Evolution: A great book, with only one misstep

I’m reading through this book with Youngest Boy. It’s “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” by Daniel Loxton. It’s really good. It has a good overview of evolutionary theory, with the evidence.

But there is one misstep, and it’s toward the end of the book.

If you can’t read that scan, here’s the text.

This is a question people often ask when wondering about evolution. They want to connect the discoveries of science to their religious understanding.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something science can help with. Individual scientists may have personal opinions about religious matters, but science as a whole has nothing to say about religion.

Science is our most reliable method for sorting out how the natural world functions, but it can’t tell what those discoveries mean in a spiritual sense. Your family, friends and community leaders are the best people to ask about religious questions.

I think this answer was trying to do two things: tell why science is good, and allow for the validity of religion. Those are probably good goals for a book like this, since they’re aiming for a broad audience, and the book wasn’t intended to be an atheist polemic. I can even see the benefit in not antagonising religious readers.

But I also think it’s important for scientists to tell the truth, and this answer sidesteps that responsibility. Here’s what’s wrong.

• It says that science can’t deal with supernatural claims, only natural ones. This is untrue. While the scientific method, with its emphasis on real-world evidence, can’t categorically disprove supernatural claims, it does tell us what to do when such a claim comes along: remain skeptical of it until its proponents provide real-world evidence in favour of the claim.
• It says that religious claims about creation are essentially supernatural. But creationist claims really involve the natural world, and can therefore be evaluated by science just like any other claim.
• It handballs the responsibility for answering questions over to family, friends, and community leaders — people who may be no better than anyone else at evaluating truth claims, or who may have an interest in promoting an unscientific view. Religious leaders are the ones who ought to be promoting religion, of course — that’s their job — but is that where we want to send young people for information about how evolution and religion interact?

I think the book should have said something like this:

Some religious people claim that evolution didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible. But according to the evidence we have, evolution is real, and it’s happening all around us.

Many religious people do accept evolution. They don’t see a conflict between evolution and their religion, or they see evolution as part of creation.

Whether you believe in a religion or not, you can use science to figure out how our amazing world operates.

This answer re-asserts the reality of evolution and the primacy of science, but it takes it easy on the conflict between religion and science. It allows that people have their own opinions, and is written not to be offensive.

I still think the book is really good. It’s interesting, has beautiful illustrations, and lays out the basics of evolutionary theory in a way young people can grasp. Even the religion question can lead to an interesting discussion.

The author responds to the criticism here.