Dissonance Dawning… Paisley, Part 8

Two Standing Questions

My friends, I come now to the turn in the story which will, no doubt, lead to a good deal of seat shifting among you. However, before rounding that bend, I hope to briefly lay to rest two standing questions that have been put to us.

First, I hope that I have, by this point, answered the question of forgetting Paisley. There has been no forgetting. Three years later, it can moisten my eyes at a moment’s contemplation. The preceding account was written on straight recall and burning tears, though I did review my hospital notes afterward for any slippage on detail.

Second, I hope to have answered those whose theology mandates that my departure from the Christian faith must mean that I never actually believed. I sometimes reflect that Paisley’s song serves as a marker of sorts: an expression of the earnest and heartfelt view of God, of faith, and of prayer that I once had. To those who vacantly suggest that I must not have really believed, I can do no better than to offer Paisley’s song.

If You are Earnest

Some of you have been very earnest in your questions regarding Paisley, and I feel in your tears an honest desire to understand how we could leave the faith after what happened with her. Here we come to the unavoidable reality; seat shifting will follow.

If you wish to have an honest answer, it will require that I address the collision of two seemingly unconnected subjects: (1) Paisley’s crisis and (2) the science of evolutionary theory.

In preface to this discussion, I would like to allay some possible apprehensions. I will not here be itemizing the evidences for evolutionary theory. I will also not undertake any evaluation of the Genesis text. My discussion will be strictly limited to those aspects pertinent to Paisley, how they catalyzed my long research, and why I abandoned our standard faith-based dismissals of evolution.

Paisley’s crisis ran a collision course with evolutionary theory (of which I had been blind). You must understand this full-frontal impact, if you are to understand us. To those who indeed are earnest in their concerns and questions, I would ask that you read Section 4, both this part and the one that will follow. I would understand if you choose to go no further.

Pebble One

Paisley was seventeen months old when my grapple with upending faith questions began. The onset of the landslide, as described in my Journey pages, regarded human origins and evolutionary development.

The initiating pebble was a now un-locatable article written by Tim Keller, though I had not the slightest idea that it would connect to Paisley in any way. Keller seemed to suggest that we needed to do a better job as Christians in addressing the evolution question. His position essentially stated we should take evolution more seriously and give better answers. My forehead wrinkled quizzically at this, since Keller is a high-visibility pastor in our conservative Presbyterian denomination. In a word: he just seemed to me like the wrong person to say such a thing.

For 35 years, I had uniformly rejected evolutionary theory as patently false, as unbiblical, and as reprehensible to human worth and dignity. I know that many of you agree with this position. Like many of you, I was from childhood a Genesis man. I had read leading creationist and intelligent design authors, and my criticism of evolutionary concepts had always been vocal and readily offered.

Keller’s article touched off a self-inventory. I asked myself – what did I actually know about the subject? It proved deflating to recognize in myself one of those cardinal sins that we researchers eschew. I had studiously avoided reading anything directly from the proponents of evolution. My life had brimmed with discussion a-plenty, but all information had originated from the anti-evolution camp. The creationists had explained creationism; the creationists had also explained evolution. This show-trial, in which a single lawyer played both the prosecutor and defense attorney, had produced an unsurprising verdict. It was a structural problem, a classic illustration of Proverbs 18:17:

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.

What if the other is never allowed to examine? One-sided knowledge is essentially no knowledge at all. This is a wisdom problem. A stupidity problem. I knew better.

What, you may ask, does this rabbit trail have to with Paisley? I have alluded to the labyrinth before, and this path too will wind back to her shortly.

A Single Book

Repentant and determined to do better, I hunted for a legitimate subject matter expert who was both pro-evolution and faith-friendly. Ironically, this asterisk on my quest illustrated the very problem – I would read from an evolution supporter, provided that he was the right sort. I now see this as a general pattern of how we, the religious, are prepared to interact with questions of fact. We establish a priori what facts we are willing to accept, and on what grounds, and from whom. I need not point out how short this attitude falls of a serious research mindset, but it was a start.

In any case, my lukewarm effort at outgrowing ignorance led to a book by Francisco Ayala, who presented the evidences for evolution in a faith-friendly manner. He did this with thoroughness and care, while steering well clear of the unbridled anti-religious salvos of Dawkins & Co. Ayala’s book changed my entire view. Or rather, it began the process of changing it.

Bluntly put, I have a scientific mind. I understand how to conduct investigations, how to weigh evidence, and what grounding is required to advance a theory. The problem is that I had never actually deployed my scientific mind to examine the case for evolution. I had no idea how much evidence they had amassed in support of evolutionary theory. I had no idea how uniformly biologists – including Christian biologists – supported evolution as true. In my own engineering research, I could only wish for such overwhelming data. Moreover, it became clear that the creationists and intelligent design authors had been playing fast and loose. What they omitted from their books was terrifying – nay, dishonest.

Thus, as an honest researcher, and as one who prizes fact and truth, I was confronted with a difficult problem. What if God actually had chosen to create in this way? What if God’s world, His creatures, and even my own body did give evidence of such development? What if? The haunt of those two little words had boomeranged back into view.

Yet none of this was actually the hard part.

Dead Stop

Just one quarter of the way through that book, my ship ran aground. Lurch-tossed from the deck, I found myself in frozen hover, arrested by an innocuous paragraph. Its prose was so benign and matter-of-fact that I suspect few would give it notice. Yet it flashed a certain constellation of words that had rattled me before:

When an individual receives an antibiotic that specifically kills the bacteria causing a disease—say, tuberculosis—the immense majority of the bacteria die, but one in several million may have a mutation that provides resistance to the antibiotic. These resistant bacteria will survive and multiply, and that antibiotic will no longer cure the disease. This is why modern medicine treats bacterial diseases with cocktails of antibiotics. If the incidence of a mutation conferring resistance for a given antibiotic is one in a million, the incidence of one bacterium carrying three mutations, each conferring resistance to one of three antibiotics, is one in a quintillion (one in a million million million); it is not likely, if not altogether impossible, for such bacteria to exist in any infected individual.

~ Ayala, Francisco. Darwin’s Gift: To Science and Religion. National Academies Press.

For you, these peppershaker keywords may flag nothing whatever, and that would be entirely normal. Yet the last time I had heard these words conjoined, Paisley lay under that dim hospital lamp, wired and tubed, and fighting for life. They had been uttered by Paisley’s infectious disease specialist as she described the treatment regimen that ultimately beat back the legion. My ship had run aground on the reef of that haunting hour.

I read the paragraph again. In the broader context, and in plain English, the author was stating that the antibiotic cocktail strategy employed by Paisley’s doctors was derived from evolutionary assumptions. Cocktails indeed: ampicillin, cefotaxime, vancomycin, etc. That terrible turn for the worse – the one that never came – had been preempted by the doctors in their treatment regimen. Turn for the worse was code-speak for evolutionary mutation. They triangulated a decimation of no-escape, which anticipated the evolutionary mutations of microorganisms, yet cutoff all escape routes. The doctors had transacted the war on her meningitis using a strategy. And it derived from evolutionary theory.

Ayala had already commanded my attention. Yet after this paragraph, be assured that I read very carefully indeed.

What if the good doctor Ayala was telling the truth? There was that haunting couplet of words again. With wrenching pressure, one way or the other, the question of evolutionary theory had ceased, for me and forever, to be academic.

General Who?

The scorched battle plains of Paisley’s crisis were hallowed ground. Yet now came a belated messenger, finally straggling back from the war, bearing a very credible after-action report. This communique disclosed that the good General Pasteur had not in fact acted alone – a certain General Darwin had also been a valorous strategist behind the battle victory. Picture, if you can, my revulsion and dissonance at such a suggestion.

A gnawing burden troubled my mind. I watched Paisley at play. Her vivacious personality. The light in her eyes. She was perfect. She was whole. I was inexpressibly thankful for her. I credited her survival to prayer and to advanced western medicine. And Darwin?

Yes, I had a problem.

~

[to be continued…]

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