Contrasting teachers
Interesting how memories of teachers play out into adult life!
Christopher Hitchens, the writer of a new book 'God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything' , dismisses all faith as "wish-thinking". The vitriolic and evangelical atheist (his own description) described how he came to lose his beliefs, when his teacher Mrs Watts came out with a really stupid comment:
There came a day when poor, dear Mrs Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said: "So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be." However, I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little anklestrap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of 9 I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about.
A stupid teacher meant, for Hitchens, that all religious beliefs must be stupid too. He remembers his teacher as a point of conflict, when he decided that he couldn't go along with stupidy, and that, for him, meant religion rather than science.
Stephen Jay Gould, on the other hand, had a very bright teacher, Mrs McInerney, his third grade teacher, who didn't come out with fanciful explanations, but was in the habit of rapping young knuckles when their owners said or did particularly stupid things. As a consequence, whenever he came across the argument that, for instance, evolution "disproved" God, he would comment:
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action).
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I thought the argument was not so much that Darwinism disproved the existence of God, but that it disproved the biblical explanation of creation, which has been one of the central tenets of Christian beliefs since its inception.
Since the Christian creation theory also underpins the concept of original sin, and the sequence of historical events (eschatology) that derive from that, it's easy to understand why evolution is seen as an attack on God, when in fact it is an attack on the obviously unscientific beliefs at the core of many religious faiths.
It's Christianity's problem that it depends so heavily on its creation myth.
Many people believe in god or gods at the same time as accepting that evolution is true because they are not bound to any special creation myth. Their god is not personal but is a kind of mystical transcendent being, similar to the Tao in Taoism.
So there is no reason why an acceptance of evolution should preclude a belief in a god. In fact, Dawkins separates these two things in "The God Delusion" and has a whole chapter discussing pantheistic type beliefs that aren't dependent on creation myths, with special attention to whether Einstein held such a religious belief (he didn't).
Religious believers with an aversion to Dawkins polemical approach might find Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenom" more approachable, but hardly less consoling.
If you read Augustine or Jerome, it is clear that they took the genesis stories as mythological not factual, a point made by Michael Ruse in "Can a Darwinian be a Christian?" (2001). He also tackles the "original sin" matter, which clearly didn't pose problems for Augustine when he both wrote on that and took the Genesis stories as myth.
The taking of the stories completely literally and no other way comes from the far later enlightment conflicts which produced a narrow fundamentalist Christianity.
In fact, regarding James Ussher’s dating of Creation as 4004 BC, he is in fact using a rationalist means of dating rather than it's "the bible says so" method of today's creationists, see for example Gould:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_house-ussher.html
As James Barr has also commented:
"It is a great mistake, therefore, to suppose that Ussher was simply concerned with working out the date of creation: this can be supposed only by those who have never looked into its pages. . . . The Annales are, an attempt at a comprehensive chronological synthesis of all known historical knowledge, biblical and classical. . . . Of its volume only perhaps one sixth or less is biblical material."
You won't find Gould's in depth research into sources in Dawkins, who quotes from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia (internet edition) for his God Delusion. Lazy, and sloppy, which characterises most of Dawkin's later work - although the roots of it go back to his muddled use of the word "selfish".
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