Weak knowledge of Christianity keeps more people away from the Church than strong arguments against it do. In particular, misconceptions about evolution lead to many people — especially young men keen to harmonise faith and reason — either losing their faith or never finding it. The crisis of masculinity in society at large is a reflection of the crisis of masculinity within the Church, and weak catechesis is a symptom of it.
This is the article I wish I’d read on the topic when I was in my late teens or early twenties. It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble, so I hope it will do that for someone else. It might, God willing, even save a soul or two. No, I am not a scientist, but holding that against me would be what’s called the genetic fallacy in logic — the confusion of the origin of a belief with its truth or falsity. For example, I am not a mathematician either, but I can still tell you 1+1=2. And in fact any scientists claiming evolution disproves God aren’t doing science at all but philosophy instead. Badly.
The inescapability of metaphysics
What most people think of as science today is actually scientism, not science. It’s the belief that science is the only field interested in truth and in which beliefs can be rationally assessed — man’s only way of knowing truth. But of course that is self-refuting because it can’t be scientifically proven. It's not a statement of science or the result of a scientific experiment but rather a philosophical statement about science. You can't use science to justify science.
My reading of Nietzsche helped me to see this. 'There is no such thing,’ he wrote, ‘as science "without any presuppositions"...a philosophy, a "faith", must always be there first.’ The F word. Scientists don’t like it, but they can’t avoid it. There are at least seven presuppositions of science that science itself can’t validate:
The senses are reliable
The mind is rational
The universe is rational
The uniformity of nature to justify induction
The laws of logic
The existence of numbers
The existence of truth
Without these, science is impossible. As Nietzsche put it, 'a metaphysical faith...underlies our faith in science.’ By pretending to do without metaphysics, the scientist simply ends up doing metaphysics anyway. It’s inescapable.
The Evolution Delusion
Apart from Nietzsche, Dawkins was another reason why I saw through scientism. He summarises what he calls “the central argument” of The God Delusion like this:
1) One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2) The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3) The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4) The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5) We don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6) We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
This kind of thing makes edgy 15-year-olds lose their faith. In their pride and wisdom, those teenagers then never bother to read anything more about religion. They’ve got it all figured out. And that’s why they retain a 15-year-old’s understanding of religion for the rest of their lives. “Evolution did it” and “if God is real, why do bad things happen?” are the full extent of most people’s arguments against Christianity.
But of course the fundamental challenge to the human intellect is actually why anything exists at all. And then there’s Dawkins’s embarrassing misconception that God is a complex entity like a butterfly or hippo — just one more being among beings in need of explanation rather than, as the Church teaches, Being Itself, totally simple. He, too, probably “figured out” Christianity was wrong as a teenager then never went beyond a teenager’s misunderstandings of it.
What the Church actually teaches about evolution
Fundamentally, though, evolution is in principle irrelevant. And Dawkins doesn’t understand that either. The Catholic Church has never expressed disapproval of the theory of evolution. Pope Pius XII in 1950, in Humani Generis, said that biological evolution, including the evolution of the man’s body from the bodies of lower organisms, was as a scientific hypothesis not contrary to Catholic teaching. Pope John Paul II even said evolution is now more than merely a hypothesis.
Indeed, some of the early Church Fathers suggested God had endowed creation with ‘seminal causes’ — the ability to evolve. According to them, as Thomas Walshe explains in The Principles of Catholic Apologetics, ‘the potentiality of the matter to develop was absolutely God-given’ and ‘the soul created by God was infused when suitable development on the physical side was reached.’ (p.xvi)
In other words, evolution doesn’t disprove God but may in fact actually point to Him. The question becomes not only why the bird’s wing exists but why a universe capable of producing it exists.
Did the universe itself evolve? Clearly not. That is absurd. There was nothing for it have evolved from or any time for it to have evolved in. Thus ‘the believer in evolution is bound to postulate a beginning. Evolution without a beginning is as self-contradictory as a square circle,’ Nicholas Corte writes in The Origin of Man, p.130. Furthermore, a natural process is governed by natural laws, so the idea that the laws of nature evolved is also absurd. A law can evolve only in a process governed by another law. And so on and so on.
If ‘evolution’ means that more and complex species gradually appeared on earth, it doesn’t conflict with Christianity. If it means that this took place via natural selection, that doesn’t conflict with Christianity either — after all, perhaps God chose to work that way. Certainly, that is logically possible. But if evolution means the absence of divine design, it not only conflicts with Christianity but is also no longer scientific but now both philosophical and theological.
From the slime of the earth
Catholics are free to believe in the evolution of man’s body from the animal kingdom. Perhaps it did, but it probably didn’t. Science certainly hasn’t proved it, so the question remains open, and doubt is reasonable.
One problem is the fact that macroevolution in the sense of functional new genetic material has never been observed. There is no empirical evidence for the inheritance of environmentally acquired characteristics except within a species — Darwin’s famous finches, for example. Even thousands of years of intelligent selection by human beings has failed to breed a dog the size of an elephant or an ant, let alone turn a dog into one.
Another problem is that the fossil record is empirically equivalent to creationism. Species just appear fully formed and, in the case of the famous Cambrian Explosion, around a hundred times faster than anyone had imagined was possible. Yves Delage, the eminent scientist, believed in evolution but famously said that one species evolving from another has not been demonstrated.
Nor has science demonstrated that life came from inorganic matter. Darwin, moreover, had no idea that the information necessary for the most basic bacterium is around the same as what’s contained in the Encyclopedia Britannica. And Reincke, another great scientist, believed that “the only statement consistent with her dignity that science can make is that she knows nothing about the origin of man.”
Ironically, then, belief in the evolution of man’s body isn’t incompatible with Catholic dogma, but it does go beyond the scientific evidence. Sticking to the science means acknowledging its limits. In an essay written in 1959, Werner Heisenberg said that Wolfgang Pauli, the brilliant physicist, was “skeptical of the Darwinian opinion, extremely widespread in modern biology, whereby the evolution of species on earth is supposed to have come about solely according to the laws of physics and chemistry, through chance mutations and their subsequent effects. He feels this scheme is too narrow…”
While Catholics can believe in the evolution of the body, then, they can decide not to on the basis of the scientific evidence. I certainly have my doubts. The more biology progresses beyond what Darwin knew, the greater the difficulties. DNA, for instance, is literally — not figuratively — a code. It embodies meaningful information, and there is currently a $10 million prize for anyone who can demonstrate a naturally occurring encoding/decoding system. Nobody can.
Cells also edit their DNA in real time in response to threats. This isn’t random, and there is variation and adaptation before natural selection can occur. And some structures appear to require the whole structure to be in place to work at all. Imagine having 1/10th of an eye, 1/100th a heart or 1/1000th of a penis.
Even if true, however, the evolution of man’s body from the animal kingdom poses no problem for religion whatsoever. Few people know that Darwin himself concluded The Origin of Species with these words:
"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one . . . endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful being evolved.”
Augustine and other Church Fathers would have agreed. Indeed, Father Teilhard de Chardin S.J. went even further. After a lifetime studying palaeontology and kindred subjects, he believed in the evolution of "whole of creation" (Rom., 8:19) towards a final perfection in Christ. He called God’s creation of the material universe out of nothing "Point Alpha,” and Christ was the "Point Omega" of the whole evolutionary process, helping creation towards its eternal destiny.
But ultimately the point is that, before things can evolve, they first have to exist and be continually upheld in existence.
What certainly didn’t evolve
Although the Church is open to the possibility that man’s body evolved from lower forms, it teaches that man’s soul certainly didn’t. This is symbolised in Genesis by God “breathing” upon Adam. That is the creation of man’s soul out of nothing. God also creates each individual human soul out of nothing at the moment of conception.
Scientism views that idea that man isn’t purely matter as absurd because it holds that only matter exists. Evolution only works on inanimate matter; the sperm and the egg, too, are merely matter. How, then, can the entirely material processes of evolution or sexual reproduction produce something immaterial? So the scientistic reasoning goes. Since there’s no God, a human being can’t be anything more than matter.
By contrast, anyone not starting from the assumption that only matter exists is free to face the facts rather be bound by a theory. And philosophers traditionally point to at least three facts about human beings that prove the immateriality of the intellect:
First, unlike non-rational animals, we can perceive immaterial concepts that are totally inaccessible to the senses, e.g., God, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, fairness. This is because we have the power of abstraction, and it is coextensive with human nature. Even a child, after seeing lots of circular objects, can form the concept of circularity as distinct from the concrete materialising conditions — such as being big, red and in the toy box — that might apply to any individual circle.
Second, the intellect can make reflex acts. We can think about ourselves thinking. No material object is capable of this. For example, part of a car can touch another part of the car. But the whole car can’t touch itself. Only spiritual substances can make reflex acts.
Third, we have free will. When we accept the conclusions of arguments as rational based on the truth of the premises and the laws the logic, our choice isn’t physically determined like the rain falling. A man knows he can cheat on his wife or resist temptation. And if his wife cheats on him, even a materialist will hold her accountable.
Many philosophers also point to our ability to recognise some truths as being necessary. Evolution is concerned only with survival, not truth. Being pretty sure that fire burns is enough. But understanding that 1+1=2 is necessarily true in any possible world goes far beyond anything survival requires. Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that since evolution selects for survival value, not truth, it undercuts belief in the truth of evolution.
Rather than face these facts honestly and scientifically, however, scientism simply denies them. Man, say the materialists, is neither rational nor free. And if that makes scientism irrational itself, so be it.
Neither ape nor angel
The truth is far richer and stranger. ‘The human soul,’ Aquinas wrote, ‘is a kind of horizon and frontier between the corporeal world and the incorporeal world.’ Developing this insight in his book on Aquinas, Chesterton wrote that ‘man is not like a balloon, floating free in the sky, nor like a mole, burrowing in the earth, but like a tree, with its roots firmly planted in the earth and its branches reaching up into the heavens.’
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Similar to your final paragraph and the quote by Aquinas:
“There is a point at which the world of spirit comes into conscious contact with the world of matter. That point is man. It is surely rational to suppose that the world of thought and of spiritual values, on the threshold of which man has consciousness of standing, is a real world, an order no less great than the material order, and that it is in this alone that we shall find a solution to the otherwise hopeless conflict of man's spiritual aspirations and the limitations of his material existence."
~Christopher H. Dawson
"The apes which bear the greatest resemblance to man in bodily form are stupid and without intelligence, and seem to have been created in order that we may see what would have been if God had not breathed into him an immortal soul" (The CC Explained pg.109)
The longing of the immortal soul for eternal happiness: "Man has a longing after a perfect and lasting happiness. This longing is common to all men, and is implanted in them by their Creator. Such happiness can never be attained in this world-and therefore if man possessed the desire for it, without any hope of it's being satisfied, he would be more unfortunate than the brutes who have no such desire, and God, in implanting it in his breast would be, not good, but cruel" (The CC Explained pg.112)