The Theory of Evolution

See first: Faith and Science.

The theory of evolution teaches that living species developed over immense durations from earlier and simpler forms. It is often presented as the proof that the world explains itself, and that the Creator has become useless. Many have concluded that to accept evolution is to renounce God. This conclusion rests on a confusion between three senses of the word “evolution.”

Three senses of one word

The word “evolution” covers three different realities, which must be distinguished to see clearly.

The first is a fact. Observation shows that living forms have changed across the ages, and that present species descend from earlier forms. Many converging clues point this way, from the fossils buried in the ground to the deep resemblances among living beings.

The second is a scientific theory. Science proposes an explanation of this development, the mechanisms by which one form gives rise to another: the variation of living things, and the survival of the forms best suited to their environment. This explanation belongs to scientific work, open to study and correction.

The third is a philosophy. Some add to the science an affirmation of another order: that this development came about by the sole play of matter and chance, without Creator, without design, without end. This affirmation exceeds what observation establishes, for it bears on the whole of reality and on its meaning.

The Church allows the first two to be studied freely, for a truth about nature always accords with faith. It opposes the third alone, because the third has left science to become a philosophy, and a false philosophy.

What faith admits

Faith leaves science its own domain. That living bodies developed over time, and that species derive one from another, remains an open question, which research settles by its methods. This development describes how living forms succeeded one another, without touching the question of their ultimate origin, which is in God. Science seeks the mechanism, faith the source: these two orders of questions stand at distinct levels.

This holds even for the body of man. As to his flesh and his organic structure, man resembles the animals and could have developed from an earlier living form: faith leaves one free to think so. The development of the body belongs to science, and faith welcomes it without trouble.

The creation of the soul

But man bears within him more than his body. He grasps universal ideas, reflects on himself, knows that he knows, judges good and evil, decides freely, and reaches toward an infinite that nothing in the world fills. These acts of the spirit come from a source higher than matter. Every material image represents a particular thing, with a determined shape and size; the spirit grasps the universal: justice, truth, the very notion of man, which hold for all cases and have neither shape nor dimension. A power that attains the immaterial surpasses matter, and what produces it must surpass it too.

This is why the Church holds that, even if the body of man developed from an earlier form, the spiritual soul of each man is created directly by God. Genesis says it in figure, by two distinct gestures: God first forms the body from the dust of the ground, which links man to the rest of creation; then he gives it life by his own breath, which marks the divine origin of his soul. “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7. The body links man to the earth; the soul, breath of God, raises him above it.

One will object that to invoke here the soul created by God amounts to stopping a hole in knowledge for a time, which science will one day fill by explaining thought through matter. This objection would suppose that thought is matter organized more finely, which one will end up explaining in detail. But thought grasps realities that have neither shape nor weight. When I understand what justice is, I represent to myself no object of a certain size or a certain colour: I grasp a meaning, which applies to all just actions without being itself a thing one could see or touch. Now matter, and all that is drawn from it, always has a shape, a size, a place. A thing that grasps what has neither shape nor place is therefore of another order than matter, and matter alone could not produce it. The limit holds therefore to the very nature of things, and not to an ignorance that time would lift: the better science describes the brain, the more it describes matter, without ever bringing out from it what surpasses it.

The error of concluding “therefore no God”

There remains the step the materialist takes: since living things are explained by natural processes, the Creator would be superfluous. This reasoning supposes that matter alone exists, which science never proves, for it limits itself by method to material causes; and a method that examines matter alone remains incapable of establishing that matter alone exists. The mechanism by which a thing comes about leaves whole the question of whether it was willed, and by whom.

The chance one invokes does not fill this want. Chance designates the unforeseeable meeting of causes that already act; it supposes therefore a world already there, with its things and its laws, where this meeting can occur. An explanation by chance thus rests on things and laws it does not create, and remains incapable of explaining why the world exists. Further, evolution needs a world already ordered in order to occur: constant laws, a regular matter, an order that reason can understand. This order, evolution makes use of without creating it; it was there before it, and remains to be explained. Now an order so vast and so constant is better explained by an intelligence that willed it than by a matter that would have ordered itself. The ordered world science studies thus leads toward its Author, rather than setting him aside.

Thus the theory of evolution leaves whole faith in God. It describes a path, and leaves open the question of its source. The Church welcomes research on the development of bodies, holds firmly that the spiritual soul is created by God, and that man, body and soul, is made in his image. “God created man in his image; he created him in the image of God.” Genesis 1:27. The truth of science and the truth of faith come from the same Author, and meet in the same light.