So says the 2010 Templeton Prize Winner
Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, a former Dominican priest who as an evolutionary geneticist has long argued that science and faith are compatible yet separate, won the Templeton Prize, one of the world's most prestigious religion prizes. Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, is known in the science world as the Renaissance man of evolutionary biology.
Here Ayala speaks of God, Darwin and the work of natural selection:
God’s handiwork in biology is undetectable. I get a lot of people who don't know what to think. Or they believe in intelligent design but they want to hear. Evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory. The belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God, in fact, evolution is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. Besides, in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, Pope John Paul II endorses evolutionary teachings.
If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for. Consider that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, God is the greatest abortionist of them all. Or consider, the "sadism" in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates' genitals, along with all their other parts.
Evolution is not only NOT anti-Christian, but the idea of special design, which many fundamentalists adhere to, might be – because it teaches the view of God that is blasphemous. The Special-Design-God is a God who messes up. Think about all the backaches, infected wisdom teeth and painful childbirth that exist because we humans evolved incompletely! ''Do you think God is absent-minded?'' I ask them.
Darwin’s discovery of natural selection is one of the most significant events in intellectual history because it completed the Copernican revolution. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a great number of physicists, as we would call them now — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and eventually Newton , among many others — initiated what is now known as the Copernican revolution.
It is science in the modern sense of the word, science that proceeds by formulating laws and hypotheses and testing them by observation and experiment. It is science that looks for universal laws. But these physicists left the living world out of that revolution. They thought that their discoveries applied to the earth as well as to the heavens. The same laws that explain the motion of bodies or the falling of bodies on earth also explained the motion of the planets and the stars in the sky. But living organisms were clearly “designed”, ergo the eyes for seeing and the hand for grasping.
Natural selection can account for the design of organisms. Darwin brought into the realm of scientific explanation the living world, which had been left out by the Copernican revolution, and thus, completed that revolution because now everything in the world of nature was explainable by scientific laws. It was due to the genius of Darwin that he discovered what has come to be known as the law of natural selection or, more accurately, the theory of natural selection, as a way to account for the design of organisms, and why the eye, for example, has all the parts put together for the purpose of seeing.
It is all right to give credit to Darwin for the theory of evolution because he accumulated large amounts of information and evidence supporting this theory. But evolution was frequently accepted by biologists at the time, and theories of evolution had been proposed previously, most notably in 1809, the year of Darwin ’s birth. A French scientist, Lamarck, had published a full theory of evolution. But many scientists on the Continent, as well as in the U.S. and in Great Britain , weren’t quite willing to accept evolution. What was not known was how to explain evolution, how to explain the change of organisms over time, and critically, how to account for design.
The idea of natural selection came to Darwin shortly after his return from a trip that he took on the HMS Beagle around the world between 1831 and 1836. So we know from his notebooks that by late 1837 to early 1838, he had come up with the idea of natural selection, and he was extremely excited because he realized that he now had the explanation for design and, therefore, for evolution.
Now he had a theory to work with. For the rest of his life he conducted all sorts of observations and experiments. He was looking for observations that could falsify his theory, if his theory was wrong. By the way, that’s the proper way of doing science — not trying to find evidence that is consistent with one’s theory, but that is actually contrary. Doing all these observations, experiments, and studies convinced him that his theory was correct.
Why creationism has such a strong hold on America ? It is rooted in historical origins. This is a country colonized originally by people seeking their own religious feelings, people who felt themselves marginalized because of them. This beginning gave rise to a kind of religious populism, which remains a strong part of U.S. culture, even today.
The John Templeton Foundation awards the annual prize, worth about $1.5 million, to “a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Following is a description in the Templeton Prize website:
It was the first of many discoveries that placed Ayala among the pioneers of genetic research in the second half of the 20th century, including his proof that the parasites responsible for Chagas, an often fatal disease afflicting millions of people living in the tropics, reproduced not sexually but by cloning. This led to similar discoveries about the parasites that cause malaria and other tropical diseases, opening up new approaches to potential vaccines.
Ayala also developed highly-accurate ways to read genetic clocks to determine the timing of precise steps in the evolution of a species over millions or even billions of years. Recently, he and colleagues determined that malaria was likely first transmitted from chimpanzees to humans a mere five or six thousand years ago, possibly through a single mosquito. In January 2010 he co-authored a paper establishing that gorillas and chimps may now serve as reservoirs for the parasites that cause human malaria, so that even if a vaccine is developed, humans will always be vulnerable to re-infection.
Dr. Ayala, 76, whose recent research focused on the evolution of micro-organisms, particularly those that cause malaria, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and holds the National Medal of Science. His philosophical writings range from the scientific method to the biological foundations of ethics. His books include Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1995), Modern Genetics (second edition, 1984), Population and Evolutionary Genetics: A Primer (1982), and Darwin ’s Gift (John Henry Press, 2007), in which describes the theory of evolution as helping to explain how evil could co-exist with a good and omnipotent God. His newest book, Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution, will be published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press.