http://www.walsingham.org.uk
Once considered one of the four great shrines of Christendom, Our Lady of Walsingham shrine is the site where the Virgin Mary appeared to Richeldis de Faverches in 1061 and asked her to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth. Still a very active shrine, the sanctuary continues to welcome pilgrims from around the world as it has for almost a thousand years.
One of the peculiar ironies I have noticed over the years has been the divergent ways in which the notions of evolution have, er, evolved in the minds of Catholics and some of the more anti-Catholic folks among our Fundamentalist brothers. One of the distinctions between Catholics and Bible Christians is that Catholic theology has never especially demanded a literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 and is therefore not particularly shaken by evolutionary theory or the discovery of the immense age of the earth.
As the late great Fr. John Hardon, S.J., says in his Catholic Catechism, “Charles Darwin (1809-82) undoubtedly sparked a new era in anthropology and allied sciences, but Darwinism as such had only minimal impact in Catholic thought, whereas it struck many believers in evangelical Protestantism like a tornado. The issues raised by latter-day evolutionists directly affected the interpretation of the Bible, notably the first three chapters of Genesis. Christians who had only the biblical text as their guide, and no extrabiblical tradition or less still an authoritative Church, were left with only the literal words of Scripture. It was not enough to cope with the rising tide of criticism from scientific quarters, which made the simple narrative of Genesis look like another cosmological myth.”
This was borne out again in October 1996 when Pope John Paul II, standing in the context of a train of Catholic thought which stretched back at least to Augustine and which had been reaffirmed by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis said, in essence, “Looks like there's some good evidence for biological evolution.” That is, he said, as so many Catholics have already said, that there is nothing in divine revelation that particularly forbids you to believe that God made Adam from the dust of the earth r e a l l y s l o w l y rather than instantaneously. This comment, a blinding non-news flash to Catholics, was an immense shock to many journalists, who seem to divide the world into “those who have absolute faith in naturalistic evolutionary dogma” and “Fundamentalists.” Where could the Pope fit in such a black and white world?
Now, before I proceed, I think I should mention that I believe Fundamentalists get entirely too much guff from the media for their concerns about evolutionism. Granted, I think the Creation Science attempts to turn the obvious language of myth in Scripture into the language of a science text are stupendously wrong-headed. I do not believe for a moment the bad science supposedly proving that the earth is at most 10,000 years old, nor the zany theories that earth's atmosphere was shielded by a giant ice shell (the “waters above the heavens”) which melted and produced the Great Flood of Noah. I think it a tremendously dumb (but entertaining) effort to show that “God created the earth with dinosaur bones already in the ground to test the faith of True Bible Christians and lead the ungodly astray.”
But, having said all this I also think Fundamentalists have a healthy moral reservation about evolutionism which we do well to listen to despite the badness of Creation Science. For as C.S. Lewis points out in his fine little book Miracles, the mere fact that somebody is wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about everything. Lewis talks about a little girl he once knew who had the notion that poisonous things had to have “horrid red things” in them in order to be poisonous. Her science was bad. But as Lewis says, “If a visitor to that house had been warned by the child, 'Don't drink that. Mother says it is poison,' he would have been ill advised to neglect the warning on the ground that 'This child has a primitive idea of poison as Horrid Red Things, which my adult scientific knowledge has long since refuted.”
Similarly, Fundamentalists seem to me, despite their absurd Creation Science, to have more moral common sense in their little fingers than the great thinkers and social planners of the 19th and early 20th Century had in their whole bodies. For it was these “intellectual giants” and not Fundamentalists who took the basic premise of “survival of the fittest evolutionism” and constructed the whole edifice of Social Darwinism, laissez faire capitalism, eugenics, euthanasia, racial theory and, in its final apotheosis, Nazi racial theory and genocide. It was the Best and the Brightest, the Educated and the Advanced who labored to create such living hells as Auschwitz in the name of the Fitness of the Race.
For all their daffy science, Fundamentalists preserve in their bones an essential insight to which evolutionists are stone blind: If a man's nose is simply a slightly different product of the same kind of accidents that made a pig's snout, there is ultimately no reason you cannot butcher him like a pig. Fundamentalists recognize that, as Dostoevsky says, if there is no God, everything is permissible. Catholics, while eschewing the bad science of Fundamentalists, ought to be grateful that they have passed to their children this inchoate refusal to call man an unusually clever piece of meat. Insofar as they do this, Fundamentalists are on the side of the angels (and of the Holy Father, who also stresses that evolutionary theory does not provide a philosophical basis for reducing the human person to a mere product of material forces). Thus, when we are embarrassed by the bad science of Fundamentalist Creationism, we Catholics do well to remember, as St. Paul says, that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.
Yet at the same time, it also seems to me that Catholics ought to point out to Fundamentalists the curious parallel between the view of natural history they emphatically reject and the view of supernatural history they often emphatically affirm. For one of the weirdest ironies of American Fundamentalism is that it often regards any trace of evolutionary theory with fear and loathing while simultaneously holding a view of Christian history that reads as a kind of Darwinian myth.
(To Be Continued Tomorrow as “Brother Darwin, Part II”)
