In God and Darwin We Trust
In Southern Patagonia, Charles Darwin is big medicine. I’m writing this from Puerto Natales, from the third floor of the Charles Darwin Hotel--every tin-roof town in southern Chile seems to have one. There are streets named after the British naturalist, and restaurants and schools and, of course, bars. Outside my window the sun is setting on the broken black teeth of Torres del Paine National Park. The low clouds catch and stumble as they race over the icy massifs. If you don’t ponder Creation here you are as insensible as a stone.
It’s a long way from the courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa., where in a month or so Judge John E. Jones III will render his verdict in the civil suit against the Dover Area School District--a fight over a four-paragraph statement read to biology students that seems to support “Intelligent Design,” crediting nature’s complexity to some supernatural power as opposed to the theories of random mutation and natural selection Darwin first conjured in Patagonia.
Poor old Darwin. Like an incorrigible drunk, he always seems to be in the dock. First it was the Oxford debates in 1860, then the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, and now Dover, Pa. He is forever being dragged before some school board or another (in November, Kansas became the fifth state to allow discussion of Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinism). To a sizable percentage of America, the mild-mannered beetle-collector from Shropshire is no more than a bearded blasphemer.
Here in Patagonia, however, Darwin is anything but God’s enemy. Perhaps it’s because Chile owns a piece of evolution’s scientific history, or perhaps it’s because the brand of Catholicism practiced here is both universal and unusually easygoing, but the country never joined the Darwinian debate.
“There is no conflict,” says the town’s mayor, Mario Margoni. “The Catholic Church fully accepts evolution. It’s the mechanism of God’s work. Creation comes when Homo sapiens accepts enlightenment and Man becomes a rational being.”
“Personally,” he adds, charmingly, “I don’t care if I’m descended from a monkey or a mouse.”
This is what culture would look like without the culture wars. Religion is taught in public schools, but it’s not “religious proselytism,” says Patricio Silva, the principal of Puerto Natales’ school. “It’s more values education that’s transversal to all religions.” Students who would rather not participate can go home, and a fair number of them do just that.
Meanwhile, evolution is taught without parental drama as an interdisciplinary subject beginning in high school, in biology, history and philosophy. As for the notion of Intelligent Design, Silva shakes his head. “It’s a totally backward movement,” he says. “The two ideas cannot be linked together. The fundamentalists only want to discredit evolution.”
This defense of Darwinism is especially striking, since Darwin is not the most sympathetic character in Patagonia. In fact, “to be called a Darwinist here is to be called a little bit of a racist,” says Silva. “Darwin was very hard on the locals. He called them subhuman and beasts. But that doesn’t minimize his contributions to science or the clarity of his thought.”
From this distant shore, the trouble in the United States appears to be simply one of trust. The generous comity has broken down so comprehensively--was it ever really there, I wonder?--that one side cannot yield an inch for fear they surrender the whole. I’m as hard-headed an atheist as you are likely to find, but I am not afraid of four paragraphs that muse on the possibility that there was a teleologic agency behind Creation, and let’s just call it God. Or at least I wouldn’t be afraid except for the large percentage of Americans--38%, according to a recent Pew Forum survey--who want to replace evolutionary biology with a Babylonian fairy tale about Adam and Eve. Intelligent Design is lipstick on the pig of Creationism.
And yet the faithful have reason to fear too, when secularists recoil from the sight of a cross as if they were Nosferatu. The seniors at Puerto Natales’ school--nicknamed “the Darwin class”--seem remarkably unscarred from their exposure to religion in school.
“When we learn about the creation of the world we learn about all the options,” says a fair-faced young man who is going into the army, “and then we make up our own minds.”
In a weird stroke of chance--or is it the unseen hand of God?--an exchange student from Harrisburg, Pa., is in the Darwin class. “Of course, Dover County,” Claire Hortens says, rolling her eyes. “It’s so lame.”
Perhaps landscape is destiny. Here in postcard Patagonia, the distinction between Nature and God seems so manufactured and irrelevant, so easily transcended by people of goodwill. The Patagonians actually seem a little bewildered that the most advanced nation on the planet cannot manage this low hurtle of imagination.
