LifeSiteNews has alerted me to an op-ed piece authored by David P. Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, who wants to see scientists produce human/chimp hybrids in the near future. Why? He thinks it will silence people who believe in the sanctity of human life (such as John Wesley Smith) and annoy creationists like me.

Some geneticists have postulated that ancient humans and chimps interbred, and Barash argues this proves even further that humans are not distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, and therefore have no right to "dominate" the earth. He says:

Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism — as our ancient human and chimp ancestors appear to have done long ago — it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.

Barash seems to have a misunderstanding of sanctity-of-life principles.  We believe the "image of God" quality that makes humanity unique is a spiritual and perhaps mental one, rather than simply biological. Disgusting as it is, humans have been sexually involved with animals in the past (the Bible specifically condemns it), and the prospect of a hybrid is not far-fetched, though it would be morally wrong and wouldn't qualify under the "image of God" criteria.

However, Barash is not being irrational. He is consistent with his own worldview, an atheistic evolutionism that teaches all of life--indeed, some would say all of reality--is the freak offspring of blind chance. Barash has simply taken Neo-Darwinism to one of its natural conclusions.

From Barash's piece:

The latest tactic of creationists in the United States has been to accept "microevolutionary" events, such as drug resistance in bacteria, but to draw the line at the emergence of human beings from other, "lower" life forms, cloaking their religious agenda in a miasma of pseudoscience. It is a line that exists only in the minds of those who proclaim that the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.

Um, it's not the "latest tactic," folks. Creationists have believed that organisms can change for quite a long time now.

Meanwhile,even some Christian scientists are advocating the General Theory of Evolution, and criticising the Intelligent Design movement.  One such person is the recent author of The Language of God, Francis Collins (leader of the Human Genome Project), who at a recent conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation called the evidence for evolution "overwhelming," after performing hymns on a stage piano. A Washington post article published one week ago described Collins' position:

[Collins] tells fellow evangelicals that opposition to evolution -- whether based in the biblical literalism of creationists or "intelligent design" arguments -- undermines the credibility of faith. He finds the first line of thought "fundamentally flawed" and says the second builds upon gaps in evidence that scientists are likely to fill in.

Collins, who was once an "obnoxious atheist," began to reconsider his view of faith and God partly as a result of reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Two years of mind-wrestling later, Collins gave up his disbelief and invited Christ into his mind and heart.

He has not, however, given up his faith in evolution.   Again, from the WP article:

Collins writes that "it is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit," in which the dominant voices have belonged to narrow, anti-God materialists and believers who spurn orthodox science.

He says both approaches are "profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary."

What's ironic about this is that C.S. Lewis called evolutionism a "grand myth," and argued against its compatibility with Christianity in his essay Is Theology Poetry? If you are in doubt you can read his excerpt on evolution here. I reproduce the following quotes for convenience's sake.

I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate [the General Theory of Evolution].

. . . .  

The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher, corresponds to nothing in my own experience.

That grand myth [the General Theory of Evolution]which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought--laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory-in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it.

. . . .

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are embedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science.

        --C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?