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Hi, Winston —
Whether evolution is true is a scientific question,
and, as such, the Catholic Church takes no position on it. She does require that we believe that we are
descended from one set of parents and that the soul
does not evolve but is immediately created by God.
- Where did you get this quotation from?
I can't speak for those who uttered it as to what
it means. I can however think of two ways in which
it might be true.
- One, when divorced from sound philosophy
and then projected into philosophy, it implies that
there is no meaning or sacredness to life. That it
is all randomness left to chance. That is to say,
if you derive your philosophy from a strictly materialistic
evolution,
it might lead you to conclude that not every life
has intrinsic value. This is not a necessary conclusion
if you start off with the right philosophy but not
every evolutionist does.
- Second, and this is related, is the whole survival
of the fittest thing, which, again, implies
that the lives of the less fit are less important
and, in fact, it is important that the less fit not
survive. Where this becomes problematic is with social
Darwinism, where people take principles observed
in the natural world (or theorized) and try to execute
them in the human order.
For example, it is one thing to observe that the
fittest animals survive on the prairie and flourish.
This is probably incontrovertible. It is another
thing to postulate that sick old people are not fit
and so must not be allowed to survive.
Another element is that as soon as you speak of
the sanctity of human life, you are speaking
on the supernatural order, and evolution, being science, is
on the natural order and cannot admit of sacredness, sanctity, or any such thing.
So to sum up, evolution, in and of itself, ascribes
no meaning or sacredness to life . . . it is utterly neutral.
For that matter, the same thing could be said of
science. What matters is the philosophy one holds.
One can hold a philosophy that life is sacred and
believe in evolution, but here it is the philosophy
that makes life sacred, not the evolution.
Eric
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