November 07,
2015
Fr. Michael Chaberek's carefully researched and argued book Catholicism and
Evolution examines how the magisterium of the Catholic Church has dealt with
Darwin and the subsequent theories of evolution
Detail from "The
Creation of Adam" [1508-12] by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel [Wikipedia]
"Can he
who made the ear, not hear? Can he who made the eye, not see?” — Psalm 94.
"Unfortunately,
a significant number of the most influential theologians treat the issue as if
evolution were already an established ‘dogma’. Meanwhile, the evidence of
Tradition, as well as contemporary science, again poses the question regarding
the formation of the world. Did God create matter and energy, with laws
pursuant to which, under God’s Providence, everything incessantly evolves,
heading towards the ‘Omega Point’, towards ultimate self-realization? Or
rather, did God create the world, and then during six days decorate it (St.
Ambrose), that is, add the bounty of new natures...? And after He completed
this act of formation on the seventh day He took his rest, and this is when the
history of salvation started, a history in which God also acts, albeit in a
different manner.” — Michael Chaberek, O.P., Catholicism and Evolution, 2015.
"The
truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to
combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the
priests and the philosophers.” — G. K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 1925.
I.
Fr. Michael
Chaberek's carefully researched and argued book Catholicism and Evolutionexamines how
the magisterium of the Catholic Church has dealt with Darwin and the subsequent
theories of evolution since about one hundred and fifty years ago. Adam and Eve
have, of course, been with us for a long time and, indeed, they are still with
us in this book. But was there one Adam or many? Where did Adam’s body, if not
his soul or whole being, come from? What about Eve? Did she, to provide for
future generations, just settle among us by chance or by a special creation?
And what about the cosmos itself? Is it still worth reading Genesis and its
account of “the Beginning”? Or, if we insist on accepting the chance version of
cosmic and human origins, what does this theory do to Christian revelation? Did
the Church just “rubber stamp” the latest scientific “theories”, “hypotheses?
or speculations no matter how much they contradicted Scripture? Is there a
reason to take a “second” look at what the Church Fathers had been saying all
along?
Chaberek is a
Polish Dominican priest and theologian whose book has two basic purposes: 1) To
examine the record of papal, Episcopal, and other documents from Catholic
theological and philosophical sources on the question of evolution and how to
understand the “authority” of these various statements, and 2) to propose that
science itself requires a new way to look at what is called evolution, one that
makes the central tradition of the Church on cosmic and human origins much more
sensible than many theologians had recognized. Basically, this book proposes
that the “intrinsic design” evidence that comes out of research in biology and
genetics in particular no longer allows, on scientific—not religious—grounds,
an easy relation between those forms of evolution based on chance and random
selectivity with what really happened with the appearance of the world and man
in reality.
The first two
chapters of the book present the understanding of Darwin and evolution in the
century and half from when Darwin’s works first appeared. The remaining eight
chapters of the book, with the Appendix (“Two Views on the Origin of the Human
Body”), proceed chronologically through the various discussions in Catholic
circles of the import and meaning of evolution for the faith. This very
detailed and wide-ranging reading of these positions from Pius IX to Pope
Francis contains a rich mine of useful and interesting information. Naturally,
the centre of attention in the Church was whether Darwin’s famous proposals
were compatible with divine revelation and, secondarily, whether they were even
reasonable in themselves.
Chaberek is
careful to acknowledge the differing theories of evolution and the
corresponding degrees with which theologians agreed or disagreed with it and on
what grounds. If Chaberek has a “thesis”, it is that many Catholic prelates and
theologians have been too hasty in accepting the presumed scientific grounds of
evolution. Hence, they have been less careful to see the relevance of
revelation to the scientific question itself. Perhaps, like the presumed
“scientific” basis of “earth warming”, we have a “Galileo-in-reverse”
situation. That is, Church officials, instead of imposing theological ideas on
science, are too quick to accept scientific proposals as a basis for
theological reflection that are themselves dubious or unproved.
The book is
also a good examination of just what we mean by “infallible” and who exercises
infallibility—how, when, and with what authority. The reason why Chaberek takes
so much care with the exact “authority” of each papal, Episcopal, or
theological document is that, in his view, Catholic thinkers, sometimes at the
highest level, seem to have been much too uncritical in accepting the
implications of evolution as if it were “proved”. This caution means that the
book is often a study in the binding or non-binding force of apparently official
documents. It seems somewhat ironical but the import of this book is to suggest
that the Church tradition has been mostly right all along. But many thinkers
were tempted to deviate because they were too sure that a form of evolutionary
science had said the last word on a subject that was itself open to much
questioning on its own grounds.
II.
That being
said, this book is not antiquarian or by any means “fundamentalist”. It accepts
forms of evolution as a fact in making accidental, though usually not permanent,
changes in individuals of a species. If anything, Catholicism and Evolution is a plea to be more up-to-date than the modernist and liberal mind that
bases its views uncritically on a popularized version of evolution as
“scientific”. This book requires a very careful reading; it is tightly argued
and carefully researched. If I were to suggest anything to read along with this
book, it would be Fr. Robert Spitzer’s New Cosmological Proofs for the Existence of God, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger’s In the Beginning…”, and Fr.
Robert Sokolowski’s The
God of Faith and Reason.
The
researches and approach of the Discovery Institute in Seattle are present in
this book. That is, there is a much controverted argument within science itself
that something very wrong is found in those evolutionary theories that assume,
in its various versions that something by chance came from nothing. This
position will mean, of course, that the validity of the argument of this book
will itself depend largely not on theology but on science and its
self-understanding. In other words, the Psalmist’s query “Can he who made the
ear, not hear?” suggests a universe of intelligence and order. What intelligent
designs adds is that there is no mathematical or scientific probability that
such a relation could occur by chance or random selection. In itself, this
position has nothing directly to do with revelation, though it does have much
to do with reason.
This book
then is not an “anti-scientific” book. It is just the opposite. Nor is it an ”anti-theological”
book. Rather it suggests that many Catholic prelates and theologians did not
take a careful enough look at the facts of revelation because of a too facile
acceptance of those Darwinian schools that were based on the notion that the
world just happened by itself with no real guiding origin or following order.
The famous Big Bang thesis, no doubt, has already caused considerable
hesitation here, though one of the current scientific “missions” seems to be to
save this version of science so that it does not have to admit a beginning from
a nothing that seems to presuppose a very detailed and specific order in that
universe, one that alone could have made it possible for actual finite human
beings to live someplace in this universe.
It is
important to note that the scientific thesis of intrinsic design has room for
evolutionary elements within the manifestations of order. In fact, chance is a
definite factor in the universe and in every existing human life, but it is a
chance that occurs when two purposeful actions cross each other. It is not just
“chance” in the midst of nothingness. Thus, if it could be shown that the
manifestations of intrinsic design that do exist in the universe and in the micro
cosmos that is man were products of chance, this book’s thesis would fall
apart. But the evidence seems to
show rather that order does exist. In this
context, the real “liberals”—the ones really willing to accept “change”—are not
the dogmatic evolutionists and their theological followers who show themselves
as “conservative” if not “reactionary”, but those who are willing to face the
implications of the evidence that order is manifest in the universe.
III.
The final
point worth making about this book has to do with revelation and reason. It is
quite true that under the impact of evolutionary theory, as well as that of
biblical criticism, we have a much more nuanced understanding of Scripture in
the light of what we know about the universe, its age, the age of man, the
conditions for life, and the distinction of living species. What is
interesting, as noted in the citation that I placed at the beginning, is that
Chaberek understands that a “history of salvation” began when God rested from
creation. The world does not exist to reach some inner-worldly “Omega Point”, a
view that Chaberet deals with in his chapter on Teilhard, but to connect the
Word that began creation with the Word that came to redeem it. The awareness of
this point may well be the most important part of this book.
Thus,
Chaberet goes back to read Scripture, the early Fathers of the Church, as well
as Aquinas and the later theologians and pontiffs who wrote before Darwin.
Along with the 19th and early 20th century decisions, they defended the importance of
the essential elements in the creation and redemption narratives—creation from
nothing, different elements within creation, existence of a mind within the
cosmos, evidence of mind in existing things. Under the pressure of the prestige
of evolutionary theory based on chance and random selection, many
accommodations were made, even to the extent of simply accepting this view as
“scientific” with no questions asked.
But what
actually has happened, as both Chaberek and Spitzer have argued, is that many
things in science today look very much like the essentials of revelation. No
one wants to force this development to prove more than can be proved. But the
situation is very different. I have often cited the following passage from E.
F. Schumacher’s 1977 book, A
Guide for the Perplexed:
Evolution, as
within the descriptive science of biological change, can…be taken as
established beyond any doubt whatsoever. Evolutionist Doctrine, however, is
a very different matter. Not content to confine itself to a systematic
description of biological change, it purports to prove and explain it in much
the same manner as proof and explanation are offered in the instructional
sciences. This is a philosophical error with the most disastrous consequences.
Darwin’, we
are told, ‘did two things: he showed that evolution was in fact contradicting
scriptural legends of creation and that its cause, natural selection, was
automatic with no room for divine guidance or design.’ It should be obvious to
anyone capable of philosophical thought that scientific observation as such can
never do these ‘two things’. ‘Creation’, ‘divine guidance’, and ‘divine design’
are completely outside the possibility of scientific observation.”
Yet, if we
examine with more care what revelation teaches us, in the precise light of what
we now know of the physical and biological universe, we can see that the
teachings found in Scripture, in their essence, do shed light on what we have
come to know. We cannot argue from reason to revelation, but we can make sense
of reason in the light of guidance in revelation. At bottom, I think, this is
what this book is about.
In
conclusion, Michael Chaberek has given us much to think about. One sometimes
wonders whether scholarship is “worth” anything these days. But as it often
turns out, someone working away at such evidently dull topics as what did the
Catholic Church have to say about evolution in modern times will suddenly open
up a whole new take on essential issues of our kind—its origins and order being
among the most important. Chaberek is very measured and careful in his
judgments. He seeks fairness and objective evidence. But he also is willing to
tell us when things do not fit together. Uncritical Catholic acceptance of
forms of evolutionism has often prevented us from seeing the real “logos” that we
find in things and in their origins.
Catholicism
and Evolution: A History from Darwin to Pope Francis
by Michael Chaberek, OP
Angelico Press, 2015
Paperback, 354 pages
by Michael Chaberek, OP
Angelico Press, 2015
Paperback, 354 pages
