Fish Fight
I've never been all that comfortable with the "Darwin Fish" that you'll see on some cars. Initially, my reaction was based on the fact that I found it disrespectful to mock an innocuous expression of someone else's religious convictions. I wouldn't appreciate it if I saw a bumpersticker that mocked my denomination. Also I'm pretty sure that a humorous image mocking the Star of David would not go over too well.
Now my discomfort is compounded by the plaques depicting a "Truth Fish" eating the "Darwin Fish". This ridiculous war of the fish is just feeding into the unhealthy antique belief that science (and particularly the theory of evolution) is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.
There are several problems with this diametric view of Christianity and science as far as I can see. First of all, Christianity should have more to do with the teaching and example of Jesus than with how the Earth and its inhabitants were created. Getting hung up on creationism entirely misses the point.
Second, is there not a distinction between scientific truth and religious or spiritual truth? Science seeks to tell us as accurately as it can given the evidence it can gather how things literally happened. This does not preclude one from reading Biblical history and examining the morals and lessons as from the mouth of God, if that is your inclination. Whatever science tells us cannot affect the spiritual truth of any religious text.
Third, when I strip away the unfortunate sexual politics from the story of The Fall, I find that it gives me an elegant and poignant first-hand account of our ancestors' evolution of self-consciousness. The time when Adam and Eve live in God's garden, immortal and without shame, is the time before our ancestors were aware of their own mortality or morality. They were cognitively still more animal than human, without fear of death and without moral and societal dillemas. But with the evolution of their cognitive abilities--the fruit of the tree of knowledge--came also a self-awareness in the human individual that he or she would know pain and would one day die. This is the loss of immortality associated with the fruit of the tree. Also with this more highly developed brain came the birth of human society, and thus more complex moral dillemas for which animal instinct was no longer able to account. Good bye Garden, hello shame and sorrow and self-doubt and loss.
Unfortunately, I fear that the "Darwin Fish" only strengthen the literal creationists in our society at large. They reinforce from the other end the creationist argument that science and faith are incompatible. Maybe if we saw some cars sporting both fish side by side, we'd know that our society was finding a higher ground, where people weren't made to feel they had to choose between an anti-religious modernity and an anti-modern religion.
2:13:42 PM 
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