Posted by
FrZeile on Thursday, February 12, 2009 9:44:55 AM
I very much appreciate D'Souza's nuanced discussion of Darwin's science versus his personal religionous beliefs. Two observations are in order:
1) What is the interface between the spiritual and the material, or if you will, between the natural and the supernatural? Sooner or later materialists end up attributing to "nature" or "chance" the telos (purpose) traditionally assigned to the Divine Mind. In the opposte extreme are those believers for whom everything is the arbitrary (lacking consistency or predictability) decision of God.
2) The real conflict with Christianity is not the seven days of Creation, which can be (and have been by Christian theologians such as St. Augustine)understood as allegorical. The real conflict with Christianity is the doctrine that death comes by sin, and that sin has infected the whole creation with death. Evolutionary theory holds that death preceded sin. Christianity holds that nature was qualitatively different prior to sin, and will be restored/translated when sin is disposed of at the Advent of Christ. If this sounds fantastic, compare it to some speculations about the "Big Bang" where it is argued by some physicists that the nature (behavior) of matter was different prior to (or in the midst of) what caused the primordeal explosion.
One of our responders has argued that Evolution has been "proved by generations of peer review." One could have said the same concerning Euclidian geometry. Another has said that evolution has been confirmed by studies in genetics, zoology, etc. Actually, Evolutionary theory has had to be modified to account for various discoveries in these areas, sometimes markedly different from Darwin's original thinking. Genetic studies have been particularly troubling to conventional Darwinism. Related species, I believe, have differing chromosome counts, a circumstance not envisioned by Darwin who assumed a simplicity and uniformity to cellular life that proved mistaken. This goes to the heart of Darwin's original theory which pertaned not to adaptation within species (any dog-breeder knew that!) but to the development of one specie out of another.