My Summer With Darwin (Part One)
That something different came about as I was wandering through Powell's, a used book-store chain here in Oregon (this happens regularly, and often accounts for my frequently changing reading lists, and empty pocket book) and stumbled across a pristine (and cheap!) copy of Charles Foster's The Selfless Gene: Living With God and Darwin. Ironically it had been misfiled, and I so I found it nestled away in a section devoted to atheist literature (it was getting chummy, incidentally, with Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, from whose title, obviously, it draws an equal but opposite inspiration).
After Vanhoozer's juggernaut, The Selfless Gene proved both brisk and, for its part, engaging. Foster is a very clear writer (he reminds me of a snarkier but less insightful John Lennox, for what its worth) and the book is certainly worth the read. Yet Foster's book turned out to be something of a false promise; one would expect a book entitled The Selfless Gene to be almost entirely devoted to the phenomenon of evolution and altruism (or at least an extended engagement with Dawkin's opposite claim of genetic selfishness all the way down), when in fact it has only a single (and, lamentably, only somewhat interesting) chapter devoted to it. What the book turned out to be for the most part was an evaluation of the evidence for evolution (which is legion) over and against Creationist and Intelligent Design camps (though as a Catholic Foster argues, of course, that evolution is fully compatible with Orthodox Christianity); the book ends with several very lengthy examinations of the problem of pain and suffering in evolutionary theory (in particular, the problem of animal pain). Bad? Not at all. But it was certainly unusual. And unfortunately given the book's somewhat uncomfortable shapelessness when held up to the seemingly specific nature of its title, calling a book The Selfless Gene when that is not really what your book is a about seems like shamelessly cashing in on Dawkins' coat-tails. But that is probably a bit too cynical of me. I mean we all need to eat.
While Foster's book was good, if not entirely remarkable, it did manage to turn floodlights onto that "something different" that my soul needed for the remainder of summer. I have never been a stranger to the whole evolution-and-Christianity thing. In some ways I think it is fair to say it is always on my mind. I can remember when I was six or seven. Like a lot of kids, I loved dinosaurs more than anything (well, that and Batman). My parents, being the good parents they were, bought me several books on dinosaurs, and I would spend hours and hours looking at the pictures and, as I was still not really able to read, having my dad or my mom patiently enunciate their cryptic scientific names, which I memorized like they were magic incantations, and recited them like liturgy. Large portions of my summers would be spent in our backyard with shovel in hand and batman cowl on head, fantasizing about becoming an (apparently crime-fighting) paleontologist and digging up my mother's roses in the name of science. We had several exciting breakthroughs on my dig sites (which my mother annoyingly insisted to keep calling her "garden"), but unfortunately on further analysis these turned out to be two old beer cans and an emaciated shoe.
Thinking back, if one had made a chronology based upon the "fossils" I had unearthed, I suppose my younger self would have come to the conclusion based on the strata layers in which they were discovered that beer cans came before footwear. This probably has something to contribute to a social commentary on society's priorities; but perhaps all it meant was that people began to realize that walking barefoot to go buy your beer was exceedingly impractical.
My dino-philia did not serve me as well in church, however. My memory of the event is a bit hazy, but at our church of the time they had a wonderful tradition where when you moved up to the first grade, they would give you your own New Testament. I was ecstatic and eagerly accepted this gift. I was particularly excited because this bible had pictures in it, something that I had not yet owned. Being a good leader, the kind old man who gave me the bible knelt beside me and, apparently sharing my enthusiasm for the pictures, helped me flip through them. We didn't get very far because (and I remember this quite clearly) there was an illustration of Noah's Ark, which had always been one of my favorite pericopes, and I decided it deserved a more careful look than the once-over I had given the other illustrations.
"And here are the animals going into the ark," I remember he said, as my eyes scanned the picture.
There were horses, cows, zebras, and...brontosaurus? That couldn't be right. And what was that in the distance, an Iguanadon? I remember turning to the elderly man with a smile on my face, because I knew he and I were surely about to share a wonderful inside joke about the ridiculous error the illustrator just made. Laughing, I said "there weren't any dinosaurs on the ark!" The story itself of course never mentioned them--I would have noticed that. In fact had there been dinosaurs I probably would have assumed that that factoid, after all, was the reason the Old Testament was written. Dinosaurs, then Jesus. That was a chronology I could get behind. But my dinosaur books were quite explicit about their age. I was never very good with numbers, but I knew they had to be at least a hundred times older than that shoe I found--and that was one very old shoe. This picture just couldn't be true. I don't remember exactly what he said after that, but I do remember his wizened smile when he attempted to correct me that, yes, Noah in fact was bunkmates with the velociraptors, slowly faded into concern as I refused to back down. I had never even heard of Charles Darwin at that point of my life; but certainly the tensions that name now conjures were already present to me that summer.
Which is all to say: I suppose in some ways the happenstance of coming across Charles Foster's book inspired me to get back to my roots. So after I finished it, I decided it was time to have another summer with Darwin.
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