BARNUM SMILED:

An Evening with Darwin in New York: The glibness of the recent Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York shows off the fact that Darwinism has become an officially sanctioned orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which is to be promoted and defended at all costs. (GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON, Crisis)

In New York, it’s been the season of blockbuster exhibits. Fra Angelico and Van Gogh had spectacular shows at the Met, while a few blocks north the Guggenheim offered the best retrospective of Russian painting ever mounted. But the Museum of Natural History has grabbed most of the headlines by putting on an elaborate show with a simple title: Darwin. It’s doubtful that a science exhibit has ever received so much attention. Newsweek and CNN covered it as breaking news, while the New York Times published a rave review and an approving editorial. The show is also striking deep chords with the public. The night I went, one bohemian-looking father was solemnly guiding his young son through the displays about evolution as though this were catechism class — which, in a way, it is for a modern secularist.

The show presents the life and ideas of the great evolutionist, and its tone is frankly triumphalist. Darwin’s theory, we are told, “underlies all modern biology. It enables us to decipher our genes and fight viruses, and to understand Earth’s fossil record and rich biodiversity.... [T]he theory remains unchallenged as the central concept of biology.” A subtext of the show is that scientific doubts about the theory were cleared up long ago and that opposition now comes only from Fundamentalists who insist on reading Genesis as a scientific textbook. A bogey haunting the exhibit is Intelligent Design, which is politely but firmly dismissed as a wedge for religious beliefs that have no place in science.

Catholics, of course, are not troubled by the idea of evolution. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly.” Pope John Paul II, who addressed the issue on several occasions, said that the Church has no problem with evolution, or with the possibility that the first humans had biological antecedents, so long as God is not kept out of the big picture.

But the Church does have a problem when Darwinists become crusading materialists bent on turning God into an irrelevancy. It’s a mission they find quite appealing. And once they start behaving like agents of enlightenment, rather than scientists, they tend to play shell games with the evidence. Their language becomes slippery and their methodology dubious. But they get the result they want: a vague, widespread impression among the “educated” public that Darwinism has solved all the mysteries of creation. Darwin comes close to making that claim, and so it’s worth taking a critical look at what it has to say. The show, it turns out, is almost a caricature of what Stephen Jay Gould once called Darwinian fundamentalism.

It's not as if Darwin wasn't aware that he was offering up a secular faith. As Edward Larson relates in his fine short volume, Evolution:

By the 1870s, Darwin was an international celebrity. Even if people did not believe they descended from apes, they talked about it--and about Darwin. And for many of those who did believe, Darwin became a kind of secular prophet or high priest. Secluded in his remote country home at Downe, perpetually ill or supposedly so according to some, Darwin played the part of hermit sage receiving favored guests on his own terms. [...] Surveying the scene, Huxley sent Darwin a sketch of a kneeling supplicant paying homage at the shrine of Pope Darwin. Given their almost visceral contempt for Catholicism, both Huxley and Darwin surely enjoyed the irony.

The real irony is, of course, the absence of irony.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2006 11:29 PM