Catholics and Evolution

Shortly after a bishop's comments about evolution in the NY Times, anti-Catholics in the press commenced plying their trade. The Church in the last few hundred years has been quite enlightened about scientific issues such as evolution, as opposed to protestant fundamentalists, who will look you in the eye and swear that Jonah was in the belly of a whale for 3 days writing a psalm. But that doesn't stop the bigots from using any dumb thing some bishop says off the cuff to paint all one billion of us as intellectually tone deaf biblical literalists in lock step with an out of touch patriarchy. That is a shame.

Sometimes accusations like this are so dumb, so completely stupid, so utterly brain rotting just on their merit, that it is maddening to even address them. I have to say that if anyone thinks that I am a knee jerk apologist for The Church they are smoking crack. I've dissented on plenty with the good fathers since before I graduated from Kennedy Catholic in '89, where the Sisters of Divine Compassion taught us evolution in biology. But that doesn't mean I'm OK with anti-Catholic bigotry either, which is exactly what all this hullabaloo is really all about. There are people out there with an axe to grind against the Catholic Church because it's teachings don't dovetail with their opinions, so they'll use anything they can to spit venom.

Even if the Church did categorically deny the theory of evolution (which it does not), what of it? Why do non Catholics, former Catholics, and other secularists even care? Why do those in science care? The Catholic Church is first and foremost a religion. Catholics believe in God. We believe a guy named Jesus was the Son of God, walked on water, fed the masses with a few loaves of bread and fish, was crucified and rose from the dead. Every Sunday we (some of us, at least) eat a bread wafer and call it the Body of Christ. These things aren't exactly scientifically plausible. So why don't these same people write stories in the Times and Slate about how screwed up those things are (actually a few have)? Because it would be too obvious. But the evolution issue is easier to hide behind because it obfuscates the bigotry. It is no different from an anti Semite being mum about all things in Judaica who then blows up over something the Israeli army does. What does the Israeli army have to do with the Jewish religion? As much as biology class has to do with Catholicism.

Comments

[s.w.]

I'm not sure that, "all this hullaballoo" as you call it is because people are bigoted against Catholics or any other religion. I think you actually identify the real cause yourself when you argue that theories of creationism and religion have absolutely nothing to do with science and biology class. Personally, I have no problem with the belief that God created the Earth - I actually believe it myself. But I don't see why that has to exclude the the Theory of Evolution - if God created the universe, there's no reason She didn't just create it as it exists scientifically, determining all of the laws of nature (such as, for example, evolution.)

But that's beside the point. As you said yourself, the ideas of religion and of science are totally separate. Both have important, but generally completely different functions in informing our understanding of the world and ourselves. And the simple truth is that religious perspectives have no place in a biology class- they're completely irrelevant, and moreover, they're the type of thing that needs to be considered and evaluated on one's own, not at the behest of the government. As a public school student who took biology last year, I find the notion of requiring my teacher to teach us ideas which should be matters of personal faith abhorrent, especially since I know for a fact that neither he nor the majority of my class believed them.

When one steps back and examines the situation without the obscuring filter of the always-assumed divisions and partisanships of left vs. right and religious vs. nonreligious, I think there really is a deeper issue at stake then one group of people trying to make another look stupid. There is a divide between religion and science, and there ought to be one, for a whole host of reasons, and people get justly upset when anybody tries to cross that line, especially in our schools, since everybody's kids, regardless of their backgrounds, are required by law to sit there and listen. They're not angry because it's religious, and they don't mock it because it's unscientific, they make a big "hullaballoo" because anything that isn't scientific, regardless of it's merit, doesn't belong in a science classroom. I think you'll find that any time it is suggested that religious ideas be added to our government-run schools, there will be angry and yes, often mocking objections, not because people have religious ideas but because they don't recognize the distinction between those views and those of science, which, as you pointed out, is so glaringly obvious.