Theistic evolution

Dad's calling himself a "theistic evolutionist" was comparatively quite enlightened, none of his peers seemed to know what it meant or that it was an improvement on the old-time fundamentalist Know Nothing religion. He said he got the idea from a Baptist minister who probably didn't cotton to it himself, but Dad ran with it as an acceptable reconciliation of the handed-down faith of his fathers and the medical science he learned in vet school. His sense of loyalty to forebears and gratitude specifically to his good-hearted pious midwestern mother took atheism and agnosticism off the table for him, though he was still a free-thinker by the standards of that time and place.

I remember him plucking Ken Miller's book Finding Darwin's God from my shelf once and musing that he didn't understand why there was any controversy at all on this topic, among the devout: of course religion and science are compatible, of course a God should be expected to work His will through the laws and processes of a rationally ordered nature. "Intelligent Design" does not have to descend to anti-intellectualist Young Earth Creationist nonsense, though as a matter of fact it has tended to do just that in the debates of recent years, in the hands of rigid partisan pious zealots.

There's plenty of intolerant fire coming fron the other camp too, among evolutionists who insist that science moots religion entirely, and do not welcome any alliance with the likes of Miller. P.Z. Myers is one of those.

I understand where they're all coming from. There really should be room in a corner of the tent for at least those theists who aspire to scientific respectability even if their synthesizing project is doomed to fail. You don't have to agree with them, endorse their faith, or even respect it, P.Z. But you should respect them. A fundamental respect for the humanity of our fellow human beings should not depend on their falling in lock-step with our respective worldviews. I learned that from my Dad.

John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.