More from Lewontin's Essay

This excerpt is directly from the Richard Lewontin essay in NY Review of Books. Reading it makes my heart sink in sadness for the world.


"How then are we to explain the continued strength of the campaign against evolution? We can do no better than to listen to the Reverend Ron Carlson, a popular preacher, lecturer, and author. He presents to his audience two stories and asks them repeatedly whether it matters which one is true.

In the secular (biological) story,

you are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system... in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You came from nothing and are going nowhere.

By contrast, the Christian view is that

you are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation.... Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind.... Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that...He gave the life of His only Son that you might spend eternity with Him.

Lewontin continues:

"What is at issue here is whether the experience of one's family, social, and working life, with its share of angst, pain, fatigue, and failure, can provide meaning in the absence of a belief in an ordained higher purpose. The continued appeal of a story of a divine creation of human life is that it provides, for those for whom the ordinary experience of living does not, a seductive relief from what Eric Fromm called the Anxiety of Meaninglessness. The rest is commentary."