God in the Details

Yet biblical faiths endure. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, once a born-again Christian before undergoing what he describes as an epiphany inspired by his discovery of the richness of evolutionary theory, says humans innately hunger for something larger than themselves. Our conscious minds desperately crave permanent existence—everlasting life—and belief in eternal life helps ensure the survival of civilizations. Faith has an evolutionary function. "There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose," he writes in his book Consilience. "Even when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death in common cause, their genes are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than those of competing groups who lack equivalent resolve."

The widespread preference for God-based explanations over the empirical can be blamed on the emotional shortcomings of science, Wilson says. Science is bloodless. It lacks the poetry of affirmation woven into religion and fails to satiate the deep cravings for immortality and the transcendent.

Certainly there are theistic evolutionists. The Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, among other religious organizations, have issued statements acknowledging the evidence for evolution and its compatibility with faith.

Yet most of the religiously faithful, if polls are to be believed, seem to care not a whit for the mounting evidence supporting scientific explanations for the universe and the existence of varied life forms. According to a March 2007 Newsweek poll, 91 percent of Americans profess belief in God while a tiny 3 percent self-identify as atheist. Fully 48 percent of those polled reject evolutionary theory out of hand while 73 percent of evangelical Protestants, 39 percent of non-evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics do so, holding that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago.

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Newsweek's poll data potentially promise a wide audience for the Museum of Earth History, a repository of exhibits taking shape in Oak Cliff on the campus of Christ for the Nations Institute, a Christian missionary organization and Bible school. The 20,000-square-foot museum with 8,500 square feet of exhibit space will present "research-quality dinosaur fossils and authentic scientific artifacts" bolstering the biblical account of creation, its founders claim. John Heffner, a mathematician who is on the museum's board, says the museum will present evidence that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and probably closer to 5,000 years in age. He says most of the dating methods employed by scientists contain huge fudge factors and are unreliable. He suggests a conspiracy is afoot to suppress this evidence from the public as well as edit out of textbooks anything that disproves evolutionary theory or calls it into question.

"We're not hiding the fact that we think the biblical account is accurate," Heffner says. "But we hope to show the scientific evidence from secular sources [disproving evolution] that is buried...In fact [evolution] is so deeply entrenched that some suggest it's not going to die out until this generation of older scientists, that are swallowing it and pushing it, are gone."

Such widely held beliefs infuriate evangelical atheists. Sam Harris points out that the idea of such a young earth means it was created right around the time the Sumerians invented glue. "Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant," he writes in Letter to a Christian Nation.

Entering this thicket of agitated atheism is University of Colorado philosopher and physicist Victor Stenger, whose recent book God: The Failed Hypothesis has climbed the lower rungs of The New York Times' best-seller list. Stenger stresses that the central conflict is not between creationism and evolution. "It's between reason and superstition," he said in an interview just after the publication of his book.

Arguments such as Varghese's are eminently refutable, Stenger says. The physical laws governing the universe are not a framework sprung from a supernatural source. They are human inventions, mathematical models used to describe observations. "[T]he most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behavior of matter," he writes in God. "Rather they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior." Stenger believes scientific investigation will ultimately explain consciousness, free will, thought, self-awareness and the other phenomena Varghese attributes to infinite mind. "There is no reason that we can see now, from the study of the brain, that would require you to introduce any immaterial element," he says.

Stenger speculates free will may be nothing more than the brain interacting with radiation both from external cosmic rays and potassium in the blood. Self-consciousness may be an evolutionary coping mechanism whereby little stories are formulated in memory to help the human brain make sense of and digest the stream of step-by-step calculations it rapidly performs continuously.

Yet as much as these books construct logical arguments against the existence of God, they are also screeds against the texts that inform religious faith and the apparent ignorance among the faithful of what is actually written in these texts. Writes Dawkins: "The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his own chosen desert tribe."

As a text for establishing moral rectitude, the Bible is an abysmal failure. The Old Testament God is a violent tyrant who repeatedly condones—even commands—pillaging, slavery and genocide. God demands a man be stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. He seemingly turns a blind eye to aberrant behaviors among his faithful including incest, the seeding of offspring among family servants and the offering up of wives and daughters as sexual favors.