The state of these two great thinkers’ reputations today reveals a great deal about 21^st-century America.  Darwin’s ideas provide the framework for all of biology; and yet polls tell us that almost half of all Americans do not “believe” in evolution.  Meanwhile, Buddha is radically misunderstood, popularly associated with passivity, inscrutable mysticism, and otherworldly transcendence, when in fact he preached the clear-eyed understanding of the world as it is.  

These attitudes reflect the deep stresses at work in modern life, thwarting the integration of our intellectual and moral lives.  Bombarded with a stupefying barrage of contradictory messages, each delivered by seemingly authoritative media, it is all too easy to be overwhelmed.  Some of us opt for narrow dogmatic certainty, others try to juggle contradictory beliefs, and many take refuge in the seductive arms of ignorance. That most admirable product of creation – the curious, skeptical, and creative human being – is threatened from all sides.

It seems to me that many of our modern discontents reflect the barriers that we have built between scientific and spiritual sources of truth.  As a scientist, I find Darwin’s principles of evolution critical to understanding the biological world, from the layers of fossils in the earth to the genetics of disease.  But that does not in any way rule out a divine – or simply unknowable – cause at the beginning of all things. There is no reason why respect for scientific facts cannot coexist with spiritual values. 

Darwin understood that very well.  His last words in The Origin of Species are these, words not of scientific argumentation, but of wonder and benediction:  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Or, to distill the truth of Buddha and Darwin into a single image, from the Zen:

“The whole universe is an ocean of dazzling light, and on it dance the waves of life and death.” 

Our bodies, our lives, and our planet dance forever on these unresting waves. There are no rocks to cling to.

What a wonderful world.