"Evolution and monkeys and stuff"

Daughter Lauren and I have the DVR set to record "Discovering Ardi" on the Discovery channel tonight. "Ardi" is the 4.4 million year old Ardipethicus Ramidus skeleton that was unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994. The announcement of this discovery last week bumped the famous australopithicus afarensis "Lucy" aside on the hominid evolutionary tree, as "Ardi" is over a million years older. Bipedal in open areas, Ardi was quadripedal in the trees. We can't wait to hear more about her tonight. As a teenager, I was captivated by articles and television programs about Lucy...and I admit to feeling a bit sad that she's no longer the most important archeological piece of the evolutionary puzzle.

Coincidentally, I happen to be re-reading Dava Sobel's wonderful "Galileo's Daughter," in which I am reminded of Galileo's struggle to argue for the heliocentric Copernican model of the solar system. Galileo (and Copernicus before him) believed, correctly, that the sun was the center of the solar system. The Catholic Church disagreed, in part based upon various passages in scripture that mentioned the movement of the sun. More importantly, however, religious leaders wanted to preserve the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe because that's what they believed God would have set up. Why would God create Earth as a tiny planet in a vast universe, revolving around one of billions of stars? While nobody seriously suggests that the Earth is the center of the universe today, many religious leaders (and their followers) continue to argue against evolution. Even our own teenaged son was recently shocked to hear that I "believe in evolution and monkeys and stuff."

Galileo had a response, one that should be re-read today by people who continue to teach their children that evolution is "just a theory." From Galileo's letter to the Grand Duchess Christina:

...I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradic tion to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors-as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the Sciences ....

Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them. To this end they hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly…

Hence, in expounding the Bible, if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies.

I question whether there is not some equivocation in failing to specify the virtues which entitle sacred theology to the title of 'queen'. It might deserve that name by reason of including everything that is learned from all the other sciences and establishing everything by better methods and with profounder learning .... Or theology might be queen because of being occupied with a subject which excels in dignity all the subjects which compose the other sciences, and because her teachings are divulged in more sublime ways.

That the title and authority of queen belongs to theology in the first sense, I think will not be affirmed by theologians who have any skill in the other sciences. None of these, I think, will say that geometry; astronomy, music, and medicine are more excellently contained in the Bible than they are in the books of Archimedes, Ptolemy, Boethius, and Galen. Hence it seems likely that regal pre-eminence is given to theology in the second sense; that is, by reason of its subject and the miraculous communication, by divine revelation, of con clusions which could not be conceived by men in any other way, concerning chiefly the attainment of eternal blessedness.

Let us grant then that theology is conversant with the loftiest divine contemplation, and occupies the regal throne among the sciences by this dignity. But acquiring the highest authority in this way, if she does not descend to the lower and humbler speculations of the subordinate sciences and has no regard for them because they are not concerned with blessedness, then her professors should not arrogate to themselves the authority to decide on controversies in professions which they have neither studied nor practiced. Why, this would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect, but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim-at grave peril of his poor patients' lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices.

The photo above is a last one of my friend Lucy.