Last night I watched the Nova special "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a two hour documentary on the Dover, Delaware court case challenging the School Board's attempt to introduce the concept of Intelligent Design into Dover classrooms.
When the school board mandated that a statement challenging evolution be read by all science teachers in science classrooms, the teachers refused and a number of parents filed the lawsuit.
After watching the program I thought about the many attempts that have been made and continue to be made by evangelical Christians to oppose the teaching of evolution. As I was fortunate to have fourteen years of excellent Catholic education, where the theory of evolution was not challenged, and in fact was considered by my instructors to be wholly compatible with Catholic teaching, I have not understood why so many American evangelicals are so adamantly opposed to it. In fact, the opposition is so extreme that the judge who ruled against the school board in the Dover case received multiple death threats, as did the parents who filed the suit.
Then it occurred to me that this one issue is an existential one for many evangelicals, especially those who are also fundamentalists, i.e. believers in the Bible as the literal and unerring word of God. By existential, I mean threatening the truth and thus the very existence of their faith and ultimately their own survival beyond this life.
If your faith includes the belief that the world was actually created in six days and that God formed man out of clay and woman out of man's rib, as fundamentalists believe, then the intricacies of evolution simply cannot be true. Yet, if vast numbers of your fellow citizens, and nearly the entire scientific community, say the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, your faith is greatly threatened. You must do everything you can to fight the theory of evolution, because if it continues to be accepted as truth, it will do dreadful things to your children, your faith, and to you. It will present your children with ideas that are contrary to biblical ideas and might cause them to abandon their faith. Not only will it threaten the story of creation that you believe in, it will threaten every other belief you have that is based on the infallibility of the Bible, including your very belief in God. Finally, with the basis of some of your beliefs challenged, and perhaps eventually proven false, you will be left without a foundation for your faith, and thus with no foundation for a belief in an afterlife, which means you have got yourself a real existential crisis.
Those of us who were raised in a faith that looks to the Bible for inspiration rather than literal truth have no problem with the theory of evolution. We can easily believe in both God and evolution, as the creation story for us is a metaphor rather than literal truth. The God we believe in is a mystery and how the universe was created is also a mystery. If evolution is the way the mystery of life unfolded, over millions of years rather than over six, that complexity actually adds to the wonder of creation and the majesty of the Creator.
All fundamentalists would have to do in order to resolve their existential crisis over evolution would be to accept the Bible as metaphor rather than literal truth. Why they can't do that when people of other faiths can, I don't know. But for now, it appears, they can't, and the Dover case that was won by the proponents of evolution will not be the last case in which fundamentalists fight for their absolute belief in the Biblical story of creation, which as we have seen is a fight for their very existence.
