By David Yount
Scripps Howard News Service
After being summoned by inquisitors and shown the instruments of torture, the scientist Galileo consented to keep to himself his disquieting discovery that the Earth is not at the center of God's universe.
Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago, preached a more disturbing theory – that the physical universe had evolved by chance, with no need for a creator.
Unlike Galileo, the Victorian scientist was honored in life and death by his Christian nation. To this day, tourists tread upon a marble slab in London's Westminster Abbey, inscribed, “Charles Robert Darwin. Born Feb. 12 1809. Died April, 19 1882.”
Although he was not threatened by inquisitors, Darwin hesitated 17 years before publishing his findings in "On the Origin of Species," acknowledging that "it was like confessing to a murder."
He waited another dozen years before releasing "The Descent of Man," in which he concluded, "Man, with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins."
The contemporary English commentator Brian Appleyard says, "Implicit in this is the statement: we are not the children of God, the noble stewards of creation; we are deeply embedded in the blind workings of nature, cousins to the virus and the vegetable." In short, we humans are at the mercy of mutable nature, and only the fittest of us will survive.
To this day, with rare exceptions, the scientific community agrees with Darwin, while most Americans cling to the notion that God created the universe and maintains it, cherishing homo sapiens as his greatest triumph.
I was educated by Catholic nuns, whose faith was not shattered by Galileo's and Darwin's discoveries. The sisters taught evolution because they assumed it was simply the mechanism through which the creator chose to work. I suspect that most Americans are comfortable with the same notion, sensing no clear conflict between science and faith on the matter.
In America today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, it is mainly pious school boards that fear that exposing children to evolution in the classroom amounts to teaching them to be atheists.
Galileo's heliocentrism can be demonstrated, but Darwin's evolution can only be theorized. The Victorian scientist knew nothing about genes, nor could he explain how random mutations could produce something as complex as an eye. Although Darwin observed micro evolution in the shape of beaks of Galapagos birds, "his conclusion that this proved ... species transforming into other species was a leap of faith," Appleyard says.
Originally, scientists assumed that every man and woman required 100,000 genes to support his or her complexity. Later they discovered we have only one-fourth or one-fifth as many genes as suspected, sharing most of them with the common mouse.
We can thank Darwin for helping us to be humble about our place in the universe, leaving room for thanking God for his imagination in creating both mice and men.
