Michael Dowd, the self-proclaimed "evangelist of evolution," wants religious people to discard their beliefs while keeping their religious language, which he would like to redefine to refer to concepts from the scientific theory of evolution and speculations of evolutionary psychology.

This is a pretty big horse pill to swallow. Dowd knows this, so he markets his ideas with his Seven Reasons for the Gospel of Evolution. And here they are, seven reasons Dowd thinks people of faith should come around to his way of thinking:

1. The gospel of evolution would give us a common creation myth. Since Christians and Jews already share a common creation myth, I assume Dowd must mean to use the gospel of evolution for a sort of universal ecumenism, in which all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity among them — acknowledge one and only one story of origins: naturalistic evolution.
   
2. It validates both scientific and religious ways of speaking. Of course, religious ways of speaking are already "validated" in the religious community. Dowd must mean therefore that religious ways of speaking will be validated among the atheistic community. Indeed, throughout his interviews, Dowd comes across as desperate for the approval of atheists.
   
3. It is a key to understanding and alleviating suffering, which comes from not living "integrously" with the flow of evolution. History, with its lessons on the eugenics movement and on Nazi genocide, teaches a far different lesson on what happens when humans try to base their ethics on the theory of evolution.
   
4. Religious language can be interpreted in a way that's universally true. By this, Dowd means it can be interpreted naturalistically. He says, "I don't have to wait to die to go to a place called heaven. When I'm in a place, integrity, love, compassion, generosity, care, consideration, I'm in heaven now, and so are you. It's true for everybody." But obviously, it's not true for those whose earthly lives are full of suffering, whether from loneliness, physical or mental illness, drug addiction, or other causes of grief. It seems cruel of Dowd to be so eager to steal the hope of a happy afterlife from people who are far from experiencing "heaven" on earth.
   
5. Only by knowing how we really got here and the trajectory we're on can we respond to problems like terrorism without making things worse. "It is impossible to know how to move into a healthy sustainable future" without understanding evolution, says Dowd. I agree that understanding evolution is important, but there is no reason religious beliefs should be discarded at the same time.
   
6. It unmasks the powers of manipulations. "We are so easily led around like a nose-ring (sic)." Here I assume Dowd is giving in to the frequent atheistic criticism of religion, that organized religion exists to manipulate the masses. Yet people of faith like myself believe we are more free in many ways than are people without faith.
   
7. "It gives us the tools for understanding how to have a great life and thriving relationships no matter what hand life deals us." That's funny; my Catholic faith also gives me those tools, and much more explicitly. I imagine that the Gospel of Religion has no sacraments, for example.

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

Evangelist of evolution Michael Dowd is not content to promote a worldview devoid of the supernatural using the language of atheism. His mission is to appropriate religious language and redefine it.

He calls the words related to faith — words like reverence and holiness, and theological terms like living in Christ — "night language," apparently because they obscure what sees as the truth. (His truth is that there is no supernatural order; he even prefers the term "unnatural" to "supernatural.") The goal, which he states explicitly, is to redefine "night language" in purely secular terms.

Original sin

In one of the two Point of Inquiry interviews, Dowd explains how and why he redefines one particular theological term, original sin. (The orthodox Christian definition of original sin is that first human sin committed by Adam and Eve. This sin is inherited by all humans, and its effects include separation from God, which is healed at baptism, and a "fallen nature" or tendency toward sin, also known as concupiscence.) Dowd does not believe in a spiritual world and thus not in a universal spiritual wound; he would like to redefine original sin to be merely an artifact of human evolution.

In the interview, Dowd seems at times desperate to gain the atheist host's approval. He brags about his secular "street cred," obtained when he and his wife had a polyamorous relationship with another woman. Being disfellowshipped from the United Church of Christ (one of the most liberal Protestant denominations) was not enough for him to change his ways, but he is now in a strictly monogamous relationship because (I'm not making this up) he is afraid of papparazzi.

So "living integrously" for Dowd does not require monogamy, but it does seem to require honesty; in his worldview, adultery is only wrong if your spouse disapproves.

This is the evolution evangelist's explanation of original sin:

When a person's social status changes dramatically for the better, such as upon being promoted or elected into office, Dowd says one experiences a boost in testosterone. (I'll take his word for it.) A high level of testosterone leads to a preoccupation with sex. He says that an orthodox Christian's response to this experience is to assume that "sex on the brain" means that it is God's will for him to commit adultery. It would be a sorry understatement to call this statement disingenuous.

Recognizing that a preoccupation with sex in this situation is just a natural response related to human evolution, rather than a result of a spiritual fall, gives a person the "tools" to live "integrously" by not acting on those urges, while a spiritual view of original sin does not do so, says Dowd.

It is true that a purely spiritual view of original sin does not by itself give one all the "tools" they need to avoid actual sin. Catholics and most Protestants agree that people cannot avoid sin entirely by relying on themselves. God's grace always a necessary weapon in the war against concupiscence.

Still, there is no denying that insight into one's psyche helps one make good choices. But it is not necessary at all to believe in human evolution in order to understand how hormones affect thinking. Psychobiology is not the same as evolution; this example would be better suited to a "gospel of psychiatry" rather than a "gospel of evolution."


Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

The recent post about this blog's position on evolution has attracted a lot of attention. Perhaps I should have added that I believe evolution is "only a theory" in the sense that it is nothing more than an idea of secular science and is not at all a sacred thing. I say this to make a contrast with the position of Michael Dowd, a self-described "evangelist of the gospel of evolution."

Dowd, previously a Catholic and then a fundamentalist Protestant, is now the inventor of "evolutionary theology" and the author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. He was recently interviewed in two parts on the secular humanist radio program "Point of Inquiry," where he explained his naturalized religion.

There is a lot to Dowd's message, parts of which will be addressed in future posts. But his ideas all boil down to one central thesis: God is not a supernatural, personal being, but a personification of reality. In other words, God is the "proper name" we give to all of nature. His term "Religion 2.0" seems to refer to a hybridization between pantheism and the philosophy of Spinoza, both descendants of Eastern philosophy.

Though he calls it a "personification," Dowd's thesis about religious thought actually makes God into a non-person. In other words, God's personhood is merely symbolic.

Dowd explicitly rejects all private revelation (what Catholics would call "the deposit of faith") in favor of the revelation uncovered by science. He says that scientific facts are "God's native language." This idea echoes the beliefs of the Deists, who accepted "natural theology" but rejected the revealed theology that is central to the claims of Christianity. Interestingly, in the radio interviews at least, he makes no attempt to refute the idea that revelation contains truth, but merely denounces it.

The Catholic Church holds that while doctrine can develop in the same way a flower unfolds, its core content never changes. The original deposit of faith was completed with the writing of the books now included in the Bible. The Church is so careful on this point that she uses a dead language as the official tongue of faith, lest the natural evolution of living languages distort the unchanging contents of revelation.

Nature likewise never changes (except, the Christian would maintain, through the rare interventions of God known as miracles), but our understanding and description of nature — in other words, science — changes frequently and often dramatically. For example, consider how the uncertainties of quantum mechanics (a model which even has a postulate called the Uncertainty Principle) compare with the clockwork universe of Newton. Even the theory of evolution, the scientific nucleus of Dowd's philosophy, may in principle be one day replaced or drastically modified as the central unifying theory of biology.

And much of Dowd's message draws not on the overall theory of evolution, which is a very strong model with overwhelming scientific consensus, but on the much more speculative field known as evolutionary psychology. To derive our behavioral "integrity," as Dowd recommends, from such a controversial discipline is to build our morals on a foundation of sand.

I subscribe instead to the Cartesian (and fully Catholic-compatible) view that science, as the study of nature, is subordinate to supernatural truth. By removing the supernatural from reality and calling the remnants "God," Dowd has made himself into an evangelist of nonsense. A commenter on the Point of Inquiry website put it well with these insightful remarks: "If the universe is god is the metaphor, then doesn’t god lose all meaning? ... An impersonal and unknowable god seems like no god at all, at least from a teleological point of view."

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion