From Mr. Peter Hala re St. Basil and Darwinism.

Mr. Baldwin's preposterous remark that St. Basil's passage in Hexaemeron prefigures Darwinism (Nov. 2004) highlights how absurd is the contemporary Catholic understanding of science and evolution. It is beyond comprehension how anybody who has read Hexaemeron can conclude that St. Basil would suggest such a thing, when the whole tract is, in fact, clearly anti-Darwinian and anti-evolutionary. The definition of Darwinism (such as given in the Oxford Dictionary of Biology, 2004), highlights the central problem of Darwinism which caused furor as soon as Darwin published his Origin of Species, because Darwin's theory postulates that the species are not immutable, nor were they specially created, the latter being read into the Scriptures by the Darwnists themselves.

As it has evolved, Darwinism is clearly atheistic and agnostic in its nature, and that is why the so-called religious fundamentalists object to it. In that sense St. Basil is fundamentally "anti-Darwinian" and "pro-Creation." He says that the creation of heaven and earth was not spontaneous and drew its origin from God, as "an intelligent cause presided at the birth of the Universe." St. Basil chastises and even makes fun of atheists, foolish Greek intellectuals, Manicheans, etc., of all those who refuse to see God's design in nature and replace it with some form of evolution. He pointedly describes our own contemporary misunderstanding of the problems--"we shall only laugh the more at this elaborate scientific trifling."

As far as the central question that interested Darwin--whether the species were created as they are now, or changed by descent--the Darwinists have muddled the philosophical, theological, and scientific issues beyond understanding for most ordinary men and women. In any case, St. Basil did not mean that waters spontaneously (i.e. without God's direction) generated birds, nor that the birds actually descended from the fish. The following describes what he really meant by the "family":

   "In the same way that fish cut the
   waters, using their fins to carry them forward
   and their tails to direct their movements
   round and round and straightforward,
   so we see birds float in the air by the
   help of their wings. Both endowed with the
   property of swimming, their common derivation
   from the waters has made them of
   one family."

St. Basil explains the meaning of "waters" when he analyzes the Greek philosophical elements, waters on which the earth rides, the waters on which the Spirit of God was borne and moves, the same word for which the "Syriac word was more expressive, and that being more analogous to the Hebrew term it was a nearer approach to the scriptural sense; ... it cherished the nature of the waters as one sees a bird cover the eggs with her body and impart to them vital force from her own warmth."

If St. Basil prefigured anything, it was the idea of germination, propagated by St, Augustine, one that is now being rediscovered in Catholic intellectual circles:

   "Nothing then is truer than that each
   plant produces its seed or contains some
   seminal virtue; this is what is meant by
   'after its kind.' So that the shoot of a reed
   does not produce an olive tree, but from a
   reed grows another reed, and from one sort
   of seed a plant of the same sort always germinates.
   Thus, all which sprang from the
   earth, in its first bringing forth, is kept the
   same to our time, thanks to the constant
   reproduction of kind."

This clearly shows that St. Basil was anti-descent or anti-transformation of species, and therefore anti-Darwinian. Insofar as he was "pro-design," Catholics ought to start paying closer attention to the emerging Intelligent Design movement.

Edmonton, AB

Professor Baldwin responds:

Catholic Insight readers may decide for themselves if Mr. Peter Hala is justified in his scorn of "how absurd is the contemporary Catholic understanding of science and evolution." My "preposterous remark" is indeed in the mainstream of this understanding.

Rather than expostulate in a personal way, I suggest that Mr. Hala and all interested parties Google the topic "Saint Basil & Darwinism." There, they will find many statements linking, indeed praising, Saint Basil (and Saint Augustine) for their anticipation of Darwinism.

Of most interest to C.I. readers may be the site www.netac.net/-matg/cques35htm. There, they will find the text of chapter 35 of "Things Catholics Are Asked About," specifically on the subject of Evolution, where Basil and Augustine are cited as early Christian examples of this approach. The chapter among many other sources draws on and quotes extensively from the works of Wassman, described as "one of the greatest living scientists, who is also a Catholic priest."

A similar text may be found at www.elca.org/p/philoed.html, by the US Navy Chaplain, Jeffrey R. Bornemann. I may subjoin the words of the great Catholic scholar Johannes Quasten (Catholic University of America, from a previous rather than a contemporary generation) on Basil's Hexaemeron as "an amazing display of natural science and philosophy." So, in the words of Dr Samuel Johnson, "If I err, I err in very good company."

Calgary, AB

Editor's note:

Catholics do not necessarily reject the idea of evolution, but we do reject Darwin's materialist philosophy, i.e., his insistence that man evolved from the ape without God intervening to create the human soul.