there are a number of posts on evolution, and they seem to draw the most attention, which seems funny to me in that Catholics are free to accept or not the ideas of evolution. of course we are not biblical literalists, that is a feature of protestant Christianity. evolution represents a threat to their literal reading of Scripture and thereby their existence, in that the defining precept of protestantism is
Sola Scriptura or only the information contained in cannonized Scripture, matters. this is their main seperation from us and therefore evolution is a threat to their very survival.
evolution is not however, a threat to us. it can be absolutely true and still have nothing to do with matters of faith, cosmogony, or Catholicism. ergo, our freedom to accept
that said, evolution in its entirety has several flaws, which i think people like to talk about, abiogenesis, holes in the fossil record, irreducible complexity. all of which make for interesting discussion. (yes, ive heard the arguments back and forth, and no, i dont care to hear more)
but in the end, evolution, one way or the other doesnt matter. **its 13.7 billion years too late. **it says nothing more interesting about faith than “wow, G-d works in mysterious ways”, it doesnt affect the issue of G-ds existence in any way at all.
so evolution simply doesnt matter.
I think your statement about the compatibility of orthodox Christian belief and the embrace of evolutionary theory is correct. So far as I can see, no contradiction between them obtains. I have Catholic friends who are both devout with respect to Church doctrine and fully supportive of modern evolutionary theory, and I find the theodicy and theology that proceed from that more elegant and robust than special-creationist alternatives. If one is going to proceed under the irrational assumptions of Christian theism in the first place, that seems to be a fairly rational way of proceeding from there. In any case, it doesn’t place those Christians in the mental ditch so many drive themselves into with the anti-evolutionary bent, denying reason and evidence in abundance for evolutionary theory.
Even so, I think you are dismissing the problem in a very simplistic fashion. While I just affirmed that evolution and orthodox Christian doctrine are compatible, evolution is nevertheless quite toxic in many cases to support for Christian belief. Many Catholics, for instance, have maintained a kind of faithful theistic evolution throughout their lives, but for many others, evolution seriously undermines faith in God because it in a significant sense makes God superfluous, an afterthought, an unnecessary part of the explanation.
I think that explains why so many Catholics here militate against the evidence and the facts on the ground concerning evolution. The objection is NOT that evolution cannot be harmonized with Catholic doctrine – manifestly, it can be – but rather that evolution betrays a basic conceit many believers have about their status as humans. Christian theology exalts mankind in an ontological sense – only man is imprinted with the
imago dei, only man has the reasoning faculties to apprehend natural law and the noetic facilities for knowing God in a spiritual sense.
Man is fallen, but that “fallenness” itself is proof of man’s ontological primacy in the world; there is hubris in supposing man had somewhere to fall
from in the first place.
As Christian, I know
I was guilty of this conceit. And while evolution does not and cannot discredit the idea that God made the universe, and
utlimately designed the world so that man would be man, in such form that he might enventually be invested with a soul, fashioned in some dualistic way in God’s image, evolution as a mechanical, natural process really takes the pride out of human exceptionalism. Darwin’s dangerous idea was that we
are animals in the most thoroughgoing sense, cousins of the chimpanzee and relatives of the lowly cabbage, or even the most virulent bacteria, if we are to trace our lineage back far enough.
I suggest to you that some of the draw of Christian faith – not all of it, but some – obtains from this intuitive desire to classify oneself, one’s kind as “special”. Not just special in some parochial sense, but “cosmically special”. Catholicism can still cater to this innate inclination, but it’s a lot harder to cater to through the filter of evolutionary theory. Evolution places man as an ordinary leaf, like all the other leaves, or a very large and ancient tree. Many have a conceit grounded in the idea that man was “formed from the dust” in some special, hands-on way – a custom job, or as they would say in the UK, “bespoke”.
Evolution works right against this conceit, and while doctrine and faith
can be maintained in embracing it, evolution just kills a lot of the joy of the “specialness” many believers are enamored of. If evolution is true, God may still be the Creator, the one forming man with the
imago dei, somehow, but it sure does look more remote and mechanistic than it used to. And of course, it continually provides the idea that this is just how things would look if God
were imaginary, and that’s something many believers understand, and resist strongly on those grounds.
-TS
