Preachers are indignant against what offends what they’re for. I felt that indignation in E.O.Wilson when I heard him snort, “Ants are not bugs!” It’s the first thing I thought of when I read the new “On Faith” question:
“In his ‘letter to a Southern Baptist pastor,’ biosociologist E.O.Wilson warns: ‘An alliance between science and religion, forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect, may be the only way to protect life on earth.’ Is such an alliance necessary? Possible?”
Next, I thought of another Southern Baptist—Al Gore—as a Nobel Peace Prize winner for protecting life on earth. Then I remembered two other Baptists of the South who were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes as fighters for human dignity: Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. And I recalled that Wilson himself has a Southern Baptist background. And that Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, the only state of the United States to be founded on complete religious freedom, was a Baptist preacher. And I remembered the influence of the Baptists on Thomas Jefferson, resulting in the Virginia declaration of religious liberty, the predecessor of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And I recalled Jefferson’s letter to Connecticut Baptists, from which we got the phrase “the separation of church and state.” And I remembered that Baptist vision and money founded the University of Chicago, whose faculty has been awarded more Nobel Prizes than any other institution. (What’s with these Baptists?)
Back to the indignation of ex-Southern-Baptist E.O.Wilson. At age 9, he discovered that an ant is a world, not a bug. In the Christian language of his people, an ant is a creature, not a thing. And I’ve no doubt that he sang this Sunday school song dignifying all creatures: “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small; all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.”
“An ant is not a bug!” It is a creature with the dignity and “grandeur” of its origin in the mind and hands of “the Creator.” In that sentence, I italicized “grandeur” and “the Creator” because they occur in the last paragraph of the first edition of Darwin’s THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. When in subsequent editions “the Creator” was dropped, “grandeur” was weakened. Heaven became only the sky, creation became only nature, creatures became only things, ants became only bugs.
But grandeur is a word Wilson prizes. We cannot save our fragile planet from “the sixth extinction” without a new convergence and cooperation between heart and mind, religion and science. In CONSILIENCE: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), he said “as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendence continues to win the heart.” For the sense of grandeur, “people need a sacred narrative” (such as the Bible provides). Wilson believes that if written with sufficient poetic force, “an evolutionary epic” might provide the needed grandeur. No scientist since Darwin has done more for grandeur than he, the coiner of the word and the developer of the discipline of “sociobiology.”
But now Preacher Wilson, after full expression of his indignation that in our culture ants have lost their grandeur and are only bugs, tells us that planetary degradation will soon reach its Armageddon stage. Repent, you eco-hell-bound sinners, for devastation is soon (within 40 years) upon us! He concludes his sermon with hope for a saving, grandeur-producing “alliance between science and religion, forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect.”
Mutual respect. When Wilson and theologian Harvey Cox began their 40-year careers of teaching at Harvard, on Sunday mornings the five churches and the chapel near Harvard Yard were empty: no respect for religion. Now, those churches are full! Not that Harvard faculty and students have got religion and gone fundamentalist; but there’s a new openness to religion, in Wilson’s phrase “the theology of the searchers.” Describing himself as “a provisional Deist,” he says “some creative force determined the parameters of the universe when it began,” and a “prime mover” is “likely.” A course repeatedly taught by Cox and Stephen Jay Gould (the wistful agnostic who gave us “punctuated evolution”) was consistently mobbed.
Enjoy the irony. The louder the shouting of the religion-hating “new atheists,” the greater the “mutual respect” between religion and science, whose converging is producing a new grandeur. Wilson is especially impressed with the rising eco-concern among evangelical Christians, and called Ed Brown’s OUR FATHERS WORLD (2007) “a beautiful and inspiring book.” Care for the creation is an implicate of belief in creation. Long ago Wordsworth put the hope this way: “Let knowledge grow from more to more but more of reverence in us dwell; that heart and mind, according well, may make one music as before, but vaster.”
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