What does (1 + 1) equal?
Yesterday I was talking to an old friend - a thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated, successful, and religious man. I told him that I was concerned that my sister was growing up in an environment that was leading her to believe in a religious account of life and to reject evolution. Since, like my sister, he is also a Muslim, I asked him about his own stance on evolution. His response was interesting - if not disheartening. He said that it wasn't an issue he thought about much, but he accepted the general Islamic account that rejects evolution. We talked about it briefly, but it was clear that we weren't going to get anywhere. The interesting part, however, was his claim that those who argue for evolution are just as "fundamentalist" as those they claim to reject.This claim underscores the very real danger of breaking every issue down into a dichotomy. It is similar to the "intelligent design" tactic of "teaching the controversy." And luckily, on this small point, I managed to convince my friend that passion does not equal fundamentalism. I tend to argue by example - and here is the example I drew: suppose two people are arguing. One of them believes that (1 + 1 = 10) whereas the other believes that (1 + 1 = 2). Even if we suppose that both of them are arguing just as loudly, the fact is that only one point of view is defensible. The sheer volume of the right arguer does not make him a fundamentalist. And one can only hope that there is no "controversy" to teach in this case.
The underlying assumption of my analogy was that the defender of (1 + 1 = 2) had arrived at his conclusion by reason. So if circumstances had been different - suppose they had been talking about a binary numeral system - he would have been perfectly willing to accept that in such a system (1 + 1) does indeed equal 10. In other words, when he is confronted with a good reason to change his views, he will. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, is committed to his belief regardless of evidence. By a funny coincidence, I happened to read Richard Dawkins' take on being called a fundamentalist because of his passionate defense of evolution today. (This is my second Dawkins link this week. Go figure.)
Labels: evolution, intelligent design, islam, religion
