You're protective of Simon Conway Morris, who's a pretty lonely example: a prominent evolutionary biologist and a Christian believer. You don't feel that he's required to perform a set of difficult intellectual gymnastics?

I don't think so, really. If I were to spend another two or three years on this book, I would have done a much bigger survey, to get some notion of how many active evolutionists are practicing Christians, or at least sympathetic. At one level Conway Morris is a lovely example for somebody like me -- he's a well-respected evolutionist and a very committed Christian. So you're damn right I'm protective! To a certain extent he's, not an oddball, but an exception. I go on to people like Holmes Rolston, who explicitly want to reject or modify Darwinism [in the interest of belief]. I don't see that Conway Morris wants to do that.

Some of the attempts to wage peace between evolutionary biology and religion are a little problematic. Stephen Jay Gould's famous quote about science and religion being "non-overlapping magisteria" sounds nice. But doesn't he really mean: "Our magisterium is the truth, and yours is superstitious crap"?

Oh, he does. I don't think there's any question about that. I like a lot of Gould's writing even when I don't agree with him. He starts out saying, "Twin magisteria, we can both go our own ways." But by the time he starts talking about religion, virtually all the things religious people hold dear go out the window. Now, you may think they should. But don't give me any codswallop about twin magisteria then. If you say, "Well, I'm going to let religion have what it wants. But by the way, no Resurrection, no Incarnation, none of this nonsense about life after death." If I were a religious person, I'd have to say thanks but no thanks.

"The Evolution-Creation Struggle"

By Michael Ruse

Harvard University Press

336 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

There's a creationist argument you address briefly that I find interesting: the idea that the Bible -- and the entire Christian faith -- starts to come unglued if you don't read Genesis literally. You've got no Adam and Eve, no Eden, no Flood. You can't say there was no death and suffering before the Fall if the Fall was mythical and we had zillions of years of dinosaurs and insects. When Jesus refers to Noah and Moses, he's just recycling myth; it all becomes an interesting parable to be read however you like. What happens to the divinity of Christ, or the Resurrection, or any of it? They have a point, don't they?

They do and they don't. Fundamentalists themselves don't read the Bible literally. Jesus has a whole pile of stuff about turning the other cheek -- Quakers read that part literally, but George Bush doesn't. What about when Jesus says, "Leave your father and your mother and your wife and follow me"? A sophisticated biblical scholar is going to say that Jesus was living in an apocalyptic age. Jesus thought that the end was coming. This does not deny that Jesus was God, but the point is that Jesus was man at the same time. Being man means being limited, and Jesus shows his humanity in the fact that he was limited.

We all interpret the Bible. By the time we get to Revelation -- every fundamentalist spends time deciding, is the Antichrist the pope, or is it Saddam Hussein? Is the Whore of Babylon the Catholic Church? They're all in this business. Do they actually mean that she's a female who gets shagged on a regular basis who lives in Babylon? No, they don't. You cannot read the Bible literally, or at least nobody ever does.

As you note, the Catholic Church has done an uneasy dance with evolution over the years. Intellectuals have embraced it, popes have mostly avoided it. John Paul II came awfully close to endorsing it a few years ago, and now Benedict XVI seems to be backing away or hedging his bets.

Look, the previous pope had been a professor at the University of Krakow. Who was the most famous professor at Krakow, before John Paul II? None other than Nicolas Copernicus. There's a huge paper trail on this; the pope was extremely proud of Polish culture in general and Copernicus in particular. He had a very strong vested interest in forward-looking science. So the fact that John Paul II was friendly toward evolution came as no surprise to me. He was adamant that when it came to human souls, that required a miracle. But he went to his grave without a worry that those things were compatible.

I think the new chap does not have the same sympathy toward science. Whether this is bound up with the social context, especially in America, I don't know. I'm putting together a hypothesis here. The current pope is much more sensitive to the American divide; he sees this battle being waged and he sees that conservative Catholics have aligned themselves with conservative evangelicals over the abortion issue and homosexuality. To what extent he believes that by endorsing an I.D. position, he's coming to their aid, I don't know. But it's a reasonable hypothesis.

So what has become of the Augustinian tradition within Christianity, which would be perfectly happy to accept evolution, geology, the Big Bang, the laws of physics, whatever science has got? You know, God works in mysterious ways, the Bible is a human document subject to interpretation, and so on. Is that gone?

In the great Catholic universities of the world -- and I'd include Notre Dame and Fordham in the United States -- most of the theologians would be fairly comfortable with a position like that. I've never seen Cardinal Avery Dulles [the leading American Catholic theologian] write on that, but he's very sympathetic to John Henry Newman [who rejected fundamentalism and saw little or no conflict between evolution and the church's teachings]. You may see some Thomists as well as Augustinians, you may see some wrestling with the question of natural theology, but most of them would feel fairly comfortable about evolution. But in America at the moment, with this bastardized right-wing evangelical Catholicism, I don't see a hell of a lot of deep thinking going on.

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