God in Proof by Nathan Schneider

Author:Nathan Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520269071
Publisher: University of California Press

During that trip I stopped for a couple of days at Jordan’s Dana Nature Preserve, a stretch of desert mountains and valleys full of rare creatures. There was a silence there so total that it was loud, as if Pythagoras’s blaring harmony of the spheres were somehow seeping through. The manager of the campsite, Abu Ahmed, was an old man who said he was illiterate. I couldn’t help asking him about evolution one night over supper; I wanted to compare what he would say with the experts. At first, when he finally understood what I was talking about through the language barrier, his answer was blunt: No, Islam doesn’t allow it. He pointed at the scene behind us, outside the tent. There were birds soaring, cypress trees casting long shadows across the ground, and, surely not far away, a family of ibex making its way around a sheer cliff. God created nature to serve people, he said, and people have to care for it in turn. Everything is a balance, and atop it human beings were made by the hand of God—no monkeys necessary.

That was enough to get me thinking. Was it true that Harun Yahya spoke for Muslims more than I had been led to believe? But soon it became clear that what I had said had gotten Abu Ahmed thinking too.

The next day at breakfast he came to me and asked why, if evolution is true, monkeys don’t turn into people all the time. It would take millions of years, I said, so we shouldn’t expect to see it happening in front of us. To explain the idea of common ancestry I drew an evolutionary tree. It showed how we don’t really come from the monkeys and apes alive today but that all of us descended from earlier species long ago that are now extinct. I said that many people think God could have created us through an evolutionary process, and Abu Ahmed lit up. He liked that. More to think about, he told me, and left me to my hard-boiled egg.

Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood to press him on it. After a while in a place like the preserve, away from concrete landscapes, looming spires, and charlatan preachers, heavy questions start to shed their weight. The grandeur is simply there. It’s just a place, with beauty and sustenance and dangers. The transcendentalists knew this well as they, a century and a half ago, taught Americans how to think in the wilderness. Their fellow traveler Walt Whitman saw fit to write:

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God.

For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God.30

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