Opinion: Brownback speaks

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The good news is that Sen. Sam Brownback, one of three Republican presidential candidates who raised their hands at a debate when asked who didn’t believe in evolution, felt compelled to explain himself further in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The bad news is that the explanation, while full of reasonable-sounding phrases, is if anything wackier than his generic gesture to creationists.

Brownback, a convert to Catholicism, begins his piece by bewailing the fact that “in our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves.” He then purports to offer a nuanced account of his anti-evolution position, and he follows the classic creationist M.O. of exaggerating differences between adherents of Darwininism (“There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today”). Stephen Jay Gould must be turning in his grave.

Brownback also offers this disingenuous choice: “The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.”

But it’s Brownback who does a disservice to the truth by suggesting that opponents of evolution have reasonable qualms, not to be confused with a literal reading of Genesis. Brownback himself seems to hold a view that, scientifically speaking, is just as silly as the literalist reading of Genesis: the idea that evolution does not produce new species.

Brownback camouflages this conviction in another false choice: “If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.”

Another false dichotomy. You can believe—as did the Christian Brother who taught me biology in a Catholic high school—that reality exists because of as “guiding intelligence” (aka God) and also believe that new species evolve out of old ones. Apparently Brownback doesn’t believe in what he would call “macro-evolution.” The similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA and the presence in human anatomy of vestigial traits—pure coincidence!

If I wrote on a high school biology test that only “micro-evolution” had occurred, I would have expected to receive an F. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before (scroll down to “Theological Evolution”), Brownback’s adoptive church lately has been playing footsie with the purveyors of the Gospel According to Sam.

If John Paul II were still pope, Brownback’s op-ed would suggest the question David Letterman once posed to a priest who moonlighted as a nightclub performer: “Does the pope know about this?” With the current pope, I’m afraid that the answer might be yes—and that he approves.