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A Note on Evolution

 

·        There does seem to be a problem in the U.S., a fairly serious and vigorous debate with political implications between ‘Evolutionists’ and so-called ‘Creationists’.  What people need to realize is that this debate is largely confined to North America and that even in North America Catholic intellectuals including theologians even conservative ones have long ago moved on.  [Nor has it ever been a problem for me or for people like me educated in Catholic schools in Australia and Europe in the sixties and seventies. It has just never been an issue.]

·        This is not to say that it isn’t a genuine problem and that there isn’t fault on both sides of the debate.  But it needs to be put in context. There are a lot of good Christian people around including in main-line churches in North America for whom it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

·        I’m personally quite happy with the idea that God said, “Let the earth produce…” (Genesis) and that Darwin tells us how.  As the North American process philosopher Charles Hartshorne puts it, “God makes things make themselves” and this is God’s most preferred way of working both in the biological realm and in the human realm, and even in the non-biological world.  We all, and everything else in interaction with everything else have a part to play in putting the universe together and in putting it together the way it turns out.

·        The consequence is that, while we have now to give up on any crude version of 18th or 19th century arguments from spatial order, the sophistication of evolutionary mechanisms themselves can be construed, if we desired, as contributing their bit

o       To an Argument from Temporal Order,  considering this as quite a sophisticated way of doing life in constantly changing environments

And maybe even

·        To an Argument from General Providence e.g. an “inference to the best explanation” argument in favour of ‘Anthropic Theism’ (Peter Forrest), the evolutionary story doing its bit to contribute to the picture of a self-ordering universe in which the emergence of complex creatures is not only possible but also likely.

 

Whether or not the deliverances even of the biological sciences might be construed as part of an argument, according to this point of view that they might be construed as an objection or refutation is based on a faulty way of interpreting or mis-interpreting the Bible, which we Catholics got over about the middle of last century.  Genesis = poetry with a point, the main points being:

·        Everything is God’s creation,

·        Everything is therefore good, good even without us,

·        Even with us, it is very good; and

·        Human beings have a special place and a special role to play in it all, a special responsibility “to tend the garden” so to speak.

It was this for the writers themselves, they didn’t think they were writing science, they assumed the best story available to them and adapted it for the sake of writing a fundamentally religious message.  We should take it in the same spirit.

Or, as Galileo, nowadays quoted even by the Pope, said a long time ago: the Bible was written to tell us how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go.  For that we go to the other Book, also written by God, namely the Book of Nature, whose language (according to Galileo) is the language of Mathematics.

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