The Origin of Species, and Everything Else

IN the closing scene of the classic 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy holds a Bible in one hand and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the other, smiles, claps them together, and puts them both under his arm as he walks out of the courtroom. This was an iconic encapsulation of the broader consensus of educated Americans of that era that we can accept both God and Darwin. In recent decades, however, the conservative coalition has become divided over the compatibility of faith and evolution.

Many people, including many scientists, have traditionally reconciled God with evolution by considering evolution to be a process created by God. Lately, this common-sense position has been attacked as happy-talk by scientific atheists who condescendingly argue that anyone who really understands evolution realizes that it implies atheism. Probably the most famous of these is Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, who has expounded this idea over more than 30 years in a series of bestselling books with increasingly direct titles from The Selfish Gene to The Blind Watchmaker to, most recently, The God Delusion.

About the Author

Jim Manzi

Jim Manzi is CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), an applied artificial intelligence software company.

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IN the closing scene of the classic 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy holds a Bible in one hand and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the other, smiles, claps them together, and puts them both under his arm as he walks out of the courtroom. This was an iconic encapsulation of the broader consensus of educated Americans of that era that we can accept both God and Darwin. In recent decades, however, the conservative coalition has become divided over the compatibility of faith and evolution.

Many people, including many scientists, have traditionally reconciled God with evolution by considering evolution to be a process created by God. Lately, this common-sense position has been attacked as happy-talk by scientific atheists who condescendingly argue that anyone who really understands evolution realizes that it implies atheism. Probably the most famous of these is Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, who has expounded this idea over more than 30 years in a series of bestselling books with increasingly direct titles from The Selfish Gene to The Blind Watchmaker to, most recently, The God Delusion.