Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: Why Evolution Can Be a Beautiful Idea

I’ve decided to break up my series on tensions in religion and literature with some other writings. I plan to return to it every once in a while in the future as the spirit moves.

Even though I grew up hearing a lot about the science and religion wars (as I mentioned in another post), until last month, I really hadn’t given much thought to the debate between evolution and creation. I’m a literary critic, not a scientist, so I tend to care less about what actually happened at the dawn of time than about the stories we tell ourselves about it and how they affect the way we live. If pressed, I suppose I would have said evolution was more scientifically convincing than creation, but I would have also stressed that I find the story of creation far more artistically and ethically appealing. I would have said that Genesis 1-2 is a breathtaking storytelling feat and that I like what it teaches: that creativity is worthwhile since God himself is a creator, that humans are valuable because they are made in God’s image, and that the world is (or at least was) “good” and that we should take care of it. In contrast, I would have said, the story of evolution is never as beautifully told as the story of creation, and, at least in its extremist forms, it teaches troubling messages: that life is an accident, that success comes only with violent competition, that art and religion and human relationships are, like everything else, only survival devices.

That was what I thought of the story of evolution a month ago, before I read Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. Goodall’s book is a remarkable spiritual autobiography about a life-long study of chimpanzees, and it opened my eyes to the beauty in the story of evolution and helped me see its potential for inspiring ethical living. While I still think the story of evolution has its artistic and ethical problems, I now think it has undeniable strengths as well.

From the start, Goodall puts the debate between evolution and creation into perspective, a move I find appealing. She describes herself as an evolutionist, but, like me, she seems to care less about whether evolution actually happened than about how it influences how we live. She explains this philosophy to a curious bellhop one day:

I ended by telling him that it honestly didn’t matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God’s creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of His planet? Or were we going to find ways to live in greater harmony with each other and with the natural world? That, I told him, was what was important.

However, while Goodall downplays the necessity of believing in evolution, she also does a good job of quietly demonstrating, in the example of her own life, that the story of evolution has the potential to make a profoundly positive impact on one’s spiritual life and that it can make one a more responsible citizen of the earth. Indeed, for Goodall, the story of evolution is inextricably connected with a spiritual and moral existence because if, as evolution teaches, humans share a common ancestry with monkeys and alligators and mosquitoes and daffodils, each of them are part of our extended family and must be treated with care. Moreover, if every living thing is included in our vast family tree, each can tell us something about ourselves and our place in the world.

Indeed, Goodall’s belief in the story of evolution seems to propel her toward an intimacy with nature that I find deeply moving. For example, she describes giving personal names not only to the chimpanzees she is studying, an unusual enough practice in scientific research, but also to inanimate natural phenomena–a nearby mountain, a stream, the wind. In fact, she describes having an “intuitive” connection with the trees she encounters in the forest:

I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead. Why, I used to wonder, did our human ancestors not take to the trees, like the other apes?

Ultimately, Goodall’s connection with the natural world–and in particular, with the chimpanzees– stimulates her ethical development as well. Goodall talks at length about how the chimpanzees taught her, not only scientifically, but also personally–about how to mother, how to resolve conflict, and how to cope with death. Furthermore, it is Goodall’s belief in the interconnection of all life that prompts her to become a leading advocate of environmental preservation and animal rights.

I suppose Goodall’s appreciation for the natural world would have been equally possible from a creationist worldview. Genesis teaches humans to be stewards of nature, and Goodall says herself that she knows many environmentally-aware and admirably moral creationists. In the end, then, Goodall seems to be right in saying that it doesn’t much matter what one believes about what happened in the beginning; what matters is how one acts now. And, I would say, Goodall offers an admirable example of how one should be acting now, convincing me that the story of evolution can be beautiful and that it can produce at least one extremely beautiful life.

Tensions in Religion and Literature I

My father is a scientist who studies the relationship of science and religion, so, growing up, I heard probably more than your average Jane about the tensions between the scientific and religious worldviews. However, while my upbringing was perhaps unique, I don’t think I’m the only one who has heard a lot about the intersection of science and religion. Given the prominent voices in the media today of, on the one hand, America’s religious right and, on the other, vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, we–that is, Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans–are constantly bombarded with the question of how to reconcile science and religion. Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that ever since the scientific revolution, the interface of science and religion has been the primary battleground in the great war between the church and the academy, between faith and reason.

And understandably so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from hearing my father talk about his work, it’s that reconciling science and religion is a tricky business deserving of extreme care and attention. However, while I think discussing the science and religion interface is important, I can’t help but wonder if, in our attention to the religion and science front, we’re neglecting other fronts in the war between the academy and the church–fronts that were discussed more often in the days before the scientific revolution and that today, in a postmodern age when some argue that how we talk about truth is at least as important as truth itself, require our attention again. I’m thinking about the front between religion and the humanities, and in particular between religion and literature.

Most people assume that religion and literature make good bedfellows. When I tell friends or relatives that I study religion and literature, the usual response is, “Oh, they go together well!” Certainly, on some level, religion and literature do go together well. Afterall, biblical studies is really literary criticism, systematic theology is really philosophy, and church history is really, as its title suggests, history.

However, my experience in the literary world has taught me that the relationship of religion and literature isn’t so simple. Over and over, I’ve observed that in Christian colleges and universities, it is the English departments and not the science departments that are, as one of my English professors put it once, “the liberal holdouts.” Far from easily swallowing their institutions’ theological lines as some might expect, then, English professors actually seem to be the most eager to challenge theological teaching.

Indeed, after graduating from an Seventh-day Adventist undergraduate institution and watching my SDA friends go their separate ways, I’ve noticed that, at least within the SDA church, it is the humanities majors who stop attending church, not the science majors.* To be sure, many of my scientist friends do have questions about their faith. However, maybe because they see that the church is interested in talking about their questions, they seem to keep attending church faithfully. My humanities friends, though–perhaps seeing that the church doesn’t address their questions and then concluding that it is uninterested in, unaware of, or unable to answer them–seem to give up on church altogether.

Which leads to the million dollar question: what are the questions that humanities majors are asking that the church isn’t? Or, to phrase it differently, what are the tensions between religion and the humanities? For the next few posts, I plan to describe what I think are some of the big conflicts between religion and the humanities–and, in particular, between religion and literature. My goal is not so much to reconcile religion and literature or to encourage the church and my humanities colleagues to reunite; like science and religion, literature and religion are not easily reconciled and sometimes I’m not even sure thay should be reconciled. Instead, I hope merely to bring to light in an articulate way some of the tensions between religion and literature that have long been overlooked.

*I think it would be fascinating to compare the retention rates of humanities students in other Christian faiths. My hunch is that Catholic or high church Protestant humanities majors would be more likely to stick with their churches than their low church Protestant counterparts because Catholicism and high church Protestant faiths have historically engaged more in pre-scientific revolution issues like the tension between religion and literature than have low church Protestant faiths.