A birthday for Charles Darwin

(looks like a Rabbi, don't he?)

Today is Mr. Darwin's 200th birthday. Whenever I ruminate on Darwin and his discoveries, I find myself recalling an inadvertently hysterical line from the imperishable A.B. Rotenberg song "Atheist Convention in L.A." In the song, three men, traveling by plane to the convention, say:

That we all once were primates is our motto
And the Big Bang's not a theory but a fact!

The line is funny because only an ignoramus would imagine that an atheist might deny that we are still primates and also because of the familiar way it misuses the word theory. In our vernacular a "theory" is an imperfect guess. In science, a "theory" is a set of ideas devised to explain a group of facts. A theory can be debated and modified. Facts usually, aren't.

Evolution is both a theory and a fact (Stephen J. Gould said it first) Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. (he said that, too.) Thought the mechanism of evolution continues to be debated, the facts aren't in dispute - at least not among educated men.

This is (part of) why I reject the Orthodox Jewish rejection of Darwin: None of what he taught is anathema to Torah Judaism. The idea that life evolves over time can easily coexist with the idea that there is a God who created us and desires our service and devotion. Natural selection poses no threat to our beliefs; the two can be reconciled.

As for the fear that the literal word of the bible is countermanded by Darwin's theory, well, let's first remember that Jews aren't biblical literalists. We have libraries filled with widely-accepted books offering non-literal interpretations of the Divine Writ. And we've always been willing to reinterpret to suit new discoveries. For instance, before Copernicus, we gave the story of Joshua Halting the Sun a literal interpretation; today we know this is impossible, yet Judaism continues to flourish, just as it will continue to flourish after we permit ourselves to fearlessly follow facts wherever they lead and finally reconcile Genesis to Darwin.