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Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Darwinists vs. the Catholic Church: Stuff to know before climbing into the ring

Here is nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s assessment of the oldest major institution on Earth:


So, getting the Catholic Church to accept any clearly naturalistic, modernist view of life (like Darwinism) is not on the same order of difficulty as getting the local school board or the Supreme Court to accept it. The school board and the Supreme Court accept it already; they may not know that they do until someone points it out to them. That is, most of them have never considered the possibility that naturalism, Darwinism and related philosophies might literally not be true.

But the Catholic Church has never thought that these ideas were true, ever. And naturalism (of which Darwinism is the creation story) is not even a new idea. For practical purposes, Epicurus beat the Darwinists to it by nearly 2500 years. So the Church has had plenty of time to develop an opinion.

(Note: The Catholic Church would not agree with Macaulay that it is "a work of human policy.": It believes that it is the true heir of Jesus’s promise to Peter, who is regarded as the first Pope, "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it." (Matthew 16:18))

The looming conflict will certainly be lively.

Incidentally, some people wonder why we can't just decide that Darwinism is only a scientific theory and not a philosophical one. I doubt that that will really work for any length of time. I will have more to say on that subject later, but this for now: The major Darwinists have never intended Darwinism to be any less than a way of looking at all of life. It is only fair to evaluate the theory as they do. Also, stripped of its philosophical claims, Darwinism becomes only an assertion about how species change over time - an assertion for which there is actually very little good evidence. Please note, I am not saying that Darwinism, seen in this limited way, is not a correct explanation. I honestly don't think there is enough evidence to tell whether it is a correct explanation or not. The reason Darwinist explanations for all kinds of things are so widely accepted is simply that the theory is assumed to be true on a philosophical basis.

Here is the problem in a nutshell (and I did not invent it):

A peculiarity of Darwinism, both in biology and in other fields, is that it explains too much. It is very hard to imagine a condition of things which could not be explained in terms of natural selection. If the state of various elements at a given moment is such and such then these elements have displayed their survival value under the existing circumstances, and that is that. Natural selection explains why things are as they are: It does not enable us, in general, to say how they will change and vary. It is in a sense rather a historical than a predictive principle and, as is well known, it is rather a necessary than a sufficient principle for modern biology. In consequence its results when applied to social affairs were often rather odd. (MacRae, Donald G. [Reader in Sociology, University of London], "Darwinism and the Social Sciences," in Barnett S.A., ed., "A Century of Darwin," [1958], Mercury Books: London, 1962, p.304).

Darwinism is "necessary" if you want to get rid of the idea of design or purpose in biology. But that is a philosophical project. And if, increasingly, Darwinism is not "sufficient", well, ... maybe that's because you can't get rid of design or purpose in biology.






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