6. There is—apart from revealed doctrine—an absolute scientific certainty of the truth of that same doctrine respecting the creation of the human soul, and the highest probability of the immediate creation of the human body.
So much for the facts, so much for the theory, so much for its bearings on revelation.
In all we have said, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the Darwinian theory, even in so far as it does not conflict with Catholic faith, nor as committing ourselves to the general doctrine of evolution. The fact is, we do not care as Catholics to pledge ourselves hastily to any hypothesis whatever. We know some little of the history of hypotheses, and we know that it has been a history of failures.
When the Darwinian hypothesis or the theory of evolution shall have stood the test of years and facts, and the most searching investigations, let the Catholics who will be then alive accept them. There is no special reason why we should profess our faith in them. We do not need them to account for the phenomena about us.
On the other hand, we can readily understand why a certain class of minds should subscribe to it.
The human mind naturally seeks for an explanation of the origin of things. Intelligent men know the human race has not always been on the earth, that the phenomena about us are not eternal, that animal and vegetable life must have had a beginning here. Catholics know the same, and knew it before science had demonstrated it or discovered its minutiæ.
Men who wish to get rid of God welcome any hypothesis which seems to remove him to a greater distance from them, even before that hypothesis has more in its favor than against a it. Catholics, who believe in God, have no such anxiety. They are willing to wait, since they have already an explanation of the origin of things in their belief in God, and in the teachings of his revelation that he in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and all that they contain. The minutiæ, the How of that creation, they leave it to science to discover. When discovered and proved, they will accept it. But science can never give them anything not contained in the first article of the Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” All it can do is to explicate and confirm this.
If it be objected that scientists accept the theory, and that we therefore should, we reply, mere scientists do; and of all men, the least safe of guides is the mere scientist. No other man is more apt to become a blind worshipper of the idols of the Cave. He confines himself within the narrow limits of his laboratory, among instruments of death, and then would excogitate a solution to the problems of life and of the universe; as if with bolts and screws he could wring from nature the secret it will not yield.
Goethe well knew that from such men we need not expect the answer to the riddle of the universe; that one glance at the world as a whole as it lies bathed in the sun on a summer’s day tells us more than all the tomes of philosophers.
“Ah me! this dungeon still I see,
This drear, accursed masonry,
Where even the welcome daylight strains
But darkly through the painted panes,
Hemmed in by many a toppling heap
Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust,
Which to the vaulted ceiling creep,
Against the smoky paper thrust,
With glasses, boxes, round me stocked,
And instruments together hurled,
Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed:
Such is my world: and what a world!
And do I ask wherefore my heart
Falters, oppressed with unknown needs?
With some inexplicable smart
All movement of my life impedes?
Alas! in living nature’s stead,
Where God his human creature set
In smoke and mould, the fleshless dead
And bones and beasts surround me yet!”