Catholic Education and the Cult of Theistic Evolution

Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

Authentically Catholic liberal-arts colleges and universities accept the harmony of faith and reason. The
overall intellectual bent of Catholic schools should thus be, at least to some extent, and hopefully to
much extent, Thomistic; and the teaching of Thomism and the philosophia perennis with regard to the
philosophy of nature and science is, as opposed to nominalist, scientistic, materialist, and fideist
rationalities, that secondary causes are truly causal, and that God likes to do things in the world through
them, even giving them genuine co-creative power. In other words, nature, a robust nature, is distinct
from God (yet never separate from Him, for, through created esse, He is closer to all beings than they
are to themselves), and possesses a relative autonomy and causal power that does not require God’s
perpetual interventions, though He can and does intervene. Nature is so powerful that it would appear
to have full autonomy, and this is the misguided pretext and source of the prima facie credibility of
materialism and atheistic scientism. Furthermore, nature’s causal structures can be known through
man’s unaided reason, and the effects of these causes, including biological phenomena, can be
explained without the use of Revelation, though, of course, not explained exhaustively, as all things,
especially man, possess a certain unfathomableness due to their having been created and sustained in
existence and activity by an ultimately unfathomable, transcendent, and mysterious God.

All this is to say that science should be taken seriously at any Catholic college or university, and where
modern science has discovered truth about the material world—well, it has discovered truth about the
material world, period. If “fundamentalism” is something bad—it is bad if it denies this, in a misguided
attempt to vindicate sacred Scripture Scripture. Scriptural interpretation must take such truths into
consideration, and sometimes previously held views, such as six literal days of Creation and a 10,000
year-old universe, must be looked at anew in the light of the latest and true scientific evidence (and one
has to be careful to discriminate between genuine scientific discoveries and counterfeit claims by the so-
called “overwhelming consensus of scientists”—when I hear that phrase, I suspect ideology). Science
has the capacity and duty to take care of its own, as it were, that is, without any undue interference
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from other disciplines, even the higher ones of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology—unless, of
course, it oversteps its humble charge of cataloging, describing, law-making, predicting, interpreting,
shaping, and controlling matter, and offering up its material data to the higher sciences for ultimate, and
more certain, interpretation and adjudication. If modern, empirio-metric science attempts to teach on
things that it knows nothing about, such as the metaphysical truths of the philosophia perennis, the
purpose and meaning of things, the mystery of man, the supernatural, and God, and dares to trespass
against the natural and supernatural hierarchy of wisdom, then Aristotelian natural philosophy,
Thomistic metaphysics, and orthodox theology are in their rights to step in and put science in its place.

Have there been some oversteppings and trespasses in the modern era up to the present? Of course,
Catholics of a traditional cast know all about the Enlightenment, modernism, rationalism, etc., and the
incessant and insufferable ignorant machinations of the four-horsemen of atheism. But the
transgressions of the atheistic Darwinians is not the focus of this essay. I am speaking of the Catholic
theistic evolutionists. They overstep science’s bounds when they claim that debatable theories, such as
the theory of evolution, are “facts”—something that Pius XII condemned very unequivocally with regard
in Humani Generis. They overstep science’s bounds again when they attempt to render certain non-
verified, non-facts, such as common descent from mono-celled organisms, as verified, indisputable facts
by recourse to, not actual indisputable evidence, but the social force of the so-called “scientific
consensus,” that same force that fires and character-assassinates people who publish peer-reviewed
scientific articles that conclude to, say, intelligent design of certain cellular processes, and that excludes
anyone but committed evolutionists to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. They overstep philosophy’s
bounds when they teach debatable and idiosyncratic philosophical theories about causality in the
natural world and its relation to God, claiming, for example, that God’s providence over the world is
compatible with genuine chance in nature—yes, not just the appearance of chance, but chance!—as if
this were the only rational and Thomistic way to explain things, as if serious and sophisticated
philosophical challenges to it, such as found in the work of Robert Koons, are just, a priori, otiose and
tending towards fundamentalism. They overstep theology’s bounds when they dismiss the very serious
challenges, not just to evolutionary theory, but to the very fact of evolution itself, from not only the
Catholic Magisterium and Fathers of the Church, but also from the latest scientific evidence, which has,

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it must be said, proved neither common descent of humans from primitive organisms, nor the
generation of all life, in all of its glorious complexity and design, from mindless natural selection
conserving random genetic variation and mutation.

There is surely indisputable scientific evidence for mirco-evolution, that living beings change and adapt,
and that living species have genetic similarities. But, as there is no indisputable scientific evidence that
all species have descended from a primitive ancestor, that species macro-evolve, and that evolution of
species has taken place at all, we are dealing here with a dialectical topic, not a demonstrative one. In
fact, the many missing transition fossils in the fossil record, the Cambrian species explosion, and the
irreducible complexity of many biological phenomena, along with a host of other evidence that has been
censored, belittled, or ignored by academia and the mainstream scientific community, seem to disprove
Darwin’s original theory as well as the neo-Darwinianism of the theistic evolutionists, or at least make
these debatable.

Intelligent design, and I would also include some of the findings of the creation scientists, is as scientific
and confirmed by the evidence as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution, and perhaps even more scientific
and reasonable, but you would never know that intelligent design and non-evolutionary biological
theories were even debatable theories, let alone possibly true, due to the irresponsible deference
among so many in academia and media, including Catholics, to the idols of the tribe, the sacred cows of
Darwin and the so-called “scientific consensus.” Such bespeaks not loyalty to reason and science, but
kneeling to the world.

What is the educational upshot of this? It is beyond obvious that a good case can be made for intelligent
design, as the debate has been raging in the pages of First Things for years. Catholic colleges or
universities should give as much deference to the possible truth of intelligent design as neo-Darwinian
theistic evolution for the sake of the students’ intellectual good and the integrity of the school,
regardless of the private beliefs of the professor, which he is, of course, free to express to students.
Students taking science in a Catholic liberal-arts college should be led to investigate all the issues with an
open mind, conducting dialectical inquiry into all the reasonable positions that are inside-the-pale, as it
were, of Catholic orthodoxy, philosophical possibility, and scientific evidence. The point of such courses

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is not indoctrination into a certain debatable scientific or philosophical or theological viewpoint, but to
teach the students how to think scientifically, how to think philosophically and theologically about
science, and how critically to assess scientific and philosophical theories so as to be able to arrive at
truth. Of course, the teaching of the relevant scientific facts and actually confirmed theories is essential
to such courses, but the status of "fact" and "theory" is not always something finalized in science--
Kuhn's paradigms--as any liberally educated, non-scientistic, scientific theorist knows, and this should
also be made clear to students. The idolatry of Science is ensconced in culture, as John West recently
argued in First Things, and Catholics must go against the grain to combat it. The proper suspicion of
claims of science is not fundamentalism or conspiracism, but prudence.

There is simply no view-from-nowhere on the issue of evolution, that is, no knockdown, theological,
philosophical, historical, or scientific argument that resolves the evolution issue to one side over the
other. One’s presuppositions and starting points, usually quite implicit and unconscious, tend to
determine what kind of data is taken to be legitimate evidence, what data to ignore, what kinds of
arguments are deemed “scientific,” and which conclusions appear plausible. The claim to have
“overwhelming evidence,” made incessantly and insufferably by pro-Darwinists, such as Laurence
Krauss, and, not to mention, by the theistic evolutionists, does not render a manifestly debatable issue a
non-debatable one. Evolution, in both in its factual and theoretical claims, is, most certainly, debatable.
It is, after all, being debated, at least among the open-minded truth seekers among us, perhaps only a
small minority these days. But even if it were no longer a topic of debate, at least among mainstream
scientists and intellectuals, this alone would not prove its having been definitively resolved and
concluded.

The purpose of a Catholic college course on this debatable issue, as well as all the other ones at the
nexus of science and religion, such as the historical existence of Adam and Eve, the age of the earth and
the universe, and the geography of the cosmos, is to introduce students to the debates, and to present
the best case for each side, even if the professor leans to one of them—and he is surely permitted, even
encouraged, to share his leanings and the reason for them with the students. The purpose of both
liberal and specialized education is not to teach only one side of a debatable issue as the only possible

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truth of the matter, whatever the so-called “overwhelming consensus of scientists” says. The sad fact
is—and it is so obvious that it can no longer be relegated to “conspiracy theory”—that much evidence
against both the fact and theory of evolution is censored/belittled/ignored by the materialist and
atheistic scientific establishment—just consider the work of Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895-1985), the
renowned French zoologist and die-hard evolutionist, who himself admitted, “Through use and abuse of
hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is
taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists.”
He is entirely ignored.

The Church has surely given us strict guidelines on the legitimate interpretations of Genesis and other
relevant Sacred Texts, but she has also approved of a certain level of openness to the possibility of the
truth of certain modern scientific theories, such as evolution. We do know that scientific, philosophical
and theological theories cannot be true if they trespass against known natural and metaphysical
principles and revealed truths: Something cannot come from nothing, potency cannot actualize itself,
unformed matter cannot alone cause form, on the one hand; Adam and Eve existed, Eve was created
from Adam (she did not evolve from an ape!), they alone committed the Original Sin, God created the
universe from nothing, and specially creates every human soul from nothing, on the other. Positions
that fall within the limits of genuine reason (not consensus-obsessed, secularist, scientistic, materialist
or fideistic “reason”) and Catholic orthodoxy (and this requires us not facilely to dismiss challenging
statements of Popes and Church Fathers as outdated or irrelevant, as many in the theistic evolution
camp do)—and, of course, the most difficult part of the dialectic is to determine definitively these limits
and which positions fall within them!—are genuinely debatable, and students need to learn to see them
as such.

If a professor thinks a particular debatable issue has been resolved in one way or the other, while he is
in his rights to say so to students and to present his case and the case of others, he is not in his rights to
make the students think that his view of the matter is somehow indisputable and "the obvious truth of
things," especially if this is done by presenting the other case as a strawman, with that exquisite

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condescension and sarcasm and selective use of evidence that is legion these days among Catholics. On
genuinely controversial and debatable issues, it is a grave disservice to students for Catholic theistic
evolutionists to use canards and conversation stoppers such as "science tells us", "we now know,"
"evolution is a fact." Of course, science does tell us some indisputable things, such as the fact of micro-
evolution (since we have actually observed this taking place), and we do “now know” certain things we
didn't know in the past, such as the existence of genetic similarities between different species. And, of
course, there are indisputable facts (pace post-modernism) that modern science, and modern science
alone, has enabled us to see, such as the unfathomable distance of the universe, but macroevolution is
simply not one of these facts, and thus it should be taught as precisely what it is, a debatable theory.

On a practical note, the policy upshot of my position relates to academic freedom. Professors who teach
a course on evolution or other debatable scientific issues have the freedom to select the texts they think
are most appropriate and excellent—some would choose Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, others
Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt (the creationists would go for Gerald Keane’s Creation Rediscovered),
for example—and, although the course should be taught dialectically, the professor is in his rights to
teach one of the positions as the evidently true one, as long as he refrains from using his mere authority
as a professor or as degreed scientist to make claims, and avoids the use of inappropriately dogmatic
language (unless it’s a matter of philosophical principle, manifestly true established fact, and magisterial
teaching) and facile arguments to influence the students to think that such-and-such must be true, that
no other positions have any merit or plausibility, and that only “those people" would talk that talk way
about the origin of species.

Am I saying one cannot support evolution as a Catholic? No, but I wonder about being an adamantly
pro-evolution Catholic, which is the position of the Catholic theistic evolutionists. Even to have an open
mind about the possible wrongheadedness of the theory of evolution, let alone the fact, is to be cast
into the outer darkness, to join Ken Ham and the biblical-literalist morons. However, the “evolution as
fact” attitude directly goes against Pius XII’s teaching in Human Generis, which, if anything, is even more
germane now than it ever was. As Stephen Meyer has shown, and many biologists have now admitted—

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Stephen J. Gould, for one—since 1950, the evidence for Darwinian macro-evolution has become less
compelling, so it makes Pius XII’s condemnation of “rash transgression” even more pertinent now:

Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the
human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by
the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there
were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and
caution in this question.

My main concern is that such moderation and caution is not being exercised by Catholic evolutionists
and other Christians, especially in today’s Catholic and Christian colleges and universities, and in
Christian and Catholic intellectual circles in general. It seems to me that many academics and professors
are afraid to question evolution for fear of being ridiculed or at least being put on the outskirts, to
become, “one of those people,” and a fortiori for the Catholic scientists who question the Sacred Cow,
as all the smart Catholic science people know that evolution is the indisputable truth and the only
position for the educated Catholic to hold. It seems to me that an evolution cult has developed among
conservative Catholics. Father John McCarthy describes it well:

The movement to accommodate traditional Catholic doctrine, as well as the traditional

interpretation of the accounts in Sacred Scripture, to the supposed "fact" of the evolution of
man from primitive matter by a relentless process of spontaneous transformations of species
over an enormous period of time has become so widespread in Catholic intellectual circles that
it has now assumed the appearance of a "mainstream" point of view. The assumed "fact" of
biological evolution, as pictured in contemporary biological theories, has moved in our time
from a far-out to a central theological position and is now threatening to become a supposition
of the updated "teaching of the Church," with all the inevitable consequences of such a
development, not only as regards the two-thousand-year-old teaching of the Church on such
issues as Original Sin, but also as regards the very credibility of Church teaching as such. At this
moment in the historic assault of modern secular humanism upon Catholic belief, we are
witnessing to our dismay more and more heretofore "solid" defenders of Catholic tradition
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 ceding to Darwinism and its progeny ground without which they cannot survive for long as
orthodox thinkers.

It is my hope that a continuing conversation about this—most debatable—issue will help to expose and
thus dispel this cult and the “rash transgression of the liberty of discourse” that is its trademark.