| Straws in the Wind |
An Essay by G.K. Chesterton
The Unimportance
of Evolution
The Modern Mind is so called to distinguish it from the Mind. This marked distinction and emphasis is really unnecessary. There is little or nothing about what is commonly called Modernism to cause the most careless student to confuse it for the moment with mental activity, or the general use of the reason; it is a curious, moody thing and perhaps its only redeeming element is that, being founded on moods and emotions, it is full of surprises.
A good example was an extraordinary outburst of Bishop Barnes, the other day, when he asked the Pope for an infallible pronouncement on the truth of Evolution. About a hundred thousand Modernists having howled in our ears, for twenty years, that Pope and Church crushed every scientific discovery, crushed every form and fashion of Evolution, buried Evolution under monumental dogmas as archaic as the Stone Age, one of these Modernists suddenly starts up, discovers that this is not the case, and hastily proposes that the Pope should turn his attention to the entirely new topic of Evolution.
He apparently imagines that the possession of Papal infallibility is a sort of friendly joke or popular convenience, to be lent round to anybody like a corkscrew or a tin-opener, whenever anybody feels a momentary movement of curiosity on any subject.
If the Pope is to be called on to use his special and supernatural privilege in order to answer any question which it might be interesting to have answered, I can suggest quite a large number of extraneous problems on which we might invoke the oracle, possibly with more practical effect on human life. As, for example, who will win the Derby? Or if the weather will permit traveling this spring; or whether England is really wise to put herself politically at the disposal of America; or whether Einstein's mathematics are really correct; or whether there is really going to be a cure for cancer; or what are the names of the four or five deliberate murderers now wandering about in England at large.
If we are to follow the example of the independent Modernists, and regard the Pope as a person set up to answer riddles on all sorts of subjects, we shall not be likely to run short of subjects or of riddles. Only we shall have to adopt, in order to satisfy the exacting Modernist, a much more universal and overwhelming belief in Papal infallibility than we at present profess. And we have rather a way of professing at present what we have professed always and shall always profess; whereas the Modernist may go to any lengths in his new appeal, just as he could go to any lengths in his old refusal of that appeal. A hundred years hence, for all I know, it may be the mark of a Modernist to believe that the Pope is infallible about whether it will rain tomorrow, or whether there is too much oil in the salad. There is, however, a simple answer to the Bishop's question, insofar as the question has a meaning in that sense, the Pope does not pronounce on the question of Evolution for the simple reason that the question is not sufficiently important. People like Dr. Barnes still suppose it is supremely important; but that is provincial prejudice.
It is of course immensely interesting to those whose business it is to be interested in it; as the smallest star in the Nebula of Andromeda is intensely interesting to an astronomer; or the minutest shade of variety in duckweed may be of vast importance to a botanist. That sort of really scientific science the Church entirely approves, often munificently patronizes and, for the most part, very wisely lets alone. But it is not essential that the guardian of faith and morals should pronounce upon duckweed.
It may seem like a joke to say that Evolution as such is no more serious than the Derby winner. But horse racing is in the same moral world as horse breeding. And horse breeding is a perfect example of the really impartial and scientific study of Evolution.
The whole argument is concerned with whether animal life as such went through a process of adaptation or selection like that of horse breeding; and whether it is possible to have horse breeding without a horse breeder. In our human experience we know it is done by a directive will; and it would seem most reasonable that where it could not be done by a directive human will, it might be done by a directive Divine will. Darwin and others maintained, more or less doubtfully, that it might be done by a sort of prolonged coincidence; a chapter of accidents.
Darwin's theory of how this might have occurred has been largely abandoned by the latest scientific men; and indeed is only still accepted as a piece of Victorian respectability by old-fashioned people like Bishop Barnes. But in any case, it never went very far towards touching the primary problems; and Darwin himself hardly pretended that it did.
The truth is that the enemies of Christianity, the men who started with a prejudice against religion long before they had studied any science, tried to stretch these very thin and stringy theories, or rather hypotheses, of the nineteenth-century biologists, and make them impinge somehow on Christian philosophy; drawing all sorts of philosophical morals from them which the biological suggestions did not really support, even if they had been true.
For instance, the common cant phrase of the half-educated sceptic, "There never was a Fall; on the contrary there was a universal Rise," does not rest on any anti-Christian biology; but it is an attempt to make up an anti-Christian philosophy. Any biologist would tell you that, so far as he was concerned, there might be any number of Falls in the vast and complex system of cosmic change.
There are moral principles, like the Fall, which it would be anti-Christian to deny; but Evolution as Evolution does not deny them. It is simply not concerned with them; being concerned with a particular alleged method of material transformation; which requires a concentrated study and attention; like horse breeding.
Now the Papacy has pronounced, any number of times, upon these two or three moral foundations of the nature of man, which are essential to the Christian philosophy of life. That man has a dignity different from that of the rest of nature, and given with the image of God; that he once possessed a yet higher dignity in being nearer the Divine and lost it by the abuse of free will; that his nature was once more exalted by the Incarnation, and so on: these theological truths are indeed supremely important; and any scientific theories which really did contradict them would also in that degree be important. But there are practically no scientific theories that do contradict them; and there are quite certainly no scientific facts or final discoveries that do contradict them.
Outside the question of contradicting these truths, which have been laid down again and again, I say that Evolution, in the true sense of transformism or animal adaptation, is simply not important enough to have anything laid down about it: it is simply a matter of material or technical curiosity like a hundred others. The Pope is not there to pronounce upon how the camel got his hump or how the elephant got his trunk, in the manner of the Just-So Stories; it is, in comparison with the things to which he is dedicated, a perfectly healthy and even childish game.
I repeat that the point is this; that it was the Materialists who tried to twist their imperfect material discoveries into arguments against religion. But the theories they twisted broke in their hands; and have left a litter which almost every really modern man of science admits to be very bewildering.
The failure to grasp this fact is simply due to ignorance of history; and even to ignorance of mere chronology. These Materialists were always trying to suggest, by a hundred tricks of suggestion, that men only began to attack religion when they began to study science. They implied that the whole world worshiped the Bible until it was shattered in a collision with "The Origin of Species." This is so flatly the reverse of the truth that the reply to it is a mere matter of realizing that Friday comes after Thursday or October after September. It is a simple question of fact. They might just as well say that the tyranny of Napoleon was the cause of the French Revolution. They might just as well say that the spoliation of the monasteries gave rise to the Wars of the Roses.
It is simply a manifest fact that the modern sceptical attack on Christianity had begun a hundred years before it took any particular turn towards biology or the modern material sciences. Voltaire and his contemporaries derided the Catholic system exactly as Lucretius or Julian might have derided it, on general grounds of skeptical philosophy. But Voltaire derided almost as much the beginnings of modern material science, and roared with laughter at the very notion of a fossil fish bone being found in the mountains.
The whole rationalistic attack on Christianity was in full blast, and had been going on for quite a long time, before it was suggested that the fish bone also could be used as a weapon against the Cross. Europe was full of free-thinkers, and organized into vast societies, especially secret societies, for attack upon the Church, before any English naturalists began to advance evolutionary arguments against the Mistakes of Moses. The imperfect hypothesis of Evolution, the mistaken hypothesis of Darwinism, were seized upon eagerly as weapons by men who had already been all their lives in the war. These men tried to exaggerate and misrepresent the scientific suggestions, so as to turn them into contradictions of the great principles of faith and morals of which I have spoken. But few of them would really stretch so far and most of them have already snapped.
In neither case is it likely that the supreme guardian of faith and morals
will be very much excited about them.
(from America, March 15, 1930)