Accounting for Beauty
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And neither I nor my church sees a contradiction between evolution and
faith. For nearly a century, in fact, the Catholic Church has acknowledged evolution,
especially in its teachings on the Bible. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in
the Vatican, established in 1936, promotes science and the theory of evolution.
Still, I sit at my desk beside a second-story window that overlooks nearly
a half-acre filled with trees and plants, watching the changes brought about by
the rotating seasons. And with the color-drenched late afternoon sky in the
background, I’m dazzled by the beauty. And that brings me to questions
evolution doesn’t appear to answer.
What accounts for the breath-taking beauty out my window, for how moved
we are by natural beauty and how it has inspired generations of artists, poets
and writers? How is it that the earth is so well situated, and suited, not only
to human life but the human heart? It reminds me that Charles Darwin, who is
most credited with science’s theory of evolution, never meant for it to be an
answer to everything.
Attracted to Beauty
A recent article about a book by Richard Prum, an ornithology professor at Yale University, partially addresses
these questions. Prum’s book promotes the view that, unlike what many
evolutionists contend, animals are often disposed to mate with others of their
species not because of survival of the fittest but because they are attracted
to beauty.
The author points out that it is obviously true of certain bird species,
for instance, in which a female, usually, is attracted to a male because of the
males’ bright colors, apart from its mating dances or the way the male prepares a nest.
“This extravagance is … an affront to the
rules of natural selection,” says the article’s author, Ferris Jabr. “Adaptations
are meant to be useful — that’s the whole point — and the most successful
creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular environments. So
what is the evolutionary justification for the bowerbird’s ostentatious display?”
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Francis Collins
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It’s that sometimes, beauty equals health and the ability to survive. So
beauty doesn’t contradict natural selection but
is a part of it.
I know many say that if God created the universe, he/she did a lousy job.
There are daily natural disasters and when you look at “man’s inhumanity to
man,” you may disabuse yourself of the idea of a loving God-creator. But
what about the beauty that’s all around us?
I understand that the way you look at reality to a great extent reflects your
own experiences, and my life has been a walk in the park. Still, I have to ask
myself why the earth is so beautiful, why it’s so suited to human life, why, I
believe, the vast majority of people feel so at home in it.
Among other questions – such as why there is something rather than
nothing – this is one science simply isn’t equipped to answer. Science is good
in answering “how” questions but not the “why questions.” That doesn’t make the
“why” questions any less important.
Theistic Evolution
In his book, The Language of God, Francis Collins – a physician and
geneticist, director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the
Human Genome Project – writes that he is a proponent of “theistic evolution.”
Among its propositions, is that “despite massive improbabilities, the
properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.” Why?
To me, the obvious answer is that, as Collins believes, “the God of the
Bible is also the God of the genome.”
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