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A desperate voice, 3. Februar 2008
In a nation where nearly half the adult population denies or rejects the reality of Darwinian natural selection, Michael Dowd is a fresh voice. He's disturbed about that lack of acceptance of reality, so he applies the term in many forms to make his pitch. His cause is to incorporate various realities: deep time, the continuity of life, and the genetic underpinnings of our behaviour. All the while, however, keeping his "Christian" deity plugged into the equation. He wants, he says, a "marriage of Science and Religion". While he does this with enthusiasm, using prose skills honed in his travelling road show, the project ultimately fails. If nothing else, his desperation to convince his fellow unrealists shows through on every page. The result is rather like your Mum giving you bitter medicine in your orange juice. Looks good at first, but one swallow betrays the underlying reality of the dose.
Each chapter is preceded by an epigram, and the first - by John Haught: "Evolution is Darwin's gift to theology" - is sadly symptomatic. Haught, like Dowd, completely overlooks what led Darwin to abandon the need for the supernatural - 13 finch species on a scattering of East Pacific islands. What would prompt a deity to such "wasteful" divergence? Diversity, Darwin reasoned, rested on the notion of an ancient Earth. The time was required to allow the slow, incremental changes natural selection needs to produce the great variety of life-forms we see today. Dowd not only accepts this foundation, he insists on it. The book's opening deals with the vast story of the cosmos, while showing clearly that individual retains a role in such complex emptiness. The author wants his readers to accept the idea of "deep time" with all the variation it can produce as something to embrace. That puts the reader in the picture Dowd is introducing and pulls them through the remainder of the book. He justifies this by declaring the "universe is in a trajectory" carrying us along with it. Such a statement flirts with teleological concepts, which Dowd indirectly champions.
Dowd sets up a number of dividing lines which he feels will help the reader comprehend his message. Two are related to historical times - the Black Death's devastation of Western Europe challenged the notion of a "just" deity, leading to the beginnings of scientific investigation. The other, more amorphous, he calls the change from "Flat-Earth Faith" to "Evolutionary Faith". "Flat-Earth Faith" reflects a time when knowledge of the world was limited to experiences and beliefs of a given locality and time. "Evolutionary Faith" relies on awareness of all humans being interconnected through time within the vastness of the 14-billion-year-old cosmos. It's a significant leap for many, even today, but Dowd provides a one-man cheering section to encourage his readers to take that "leap of faith". The encouragement comes in the form of explanations of why things change, why change should be recognised and embraced, and why evolution is real. How Dowd can endorse natural selection without once mentioning the Galapagos finches that prompted it eludes this reviewer, but he manages the feat.
He manages it simply by ignoring it. For all his reading in cosmology, geophysics and the rest, the logic of natural selection has eluded him. He endorses deep time, but only as a wedge to insert his deity into the mechanism. Dowd pounds that wedge mercilessly with a constant reiteration of how his god is ultimately responsible for EVERYTHING. By the time we reach Section Four, Dowd's evangelical passion is at fever pitch. He's anxious to re-establish his credentials and lure his readership to his newfound cause. He even cites his wife's "conversion" and his own "gift of tongues" as obiter dicta in pleading his case. In a spoken form, this technique might work to a receptive audience. In print, it's wearying beyond measure. In the final analysis, this book is nothing more than another entry in the "Old Earth Creationist" collection. It offers little but enthusiasm and a deity that may - or may not, we remain blithely unclear on this - tinker with the universe and its living inhabitants. To what end, we remain unclear. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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