One hundred years ago, on July 21, a Tennessee jury convicted John Scopes of violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution. That case—especially as memorialized in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind”—is taken as a symbol of religiously fundamentalist ignorance allayed by “science.”
A century after Scopes, what lessons should Catholics draw?
Religion and science are not opposed. The Scopes trial helped cement a caricature of religion as opposed to “science,” a bastion of obscurantism. That may have been true of the biblical literalists in Dayton, Tennessee—but not of the Catholic Church.
It’s not just that the Church founded universities and hospitals—two places where science is rather active. It’s that Catholicism birthed science. In order to have a “scientific method,” you have to believe that
- the universe functions according to certain laws, which make it
- intelligible and
- repetitious—i.e., under similar conditions, similar things happen.
Without those presuppositions, you can have no science. That’s why you should pick up books by Fr. Stanley Jaki (Science and Creation, The Road of Science and the Ways of God, The Savior of Science) and read about Catholicism’s hand in science as we know it.
Allied to this was the Church’s rejection of the so-called “double truth” theory—i.e., something could be true for science but false for religion (or vice versa). That might work for Protestantism, with its nominalist roots (right and wrong are what they are because God said so, not because they are inherently good or evil), where everything’s a label. But if there’s one God, he doesn’t teach X here and lie over there. If there’s a supposed contradiction, it’s a challenge to dig deeper to find the underlining unity (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).
The Bible teaches that God created, not how he did it. Genesis is a theological text. It makes theological points. It is not the textbook for Biology 101.
The idea that God created establishes certain basic theological truths that are beyond science’s capacity to refute. Among the truths we hold is that the world is personal and designed and that God remains active in it.
Catholicism does not regard creation as some impersonal and maybe even accidentally serendipitous confluence of events that just so happened to produce the relatively orderly cosmos we know and love. Science may propose a Big Bang, but it cannot—one way or another—say anything about the one who made the Big Bang. Creation didn’t just happen—it happened out of love.
Those who grew up in the Anglophone thought world are perennially at risk of some form of deism—i.e., the idea of splitting the loaf by saying, “Yes, God created, but then—on the seventh day (or sometime thereafter) just disappeared.” Deists usually portray God as a clockmaker. He made the clock, wound it up (so well that it never needs subsequent rewinding or adjusting the time), and left to let it run by itself.
What’s wrong with this picture? Four things:
- The world is not self-sustaining. Catholic teaching on creation is that God created and continually sustains Without God’s sustainment, everything would fall back into nothing, because nothing is self-caused, is self-sufficient, or can give itself life. So God is not out of the picture.
- God created man to be his “co-creator,” to have dominion in his image over the world (Gen. 1:26-28). I like to say God made the world like IKEA: assembly required. God didn’t build houses. He gave man a brain and trees: figure it out! Responsible co-creation—fiduciary care of our common home—is man’s duty.
- When parents let their child venture out independently, they usually don’t do it as “sink or swim.” While preserving a degree of autonomy, they also remain in the background to step in as needed. The same can be said—against the deists who denied the possibility of divine intervention—regarding God. Christianity is a faith that recognizes that God was and is active in history. That’s called Providence. His is not the Real Absence.
- Man’s co-creatorship in God’s image and likeness makes a value judgment about man that pure biology cannot (and which I suspect haunted the background of the Scopes trial): the uniqueness of man. Man is part of the created world, but not just a part. He is part of the “circle of life,” but not just one species among many. Whether that “flattening” of human distinctiveness is a function of caricatures about evolution (man as overgrown monkey) or now about environmentalism (man is an ecologically hazardous species), the result is the same: in the name of “science” (which trespasses beyond its domain), man is treated as just another living thing.
Those who thought they were doing “God’s work” in prosecuting John Scopes may have wrongly believed that we have to read Genesis literally. The trial’s consequence has been to disparage the whole idea of creation, including ideas that “science” itself is incompetent to address. Those ideas include the distinctive nature and value of man and the supposed “closedness” of creation to ongoing divine intervention. I suspect that no small number of Catholics take a schizophrenic approach here, imagining God having an active role in history maybe up until the Acts of the Apostles (or more nebulous “ages of faith”) but certainly not being so gauche in our own “scientific” times. But the Catholic truth is that man is distinctive—even if he has one foot in a material world and developed according to steps—and Providence is real.
With the anniversary of the Scopes trial this week, let’s adopt a more nuanced approach to the issues it raised.
Want to read more? Two suggestions: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 282-301, and a short book by Joseph Ratzinger, The Divine Project.