George Washington Carver: A Constructive Form of Faith

When we think of Christians in science, we automatically think of the creationists and the Intelligent Design people whose major work is to destroy some of the most amazingly successful aspects of modern science, specifically evolution. But this is not the kind of faith that George Washington Carver had. In the previous essay, I explored ideas about Carver’s theistic way of doing science. In this essay, I want to look a little more closely at his religious faith.

Carver not only conducted botanical and chemical research, and taught classes, at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but for decades he also taught a very popular Bible study class. He was a very devout Christian but was not a fundamentalist. When Mahatma Gandhi corresponded with him, he did not denounce Gandhi’s non-Christian religious beliefs.

On one occasion, typical of many others, Carver wrote,

We make our own hell or heaven. We bring upon ourselves little moments of hell when we think and act a little meanly toward a fellow student or a fellow American, black or white. When our thoughts—which bring actions—are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be.

Carver had no children of his own and was never known to have had any interest in women. Some people have claimed that Carver was gay. According to one website, “Carver never married or expressed interest in dating women, and rumors circulated about his sexuality at Tuskegee Institute while he was an employee. In particular, his enjoyment of giving “therapeutic” peanut oil massages to and engaging in horseplay with handsome men was seen as unusual. Late in his career, Carver established a life and research partnership with another male scientist, Austin Wingate Curtis, Jr. The two men cohabitated from 1934 until Carver’s death in 1943. Carver and Curtis kept details of their lives discreet, and as such historians know little about how these men understood their relationship. Nonetheless, the fact that Carver willed his assets to Curtis testifies to the significance of their relationship.” This is not proof one way or the other about Carver’s orientation. We simply do not know.

But Carver did frequently refer to his students as his children, and to them he addressed his “eight cardinal virtues”:

Be clean both inside and outside.

Who neither looks up to the rich or down on the poor.

Who loses, if need be, without squealing.

Who wins without bragging.

Who is always considerate of women, children, and old people.

Who is too brave to lie.

Who is too generous to cheat.

Who takes his share of the world and lets other people have theirs.

This is the kind of religion that we can all admire. Even in this way, what is there to not admire about George Washington Carver?

Feeling Small

Most people want to go to places that make them feel big, places where they can experience the thrill of using technological enhancements of their power (e.g. motorboats or ORVs) or the feeding of their self-esteem (meditative retreats). But whenever I am in California in the summer, I make a pilgrimage to a place that makes me feel small: Sequoia National Park. That is what I did during my recent trip, which is described in greater detail on my evolution blog. This essay appears on that blog also.

On June 12, I hiked part of the High Sierra Trail. Just eleven miles of it. What I mainly wanted to see was the High Sierra mountains, the easternmost range of the complex of mountains known as the Sierra Nevada. The tallest mountain in the lower 48, Mt. Whitney, is easily visible from this trail. I hiked at about 7,500 feet elevation, watching the 14,000 foot Mt. Whitney flanked by peaks almost as tall. It was not just the Sierras that made me feel small. It was the thought of the massive mountain-building that created them in the last few dozen million years. The earth, utterly still most of the time, can shudder into life and raise mountains, a few inches or feet at a time. Not only I but my life span seemed insignificant. When I reached Mehrten Creek, I took off my boots and soaked my feet in bubbling cool water in a little pool that overlooked Mineral King, the high mountains to the south. It was like the best resort one could imagine, but I enjoyed it all the more for having undertaken a difficult hike to get to it.

On June 13, resting up from the hike, I wandered around the giant sequoias of Crescent Meadow and the vicinity of the General Sherman tree. Giant sequoia trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) begin their lives as little seedlings after a fire, and they grow somewhat rapidly. After just a few hundred years, they have reached their full height, about 350 feet, seven times as tall as the tallest trees in the part of Oklahoma where I live. Then they spend the next 1,500 years filling out their trunks. The largest sequoias, such as General Sherman (a tree named after a Civil War general famous for cutting down lots of trees), have trunks that are almost as thick three hundred feet above the ground as they are at ground level. The Sherman tree has 52,000 cubic feet of timber inside its trunk. These trees can also make a reflective soul feel very small and very young. This fact was lost on most of the visitors, such as the loud-mouthed biker who complained loudly about having to walk a half mile to see the tree, and then hardly looked at it, instead being interested only in having his photograph taken kissing his bikeress at the base of the tree. To him, everything around him was just backdrop to his own life. I had come for a different purpose.

I wanted to feel awe, but was usually distracted by mild pain or random thoughts. I forced myself to be contemplative. Wisdom came to me from my subconscious mind once I had permitted it. Goodness and altruism are like sequoia trees. When an opportunity for goodness becomes available, we have to germinate the altruism and grow it as fast as possible before evil fills the space. But having done so, the goodness needs to persist and grow for as close to forever as we can make it. I realize this is not a scientific insight, but a scientist is only one of the things I am.

Jesus, who was a quiet observer of nature (unlike many of his modern followers), said (according to oral tradition), “Consider the lilies of the field, that grow today but tomorrow wither away in the heat. Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” The Middle East, like California, has lots of spring wildflowers, which dry up and shed their seeds in summer. Even a single one of these flowers is more beautiful than anything that human industry can produce—as true today as in Jesus’ day. Even one. All around Sequoia Park, especially on granite outcrops, there were hundreds of thousands of Linanthus montanus plants, a type of phlox that is very small but produces perhaps the most beautiful flower in the world. There were more of them, and were more beautiful, than any human or any pollinator could appreciate. This experience humbled me as much as did the mountains and the trees.

People wanted to know if I had a good time in Sequoia Park. How do you answer a question like that? I didn’t go there to have a good time. I went as a pilgrimage to experience the vastness and the beauty of nature.