been thinking about light. I want to write about light and I can’t help notice that I am surrounded by it. It fuses within me and although it is scattered around me, I cannot see it until it strikes my eye here in the center of my universe—I am an observer, a participant with light that creates my visual field and informs my consciousness. I experience light as it combines with my mind, integrating my world at a quantum level and then bubbling up into something that can be acted upon at macro scales.

Light. What is it?

I owe these contemplations to a new book by David Grandy, The Speed of Light: Constancy and Cosmos. Grandy is a philosophy professor at Brigham Young University where he teaches classes in the philosophy of science. This book, published by Indiana Press, is not written for Mormons per se, but one cannot read the book without recognizing that it has something profound to say to a people who have scriptures (D&C 88) that read:

6 He that ascended up on high, as also he descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things, that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth;

7 Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made.

And

49 The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not; nevertheless, the day shall come when you shall comprehend even God, being quickened in him and by him.

50 Then shall ye know that ye have seen me, that I am, and that I am the true light that is in you, and that you are in me; otherwise ye could not abound.

Grandy begins by showing how, unlike the way we typically take the world such that light, in some sense, is moving through a fixed space and time, it is light that grounds the universe. It is the one constant, the framing structure to which space and time conform and to which they shape their warp and weave.

In this book, Grandy carefully unpacks the implications of the constancy of the speed of light by examining Einstein’s theory of relativity (the clearest explanation I’ve seen)*. But he does more than just catalogue light’s strangeness, he explores the stunning implications of that weirdness. He looks at the physics of light, its effect on space-time; he explores the uniqueness of light and the perplexing way it interacts with observers by affecting and being affected by them; he imagines how time passes for light, or more accurately put, how it is not affected by time’s passage; Grandy looks at ambient light in ways I’ve never thought of and explores the strange connectedness and disconnectedness of light as it moves beyond being both particle and wave; and lays out the case that light is fundamental in ways that we have just begun to discover. “Let there be light!” prior to all particular things (like suns), really is the right description of how our universe has unfolded. Or as Grandy puts it:

“ . . . light speed constancy is inclusive of, even, indistinguishable from, the first moment of creation, the originary event when spacetime bounds were set to what could and could not occur thereafter. I say “indistinguishable from” because, as noted earlier, time does not figure into light’s intrinsic nature.” p. 9.

However, for me the best parts of the book are the latter chapters where he explores the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger on the relationship between consciousness and light. These chapters, despite drawing from rather sophisticated ideas from Continental philosophy, are accessible and well explained. Consciousness and light seem to be part of a unified reality that for LDS readers will seem very familiar. This book was not written exclusively for Mormons, but members of our faith will find much to draw their interest in this book.

I typically read three or four books at the same time, but this one pushed everything to the side. I literally could not put it down. Grandy writes like an angel. My advice is not to start this book on a weekend in which you have things to do—because you will not get them done. Talk someone into putting this into your stocking.

I am sitting on a bench outside the church thinking about this book. The wind is blowing though the trees. Wind produced by the action of light from the sun on the atmosphere; trees fashioned by the action of light on photosynthetic cells drawing carbon out of the air and making trunk, branches, and the few remaining leaves clinging to the terminal sprigs; I close my eyes and listen to the sound of the wind rattling the leaves—a symphony produced by light in the form of wind and birch. I open my eyes to let this dancing light in. There, in the center of everything I experience the glissade of a light infused universe.

.

Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights: A parallel English-Arabic text translated, introduced and annotated by David Buchman, 1998. Islamic Translation Series. Brigham Young University Press. Provo, UT.

*If you are riding on an airplane going 600 miles an hour and you walk 5 miles an hour toward the cabin. Someone on the ground would measure your speed at 605 mph. Right? But if you measure the speed of light in that same airplane it doesn’t matter whether it’s going toward the cabin or away. It always measures the same: 670,616,629 mph.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.