2009 was a doubly Darwinian anniversary: two hundred years since the great naturalist's birth, and one hundred and fifty years since his epoch-making The Origin of Species. Among a great many events and publications marking the occasion, two Catholic ones stand out: the Pontifical Council for Culture's conference ‘Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories’, and this, the Heythrop-based Jesuit Louis Caruana's edited collection, surveying and examining ‘the impact of Darwin on Catholicism’ (p. 2).
Caruana is, as one might expect, careful to stake out the limits of the enquiry early on: this is not a book on evolutionary biology. It does not deal directly with the scientific content of Darwin's ideas and of his intellectual heritage. It is certainly not intended as a scientific justification of the Catholic Faith. And neither is it an attempt at making scientists change their methods and ignore pertinent data, or an attempt at making theologians discard their characteristic task, which essentially involves interpretation and historical mediation (pp. 3–4).
Disclaimers declaimed, he introduces the main areas that are explored, each corresponding ‘to major characteristic orientations within Catholic scholarship’ (p. 4): history, philosophy, and theology. (Though oddly, it is the book's latter section that is the shortest!)
As befits such a dominant and well-evidenced ‘cultural paradigm’ and ‘megatheory’– without which, in the phrase of the Orthodox geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense’– the chapters here are wide-ranging. We move from Pius XII and Aquinas to Teilhard and Lonergan, from ethics to economics (via cognitive anthropology), and approach intelligent design twice from different directions. Creation comes towards the end, and the book (though thankfully not the reader) concludes with suffering. Like the apparent pathways of evolution itself, this is a meandering, often surprising, and altogether stimulating journey.
Three chapters, in particular, are worthy of special comment. In the history section, Pawel Kapusta's ‘Darwinism from Humani Generis to the Present Day’ focuses importantly on the magisterium. Arguably its most significant statements to date – Pius XII's heavily qualified Humani Generis (‘the first recognition in a document of the Magisterium […] that some form of “evolutionism” may be compatible with the Christian faith’– p. 29), and John Paul II's rather more positive, though again not unqualifiedly so, 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (recognizing the theory of evolution to be ‘more than a hypothesis’) – are comparatively well known. Here, though, they are valuably situated in their historical, dogmatic, and theological contexts. Of special note are the decrees on biblical interpretation preceding Humani Generis, and Vatican II's remarkable denunciation of ‘certain attitudes (not unknown among Christians) deriving from an insufficient perception of the legitimate autonomy of science; they have occasioned conflict and controversy, and misled many into opposing faith and science’ (Gaudium et Spes 36). Furthermore, Kapusta ably and concisely brings us up-to-date with overviews of the International Theological Commission's 2004 Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, and recent statements by Pope Benedict XVI. Regrettably, Cardinal Schönborn's much-publicized (and to my mind, much misunderstood) comments on the incompatibility of ‘neo-Darwinian dogma’ with Catholic teaching in the New York Times in 2005 receive a far more cursory treatment than either the ideas themselves, or the furore they created, would seem to merit.
In the philosophy section, Peter van Inwagen's chapter ‘Weak Darwinism’ sounds a significant sceptical note (one that is, in general, missing from the book as a whole). His qualm is not, however, with Darwinian natural selection itself, but rather with the totalizing assumption that it is the only possible driver of the diversity and complexity of life on Earth – a stance he dubs ‘allism’. Inwagen ought not to be misunderstood here. He happily admits: ‘There are pervasive features of [the biological] world that would make no sense if natural selection had not played a central and essential role in its development’ (p. 111). He demurs, however, from accepting the second proposition: ‘The only explanation of all this diversity and complexity is that provided by the operation of random mutation and natural selection’ (p. 112). Again: it is not that Inwagen has proof that it is not the only explanation; rather, he has no proof that it actually is. As such, he advocates an openness to the possibility of other causes. This stance, dubbed ‘weak Darwinism’, he characterizes with the proposition: ‘The operation of random mutation and natural selection is at least a very important part of the explanation of all this diversity, complexity and apparent teleology – perhaps it is the whole explanation and perhaps it is not’ (p. 113). While Inwagen is adamant that he is arguing only for the possibility of other natural causes (see p. 111), it is not fully clear why he should so restrict himself: by his own accounts, naturalism is surely as susceptible to its own brand of (potentially false) ‘allism’, as he claims that ‘orthodox Darwinism’ is. Likewise, it is not altogether clear a) what non-Darwinian natural causes, ones outside of the (in fact very broad and varied) preserve of ‘mutation and natural selection’, might look like; or b) how far his ‘weak Darwinism’ actually differs from what a great many biologists and philosophers of biology already espouse. These caveats aside, Inwagen's is a weighty and engaging argument, which should repay further thought.
In the book's final chapter, the Georgetown theologian John Haught opens by remarking that ‘(a)fter Darwin, Catholic thought has been slow to integrate into its theologies the four-billion-year evolutionary story of life's struggling, striving, and suffering’ (p. 207). He continues: ‘Even though Catholic theologians do not formally contest this evidence, as do creationists and “intelligent design” opponents of evolution, their conceptualization of sin, suffering and salvation still generally ignores scientific accounts of human emergence. […] For many educated people, therefore, embracing Catholic faith still seems to require an ignoring, if not suppression, of some of the most important truths they have learned from the natural sciences’ (pp. 207–8).
Haught is right of course. Dogmatic theologians (and I include myself in this criticism) do not typically engage with the remarkable facts presented to us by the natural sciences, even when they fully accept them, when exploring and expounding Christian doctrine; following a nonchalant appeal to non-literal interpretations of Genesis (citing Augustine!) and secondary causation (citing Aquinas!), the details are usually then left to those authors occupying the library's ‘religion and science’ shelves. Haught is also right that this simply isn't good enough, and the rest of his chapter is a model of just how theologians should instead be proceeding, engaging Christian understandings of providence and suffering with the ‘fine print’ of evolutionary history.
The editor was, it has to be said, quite wise to leave Haught's chapter until last – precisely because it shows up how little some of the other, and otherwise excellent, contributors fail to do. To give just one example, Original Sin demands a more thorough treatment by theologians post-Darwin than simply to say that it is ‘what has been symbolically referred to by Christians as “our fallen humanity”’ (p. 199). The same goes for, among others, the imago Dei, redemption, and the incarnation. These and other doctrines require far more thought – in fidelity, of course, to ‘sacred Tradition, sacred Scripture and the magisterium of the Church’ (Dei Verbum 10) – than they have so far received. What Caruana has provided with Darwin and Catholicism is a firm and wide-ranging foundation, that will hopefully draw in other Catholic historians, philosophers, and theologians to thinking through and about these (and other) scientific ‘signs of the times’. For the reasons Haught outlines, it is very much to be hoped that this is only the beginning.
