In God and Darwin We Trust

[Thom Little]

By Dan Neil
Los Angeles Times
Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005


In Southern Patagonia, Charles Darwin is big medicine. I'm writing this from Puerto Natales, from the third floor of the Charles Darwin Hotel—every tin-roof town in southern Chile seems to have one. There are streets named after the British naturalist, and restaurants and schools and, of course, bars. Outside my window the sun is setting on the broken black teeth of Torres del Paine National Park. The low clouds catch and stumble as they race over the icy massifs. If you don't ponder Creation here you are as insensible as a stone.

It's a long way from the courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa., where in a month or so Judge John E. Jones III will render his verdict in the civil suit against the Dover Area School District—a fight over a four-paragraph statement read to biology students that seems to support "Intelligent Design," crediting nature's complexity to some supernatural power as opposed to the theories of random mutation and natural selection Darwin first conjured in Patagonia.

Poor old Darwin. Like an incorrigible drunk, he always seems to be in the dock. First it was the Oxford debates in 1860, then the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, and now Dover, Pa. He is forever being dragged before some school board or another (in November, Kansas became the fifth state to allow discussion of Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinism). To a sizable percentage of America, the mild-mannered beetle-collector from Shropshire is no more than a bearded blasphemer.

Here in Patagonia, however, Darwin is anything but God's enemy. Perhaps it's because Chile owns a piece of evolution's scientific history, or perhaps it's because the brand of Catholicism practiced here is both universal and unusually easygoing, but the country never joined the Darwinian debate.

"There is no conflict," says the town's mayor, Mario Margoni. "The Catholic Church fully accepts evolution. It's the mechanism of God's work. Creation comes when Homo sapiens accepts enlightenment and Man becomes a rational being."


http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-neil48nov27,0,5380083.story?coll=la-home-magazine

[lvx35]

1. I didn't know the catholic church believed that.

it kind of makes genesis a rich story, where eden represents man's animalistic state.