This fear of "materialistic philosophy" shows what's really at stake here: At a deeper level, this is a moral, religious and political debate over the adequacy of science in explaining the meaning of human life. For the people at the Discovery Institute, that debate amounts to something like a holy war.

Bruce Chapman, the founder of the Discovery Institute and its president since 1990, is a conservative Republican who held various appointments in Ronald Reagan's administration. He believes that America's moral and religious heart is threatened by the corrosive materialism and atheism of modern scientific naturalism, and he promotes IDT to other conservative Republicans as the only way to win America's culture war. Last May he even sponsored a meeting in Washington for members of Congress, who were given a three-hour briefing on IDT. Now he expects to have some influence in the new presidential administration.

At the briefing, Nancy Pearcey quoted the lyrics of a song by the Bloodhound Gang -- "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel." This, she warned, is what we can expect if the materialism of the Darwinians persuades us that we are merely mammals, rather than beings elevated above other animals and created in the image of God. She urged the congressmen in her audience to remember that the U.S. legal system is grounded in the belief in a creator as the ultimate source of moral law. Darwinism, by undermining that belief, is morally and legally dangerous.

American culture has long, if somewhat tensely, maintained a balance among common-sense morality, democratic politics, scientific naturalism and biblical religion, but this kind of rhetoric can make the schisms in American society seem unbridgeable. It's also unwarranted.

Modern science isn't necessarily incompatible with the moral, religious and political traditions of America. Darwin himself believed there was a natural moral sense rooted in the desires of the human animal, and he laid out this biological theory of morality in his 1871 book "The Descent of Man." As intensely social animals, he argued, we need to cooperate with one another to succeed. Natural selection has favored those emotions -- such as love, guilt and anger -- that dispose us to cooperative relationships with relatives, friends and fellow group members. As intellectual animals, we generalize our social emotions into the rules of good conduct and then into moral principles. Our natural moral sense doesn't require religious belief, but it shouldn't surprise us that religious teachings tend to support those universal standards of conduct -- honoring parents, not stealing, refraining from unjustified killing and so on -- that sustain social life.

And while some theologians have dismissed Darwin's theory as atheistic, there's no necessary conflict between Darwinism and religion. Darwin often confessed that scientific research could not answer questions about the First Cause -- the origins of life and the universe -- and as a result left room for religious faith. Many thinkers have seen no contradiction between biblical theology and Darwinian evolution. God could have chosen to create everything in six days. Or he could have chosen to create a universe governed by natural laws in which life would evolve gradually over millions of years. God could also have chosen to allow a moral sense to evolve in human beings. Indeed, there is an old tradition in biblical theology that God implanted a natural moral sense into the animal world. Thomas Aquinas, for example, saw this in the instincts for self-preservation, sexual union, parental care and other social behaviors.

Instead of fighting a dishonest battle for a theory that has little empirical support, American conservatives should welcome the Darwinian idea of morality as rooted in our biology. The idea vindicates the belief held by America's founding fathers that there is a fundamental harmony between scientific knowledge and religious faith. After all, when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he seemed to anticipate this very crisis when, in arguing for the existence of the United States, he appealed to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."

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