This entry is going to be a little different.  I recently attended a lecture by Francisco Ayala, a professor at UC-Irvine.  That four word descriptor really does the man no justice, because he's quite literally a modern-day Renaissance man.  He holds professorships in no less than four departments (Biological Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, Logic and Philosophy of Science), a feat that would be impressive at a school one-tenth as reputable as UC-Irvine.  He has received the National Medal of Science, he is a member of the National Academy of Science, and he was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  According to Wikipedia, he's been published on the order of one thousand times; for comparison, I just finished fighting to get my second time wrapped up.  He is truly one of the more remarkable scientists out there, to say the very least.

One interesting biographical fact I have yet to mention is that Professor Ayala was a Dominican priest before launching his amazing academic career.  This is very interesting, because it puts him squarely at the sometimes-contentious intersection of science and religion.  However, Professor Ayala sees no conflict between science and religion.  He disagrees wholeheartedly with both creationism and intelligent design, and spent much of his lecture outlining the strengths of evolution and chiding creationists for the myriad problems with their position.  I also gathered that he sees no need to "compartmentalize" his religion and his science, as religious scientists are often accused of doing by the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) types.  On the contrary, per the title of his lecture and accompanying book, he feels that evolution is not only a great boon to science but also a great gift to religion.

Enough Stalling, What Did I Think?

Professor Ayala's pedigree for a lecture like this probably can't be topped.  The man is a priest turned world-class scientist, with a knack for philosophy to boot.  He's given talks the world over, at a fifty lecture per year pace.  For crying out loud, he even grows his own wine grapes; there's nothing like an alcohol comment or two to warm up a Wisconsin crowd, especially on a cold night.

Amazing lecture, right?  Wrong.

I feel like a jerk saying so, but really Professor Ayala's talk just wasn't that good.  I wanted to like it, both because he's an amazing individual and because the topic is extremely interesting and important to me.  Furthermore, the last thing I want to do is disparage a public intellectual, especially in light of the rampant anti-intellectualism during the buildup and aftermath of the Presidential election.  (My usual response to someone making a nerd-based dig is to rhetorically ask: come on, what are we, in middle school?  Yes, Virginia, most of the country is still emotionally in middle school.)  But, like our first President probably didn't say, I cannot tell a lie.

A big part of the problem was that the majority of the talk wasn't about how Darwin proposing evolution was a gift to both science and religion.  The first 80-85 minutes of Professor Ayala's 90-minute lecture was about evolution itself, and then he quickly tacked on a quick bit about religion before he wrapped up the talk and took some questions.  The evolution part started off well, because he framed evolution in a neat way that I'd never heard before.  He said that Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution.  Copernicus (and Galileo) removed the earth from the center of the universe, then Newton unified the physical laws of the earth and the heavens, and finally Darwin removed the preternatural specialness we humans had ascribed to ourselves.  Before the Revolution, we were Images of GOD living at the Center of CREATION in a world where GOD controlled everything.  After Darwin completed the Revolution, we were, to borrow the words of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, a lucky species of ape living on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Beyond that neat framing of evolution, the first part of Professor Ayala's talk just wasn't that great.  He certainly didn't do anything wrong, because he spent most of his time going over the evidence for evolution and pointing out where and how various creationists go wrong.  He even spent a few slides detailing why intelligent design isn't science and why Michael Behe's irreducible complexity is hooey, topics near and dear to my heart (as evidenced by Entry 04 and Old Post C).  That having been said, his treatment of the subject just wasn't that appealing or interesting.  Part of the problem might have been that I've heard a lot of the layperson-caliber evolution evidence before, and in addition I'm pretty versed in many of the low-hanging creationist canards.  Unfortunately, I think a lot of the problem was on Professor Ayala's end.  Again, I feel like an ass saying so, but I really just don't think he gave that great of a presentation.

Those Pesky Last Few Minutes

After convincing us that evolution is the bee's knees, Professor Ayala wrapped up his lecture by getting to the key part of his title.  How could anyone think that Darwin did religion a favor?  After all, his insight effectively reduced man from an image of the omnipotent Creator to a fortunate primate; Freud called this one of the great affronts to man's ego, or something like that.  Evolution was received as a huge threat to religion, and most of the planet still feels that way a whopping 150 years later.

In a sentence (and, as I've mentioned, it didn't get much more coverage than that during the lecture), Professor Ayala thinks that evolution explains away the stickiest theological problems with a loving god.  For instance, someone might ask why a loving god lets innocent children die of cancer.  Well, in light of evolution, we know cancer is a genetic disorder that occasionally comes about via evolutionarily necessary random mutations.  Or, someone might ask why evil people exist if there's a loving god.  Again, in light of evolution, we know that there will be a wide spectrum of people, and the evil ones won't necessarily be weeded out due to a lack of selective pressure against them.

Basically, Professor Ayala feels that evolution allows theologians to sidestep the thorny "problems" of evil and pain.  He feels that, without evolution, there is no good answer questions such as why would a loving god give us an appendix that can only hurt us or why would a loving god let a psychopath kill an innocent person?  He feels that the reality of evolution permits the existence of a loving god in spite of the regular and continuing occurrence of these seemingly horrible atrocities.

Uhhh ... I Don't Get It

If that explanation sounds extremely lame to you, you're not alone.  I don't see how evolution does anything for these theological quandaries.  Evolution certainly does explain why cancer and a host of other disorders happen.  Random mutations are the driving force for evolution; you need a diverse genetic population over which natural selection can occur.  Just as those mutations sometimes confer benefits, sometimes they cause really bad things to happen to a given organism.  But, frankly, I don't see how on earth that relates to a loving deity.

I really just don't understand the angle Professor Ayala is espousing here.  A child dies of cancer, and their parents ask how a loving god could let their innocent child die a painful, prolonged death.  The appropriate response is that this loving god certainly exists, but chose to create life via evolution and things such as this innocent child's death are the consequence of said evolutionary processes?  What a limp-wristed, outrageous argument that is!

Professor Ayala has clearly started with his conclusion: that a loving god exists.  He then uses evolution to rationalize away the problems of evil and pain.  It doesn't seem correct that a loving god would let evil or pain hurt the living creatures He loves, but such things would definitely occur in a biology controlled by evolution.  Thus, both evolution and the loving god exist, but the loving god doesn't interfere with the evolutionary nature, red in tooth and claw.  How Professor Ayala's god can sit idly by as such horrors occur and still be considered good and loving was not delved into.

The Q&A was nothing special.  I'd love to elaborate the story and say that the end of Professor Ayala's lecture left me speechless, but really I just couldn't come up with any question to ask.  I certainly felt underwhelmed by his explanation of how Darwin helped theologians and religion in general, as my last few paragraphs hopefully made clear.  One questioner did raise my general point: the person said that evolution doesn't make the case for a loving god at all, and in fact the harsh reality of evolution actively hurts the case for a deity that loves us.  Professor Ayala quite literally ducked the question, again saying that the reality of evolution provides answers for the theological problems of evil and pain.  He did not address the possibility that the ruthless realities of evolution might preclude the existence of a loving god, and he quite clearly doesn't feel the need to.  As I mentioned earlier, he had his conclusion about this matter from the get-go.

Bickering With My Enemies' Enemies

As luck would have it, I heard about and attended another lecture on the intersection of science and religion just a few days after Professor Ayala's lecture.  The elephant in the room alluded to in this section's title was palpable at that lecture, and as such I'll save my discussion of it for next time.  I'll give it a quick three sentences now (premise, question, answer), just to whet your appetite for Entry 24.

Francisco Ayala is a great advocate of science, and moreover actively seeks to reconcile the worst conflicts between science and religion in a positive manner.  In light of all that good stuff about him, is it correct/appropriate/useful/tactful/tactical/advantageous/etc to criticize him over what amounts to that last little bit of traditional religion in his arguments?  Briefly, I just don't know.

I'll spell it out one last time, I didn't like Professor Ayala's lecture but I feel lousy for thinking and saying so.  He's an illustrious and interesting figure, but his talk honestly didn't come close to deserving either of those adjectives or any of their synonyms.  I appreciate that he opposes fundamentalism and scriptural literalism and other religion-based anti- and pseudo-science, but I struggle to concede his final point because his argument for it is frankly vacuous.

Am I hurting my cause saying these things?  Am I being a curmudgeonly debunker, or a grumpy atheist?  Should I make friends with the enemy of my enemies and hop into bed with Professor Ayala and other pro-science, open-minded, liberal religionists?  (Figuratively, of course.)  Tune back next week for part two; same skeptical time, same skeptical place!