It should be treated as an intellectual infraction for a scientist to inform a general audience that his religion, and perhaps theirs, “never condemned the theory of evolution” without right then and there SAYING WHAT HE MEANS by “evolution.”
Thus, physicist Stephen M. Barr states in the first sentence of a book review for First Things: “The Catholic Church never condemned the theory of evolution nor came close to doing so,” without saying what he, Professor Barr, means by evolution. Many readers won’t get further than that bald statement. I’ve heard similar confusing things said about Judaism, and it really irritates me.
An Ambivalent Term
Of course, there are a variety of ways to define “evolution,” ranging from changes in life forms over time, to common descent, to universal common descent, to the origin of life (chemical evolution) or of human life, to the most important meaning of all, Darwinian evolution, in the sense of nature generating all biological complexity from unguided, unintelligent mechanisms alone, without purpose or foresight. Some acknowledgement of the ambivalence of the term should have appeared at the very top of the article.
In the book review, I count 66 mentions of “evolution” and not one of “Darwinian evolution.” I leave it to Catholic scholars to comment on the theological details of Barr’s review, but it did startle me to find a reference to “the English biologist and Catholic convert St. George Mivart (‘St. George’ being his given name), who in On the Genesis of Species (1871) defended the idea of a natural evolution of species, all the way up to and including the human body, as ‘perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.’”
A Startling Reference
What about “perfectly consistent” with reality? This past October here at Science and Culture, Neil Thomas wrote about a new reprint of the 1871 book by Mivart (who is pictured at the top):
Mivart’s Genesis of Species was in its origin conceived as a philosophical counterblast to Darwin’s Origin of Species and in its pages we find many early critiques of Darwin’s logic. Mivart includes a whole chapter (pp. 35-75) on the inability of natural selection to account for incipient structures. Like Charles Lyell, leading paleontologist Richard Owen, and the scientifically educated Duke of Argyll, he felt that so-called natural selection could not possibly be the vera causa of anything whatsoever since it was an inert, purely passive phenomenon incapable of producing novelty.
Read the rest at “A Neglected Dissenter from Darwinism: St. George Mivart.”
For Stephen Barr, this slovenliness is far from a first offense. If you are seeking treatments of the whole subject that are much more complete than his, see also Catholicism and Evolution and Aquinas and Evolution, by Fr. Michael Chaberek; A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, by Fr. Martin Hilbert; and God’s Grandeur, edited by biologist Ann Gauger.