Why Science Cannot be a Substitute for God (or can it?)

The Case for Unifying Science and Religion (Part Four)

The above photo is Cassandra Extavour, a trailblazing Canadian geneticist, researcher of evolutionary biology, and professor of molecular and cell biology. She was the first Black woman to be tenured in the biological sciences at Harvard. In 2021 she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and was named the Timken Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard.

Cassandra Extavour is a remarkably unique human being. She has roots in Trinidad, grew up in Canada, and worked three jobs, including McDonald’s, to pay for her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. She attended graduate school in Spain where she became the first woman in the research lab, overcoming racism and sexism to pursue her interests in science. After graduating with a PhD in Genetics, she moved to Greece for her post-doctorate training, took a professorship at Harvard, and continues to publish research and has become a leader in the field of evolutionary genetics.

Cassandra was the first Black, queer woman throughout her educational journey. She is a distinguished Harvard professor in evolutionary biology, and yet she is also a classically trained soprano who performs with the Boston Landmarks Orchestra and the Handel and Haydn Society. Oh yeah, and she’s quite the pastry chef.

I mention Cassandra Extavour because she seems to break the mold of how people typically think of evolutionary scientists. Despite my admiration for both Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, you’d think from the prominence of their pictures that the field of evolutionary biology is mostly angry white Western men. But it’s not true. Some of them are black, queer, Trinidadian women.

My reason for bringing this up is because I’m wanting in this article to cast Darwinian evolution in a new light that perhaps you’ve never considered before, particularly if you’re someone who has been influenced by religion. I’m hoping this piece helps break the mold of conventional thinking about the meaning of evolution. Just putting the words “meaning” and “evolution” together might be unfamiliar to some people who don’t equate evolutionary biology with matters of existential import.

Let me quickly dispel the most extreme religious misinformation about evolution:

• Charles Darwin is not a Satanist who aimed to corrupt the hearts and minds of innocent children with an evil theory about the origins of life.

• The theory of evolution was not the result of a team of evolutionary biologists who met at Cambridge University in the 1850’s, hell-bent on concocting any explanation of the universe that finally killed off God.

• The implications of Darwinian evolution is not a random, indifferent and meaningless existence, consisting of nothing more than particles, chemicals and mechanistic processes, forcing us toward the heat death of the universe.

• The evolution of our species Homo sapiens does not mean that we are nothing more than apes who became a little smarter than digging up termites for food or being caged in zoos. (Although watching all the Planet of the Apes films got me wondering.)

Maybe I had a little too much fun with that, but I think you get the point. Evolution is not the antithesis of God, despite Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead”, induced by Darwin’s findings published in On the Origin of Species. I don’t disagree with Nietzsche, I just think his definition of “God” (Christian theism) doesn’t account for other legitimate views of “God” or makes room for transcendence in the natural sciences.