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The relationship between the papacy and scientists
has sometimes—just ask Galileo—been testy. Interestingly,
however, the Catholic Church has largely sat out the cultural battle over the
teaching of evolution.
One of the reasons Catholics have remained largely on the sidelines
is the well-established system of parochial schools in the United States, which
make state laws relating to the public school curriculum of much less concern
to Catholic clergy and parents than to Protestant clergy and parents.
A second reason is that the Catholic Church, at least in the twentieth
century, takes a more flexible approach to the interpreting Genesis than do
several Protestant denominations.
H. L. Mencken expressed admiration for how Catholics
handled the evolution issue:
[The advantage of Catholics]
lies in the simple fact that they do not have to decide either for Evolution
or against it. Authority has not spoken on the subject;
hence it puts no burden upon conscience, and may be discussed realistically
and without prejudice. A certain wariness, of course, is
necessary. I say that authority has not spoken; it may,
however, speak tomorrow, and so the prudent man remembers his step.
But in the meanwhile there is nothing to prevent him examining all available
facts, and even offering arguments in support of them or against them—so long
as those arguments are not presented as dogma. (STJ, 163)
A majority of American Catholics probably sided with
the prosecution in the Scopes trial, but—with one notable exception, defense
attorney Dudley Field Malone—all the major participants in the controversy,
from the author of the Butler Act, to the defendant, the judge, the jury, and
the lawyers were either members of Protestant churches or were non-churchgoers.
Catholics tended to be viewed with some skepticism in Dayton; local
prosecutor Sue Hicks discouraged William Jennings Bryan’s suggestion that Senator
T. J. Walsh of Montana, a Roman Catholic, be added to the prosecution team.
(SOG, 131-32) The Catholic Press Association did
take enough interest in the case, however, to send a top correspondent to Dayton
to cover the trial for diocesan newspapers. Writing from
Tennessee, reporter Benedict Elder wrote, “Although as Catholics we do not
go quite as far as Mr. Bryan on the Bible, we do want it preserved.”
(SOG, 127)
Pope Pius XII,
a deeply conservative man, directly addressed the issue of evolution
in a 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis. The document
makes plain the pope’s fervent hope that evolution
will prove to be a passing scientific fad, and it attacks those persons who
“imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution
…explains the origin of all things.” Nonetheless, Pius XII
states that nothing in Catholic doctrine is contradicted by a theory that suggests
one specie might evolve into another—even if that specie is man.
The Pope declared:
The Teaching Authority of the
Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human
sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men
experiences in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution,
in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent
and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are
immediately created by God.
In other words, the Pope could live with evolution,
so long as the process of “ensouling” humans was left to God. (He
also insisted on a role for Adam, whom he believed committed a sin— mysteriously
passed along through the “doctrine of original sin”—that has affected all subsequent
generations.) Pius XII cautioned,
however, that he considered the jury still out on the question of evolution’s
validity. It should not be accepted, without more evidence,
“as though it were a certain proven doctrine.” (ROA, 81)
Pope John
Paul II
revisited the question of evolution
in a 1996 a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Unlike Pius XII, John
Paul is broadly read, and embraces
science and reason. He won the respect of many scientists
in 1993, when in April 1993 he formally acquitted Galileo, 360 years after
his indictment, of heretical support for Copernicus’s heliocentrism.
The pontiff began his statement with the hope that “we will all be able
to profit from the fruitfulness of a trustful dialogue between the Church and
science.” Evolution,
he said, is “an essential subject which deeply interests the Church.”
He recognized that science and Scripture sometimes have “apparent contradictions,”
but said that when this is the case, a “solution” must be found because “truth
cannot contradict truth.” The Pope pointed to the Church’s
coming to terms with Galileo’s discoveries concerning the nature of the solar
system as an example of how science might inspire the Church to seek a new
and “correct interpretation of the inspired word.”
When the pope came to the subject of the scientific
merits of evolution, it soon became
clear how much things had changed in the nearly since the Vatican last addressed
the issue. John
Paul said:
Today, almost half a century
after publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition
of the theory of evolution as more
than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory
has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries
in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither
sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently
is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.
Evolution,
a doctrine that Pius XII only acknowledged
as an unfortunate possibility, John
Paul accepts forty-six years later
“as an effectively proven fact.” (ROA, 82)
Pope John
Paul’s words on evolution
received major play in international news stories. Evolution
proponents such as Stephen Jay Gould enthusiastically welcomed what he saw
as the Pope’s endorsement of evolution.
Gould was reminded of a passage in Proverbs (25:25): “As cold waters
to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (ROA,
820) Creationists, however, expressed dismay at the pontiff’s
words and suggested that the initial news reports might have been based on
a faulty translation. (John Paul
gave the speech in French.) Perhaps, some creationists argued,
the pope really said, “the theory evolution
is more than one hypothesis,” not “the theory of evolution
is more than a hypothesis.” If that were so, the
Pope might have been suggesting that there are multiple theories of evolution,
and all of them might be wrong.
The “faulty translation” theory,
however, suffered at least two problems. Most obviously,
the theory collapsed when the Catholic News Service of the Vatican confirmed
that the Pope did indeed mean “more than a hypothesis,” not “more than one
hypothesis.” The other problem stemmed from a reading of
the passage in more complete context. In the speech, the
Pope makes clear in his speech that he understood the difference between evolution
(the highly probable fact) and the mechanism for evolution,
a matter of hot dispute among scientists. John
Paul said, “And, to tell the truth,
rather than the theory of evolution,
we should speak of several theories of evolution.”
He recognized that there were “different explanations advanced for the
mechanism of evolution” and different
“philosophies” upon which the theory of evolution
is based. The philosophy out of bounds to Catholics, the
pope indicated, is one which is “materialist” and which denies the possibility
that man “was created in the image and likeness of God.” Human
dignity, the pope suggested, cannot be reconciled with such a “reductionist”
philosophy. Thus, as with Pius XII,
the critical teaching of the Church is that God infuses souls into man—regardless
of what process he might have used to create our physical bodies.
Science, the Pope insisted, can never identify for us “the moment of
the transition into the spiritual”—that is a matter exclusively with the magesterium
of religion.
Most scientists would be content to let Pius
and John Paul
have their “ensoulment” theory and walk away happy. Not
Richard Dawkins, however. In an essay on the Pope’s evolution
message called “You Can’t Have it Both Ways” the controversy-loving biologist
accused Pope John Paul
of “casuistical double-talk” and “obscurantism.” (SAR, 209)
Dawkins took issue with the Pope’s declaring off-limits theories suggesting
that the human mind is an evolutionary
product. In his address the Pope said: "[I]f the human body takes
its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately
created by God…Consequently, theories of evolution
which…consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as
a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about
man."
In his essay, Dawkins paraphrased
the Pope’s statement: “In plain language, there came a moment
in the evolution of hominids when
God intervened and injected a human soul into a previously animal lineage.”
Dawkins expresses mock curiosity as to when God jumped into the evolution
picture: “When? A million years ago? Two
million years ago? Between Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens? Between ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens and H.
sapiens sapiens?” Clearly, Dawkins finds the divine
intervention implausible. He suggests that the ensoulment
theory becomes a necessary part of Catholic theology in order to sustain the
important distinction between species in Catholic morality. It
is fine for a Catholic to eat meat, Dawkins notes, but “abortion and euthanasia
are murder because human life is involved.”
Dawkins contends that evolution
tells us that there is no “great gulf between Homo sapiens and the rest
of the animal kingdom.” The Pope’s insistence to the contrary
is, in the biologist’s opinion, “an antievolutionary
intrusion into the domain of science.”
Dawkins makes no secret of
his distain for the distinction so critical to the Pope John
Paul’s 1996 speech on evolution:
I suppose it is gratifying
to have the pope as an ally in the struggle against fundamentalist creationism.
It is certainly amusing to see the rug pulled out from under the feet
of Catholic creationists such as Michael Behe. Even so,
given a choice between honest-to-goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and
the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic Church on
the other, I know which I prefer. (SAR, 211)
Popes have had considerably less to say recently on
the subject of the origin of the universe than they have on the subject of
human origins. In 1951, interestingly, Pius XII
(who so grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of evolution)
celebrated news from the world of science that the universe might have been
created in a Big Bang. (The term, first employed by astronomer
Fred Hoyle was meant to be derisive, but it stuck.) In a
speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences he offered an enthusiastic
endorsement of the theory: "…it would seem that present-day science,
with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness
to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when
along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation,
and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies."
(ME, 254-55)
But the Pope didn’t stop there. He
went on to express the surprising conclusion that the Big Bang proved the existence
of God:
Thus, with that concreteness
which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency
of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the
world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation
took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator.
Therefore, God exists!
The man who laid the groundwork for the Big Bang theory,
astronomer Edwin Hubble, received a letter from a friend asking whether the
Pope’s announcement might qualify him for “sainthood.” The
friend enthused that until he read the statement in the morning’s paper, “I
had not dreamed that the Pope would have to fall back on you for proof of the
existence of God.” (ME, 255)
Other people, including Belgian astronomer Georges
Lamaître and the Vatican’s science advisor, had a different reaction.
They understood that the Big Bang in 1951 remained very much a contested
theory and worried what might be the effect if the Pope pinned the Catholic
faith too much on its proving true. They spoke privately
to the Pope about their concerns, and the Pope never brought up the topic again
in public.
Big Bang theories become a problem for Catholic theology
only when they consider “the moment of creation.” That,
at least, is what Pope John Paul
allegedly told Stephen Hawking and other physicists during an audience that
followed a papal scientific conference on cosmology. (Some
scientists dispute Hawking's account, and say that the Pope suggested no limitations
on their inquiry.) The Pope told the physicists they should not inquire into
the Big Bang itself because that was “the work of God.” Stephen
W. Hawking, in his A Brief History of Time, reported that he was among
those physicists whom the Pope privately addressed. He wrote:
I was glad then that he did no know the subject of the talk I had just
given at the conference—the possibility that space-time was finite but had
no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. |
