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There remains one basic, unbridgeable divergence between religious doctrine and Darwinism: according to Genesis, nature is in essence benign. In the beginning, there were no thorns, and snakes spent their time not biting people but chatting with them. Only when man fell to temptation did the natural world receive a coating of evil. But according to Darwinism, the evil in nature lies at its very roots, instilled by its creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection is chronic competition untrammeled by moral rules. Heedless selfishness and wanton predation are traits likely to endure. If these things are sins, then the roots of sin lie at the origin--not just of humankind but of life.
Yet this dark, Darwinian view of nature has its saving grace. True, it doesn't let us imagine some idyllic time when nature was benign and the human heart pristine--a time when, as Augustine believed, human flesh had not yet been corrupted by raw desire and self-absorption. On the contrary, our distant evolutionary past was a time when desire was even rawer than now, and self-absorption less nuanced.
Still, there's something hopeful about a hideous past. Though our great intelligence and our elaborate "moral" sentiments were created solely for the purpose of genetic proliferation and not for true edification, they now interact in strange and unpredicted ways, and the occasional burst of moral progress breaks through. People like Jesus and Buddha come along and say radical things that somehow stick in the world's consciousness. And the most animal of institutions--such as slavery--do seem slowly to die out. Who knows where this could lead? Personally, I'd rather see Eden on the horizon--however dimly and elusively--than in the rearview mirror.