No intellectual Houdini act can reconcile faith and evolution

IT would be nice if all intellectual differences could be resolved by fiat.

Sean Fitzgerald (‘No conflict between faith and evolution’, Letters, November 5)) seems to think this is a perfectly reasonable approach. All you need do is quote the pronouncements of one or two popes and the difficulties just vanish. He studiously avoids offering any explanations that might reconcile the Genesis story of creation with the findings of modern science.

Of course the difficulties would disappear if people, including popes, stopped claiming that the Pentateuch is history or science or cosmology and accepted that it is a story of one people’s view of themselves and, as such, a very valuable and interesting insight into one ancient human culture just like the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the origin myths of the Amerindians or the origin stories of the Aztecs or Incas.

The difficulties are immeasurably compounded when one particular story of origins is given special status — it is ‘divinely inspired’, consequently it is ‘immune to error’ and furthermore its interpretation is guaranteed by ‘infallibility’.

Once you wrap these kinds of intellectual chains around yourself it requires a philosophical or theological Houdini to devise an escape strategy. The very encyclical (Humani Generis, Pius XII) that Mr Fitzgerald quotes as evidence for ‘no-conflict’ is solidly bound by those chains.

Pius XII writes: “... The first eleven chapters of Genesis … pertain to history in a true sense … give a popular description of the origin of the human race … with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own”.

Pius XII attempts his own Houdini act with the following pronouncement: “The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that … research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it enquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter … however, this must be done in such a way that reasons … those favourable and unfavourable to evolution ... be judged and weighed …”

At best, this treatment of evolution as if it were still an open question (even in 1950 it was a well-established fact) is neutral. Worse than that, it attempts to establish boundaries which, on close analysis, prove to be based on those chains I’ve already mentioned.

Mr Fitzgerald’s delight in quoting Darwin is equally implausible. No one was more aware than Darwin that the theory of evolution was going to upset a lot of people, especially Christians who, based on their biblical beliefs, accepted the simultaneous creation of immutable forms and the special creation of human beings.

The very idea that human beings could have any biological connection (despite the obvious) with ‘lower’ animals such as the chimp or gorilla was incredible and the idea that the human species is contingent (we might not have arrived at all — remember we are only here for a fraction of 1% of earth history, never mind cosmic history) was equally unacceptable.

This is Darwin in the very same chapter six that Mr Fitzgerald quotes: “Reason tells me that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variation be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a complex and perfect eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory”.

It would be turning Darwin on his head to claim that he wrote anything in either Origin of the Species or The Descent of Man where he accepts there was some original species created out of whole cloth, as it were, from which all other species that ever existed subsequently evolved — he explicitly refuses to discuss the origin of life in this very same chapter.

The theory of evolution represents a fundamental challenge not only to traditional religious understandings of human origins and nature but an equally radical challenge to the dualist philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas which for centuries formed the intellectual underpinnings of Christian culture.

Con Hayes

Kerry Road

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork