Subject: Article submission for Essay section

From: "Lauren Becker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:08:49 -0500

Good afternoon,

I'd like to submit an essay for your consideration to add to the
Statements and Essays section of your Darwin Day Celebration web site.
It is not a scientific paper, but an attempt to try to understand the
emotional conflicts that infuse the controversies over Darwin's grand
idea.  (It was presented at our Darwin Day celebration here at the
Center for Inquiry last year and has also been posted on the Intelligent
Design Watch web site of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.)  It is by no
means the caliber of work as your other articles by Dawkins, Dennett, or
Duncan, but if you think it might be helpful to other people planning
Darwin events (or just trying to understand Creationists), you are
welcome to it.

Thank you so much for providing such a helpful foundation for those of
us dedicated to teaching science and spreading the word about the
importance of understanding evolution.  Looking forward to the big show
in 2009!

Sincerely,

Lauren Becker

Field Organizer
Center for Inquiry
1310 Sweet Home Road
Amherst, NY 14228
716-636-4869, ext. 406
[email-masked]
www.centerforinquiry.net

Identity Crisis
Point of Inquiry pod cast, Darwin Day, 2006
www.pointofinquiry.org
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/darwin.html
By Lauren Becker

Not long ago, while researching a talk for Darwin Day, I came across an
article by Steve Silberman called "The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver
Sacks."  It seemed unrelated to my task, but I soon realized that Sacks
and Silberman could help me get a better understanding of the cultural
controversy over evolution and find an even greater appreciation for the
gift of Darwin's grand idea.

Dr. Oliver Sacks is probably best known for his book, The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of case histories exploring an
amazing variety of neurological experiences.  Each story describes
patients struggling to live with conditions such as Tourette's Syndrome,
autism, musical hallucination, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease.
In his writings, we discover remarkable people: a Tourettes patient who
becomes a successful surgeon, an Autistic patient who flourishes as a
doctor and engineer, a painter who sees more when he loses his color
vision.

At a time when diagnosis was the end goal of clinical studies, Silberman
explains that Dr. Sacks went beyond the naming of a disease to figure
out how patients might survive it, how they might go on living despite
the chaos in their minds.  Faced with a new and challenging condition,
how could they discover a new identity in a world completely changed by
their disorder?  Each story is a triumph of understanding, acceptance,
growth, and adaptation.  By digging deep into the mind, by reforming and
retraining functions of the brain and by mastering new skills, Sacks
showed how patients could redefine their existence and become whole
again, in some ways, even more "well" than before they got sick.  Along
the way, he discovered that the act of recovering one's own story was
itself healing.

We all know that Darwin and his ideas of 'descent with modification' and
'natural selection' caused problems from the very beginning.  The
implications of his research seemed to say that man might be descended
from monkeys.  This was heresy against the well-established truth of the
day: namely, that man was the child of God, created in His image,
special and set apart from earthly life.  Monkeys?  Ridiculous!  Who
does he think he is?  Who does he think we are?

Of course, Darwin was not the first scientist to challenge the status
quo. 

Johannes Kepler discovered mathematical consistency in the music of the
spheres. He found patterns in what had been thought a formless void and
gave us the first inkling that the mysteries of the universe might
actually be knowable.  So now there's a pattern, but the heavenly ether
was still separate from the four baser elements of nature: air, fire,
earth, and water - until Isaac Newton demolished the artificial boundary
between the 'heavenly' and the 'earthly'.  The apple and the moon are
indeed made of the same stuff and therefore fall for the same reasons.
With the heavens no longer an unknowable mystery and no longer set apart
from earth, the stage was set for Darwin to show us we are no longer
made of god, but, rather, of earthly matter.

So what's the matter with matter?

The most recent attacks against Darwin and evolution have come from a
group of Creationism/Intelligent Design advocates housed at the
Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, a group formally known as
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.  Like many faithful
people before them, their identity is defined by God - bound up in his
attention and love.  Their relationship with God defines meaning for
their lives and brings purpose to their existence.  So each time
scientific research pushes humanity another step further away from
special creation, they attack science for diminishing man's relationship
with God.  For faithful believers, science causes an identity crisis.
It creates a disorder and becomes a source of mental chaos and worldly
confusion.

Current publications reveal their anxiety and their coping mechanism: a
wedge strategy to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive
moral, cultural, and political legacies; to replace materialist
explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human
beings are created by God."

But here's the thing: thanks to Darwin, we now understand that we are
material beings, made of matter and part of the earth, an animal species
among millions, part chance, part natural selection, and just the most
recent iteration of bipeds to grace the planet.

With humanity now removed from the comfort of a special hallowed ground
at the right hand of God, many blame Darwin for bringing about a sort of
cultural depression and degradation, a nihilistic decline in morals and
morale.  Without a heavenly father and the meaning he brings to life, we
must be just orphans, left alone, adrift, and without direction.  

In fact, of course, the opposite is true.  Kepler gave us direction.
Newton gave us force.  And Darwin gave us company - 6 billion cousins!
Every day should be a big family reunion. 

Darwin has given us our diagnosis: Matter.  We are of the earth.  We are
not special creations, but part of a vast continuum of life.  No longer
children of god, we are children of nature.  This is our condition.  But
if this new understanding is a disorder, if it has caused an identity
crisis, then science, too, as in so many other cases, offers relief.  

How do we find a new identity in a world so utterly changed?  How might
we go on living despite Darwin's diagnosis?  Remember Dr. Sacks.  We
know we have an innate capacity for recovery and growth, creativity and
adaptation, the very adaptation that has enabled us to come this far.

Darwin's work was and is a shot across the bow because it challenges our
cherished beliefs - our definitions both of god and of ourselves.   As
Adam Phillips explained in his book, Darwin's Worm, because of Darwin,
we must rebuild our identity and retool our hopes.  But also because of
Darwin, we know we can.  He has given us our story, but it is not a
nightmare of a meaningless existence.  Darwin tells us stories about
what keeps life going.  

If the reality of evolution cuts too deep, Darwin has given us the
freedom to discover our own story and thereby begin to heal.  We might
even become more well than we were before we got sick.  Far from crisis
and despair, the hope and promise of Darwin is that the world we live in
is made more livable because of his description of it.  By sharing his
stories of human nature, we discover who we truly are, prepare for
transformation, and come back to life.