"If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth but the meaning which he has wanted to give to it. That which is opposed to Scripture is not what is in Scripture but what he has placed there himself, believing that this is what Scripture meant". -- St Augustine
"Truth cannot contradict truth...".Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus
In the last lesson, Mr Stenson gave a generally agreed-upon scientific definition for evolution as a process or mechanism. He said that the Church does not have any problem with the results of scientific investigation, and in fact, will revise its understanding of a given concept in science accordingly.
However, the Church does have a problem when material scientific thinking overreaches itself and comes to false conclusions about philosophy and theology. In philosophy and theology, scientists are just as much amateurs as anyone else. They are not in their territory. This is what this next section is about.
...Problems with Christian belief generally arise when "evolution" is loosely used in a broad philosophical sense. This meaning is substantially different from the scientific one above. It may be defined as follows: "an ideological frame of mind which sees the entire universe in terms of matter-in-development and which consciously denies the existence of spiritual or supernatural reality; all phenomena--scientific, historical, economic, and social--are explainable in exclusively material terms."
This understanding of "evolution" is not scientific, though it derives much prestige from association with the sciences. It is not founded on experimental knowledge or rational deduction. It is rather a preconceived set of attitudes and values, a prejudice that is not merely unscientific, but irrational. For it is altogether credulous to hold that complex organs like the eye are not indicative of an ordering intelligence, but are instead the result of blind chance which of course cannot know or plan the end (seeing) to which the eye's single parts combine and evolve. In fact, it is a latter-day form of philosophical materialism which has been with us since the time of the Greeks.
Inasmuch as it is really an outlook on life, it is a kind of religion. Properly speaking, therefore, this set of beliefs should not be called "evolution" but rather "evolutionism". To subscribe to creation (which is *not* the same as "creationism"), that is, the contingent world's ultimate dependence on a necessary, creative being, is not, on the contrary, an act of religion at all. It is a matter of philosophy, of drawing sure conclusions from incontrovertible premises.
Like the other religion-substitute "isms" of our time, evolutionism has adherents from all walks of life. Some physicists, astronomers, and geneticists believe in it. But so do many journalists, economists, teachers, and historians--and cab-drivers and businessmen and poets. The atheism of a biochemist is really no more significant than that of a file clerk, but it can have more sway on public opinion.
A Catholic can, as we shall see, give qualified assent to evolution in the scientific sense but not to evolutionism. The fact is that many scientists engaged in evolutionary studies are themselves devout Catholics. These people see no contradiction between what the Church teaches and what science, as science, has learned. Let us examine why this is so....
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