by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. | Editorial | Homiletic & Pastoral Review | October 2011
In his textbook, Philosophical Psychology (FSSP, Elmhurst, PA 1999), Prof. D.Q. McInerny lists and evaluates the six presuppositions of Darwinist evolution. The first presupposition is that life came to be, the way it is on earth, through natural means; there is no need for divine intervention, such as we find in the Book of Genesis. The second element is that life arose from non-life. The claim is that, over millions of years, matter became more complex until, by some chance of volcanic activity or lightning, there was a sudden transformation to the organic state, the beginning of life.
The third element is the idea that all life we know on earth is to be traced back to that first primitive form of life. Once life had gained a foothold on earth, there was more complexification until animal life evolved from plant life. After that, the two kingdoms continued to develop over millions of years to produce the many species of plant and animal life, including man.
According to the fourth element in the theory, it all began with a simple cell that underwent changes. The multiplicity of species in plants and animals is explained by chance mutation. The mutations, they say, must be small so that the new entity can survive; the change is positive, and gives the new entity an advantage over what went before. It is more suitable to survive, and to propagate others like itself. The improved one survives, and its ancestors do not. The process went on for millions of years to produce all the life forms on earth.
The fifth element is natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. The mutated organisms, that have an enhanced capacity for survival, is what Darwin called natural selection. The fourth and fifth elements are the key to the explanation of why one species is formed into another. So the mutations are necessarily very small, with the process requiring an immense amount of time—millions, and perhaps billions, of years.
This is an excellent analysis of Darwinist theory. (Why can't Fathers Baker, Schall and Fessio "take back" the Jesuit academy -- I'd love to be able to tell my son that he could go to Georgetown or Fordham, without danger of losing his intellect and soul.
The allure of Darwinism is totally alien to me -- and, I suspect, to most of our contemporaries. It is a dreary "orthodoxy" that reduces most ordinary human observations, conclusions and sentiment to "heresy".
At the end of the day, Darwinism is idiocy. If the universe is not human, there is no place for us in it. Why not etsi Deus daretur -- at every moment of however many billions of scientific years have passed.
Posted by: Robert Miller | Sunday, October 09, 2011 at 06:49 PM
This is about what I'd expect from a philosopher and/or psychologist. Philosophers do not pretend to be scientists; psychologists do, but much (not all) of what goes on in psychology is not really science, either.
Biology is not an axiomatic system like geometry. There is no equivalent in biology for Euclid's 5th Postulate. There are hypotheses that are subject to being tested. (We may not currently have any idea *how* to test a given hypothesis, a situation that is not unique to biology, but the hypothesis is not placed *in principle* protected from being disproved by observation or experiment.)
So, for example, the idea that all life descended from one ancestor is something which certain biologists are hoping to disprove. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35083220/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/scientist-alien-life-could-already-be-earth/. Anyone finding even microbial life with a fundamentally different biochemistry, or that had some alternative to the DNA of all known life (I'm not counting viruses as alive) -- that person would be a shoe-in for a Nobel prize.
Now let me put the shoe on the other foot and show how you yourself think in exactly the same way that "atheistic" scientists do. Think back to the last person to cut you off in traffic. Was that person descended from Adam? Does the Catholic Church teach that that person was descended from Adam?
The second question is the easy one to answer: No, the Catholic Church does not teach that the last person to cut you off in traffic was descended from Adam. Whoa there, you might object, the Catholic Church definitely does teach that all human beings are descended from Adam. That much is true; but the Catholic Church does not teach that the last person to cut you off in traffic was a human. Since some have entertained angels unawares, it is possible that, for reasons I cannot even guess at, an angel cut you off in traffic. However, even acknowledging the possibility, it's hard to avoid confidence that -- in the absence of any reason to think otherwise -- the rude driver was another human. Of course this means that you assume a long chain of "missing links", hypothetical ancestors that connect the driver back to a primordial ancestor: in your case Adam, in the case of Dawkins, the LUCA.
Posted by: Howard | Sunday, October 09, 2011 at 07:44 PM