Sunday, March 11, 2007

Why the Natural History Museum Makes Me Want to Believe in God


There comes a time in the life of every humanities major when he realizes that his understanding of science peaked in either 9th or 10th grade. Despite having taken three “science”—scare quotes intended to mock, not terrify—classes at Columbia, I haven’t really understood what my science teachers have tried to teach me since freshman year biology.

Which, I think, is why a trip to the Natural History Museum surprised me so much. In theory, I have learned about everything in the museum before. In practice, it was all shoved out by Simpson’s trivia and differing interpretations of gender’s role in the coming of the Civil War a long time ago. Somehow, the fact that terrifying monsters exist less than a kilometer, to use fancy science talk, under the ocean still has the power to astonish me. I should know better, but I don’t.

More than anything else, my childlike stupidity mirrors that of a scientifically literate person in the pre-Darwinian era. This is a time when William Paley’s watchmaker argument was considered irrefutable evidence for the existence of God. For those of you who have forgotten long-discredited arguments from obscure 19th century theologians—for shame!—here’s a summary. If you walk down a beach and you see a fully functioning watch, you would assume that the watch didn’t get there by accident. Substitute “exist in” for walk, “universe” for beach, “all of nature” for watch, and “therefore God exists” for the unstated conclusion of the argument, and you get the idea Paley was trying to make.

Evolution caused such a foofara because it demonstrated that the watch did, in fact, land on the shore by accident. With a single, highly evolved hand, Darwin destroyed one of the most powerful argument for God’s existence from legitimate debate, until intelligent designers started making exactly the same argument some 140 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Today, evolution remains so controversial that inside the “Hall of Human Origins” at the Natural History Museum a brief video featuring two prominent Christian scientists explaining that you can still believe in God if you want to runs on a constant, annoying loop. But, in a world where giant squids, deer with super-huge antlers, and freaky-huge dinosaurs exist because of purely natural processes, why would you?

Oh yeah, fear of death, because your parents told you to, a desire to find a transcendent morality, and to understand your place in the world. Come on, though, everyone knows a giant squid would kick their collective ass.

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