Catholic Education and the Cult of EvolutionThaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

Authentically Catholic liberal-arts colleges and universities accept the harmony of faith and reason. The overall intellectual bent of Catholic schools should thus be, at least to some extent, Thomistic, and the teaching of Thomism and the philosophia perennis, with regard to the philosophy of nature and science, is, as opposed to nominalist, scientistic, materialist, and fideist rationalities, that secondary causes are truly causal, and that God likes to do things in the world through them, even giving them truly creative power. In other words, nature exists, and is distinct from God (yet never separate from Him, for, through created esse, He is closer to all beings than they are to themselves), and she possesses a relative autonomy and real causal power that does not require Gods perpetual interventions. Natures seeming full autonomy, after all, is the pretext and the source of the prima facie credibility for many of scientific and philosophical atheism. Furthermore, natures causal structures can be known through mans unaided reason, and the effects of these causes, such as biological phenomena, can be explained without the use of Revelation, though, of course, not explained exhaustively, for all things possess a certain unfathomableness due to their having been created and sustained in existence and activity by an ultimately unfathomable, transcendent, and mysterious God.All this is to say that science should be taken seriously at any Catholic college or university, and where modern science has discovered truth about the material worldit has discovered truth about the material world, period. Scripture interpretation must take such truths into consideration, and sometimes previously held interpretations, such as six literal days of Creation, must be looked at anew in the light of the latest scientific evidence. Science has the capacity and duty to take care of its own, as it were, without any undue interference from natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theologyunless, of course, it oversteps its humble charge of cataloging, describing, law-making, predicting, interpreting, shaping, and controlling matter, and offering up its material data to the higher sciences of philosophy and theology for ultimate, and more certain, interpretation and adjudication. If modern, empirio-metric science attempts to teach on things that it knows nothing about and trespass against the natural and supernatural hierarchy of knowledge, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology are in their rights to step in and put science in its place. Have there been some oversteppings? I daresay there have been, and not just among the atheistic Darwinists. It is overstepping sciences bounds to claim that debatable theories are factssomething that Pius XII condemned very unequivocally with regard to evolution in Humani Generis. It is overstepping sciences bounds to render certain non-verified, non-facts, such as common descent from mono-celled organisms, as verified facts by using the sophistical force of the so-called scientific consensus, that same force that fires and character-assassinates people who publish peer-reviewed scientific articles that conclude to, say, intelligent design of certain cellular processes. It is overstepping philosophys bounds to teach debatable and idiosyncratic philosophical theories about causality in the natural world and its relation to God, claiming, for example, that Gods providence over the world is compatible with genuine chance in nature (and not just the appearance of chance, but real chance!), and as if this were the only rational way to explain things, and as if serious and sophisticated philosophical challenges to it are just, a priori, otiose and tending towards fundamentalism. It is overstepping Catholic theologys bounds to dismiss the very serious challenges, not only to evolutionary theory but the very fact of evolution from not only the Catholic Magisterium and Fathers of the Church, but also from the latest scientific evidence, which has, it must be said, proved neither common descent of humans from primitive organisms, nor the generation of all life, in all of its glorious complexity and design, from mindless natural selection working on random genetic variation and mutation. There is surely indisputable scientific evidence for micro-evolution, that living beings change, that living beings adapt, and that living species have genetic similarities. I do not see how there can be any debate here. But, as there is, however, no indisputable scientific evidence that all species have descended from a primitive ancestor, that species macro-evolve, and that evolution of species has taken place at all, or at least the existence of such indisputable evidence is itself debatable, we are dealing here with a dialectical classroom topic, not a demonstrative one. In fact, the many missing transition fossils in the fossil record, the Cambrian species explosion, and the irreducible complexity of many biological phenomena, along with a host of other evidence that has been censored, belittled, or ignored by academia and the mainstream scientific community, seem to disprove Darwins original theory as well as the neo-Darwinianism of the theistic evolutionists, or at least make these debatable. Intelligent design is as scientific and confirmed by the evidence as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution, and perhaps even more scientific and reasonable, but you would never know that it was even a debatable theory, let alone possibly true, due to the irresponsible deference among so many in academia and media, including Catholics, to the idols of the tribe and marketplace, the sacred cows of Darwin and the so-called scientific consensus. Such bespeaks not loyalty to reason and science, but kneeling to the world. It is beyond obvious that a good case can be made for intelligent design, as the debate has been raging in the pages of First Things for years. Catholic colleges or universities should give as much deference to the possible truth of intelligent design as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution for the sake of the students intellectual good and the integrity of the school, regardless of the private beliefs of the professor, which he is, of course, free to express to students. Students taking science in a Catholic liberal-arts college, in which science is taught in the generalist, not specialist, mode, should be led to investigate the issues with an open mind, conducting dialectical inquiry of all the reasonable positions that are inside-the-pale, as it were, of Catholic orthodoxy, philosophical possibility, and scientific evidence. The point of such courses is not indoctrination into a certain debatable scientific viewpoint, but to teach the students how to think scientifically, to critically assess scientific theories, and to be able to arrive at truth using modern scientific modes of reasoning. Of course, the teaching of certain relevant scientific facts and confirmed theories is essential to such courses, but the status of "fact" and "theory" is not always something finalized in science, as any liberally educated, non-scientistic scientific theorist knows, and this should also be made clear to students. The idolatry of Science is ensconced in culture, as John West recently argued in First Things, and Catholics must go against the grain to combat it. Such is not fundamentalism but prudence.

There is simply no "view-from-nowhere," knockdown, theological, philosophical, historical, or scientific argument that resolves the evolution issue to one side over the other. Ones presuppositions and starting points, usually quite implicit and unconscious, tend to determine what kind of data is taken to be legitimate evidence, what kinds of arguments are deemed scientific, and which conclusions appear plausible. The claim to have overwhelming evidence, made incessantly and insufferably by pro-Darwinists, such as Laurence Krauss, does not render a debatable issue a non-debatable one. Evolution, in both in its factual and theoretical claims, is, most certainly, debatableand one at least prima facie proof is that is, mirabile dictum, still being debated! But even if it werent, at least among mainstream scientists and intellectuals, this alone would not prove its having been definitively resolved and concluded. The purpose of a Catholic college course on this debatable issue, as well as all the other ones at the nexus of science and religion, is to introduce students to the debate, and to present the best case for each side, even if the professor leans to one of them. The purpose of both liberal and specialized education is not to teach only one side of a debatable issue as the only possible truth of the matter, whatever the so-called overwhelming consensus of scientists says. The sad fact isand it is now so obvious that it cannot be relegated to conspiracy theorythat much evidence against both the fact and theory of evolution is censored/belittled/ignored by the materialist and atheistic scientific establishment, and Catholic has, scandalously, participated in this intellectual treason by their winks and nods.

The Church has surely given us guidelines on legitimate interpretations of Genesis and other relevant Sacred Texts, and she has approved of a certain level of openness to the possibility of the truth of certain modern scientific theories, such as evolution. And we do know that scientific, philosophical and theological theories cannot be true if they trespass against known natural principles and revealed truths: Something cannot come from nothing, potency cannot actualizing itself, unformed matter cannot alone cause form, on the one hand; Adam and Eve existed, they committed the Original Sin, God created the universe from nothing, and specially creates every human soul from nothing, on the other. Positions that fall within the limits of genuine reason (not consensus-obsessed, secularist, scientistic, materialist or fideistic reason) and Catholic orthodoxy (and this requires us not to facilely dismiss challenging statements of Popes and Church Fathers as outdated or irrelevant)and, of course, the most difficult part of the dialectic is to determine definitively these limits and which positions fall within them!are genuinely debatable, and students need to learn to see them as such.

If a professor thinks a debate has been resolved in one way or the other, while he is in his rights to say so to students and to present his case and the case of others, he is not in his rights to make the students think that his view of the matter is somehow indisputable and "the obvious truth of things," especially if this is done by presenting the other case as a strawman, with just the right amount of condescension and sarcasm and selective use of evidence. On genuinely controversial and debatable issues, it is a disservice to students to use canards and conversation stoppers such as "science tells us", "we now know," "evolution is a fact." Of course, science does tell us some indisputable things, such as the fact of micro-evolution (since we have actually observed this taking place), and we do now know certain things we didn't know in the past, such as the existence of genetic similarities between different species. And, of course, there are indisputable facts (pace post-modernism) that modern science, and modern science alone, has enabled us to see, but macroevolution is simply not one of these, and thus it should be taught as precisely what it is, a debatable theory.

On a practical note, the policy upshot of my position relates to academic freedom. Professors who teach a course on evolution or other relevant courses have the freedom to select the texts they think are most appropriate and excellent, and, although the course should be taught dialectically, the professor is in his rights to teach one of the positions as the true one, as long as he refrains from using his mere authority as a professor or as degreed scientist to make claims, and employing inappropriately dogmatic language and facile arguments to influence the students to think that such-and-such must be true, that no other positions have any merit or plausibility, and that only those people would think that away about the origin of species. Am I saying one cannot support evolution as a Catholic? No, but I wonder about being an adamantly pro-evolution Catholic. The evolution as fact attitude directly goes against Pius XIIs teaching in Human Generis, which, if anything, is even more germane now than it ever was. As Stephen Meyer, among others, has shown, and many biologists have now admittedStephen J. Gould, for onesince 1950, the evidence for Darwinian macro-evolution has become less compelling, so it makes Pius XIIs condemnation of rash transgression even more pertinent now:Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.My main concern is that such moderation and caution is not being exercised by Catholics and other Christians, especially in todays Catholic and Christian colleges and universities, and in Christian and Catholic intellectual circles in general. It seems to me that many academics and professors are afraid to question evolution for fear of being ridiculed or at least being put on the outskirts, to become, one of those people, and a fortiori for Catholic science faculty who question the Sacred Cow, as all the smart Catholic science people know that evolution is the indisputable truth and the only proper position for the educated Catholic to hold. It seems to me that an evolution cult has developed among conservative Catholics. Father John McCarthy describes this unfortunate cultural trend:Themovement to accommodate traditional Catholic doctrine, as well as the traditional interpretation of the accounts in Sacred Scripture, to the supposed "fact" of the evolution of man from primitive matter by a relentless process of spontaneous transformations of species over an enormous period of time has become so widespread in Catholic intellectual circles that it has now assumed the appearance of a "mainstream" point ofview. Theassumed "fact" of biological evolution, as pictured in contemporary biological theories, has moved in our time from a far-out to a central theological position and is now threatening to become a supposition of the updated "teaching of the Church," with all the inevitable consequences of such a development, not only as regards the two-thousand-year-old teaching of the Church on such issues as Original Sin, but also as regards the very credibility of Church teaching assuch. Atthis moment in the historic assault of modern secular humanism upon Catholic belief, we are witnessing to our dismay more and more heretofore "solid" defenders of Catholic tradition ceding to Darwinism and its progeny ground without which they cannot survive for long as orthodox thinkers.It is my hope that a continuing conversation about thismost debatableissue will help to dispel this cult, and the rash transgression of the liberty of discourse that supports it.

1