Moses and Darwin

Moses wrote that  God created all things, and that God formed man from the dust of the earth.  God planted a tree of Life; it provides nourishment, and sustains the life that God had fashioned. 

Darwin came along a few millenia later. He drew a diagram of a tree of life; it depicted the development of man by natural processes from the earth itself.

In some ways, these two world-views are similar; they both offer explanations of life. But being informed by different historical ages and different sources, they differ. Moses revealed the creative activity of God; Darwin is neutral about the question of God;  he  observed and documented some of the processes by which life is propagated in the natural world. 

There are many things about life we can know--many principles and facts that we can discover, ponder,  document, discuss, appreciate, and use to construct our lives. Knowledge itself seems elusive; we must seek it out.  Moses wrote about a tree of knowledge of good and evil. Darwin wrote about knowledge of the physical world, exposing its inner development by natural means.

Using principles of scientific discovery, we humans have learned that there is a code by which life  happens; we call it DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid.) We wonder where it came from, how it got here.  Moses’ explanation would likely be that God wrote the code. Darwin is neutral about the code’s origin; he studied its effects.  

We humans make good use of knowledge, but it can be dangerous: we can use what we’ve learned  to unleash the power of atomic nuclei, and thus power our homes and workplaces with electricity.  This we judge to be good; we might, however,  use that same knowledge to bombard the nuclei of atoms with neutrons in a way that will produce very destructive chain reactions, and maybe blow us all up.

So Moses was right about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit that we gather from it can be beneficial or destructive. The produce of that tree can bring life or death.

Darwin was right about some things too. The problem arose after his death, when others applied his discoveries to questions that are shrouded in the mists of time.

A few years later, Einstein had the same problem. It’s the knowledge of good and evil thing that Moses had talked about.

 

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full