Trying Darwin On Trial

Commenter CMinor asks:

Do you know anything about the book Darwin on Trial? Somebody donated a copy to our parish library (which I am organizing.) I'm trying to decide what to do with it.

Well, it sells for about three bucks used on Amazon, so even if you sold it you'd need seven more dollars plus shipping to buy Cardinal Ratzinger's commentary on Genesis instead...

But if you wanted a snarky response, you would have asked for one. So I'll attempt to address the question in a more helpful vein.

Now, I haven't read Darwin On Trial, partly because I neither expected to be interested by it or to agree with it. (Which I realize is rather close-minded of me and all, but with limited time it happens a lot these days...) So given that I haven't read the book (though I've read a number of shorter articles by Johnson), I shan't make so bold as to speak directly to it's quality, but rather try to cover the topic (about which I do know a bit) and the way one would go about evaluating whether it should be in a parish library.

Darwin On Trail was written in the early 90s by UC Berkley law professor Phillip Johnson. Though without formal training in biology, Johnson turned his skill as a lawyer and debater against the work of prominent secularists and evolutionary biologists to make the case that the available scientific evidence does not in fact support evolutionary theory. Johnson's basic critique (appearing in all his books and articles) is that modern science has an inherent atheistic bias in that it only looks for material causes, not supernatural ones. Thus, he argues, scientists often adopt fanciful explanations which are material in nature (evolution being his primary example) rather than admit the possibility of divine causation.

Now, I think that Johnson is wrong in his assessment of the evidence for biological evolution, and some of his quote mining in articles I've read strikes me as being a sign of either not reading very carefully, or intentionally engaging in selective quoting -- but scientific inaccuracy and rhetorical sloppiness are not necessarily reasons why something should be excluded from a parish library. The more important question is, does the book in any way contradict or lead away from the Catholic faith?

I think there are two theological danger areas to watch out for in a book like this:

1) False Apposition -- As early as the 1860s John Henry Newsman stated that Darwin's theory was not inherently contradictory to the Catholic faith, a judgment supported by Pius XII in Humani Generis and John Paul II in his letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. However, opponents of evolution (perhaps because they subscribe to non-Catholic ideas of biblical interpretation, perhaps in an effort to bolster their arguments by exaggerating the evils of the alternative) sometimes state that if evolution is true, there is no room for God as the creator of the universe. Their intent in doing so is to emphasize to the reader of impossible it is to believe that evolution is correct, but considering that the Church has taught that evolution and God's creative agency are not contradictory, I think these kind of statements are a bit dangerous, in that according to Church teaching evolution may be true -- and it is never wise to set up unnecessary stumbling blocks for the believer.

2) Knowledge of God's creation -- Several books and articles I've read by members of the Discovery Institute (of which Phillip Johnson is one of the founding members) say that if God's 'thumbprint' is not clearly visible in the created world, then God is cruel and unjust -- since we are expected to believe in God to attain salvation, and if God "hid" his presence by working only through natural processes, then he would be holding people accountable for not knowing something which he had in turn made it impossible to discern.

This, I think, steps into two danger areas. First, it suggests that God could only have created the universe in a way that looks to us like design. Second, it implicitly limits the evidence for the creation of the universe to those physical aspects of creation which can be successfully studied by science. Both of these suggest significantly narrower criteria for discerning God's creative power than a traditional Catholic understanding.


Though this is at the other end of the educational spectrum, we've been tackling a similar issue lately in that we were thinking of putting in an order for a few kindergarten level books from Seton. They have a phonics book which MrsDarwin thinks Noogs would enjoy, and a bunch of the St. Josephs picture books about saints and sacraments and such. We've been trying to decide if we should also get their Science1 book, which mostly deals with how the human body works (Noogs loves her books on muscles and skeletons at the library) and is illustrated by Ben Hatke, who illustrated the charming Angel in the Waters. On the one hand, there's certainly nothing wrong with talking about how the ear works under the heading of "God's Gift of Hearing". However, since I don't plan on using later Seton science texts (which quickly dive down the creationist rabbit hole in the later grades) I'm a bit concerned that starting off in the younger grades about "God's gift of hearing" and then later talking about biology within an evolutionary framework will create in my daughter's mind the false dichotomy that either the ear was created by God or it is the result of evolution, with the former as the explanation for children and the latter for adults. (Like telling children than babies come from the stork, and adults that they come from sex.) It seems to me that it's always dangerous to create an apparent association between religious beliefs and an over-simplified view of the physical universe, since that runs the risk of the student discarding religion as his knowledge of the universe grows.