I am making my way through John McPhee’s compendium of writings on geology, Annals of the Former World. So far we have seen the Great Basin stretching apart and eroding into its various ranges, California scraping itself together from all kinds of detritus, and the Appalachians revealing their rumpled roots. And although McPhee warns precisely against this, it’s hard to avoid a certain smugness arising from having one’s temporal sense stretched into the millions and billions. On the positive side, I find Wal-Mart and Ikea’s enormous temples far less offensive, knowing they are built on faults and ancient river beds, and out of a material that more or less dissolves in ordinary rainwater. But it is easy to let inner peace become complacency.

The Annals have tables of geologic eras printed on the inside covers, which led on this particular Christmas break to a discussion with my parents on the age of the earth and the origins and development of life. My dad asked me if my opinions were the result of an official position of the Church. It’s true that Catholics do tend to be quite comfortable with evolution, which has a lot to do with the fact that, unlike many Protestants, we don’t have a doctrine of biblical literalism. To understand why that is, it’s important to understand that the Catholic Church is a historical entity, one that can trace its existence back to its founder and to the people who wrote the New Testament. It has been in the act of studying itself and its scriptures for 2000 years now. Protestants broke with this entity, but kept its scriptures, which leaves them with the problem of how to interpret a book out of its historical context. One solution to that problem is to read the Bible in the same way that strict constructionists read the Constitution; that is, ignoring everything except the text itself. There is an attractive humility to such an attitude, but it nonetheless gets you into trouble when the text says something that is just not supported by the science.

The other reason Catholics find themselves at home with evolution is that we sort of came up with it. St Augustine proposed that living creatures were initially created as simple forms that developed into their present complexity. Thomas Aquinas takes this idea even further, in his discussion of causality, and though he had no idea about genes or natural selection, explains how a whole chain of causes, including the environment, results in an animal’s form. The chain of causes is not infinite, however, but has its ultimate origin in an Uncaused Cause. But as Timothy !McDermott points out in his introduction to the abridged Summa, it is a mistake to read the modern conception of causality, one billiard ball hitting another, into this picture. We should not think of God as needing to muck around in the genes in order to get an eyeball. That is the sort of thing demiurges do. The divine act of creation is continuous and ex nihilo: as if (and we can only speak analogically) God has such a brilliant and exquisite conception of the world that it cannot help, as it unfolds in time, becoming an expression of what matters to its Creator.

When Cardinal Schönborn wrote an editorial for the New York Times back in July of 2005, a lot of my friends were concerned, to put it lightly, that the Catholic Church was siding with the creationists. I didn’t think that was the case back then, and I don’t think so now. While everyone has been getting hysterical, damning various electorates and bemoaning the “end of reason”, an interesting discussion of scientific methodology, teleology, and the borders between physics and metaphysics (so egregiously ignored by so many) has been developing elsewhere. If you are tempted to damn or bemoan, read this article by Ken Miller, these essays by Stephen Barr and Schönborn in First Things, and for an even longer discussion by Schönborn, this lecture.

(cdm | GeologicalSuperiority)