Darwin and the Church

Mr. William Rees-Mogg has taught me some on evolution and the Church's understanding of it.^[1] I did not know of Saint Augustine's theory of evolution, one in which God created first chaos, but a chaos with the seeds of order embedded in it. It is a compelling theory, it takes all that science suspects of the Big Bang, and all that science detects of the deterministic nature of the physical world, the narrow ranges in which life could exist and so on, and unifies it more cleanly than, I think, even the neo-Darwinists do. Which is not to say I think Saint Augustine right on this. Merely that he could be right. And if he is, then all of physics would be unified cleanly with theology.

Contrast this with the neo-Darwinist position that posits randomness and yet at the same time says that the material is all, that we are our genes. That suspects to find the cause and whole of thought in the mechanics of the mind. An argument that, combined with physics, would reduce all of nature, all of man and all of his intellect to the mathematics of atoms bouncing. The Heisenberg's uncertainty principle does not save us from this clockwork existence, for while perhaps no one can know the speed and position both at once, yet each atom has both. It would be a mistake, I believe (though I cannot prove), to say that the statistical understanding of the subatomic world is real. Each atom has a position and has a speed at any given instance. Not many speeds, but one. It is simply impossible for man, at least for now, to know it without changing the system. But that speed and position, unknown, still determines in (unknowable) mathematical precision exactly what is and what will be. Or it would, were the materialist correct, if the material were all that is. The only randomness available to the neo-Darwinist then is the randomness of the initial state, the composition of the pre-bang mass. Its nature, at best unknown and more likely unknowable, and the cause and nature of its explosion together provide the initial state after which all is determined by the geometry and physics of sub atomic collisions and wave equations.

Saint Augustine replaces this finite source of randomness. He replaces this unknowable disorder with a precision-crafted mass, and a carefully triggered explosion. A mass and explosion created, designed, to produce what we see. How much cleaner a picture this paints. It explains why each physical constant is exactly within the oh-so-narrow range it needs to be in. Why nothing is even the slightest out of place to yield life. It explains that great leap of improbability: the origin of life, an event so improbable as to cause some scientists to speculate that there must be many universes, or at least that the one universe must have collapsed and exploded time and time again, so that sufficient tries exist to allow the infinitely improbable to occur. All this messiness, this unprovable supposition is swept away with one simple and yet natural theory: that we are because some One willed it.

And yet, this too is not doctrine. It is merely, some 1449 years before Darwin published, the Catholic theory of evolution. It is the answer to the ancient Greek thought envisioning a world of atoms, whose random interactions negate the need of a Deity, and thus opens the way to the intellectually fulfilled atheist.

The Church, as Mr. Rees-Mogg states, might well want to distance itself from protestants who seek to find science in Genesis. But not necessarily because the Church thinks they must be wrong. Merely because they could be wrong. Again we face the temptation that Galileo succumbed to. We are tempted to say that we know that something is for no better reason than that the theory appeals to us. But the theory could be "beautiful," it could be incredibly useful, and yet be wrong. Just as Newton's laws proved wrong, and now perhaps even Quantum Mechanics will pass away,^[2] so too could Saint Augustine be wrong here, and all of evolution with him. There is no proof, there is only facts that fail to contradict at this point. That failure to contradict can lend strength, but, in the end, it cannot prove Truth, only find to be False. The temptation is to pride, to think we can know as God knows, to think that we cannot be wrong. To assert that all, even God, must give way before the power of our minds. And it was for this crime, and no other, that Galileo was found guilty.

Perhaps the science behind Intelligent Design is bad. Or perhaps it is only the Creationists whose science is bad, those asserting seven day creation. Or perhaps Genesis, beyond all expectation, does contain historical truth, and they will be found to have been right. We cannot know, do not know, with the data in hand.