Evolution and Catholic Faith

Darwin in the Twenty-First Century Sloan, Phillip R., McKenny, Gerald, Eggleson, Kathleen Published by University of Notre Dame Press Sloan, Phillip R., et al. Darwin in the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/40426. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/40426 Access provided at 4 Apr 2020 17:41 GMT from University of Notre Dame ELEVEN EV OL U TIO N A ND CAT HOL IC FA ITH John O’Callaghan To begin to examine the relation of orthodox Catholic Christian faith to evolutionary theory and the question of human origins, con- sider words of the fourth pope, St. Clement: Let us fix our gaze on the Father and Creator of the whole world, and let us hold on to his peace and blessings, his splendid and sur- passing gifts. Let us contemplate him in our thoughts and with our mind’s eye reflect upon the peaceful and restrained unfold- ing of his plan; let us consider the care with which he provides for the whole of his creation. (Clement 1975, 4:439). Pope St. Clement presents, however briefly, a portrait of a provident God, who, in the words of scripture, “orders all things mightily,” and whose “plan” for creation is amenable to human thought and con- templation. Against the background of neo-Darwinian evolution- ary theory (“NET” from here on out),1 it is sometimes claimed that something like this aspiration of St. Clement’s, to discern God’s pur- poses and providential plan in creation, is mistaken when it comes to NET and human origins, for there is an insuperable conflict between religious claims about human origins and evolutionary claims. This essay will argue two theses. The first thesis is that from a Roman 269 270 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN Catholic perspective it is not possible for there to be any conflict be- tween the claims of NET concerning human origins and orthodox Roman Catholic faith (RC from here on out). The second thesis is that there can be a conflict between RC and certain claims made about NET and human origins. In order to argue for these theses, I need to fill out what often amounts to a cliché in Roman Catholic discussions of science, and that is that God is the author of both sacred revelation and the world studied by the natural sciences. Insofar as He is, He cannot say one thing in revelation and another in the world. Thus there is no conflict between RC and the truth of NET in particular, since the latter is about the world. But, going beyond the cliché, one wants to know what it is about God such that this claim is true. Otherwise it is too often introduced just to end all inquiry, with the result that the Roman Catholic theological and philosophical tradition is often ab- sent from contemporary discussions of NET and religious belief, leaving a vacuum to be filled by religious views on divine action and the world as known by natural science, views held even by some Roman Catholics, that at times are in conflict with RC. THE FIRS T THESIS Concerning the first thesis, presumably the suggestion that there might be a conflict between RC and NET is driven by concerns about God’s creative activity in bringing about the various species of life studied within NET, and, in particular, the existence of the human species—human origins. It is thought, no doubt due to the claims of some cultural popularizers of NET, that the success of NET implies the exclusion of divine activity in the bringing about of the species of life. Religious believers understandably react against such popular claims about NET from the perspective of biblical revelation, a reve- lation that is quite clear about God’s intimate relation to all creatures, living and non-living, in their genesis and history. However, those religious believers can themselves fall prey to conceiving of God’s creative activity in ways that share the presuppositions of the cul- Evolution and Catholic Faith | 271 tural popularizers more than it does RC. It is part of my thesis that particularly for advocates of RC it is a proper understanding of God as creator that eliminates these confusions. It is a tenet of RC that God is the cause of the existence of all be- ings and all being other than Himself (Vatican 2012, 4. II: #290, 4. IV: #296– 97; Sokolowski 1982; Ott 1960, chap. 1). This is the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo that is developed within the theological and philosophical tradition of reflection upon the Jewish and Chris- tian scriptures, particularly in the first four centuries of the history of the church amidst the battle with gnosticism (May 1994). While Thomas Aquinas argues that in principle this is a doctrine that can be grasped by anyone upon sufficient philosophical reflection about the world and without the aid of religious faith, as a matter of his- tory the idea of creation ex nihilo is unknown to pre-Christian Greek thought. Creation accounts as one sees in such pre-Christian settings are always a creating out of a preexisting stuff that is acted upon, not a causing to be “from nothing” (Sedley 2007). This doctrine must be clearly distinguished from so called “creationism” or “creation sci- ence,” which really amounts to a thesis about the hermeneutics of bib- lical interpretation rather than science. Broadly, creationism is the thesis that the account of origins in Genesis needs to be read and understood in a more or less “according to the letter” sense—if it says that the world was created in six days, then that means in something like six solar days of twenty-four hours each, or various attenuations of that into ages, but as described in Genesis according to the letter.2 And of course with that hermeneutic in place, creationism might then look for and interpret natural phenomena to support that “according to the let- ter” reading of scripture, as well as to discredit phenomena taken to undermine it. But the RC doctrine of creation ex nihilo is a metaphys- ical doctrine about the origin of being, not a hermeneutical doctrine about scripture; although with it in place it no doubt bears upon ques- tions of how we ought to interpret scripture. Now, if the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is true, then it places se- vere restrictions upon how we characterize God’s activity in relation to the world. The first restriction is that we cannot treat God’s causal activity as simply another form of the kind of mundane causality we 272 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN study within the natural sciences. The natural causes studied within the natural sciences presuppose objects upon which they act; they change the various states of those objects. They exchange energy with one another in accord with the first and second laws of thermo- dynamics, Maxwell’s equations, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and so on. But in exercising their causality they do not produce their effects ex nihilo, that is, from absolutely nothing other than them- selves. They always work upon some kind of preexisting matter or energy state; natural causes rearrange and make the matter or energy state upon which they work into something else or some other state. But creation, insofar as it is genuinely ex nihilo, presupposes noth- ing upon which it acts. It is not a making of something into something else. It is not an exchange of energy. It is not an interaction with something, or an intervention in an already presupposed nexus, ma- trix, or receptacle (Aquinas 1941, Ia. 44– 47). God’s causality in cre- ation is not a causality that competes with natural causes, or even co- operates with them. It is best thought of as enabling natural causes to be what they are. In this respect a creator god is quite different from Plato’s demiurge of the Timaeus or the world soul of book 10 of the Laws. The demiurge acts upon a preexisting receptacle with elements already existing but in a formless or chaotic state. He forms the world according to the Forms, in particular the Form of the World, which is the best possible world—He brings a preexisting logos to an equally preexisting chaos. The demiurge just looks like a greater or even great- est possible natural cause. The demiurge acts as one element or part of and within a presupposed setting or context, and in that sense is a natural agent within it, even if not a physical or terrestrial agent. By contrast, a creator in the sense of RC is responsible for the very exis- tence in toto of the setting or context and so is neither a part or ele- ment of that context nor a natural agent of any sort. So it is impor- tant to clearly distinguish creation from natural causation by saying that natural causation is always a making of something from some- thing, while creation is not a making of anything. Using the words “create” and “make” in semitechnical senses, we say that God creates, He does not make, while natural causes make, they do not, indeed they cannot create.3 Evolution and Catholic Faith | 273 Now one thing that follows from this claim about creation ex ni- hilo is that it is not a process existing in time, a process that begins, endures through some temporal span, and ends at some time. Time measures the natural causal relations and energy exchanges between things in this world. Insofar as time can be considered to be real, and to be something other than God, it too must be a creature (in the ap- propriate sense) of God.4 It follows that there is no time at which a creature exists and is not being created by God. This is the doctrine of continuous creation— everything that exists at every moment it exists is sustained in being by God. God’s act of creation did not take place at a moment in time in the past; neither is it a process in time that continues. Rather, it is the case that the world of temporally and spatially related causes, the world subject to the study of the natural sciences, is sustained in being by God. Even if one holds as a matter of RC that the universe had a first temporal moment, the doctrine of creation itself does not entail such a first moment. And the doctrine of creation would be true even if there were no first temporal mo- ment in the existence of the universe.5 In other words, even if the past history of the universe were unbounded and extended infinitely into the past, God would still be the creative cause of it. Again, the natural sciences study causes that are effective and transpire according to spatiotemporal relations. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics indicate that at the cosmic and subatomic levels these spatiotemporal relations can become quite bizarre. Nonetheless they are spatiotemporal relations between existing material objects. So it follows that God’s creative activity as such is not subject to scientific investigation. It is true that one can say that the natural sciences study the result of God’s creation, describe it, attempt to understand it, and so on. But God’s creative act is presupposed by what the natural sci- ences study; it is not itself amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes. Similarly, if the result of God’s creative activity is intelligible to us, that is because it is an expression of God’s practical intelligence (Aquinas, De veritate, Q. II-III, in Aquinas 1949). The natural sciences do not prove this intelligibility—they pre- suppose it. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo helps us to understand why this presupposition by natural science of the intelligibility of the 274 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN world is rationally justified, as opposed to those who say that even among scientists the intelligibility of the world is a mere matter of faith, even if not religious faith (Clark 2010). Of course a quick objection at this point would be that something that is not amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes is not something that can be known—this seems to be the atti- tude of some cultural popularizers of science, particularly some of the more atheistic of them. Thus, the objection would continue, I seem to have protected against the possibility of a conflict between NET and RC by making God unknowable as such. On the contrary, there are many objections to any such restriction on our ability to know to the confines of natural science, the restriction that raises this objection. Mathematical relations are presupposed in the techniques of mod- ern natural science; they are not amenable to them—“the googolroot of the googolplex is 10” is a knowable mathematical truth that is not amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes to discover or prove it. That I am wondering right now whether my next example of this point will be effective is a knowable truth not amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes. I know that I am so wondering, and you know it because I wrote it; I simply manifested it to you who are capable of reading. You do not understand how science works if you think that manifestation is amenable to scientific investigation by anything we call science nowa- days. Your knowing it in virtue of my writing it is not grounded in a scientific technique of inquiry or discovery unless the objector makes “science” cover every mode of knowing, in which case he grants my response and loses his objection. And of course the assertion itself, namely, something that is not amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes is not something that can be known, pur- ports to be knowable, indeed purports to be true; and yet it is not itself amenable to the techniques of scientific inquiry into natural causes. If it is so amenable, just try explaining what scientific techniques you would use to know it and show it to be true. The assertion undercuts its coherence in the assertion of it. So we need not conclude from what I have said so far that I have only protected against a conflict between NET and RC by making God unknowable as such. Evolution and Catholic Faith | 275 The second restriction on talk about God’s creative activity fol- lows closely upon the first. We should not think of the knowledge we gain of God’s existence from His creation as something akin to the affirmation of a scientific theory, one hypothesis of which is God’s existence. So when Aquinas for one gives the “Five Ways” (proofs of God’s existence) his arguments are not to be understood to be scien- tific theories. Only a certain scientism or residual logical positivism would claim that only scientific theories can make meaningful exis- tence claims. Again, I am not making a scientific claim when I claim that my mother exists or that mathematical functions exist. However, some religious believers looking at particular failures of natural scien- tific explanation, the gaps in NET for instance, can be tempted to posit the existence of a god, or an “intelligent designer” to explain those things that natural science fails to explain, as if they were pro- posing an alternative scientific explanation, and so on. But this ap- proach to the existence of God is mistaken in at least four ways. First, it fails to recognize that God’s creative activity is not akin to the activity displayed by the natural causes that are the subject of the theories of natural science. If A and B plausibly compete to explain C, they must be subject to roughly the same context of evaluation as to the warrant of their competing causal claims. But God’s causality isn’t subject to anything like the same context of evaluation as natural causes are, because God does not transform presupposed matter or en- ergy as natural causes do. Second, insofar as God is brought in to ex- plain what the natural sciences fail to explain, it seems to suggest that the existence of God is not implicated in those aspects of reality that the natural sciences do explain. Again, insofar as positing the existence of a god or an intelligent designer is understood along the lines of a competing scientific theory, it must be subject to relatively the same criteria of evaluation as NET and other naturalistic theories in what- ever realm of nature we are trying to understand. So when NET or these other theories succeed in explanation, it is most rational to re- ject those competing theories, including the “theory” that God did it —God is banished, so to speak, to the gaps of understanding, the realm of the apparently irrational and lawless, with the result that the realms of reality that the natural sciences do successfully explain 276 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN appear to be that much more Godless, a result that plays too easily into the hands of some cultural popularizers who wish to use science to argue for atheism. On the contrary, RC holds that the existence of God is just as much implicated, indeed more so in the success of natural science than in its failures. This fact is known both philosophically and by virtue of revelation. It is known philosophically from the implica- tions of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and from revelation when the Gospel of John opens by asserting: In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. (NABRE 1:1– 3) Again it is revealed when St. Paul asserts that the invisible things of God are made manifest by the visible things of this world. The first text suggests that there is nothing of this world that does not mani- fest the logos of God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sum- marizes this by saying, “Our human understanding, which shares in the light of the divine intellect, can understand what God tells us by means of his creation, though not without great effort and only in a spirit of humility and respect before the Creator and his work” (Vati- can 2012, 4. IV: #299). But thinking of knowledge of the existence of God as a theory in competition with the theories of natural science forces us to abandon the thought that the logos of God is manifest in those areas of reality successfully understood by natural science. And the assertion of Paul provides both conceptually and as a matter of history the impetus to study the world more closely to see how the logos of God is manifested in its workings, that is, provides an impe- tus for advocates of RC to pursue more, not less scientific understand- ing of the natural world. Indeed, I think an argument can be made that efforts to posit God, or an intelligent designer, as a competing scientific hypothesis to naturalistic explanations requires something like a heretical notion of God, heretical, that is, from the perspective of RC. Essentially the Evolution and Catholic Faith | 277 argument goes like this. (1) For the existence of God to be like a sci- entific theory proposed as an alternative hypothesis or explanation of some natural phenomenon, it must at least be falsifiable. (2) To be fal- sifiable there must be something conceivable that would count as evi- dence falsifying the God hypothesis. (3) That something would con- ceivably be some phenomenon from which it followed that God is not causally involved in that phenomenon. (4) But the RC doctrine of providence requires that God be causally involved in anything what- soever that exists (Vatican 2012, 4. IV-V: #298– 304). (5) Therefore, the phenomenon that would falsify the hypothesis that God is responsible for it would in turn falsify the RC doctrine of providence. (6) There- fore, the claim that it is a scientific hypothesis or theory that God is responsible for some natural phenomenon is heretical as implying the denial of an orthodox RC doctrine on the condition of the success of natural science. There will be some who object to the strong notion of “falsifiability” employed in the argument above. But it is just for il- lustrative purposes. The argument could be modified appropriately for whatever criteria one prefers to distinguish scientific theories from one another as in some sense competing with one another, and subject to being ruled out in preference for another according to similar con- ditions of warrant and evaluation. If to preserve orthodoxy and the doctrine of providence the religious believer moves to an intelligent designer rather than God, an intelligent designer distinct from God whom God causes to act, the believer’s thesis either collapses into a position in which no intelligent designer is necessary because God as creator is causally involved (i.e., the position I am defending above), or he again butts up against heresy in claiming that the intelligent de- signer is necessary for God to be causally involved in the acts of His creatures. Third, scientific theories being what they are, if the existence of God is thought to be a competing scientific hypothesis established by the present failures of natural science, and if the natural sciences develop over time in such a way that they eventually come to explain what had heretofore been explained by the competing explanation involving God, then it seems that we have reason to abandon the ex- istence of God as rationally demonstrable from the things of this 278 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN world (Romans 1:20). The existence of Ptolemaic epicycles was re- jected, as it should have been, with the rejection of Ptolemaic cos- mology in favor of the simpler Copernicanism, and eventually Kepler- Newtonian cosmology, which did away with epicycles altogether. Similarly, when a scientific theory competing with the hypothesis of God comes to explain what it heretofore had not, that is just one more reason to reject the hypothesis of God. So, paradoxically, treating the existence of God as an element of a competing scientific explanation or theory promotes agnosticism and atheism, insofar as natural sci- ence succeeds, setting natural science generally at odds with Chris- tian belief. Fourth, and finally, as a matter of history from the perspective of RC such an approach to God suggests a reversion to a pre-Judeo- Christian pagan conception of divinity, in which the divine is un- derstood to be more powerful, perhaps even infinitely more power- ful than the mundane causes we are ordinarily confronted with, but, nonetheless, is still understood to be operating within the same broad context within which natural causes operate. We can take our pick between the polytheism of the gods of Mount Olympus as described in Hesiod’s Theogony, or the monotheism of Plato’s demiurge of the Timaeus and Laws, book 10. These gods or the demiurge operate upon an already existing order of being, even if only a formless and chaotic matter and a receptacle, an order of things that has its own intelligible necessities apart from and presupposed by the divine activity. They interact with it and influence it precisely because it can be conceived of as a stuff that stands over and apart from them but within the same overarching matrix or context of activity and passivity. In short they mess with stuff and with us; but their messing with stuff and with us is determined by necessities they themselves are not responsible for and within which we all exist. They do not create ex nihilo the order of things that has its intelligible necessities as a result of that creation. In either case, with the gods of Mount Olympus or the demiurge, we return to a non-Judeo-Christian, that is, pagan conception of the divine, poetic-mythological or philosophic-mythological, that does not conceive of God who is the cause of all being other than Himself. Such a creator God does not operate upon beings in creating them, Evolution and Catholic Faith | 279 does not interact with, influence, or “mess” with them, but causes them to be, sustains them in being, and gives to them the order of ne- cessity and contingency within which they operate. Aquinas writes, “Divine Providence imposes necessity upon some things, but not on others. . . . [It] prepares certain effects to happen from necessary causes, and they happen necessarily, while [It] has prepared others to happen from contingent causes, and they happen contingently, ac- cording to the condition of proximate causes” (Aquinas 1941, 1.22.4). The “god” or “intelligent designer” of scientific hypothesis is a rejec- tion of this providential God of whom Aquinas for one speaks. Given the history of Christianity, it is a return to the gnostic god against which the church developed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Indeed, it follows from what I said about creation presupposing nothing that the intelligible causal structures that are amenable to the techniques of natural science are the product of God’s creative sus- taining activity. Put another way, natural science investigates the intel- ligible structure of the world as it is displayed in natural causal rela- tions, but it does not demonstrate the very existence of that intelligible structure; natural science presupposes it. In that respect, one can say that the intelligible structure of the world studied by natural science, insofar as it is created and sustained in being by God, is the product of a divine act, and thus the expression of divine intelligence—not the demiurge, but more akin to what the Greeks called logos, but a logos that is more than the intelligible structure of reality, a logos that acts and is thus a person communicating intelligibility. It is also a logos that does not stand over against an uncreated chaos, but is prior to all things. “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” The logos that finds expression within creation comes to further elaboration and expression within our own minds through the theories of the natural sciences that are formulated and judged as adequate or inadequate to the reality of creation, that is, judged to be true or false. To give an image, the created order is the expression of intelli- gence and stands, as it were, between two intellects, the divine and 280 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN ours. The divine intellect expressing itself creatively and ex nihilo gives existence to creation and a rule or measure to it that is ex- pressed within it. That same rule or measure expressed within cre- ation then becomes the rule or measure of our intellect as we attempt to understand creation. And yet it is better to say that our intellects stand not on the other side of creation from God, but within that cre- ation as well, being informed by it, and learning more about it from within through the study of the natural sciences. As St. Augustine said echoing St. Paul, creation and ourselves within it are like a cloudy mirror within which we glimpse ever so faintly the Logos of God. Aquinas later adds that creation itself comes to self-understanding in the human mind, precisely because it pertains to the perfection of cre- ation that it contain creatures capable of understanding it (Aquinas, De veritate, II.2. respon., in Aquinas 1949). And so from the perspec- tive of RC, scientific endeavor and its success is not to be feared or avoided by Christians but, rather, pursued as a perfection and the glory of being rational creatures of God, made from the beginning in His image and likeness— in a way we are all as rational creatures called to be scientists to the extent possible. But it is because the intelligible structure of creation that is stud- ied by the natural sciences, including NET, is an expression of the di- vine logos that it is impossible for there to be a conflict between NET and RC. We have every reason to listen to the biologists when they tell us that NET is the best theory of the natural causal processes by which the living species that confront us came to be. Like every sci- entific theory, it likely contains some falsehoods subject to revision through further investigation. Nevertheless, it appears to be the clos- est thing to the natural scientific truth about the origin of species that we have. But the doctrine of creation forces us to recognize that the natural causal factors operative in evolution are only operative inso- far as God renders them so by creating and sustaining them. What this emphasis upon the proper notion of creation forces upon us is an understanding of natural causality as embedded within a larger context of divine causality, in which the natural causes are enabled to be genuinely causal because God is causing them to be so. But again, we want to avoid the conceptual trap of placing this rela- Evolution and Catholic Faith | 281 tion of embedded causality within some common framework, where we fear that the more God does, the less the natural cause does, and the more the natural cause does, the less God does. When we think of the operations of natural causes we often and correctly think that the more one does the less another does, even if they are both in- volved in bringing about the effect. So, for instance, the more I lift the less you do when carrying a trunk. Or we think we are less free in acting to the extent that we think some other agent or cause is re- sponsible for some features of what we claim to do—raising our arms, for instance. We do not think of the other cause as enabling us, but, rather, as competing with us, indeed often inhibiting and threatening our freedom of action. However, even within the natural order of causality there are ex- amples where it is better to speak of the one cause enabling the other, rather than speaking of it as competing with it —I enable my pen to participate causally in my writing, I do not compete with it for re- sponsibility as to what is written; it makes no sense to speak as if the more it does the less I do, and the more I do the less it does. And in the case of God’s causality in creation, it is a matter of God actively and presently enabling causes to cause, not competing with them. So to take my arm again, I can say God caused me to freely raise my arm— and the modality of the act as “free” is itself within the scope of God’s act, a fortiori for non-free causes; it is free because God causes it to be and to be so. That is the sense in which God does not interact with the world, or mess with it, since its very possibility of acting is the result of God’s intimate causal presence to it. Mutatis mutandis, we can think of Augustine’s assertion that God is more in- terior to me than I am to myself. And the structure of embedded causality can be described as one of primary causality, God, to sec- ondary causality, creatures. One direct result of this emphasis upon the structure of primary and secondary causality as descriptive of God’s action in nature and natural causality is the conception of miracles it forces upon us. Commonly we may think of miracles as a kind of divine intervention or interference in the course of nature, where God takes the place of the natural cause —if no natural cause did it, then God did it, and it’s 282 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN a miracle. And insofar as we think of the natural order as involving laws, we think of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. But we let God off the hook by saying that He made the laws ages ago, and so can’t really be said to violate them, since He made them, and then generally and for the most part lets them run on. But, insofar as He is omniscient, when He did that ages ago, He always knew when and where He would occasionally intervene. This picture lends itself to the intervening, interacting, messing around god of the pagans and in- telligent design. This god is an alternative explanation of what hap- pens in nature, when nature fails. On this understanding of miracles, when the church, for example, examines a purported case of a miracle, it is involved in a scientific enterprise of determining which of two al- ternative and mutually exclusive scientific hypotheses is true — the natural one or the supernatural one. Who or what did it? On the contrary, the problem with this picture from the perspec- tive I have been sketching is that it presupposes that God isn’t causally responsible for the things natural causes do bring about. But the struc- ture of primary and secondary causality denies just that presupposi- tion. The natural cause did it, and so did God by enabling and sustain- ing the natural cause to act in just the way it did when it did. And so a miracle must be conceived of as God bringing about some effect that He ordinarily brings about as primary cause simultaneously employ- ing secondary causes, but that in the particular case under considera- tion He has refrained from employing those secondary causes. God always does it, with or without secondary causes. When He does it without, that is a miracle. And the church in examining a miracle is not determining which did it—God or a natural cause. God did it as pri- mary cause, just as He is responsible for the effects of nature as pri- mary cause. The church is simply determining whether a natural cause was involved as secondary cause in what it already knows God did as primary cause. In other words, God does it all. Thus, insofar as NET appeals to natural causes to give an ac- count of the origin of species and human origins, there can be no conflict between its account and the claim that God creates those species, since it is God who is causing those natural causes to operate in the ways they do, and sustains in being the effects or results of those natural causes. Evolution and Catholic Faith | 283 But here another objection is obvious. NET appeals not simply to natural causes, but to chance or random variations in the genetic code—variations that are then subject to natural causes in the process of natural selection. Insofar as it appeals to chance, God is not in- volved in such processes, as neither are any other causes. But this mis- conceives chance or randomness, as if they meant “uncaused,” and it reifies “chance” as if it were itself a cause without a cause. But they don’t, and it isn’t. If, digging a garden in my back yard, I come across a safe filled with cash that you buried there, that is a chance event. But it is not uncaused. It is caused by your burying the safe there and my digging there. It is just that neither causal line alone is responsible for it—my digging is uncorrelated with your burying. If a meteor strikes the Earth causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, and thus allowing for the development of other competing species that would otherwise be selected out by the dinosaurs, the impact of the meteor is a random event from the perspective of the evolutionary biologist, but it is cer- tainly not uncaused or random for the astronomer. And if a gene mu- tates under the influence of a cosmic ray or radioactive particle, that is not uncaused. It is just not caused by the preexisting biological condi- tions of the organism and its environment taken into account by the biologist, as cosmic rays and radioactive decay are not correlated with those biological conditions. But if you insist that there are genuine uncaused events in na- ture, for example, the radioactive decay of atoms,6 and so on, and they enter into the process of evolution bringing about random events, I respond that that possibility still does not exclude a primary cau- sality employing those uncaused events to bring about an effect. Let us say that the result of throwing dice in the game of craps is in each instance random in the sense we are talking about here. Nonetheless, the house always wins, which is why one ought to invest in a casino rather than play in one. I want to take all your money. That is my purpose. So I build a casino in which craps is the only game played, and you must bet at least a dollar. But I know given the rules of craps that I can run a game of craps as the house, and win on average 51 times out of 100, since the odds of a shooter winning on a turn are very nearly 49 in 100. And over time, even with long stretches where you are up, you will lose all your money if you keep playing. Even if 284 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN you quit, there will always be another player to take your place, and continue the series that ends with my accumulation of the money bet. (And keep in mind that nature cannot quit, as the shooter might while she is ahead.) Thus my purpose in enabling the game will be ful- filled. That is why casinos never go out of business. A casino owner’s purpose, his goal, is to build successful gambling houses employing games in which each turn is a random event uncorrelated with the events that precede it and the events that follow it. And there is no need for the house to intervene by loading the dice, for example, to correct the process to guarantee the outcome, because the rules of the game enabling it determine the outcome of the process, not the individual events within the process. All the house needs to do is sus- tain the rules of the game. It does not need to cheat or break the law—it can legally take all of one’s money simply by inducing one to stay at the table. The rolls of the dice do not give intelligibility to the rules; the rules give intelligibility to the rolls, even as every role is un- correlated with every other roll. He who controls the rules controls the game. And the house always wins. It simply does not follow that randomness in a process, even a process in which every event is random and uncorrelated with every other event, entails that the process has no point. It does not follow that if you roll the clock back and then go forward again with the game that you will get a different result; you will simply get a different path to that same result—the house always wins. And it is striking to con- sider the fact that every event in a game of craps is uncorrelated with every other event in the game. But the utter lack of correlation char- acteristic of a game of craps does not hold of the biological processes studied by NET; no matter how many uncorrelated events take place within the process of biological evolution, by and large most of the reproductive events involved in evolution are correlated from genera- tion to generation, the evidence of which is the relative stability of species populations over time and the length of time necessary for a new species to develop through random mutations and natural selec- tion. If the events of evolution were as uncorrelated as those in a game of craps, by and large one would not get horses from horses, pigs from pigs, and fruit flies from fruit flies. Evolution and Catholic Faith | 285 Or suppose we say that the half-life of carbon-14 is 5730 years plus or minus 40 years. Suppose I build a “doomsday bomb” destruc- tive of all life on the planet and attach it to a Carbon-14 trigger that will trigger when at least half the amount of carbon has decayed ra- dioactively. Suppose we say that each radioactive decay event is “ran- dom.” And yet I guarantee you that in 100,000 years there will be no life on the planet, provided all the other operative causes continue to work as they do. And yet every individual carbon decay event is ran- dom in your absolute sense. Still, my purpose in building the bomb will be fulfilled despite the fact that the process involved in accom- plishing my purpose involved random, uncorrelated, and even per- haps uncaused events. The conclusion then is that randomness is not in fact opposed to order and even purpose, and does not in general undermine ordered even purposive processes within which the ran- domness occurs. That’s not an argument that the process of biologi- cal evolution actually has a purpose or point, just that randomness within it is not an argument that it does not have a purpose or point. Finally, even here, because causing as a creator so transcends the conditions of causing as a natural cause, we ought to refrain from denying that God can directly cause a random event to be “random” even in this sense that I have allowed for the sake of argument, just as I asserted earlier that only God can cause my act to be free. The natural event may well be random against the background of natural causes, and yet not be so as caused by God. As incipient pagans, we are forever tempted to try to place God within the ways of natural causality according to some sort of common nexus. But God’s ways are not our ways. There is no conflict between NET and RC. THE SECON D THESIS This brings me to my second thesis, namely, that there can be a con- flict between RC and certain claims made about NET and human origins. The conflict arises from a particular doctrine concerning the human soul that is undeniably orthodox— that God directly creates from nothing the human soul without the mediation of secondary 286 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN causes (Vatican 2012, 6. II: #366). Notice, this creation of the soul ex nihilo would not be a miracle in the sense that I described above, since the claim is that natural causes could never be involved as sec- ondary causes in causing the soul to exist, while miraculous events as described above involve types of events that are ordinarily caused by natural causes acting as secondary causes. Now I don’t want to leave this claim simply as a dogmatic theo- logical assertion. There are plausible philosophical arguments that can be made for the thesis, apart from the theological reflection of the church upon the data of revelation. Such arguments in general would proceed to the conclusion that the soul has a certain immaterial mode of existence. Some of these arguments are familiar in the history of philosophy, as for example the argument from human cognitive re- flection upon one’s purposes and the ability through such reflection to freely order one’s actions according to a general understanding of the goods of distinctively human life. Another argument is from the capacity to have general intellectual knowledge of kinds of things, a general knowledge that transcends the particularities of the here and now in engaging the world like other animals do. There is another argument from the intentionality of our thoughts— the relation of a thought to its object is necessary, while the relation of bodily states to material objects is always contingent—my thought of the tree is nec- essarily related to the tree, while no bodily state is. There is the argu- ment from moral experience—it is one thing to give an evolutionary causal account of how we may have come to assert as a survival mech- anism that it is wrong to kill innocents, quite another to understand that it is wrong and to be able to give reasons why it is wrong. This is the difference between giving causes and giving reasons. Another ar- gument is that from the failure of material states to represent truths, mathematical truths for example, except insofar as such material states are used by human beings to represent mathematical truths—what does one and zero (10) plus one and zero (10) equal?— twenty if the system of representation is decimal, four if the system is binary, and thirty-two if it is hexadecimal— suggesting that material states are not intrinsically representational, but take it on as used; since there can be no infinite regress of representations there must be a state that Evolution and Catholic Faith | 287 is not a representational state as physical states are. Another argument is the inability in general to give a naturalist/evolutionary account of truth and understanding in our beliefs—there is likely an evolution- ary benefit to believing the sun moves around the earth, and yet that is false, we reject it, and we understand why, so having true beliefs does not seem to be related necessarily to beneficial evolutionary con- ditions so long as the right adaptive behavior is produced by false be- liefs. What then of truth and understanding truth? The failure of natu- ralistic explanations to account for our understanding the what and why of things— there is likely an evolutionary account of why it is useful for me to perceive this large object approaching me as a threat, but there appears no account in general of the scientific endeavor of classifying it as a lion, and understanding what lions are, much less understanding their evolutionary history. There are more such argu- ments. Now each of them may be defeasible, and perhaps all of them are. I have my philosophical doubts about several of them. But it is fair to say that without an un-argued dogmatic assertion of physical- ism akin to the dogmatic theological assertion of the direct creation of the soul,7 these philosophical arguments remain plausible within philosophical discussion, or at least have not been shown definitively to be unsound. So what? Well, if the human soul is caused to be and has an im- material mode of existence, insofar as no one I know of argues that material causes can cause something with an immaterial mode of ex- istence, it follows that the human soul cannot be caused by material causes. And it follows that evolutionary processes cannot causally result in the human soul. These remarks about the soul are all very compressed, and would need much greater elaboration had I but world enough and time. But if these are granted as they are, the history of Christianity has vari- ously adopted two broadly different and mutually exclusive attitudes toward the soul, which I will call in an unscholarly fashion the “pla- tonic” and the “aristotelian.” On the platonic view the soul is a thing fundamentally distinct from the human body, even if it happens to be closely connected with a particular human body; it uses a human body, perhaps even has a special care and concern for one body over 288 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN another, but is not identical with it. On the platonic view one can say of a dead body that it is a human body because in life it is associated with a human soul. It is characteristic of the platonic view that the human person is identified with the soul, not the body, or at best the union of the two different things, soul and body, with soul being taken to be the essential person. And the soul moves the body like a kind of agent cause, much the way a child would move a ball, or a marionette a puppet; this is the sense of the soul in which Plato argues for the existence of a world soul. On the aristotelian view, the soul is the living principle as sub- stantial form of the body; it makes the body to be the kind of body it is; it is determinative of the distinctive acts of the living body as the kind of living thing it is; and it is indeed fundamentally identical to the body as the manifestation of the kind of life it is. It is not united with the body, but is, rather, the unity of the living acts of the body, nutritive, reproductive, motor, and in the case of the human, rational. It is not an agent cause moving the body in certain ways. It is the characteristic form of the movement of the body. Although he was not speaking of this himself, Wittgenstein captures this aristotelian notion of soul in saying that “my attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. And the best picture of the human soul is the human body” (Wittgenstein 1953, II.4). On this aristotelian view, a dead body is not and cannot be a human body, for a human body is a living ensouled material ob- ject. The dead body at best can be called the remains of a human body. And the person is identified with the living animal body. The soul is manifest in the life of the body. On the platonic view the soul and the body have fundamentally distinct modes of existence, and we have to infer the hidden soul from the ways it pulls the strings of the body it is associated with. On the aristotelian view, by contrast, the mode of existence of the body is identical to the mode of exis- tence of the soul, and we do not infer it — it is manifest (Aquinas 1941, I.76, esp. a.1). Again, this is all very compressed. Now allow me to claim that as far as RC goes, it by and large adopts the aristotelian view. Indeed, at the Council of Vienne (1311–12), it was defined dogmatically as de fide that the rational soul is per se the Evolution and Catholic Faith | 289 essential form of the body. Of course it might be objected that this was not an ecumenical council and not binding upon Christians generally. But I am making a claim about RC, not Christianity generally. The Council of Vienne was in fact weighing in on a broad theological con- troversy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, precisely the ques- tion of the unity of soul and body in the context of what is known as the Plurality of Substantial Forms controversy. The theological result of such a weighing in on the side of the “essential form of the body” view is that it follows that the human person is the living body, not the soul alone or the soul with the body. Finally, it may be argued that this is not a dogmatic recognition of the aristotelian position; one could come up with some kind of exegesis of the text and a suitably complex account of the soul such that it is the essential form of the body and yet not the substantial form of the body, or the essential form of the body while being a distinct thing from the body. But while we wait for that analysis, it appears very difficult to say that it does not at least favor the aristotelian position, particularly given the context of its use, and represent a rejection of the platonic. And finally, consider this recent 2004 statement from the International Theological Commission on Evolution: Present-day theology is striving to overcome the influence of du- alistic anthropologies that locate the imago Dei exclusively with reference to the spiritual aspect of human nature. Partly under the influence first of Platonic and later of Cartesian dualistic an- thropologies, Christian theology itself tended to identify the imago Dei in human beings with what is the most specific charac- teristic of human nature, viz., mind or spirit. The recovery both of elements of biblical anthropology and of aspects of the Tho- mistic synthesis has contributed to the effort in important ways. (International Theological Commission 2004) But it was by and large the Thomistic position against dualism and the plurality of forms in the context of theological discussions of the imago dei that is most plausibly read as the position affirmed at the Council of Vienne. So let’s just say for the sake of argument, and 290 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN despite elements of platonism in Catholic-Christianity, the aristo- telian view of the soul is at least favored by RC even now. So, consider this problem. I mentioned that on the aristotelian view, the soul as essential, that is, the substantial form of the body makes the body to be the kind of body it is. If we have some organi- zation of matter, however much like some kind of body it may be, if it lacks the kind of substantial form appropriate to a particular kind of substance, it is not a body of that kind. In particular, however much some organization of matter may be like a human body, even some liv- ing organization of matter, if it lacks a human soul, it is not a human body. But we have already seen that no natural secondary causes can be involved in causing the existence of a human soul. From the per- spective of RC then, a human soul must be directly created by God as the substantial form of some body. Whatever natural processes may precede that creation of the soul as the substantial form of a human body, they do not bring about the existence of a human body. At best they could be said to prepare matter to a certain state, per- haps even a living state of some organism, at which time a soul is cre- ated by God as a substantial form of the matter, thus transforming the matter from whatever it was into a human body. But clearly this is a challenge for any claim that evolutionary pro- cesses constitute a fully sufficient natural explanation in terms of sec- ondary causes of the origins of human life. It is not that NET expla- nations happen to fail where they might succeed, and for that reason we must hold that God is the cause of human origins. We have al- ready seen that God is involved in all evolutionary processes as pri- mary cause to secondary. On the contrary, the claim is that no evolu- tionary account could possibly give a sufficient account of human origins properly speaking, if what we mean by that is a sufficient ex- planation of the actual existence of the human species. At best we could say that evolutionary processes act to prepare matter to a cer- tain stage of development of human-like beings, such that at the ap- propriate stage of development or in the next generation in reproduc- tion, God creates human souls as new substantial forms for those human-like organisms, in the process transforming them such that they cease to be what they were and become something new in cre- Evolution and Catholic Faith | 291 ation, properly human beings. So this conflict only arises if one claims about evolutionary theory that in principle it sufficiently explains every aspect of human origins. But this is all very speculative. Still, we might think at this point we have a number of options for dealing with this apparent conflict between RC and a claim about the ability of NET to give a sufficient account of human origins. One option would be to simply abandon talk of the soul as in any way useful within theology given the pressure of evolutionary accounts. In other words, modern natural science has shown the concept of the soul to be no longer useful for explaining human life. I have seen this suggested, and I understand that it is at least informally favored by some theologians. However, I think that there are two problems with it. First, the philosophical suggestions that I have seen for abandoning it tend to misconceive the role of the soul in a platonic fashion, not recogniz- ing the aristotelian sense I have been emphasizing. They tend once again to conceive of the soul acting like a kind of agent cause mak- ing the body do things, an agency that would be in competition with other natural causes, much like the account of God as a competing hypothesis eliminated by the advance of natural science—it is a “soul of the gaps” that is rejected. But the aristotelian account does not posit the soul as an agent cause of the body filling the gaps of explanation, but, rather, as specifying what something is. It posits what needs to be explained. To deny the soul in that sense is to deny that there is any “what” in human life. But that is to deny the very notion of human origins, and thus to undermine the claim about NET that it fully ex- plains human origins, since there is no such thing as the human in that direction. And while I am no theologian, I think it fair to say that the havoc caused for Christian belief by a cavalier abandonment of talk of the soul is worthy of serious reservation. It is even more dogmatically as- serted by the church that the soul survives the death of the body than it is asserted that the soul is directly created by God. Are we to aban- don that doctrine as well? Indeed, a colleague of mine concerned with this theological option gave a plenary address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association entitled, “Good News, Your Soul 292 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN Hasn’t Died Quite Yet,” arguing that any such move is unwarranted (Freddoso 2002). Incidentally, Aquinas for one accepts the implica- tion of the aristotelian view that even if the soul survives the death of the person, the soul is no person, and certainly not the individual with that soul. “Anima mea non est ego” (Aquinas 2012).8 Thus there is no reason to take the survival of the soul to imply that something like the platonic position is to be adopted. Indeed, the survival of the soul but not the person is cause for Aquinas to emphasize even more the fittingness of the centrality of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body according to RC which is affirmed in the Nicene Creed— the resurrection of the body is the resurrection of the person. However, another option for us is to recognize the limited na- ture of NET in explaining human life generally. It is a philosophical assertion, and in contemporary philosophy more like a philosophical dogma, that evolutionary theory in particular and physical theories in general must account for all features of reality including all features of human life. Indeed it is a philosophical dogma that often strikes one as serving little more than the purpose of avoiding theological considerations at all costs. The best of physicalist philosophers rec- ognize that this is a philosophical attitude one takes toward science, while many of the scientific popularizers misconceive it as a result of science itself and make a philosophical thesis into pseudo-science. NET is science; this dogma about NET is not. But why must we insist that NET fails if it does not account for every feature of human life, in particular the properly human, and thus does not completely account for human origins? Suppose we held that NET provides an in principle adequate account of many fea- tures of human life, in particular, those bodily features of human life inherited by human beings from the prehuman biological species that was transformed into the properly human when God created human souls as the substantial forms of the members of a transformed and new species. What is certainly lost is the philosophical thesis that NET explains absolutely everything. But we already knew that claim about NET to be false. It is one thing to give an account of the evolutionary benefit of believing and acting upon the belief that 2+2=4; it is another thing entirely to prove Evolution and Catholic Faith | 293 mathematically that 2+2=4, and mathematical proof is not a physical procedure or algorithm, or a matter of natural selection. NET does not explain that 2+2=4, even if it explains why we believe it. NET presupposes replication or reproduction— it does not explain it as a result of natural selection. Indeed, NET presupposes many physical conditions, like the inverse square form of the universal law of gravi- tation, without explaining them, and thus cannot be a theory of ab- solutely everything. But if it cannot be a theory of everything, why should we be shocked if it is not a theory of everything human? To insist that it must be a theory of everything human and of all human origins looks simply like a prejudice against or fear of acknowledg- ing the action of God as creator and religious reflection upon it. It is to be engaged in cultural politics, not science, a cultural politics that in its fear of God constitutes an abuse of genuine science. In any case we have already seen that fear to be unwarranted, since the very possibility of the natural causes operative in random mutation and natural selection are only enabled to be causes by God’s ever present activity of creation. The existence of God is as implicated in what NET does explain as it is in what it does not explain. So ban- ishing God by insisting that NET explains more than it is capable of explaining does not banish God at all; all such banishment does is harm genuine science by making it serve cultural politics, a servitude to cultural politics that quite often leads to the counter assertion that science is just one more mode of faith no better than any other (Clark 2010). Thus, it would seem better to simply let NET do its own job and not substitute it as an alternative pseudo-scientific-pseudo-meta- physics-pseudo-religion. As Catholic Christians, we may just have to rest content with the thought that human beings, however much they are conditioned by the material world around them, and however much there is a history that can be told of how the world was prepared for their arrival, nonetheless as animals, not as souls, simply transcend the conditions of life of other animals. In other words, there may be much to be said scientifically about how God prepared the world for the origin of human life, and yet reserved that origin properly speak- ing to Himself. If religious people are tempted to think platonistically that it is in virtue of the soul or spirit that human beings transcend 294 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN the body and the life of animals, they might be better off thinking that it is in virtue of the soul directly created by God as substantial form of the body that as living animal bodies they in some measure transcend the ordinary conditions of matter studied by the natural sciences and NET. It is not as souls that human beings are transcendent—the para- dox of RC is that it is as living animals that they are transcendent. And it is as transcendent embodied creatures of God that they are in fact ordered in a dynamic movement of their living bodies as imago dei to union with God Himself. In conclusion, it is perhaps worthwhile pointing out that the sketch I have just given of an RC approach to NET and human origins was condemned by the church. Well, not really condemned. It is by and large the account proposed by the nineteenth century French Do- minican Dalmace Leroy in The Evolution of Organic Species (L’Evo- lution restreinte aux espèces organiques) (Leroy 1891). He too sug- gested an evolutionary account of the development of the physical organism that came to be the human body upon the direct creation by God of human souls as substantial forms of those heretofore human- like bodies. When it was reported to the Congregation for the Index of Forbidden Books, the Congregation moved to prohibit the book and demand a retraction from Leroy, who, in a spirit of religious obedi- ence, straightaway complied. But they did not actually place the book on the Index. And in any case, the Congregation for the Index never had the authority actually to condemn a theological or philosophical position—that belonged to the Holy Office, which never condemned LeRoy’s position (Artigas, Glick, and Martinez 2006, 270– 81). And so it is slightly ironic, given the evolution of the church’s thought, that as far as I can tell the view I sketched above is pretty much the position that the church now holds as expressed in John Paul II’s statement to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1996 (John Paul II 1996), and the 2004 statement of the International Theological Commission cited above, “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God.” So let us finish by considering the words of a poet: “the world is charged with the grandeur of God, it will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil . . . nature is Evolution and Catholic Faith | 295 never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” (Hop- kins 1877). Catholic faith seeking understanding does not find God in the failures of science, but, rather, it finds Him in the marvelous suc- cesses of science, including the success of NET. But Catholic faith also recognizes that God’s action in creation is not bound like Prometheus to the rock of natural causes. It transcends those natural causes in giv- ing the warm flame of life to human beings, as responsible for creat- ing a kind of animal who is yet different as an animal. The saint says, “question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, ques- tion the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky . . . question all these realities. All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful.’ Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?” (Augustine 2012, III/7 Sermon #241.2). The marvelous growth of the natural sciences since St. Augustine wrote those lines fif- teen hundred years ago, far from conflicting with or threatening RC, simply enriches and enlivens its profession. But even more than the natural causes studied within the natural sciences testify to the glory of God, it is human beings who sing the glory of God as they are the only animals we know of who are given the particular dignity of being made transcendent animals, as Genesis tells us, made in the image and likeness of God, commanded to be fruitful and multiply. The mark of their dignity is that they consent. NO TES 1. This paper will employ a distinction between what belongs to NET as such, that is, as a natural science concerned with the development of species, and the cultural and popular use of NET beyond that study. Claims pertaining to the latter are no doubt about NET in some sense. But I will rely upon the assumption that they are not part of the content of NET. Philoso- phers of science may struggle with determining criteria that establish neat and tidy boundaries of a natural science. Nonetheless, I will assume that some sense can be made of distinguishing claims about NET and its relation- ship to other intellectual endeavors such as ethics, politics, and metaphysics on the one hand and claims of or within NET on the other hand. With that 296 | JOHN O’CALLAGHAN rough distinction in mind it is important to recognize that even evolutionary biologists, particularly leading figures responsible for the advance of NET, can at times also engage in making claims about NET that are not thereby claims of NET, and should not be evaluated as such or treated as having the same authority as a claim of NET. Perhaps it will have greater authority, but just as likely it may have less. Socrates in the Apology explored the various ways in which a society may grant an unwarranted authority in one area to various classes of people on the basis of their success in another area. 2. One must distinguish “literal interpretation” as it is now commonly described from the earlier and much richer sense of the “literal” given by Au- gustine in On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and Thomas Aquinas in Iae.1.8–10 of the Summa Theologiae. Nowadays it commonly means some- thing like the plain or ordinary sense of a passage excluding the use of images or metaphors. So “Rommel was a fox,” would “literally” mean that Rommel had four legs, fur, and might be subject to being hunted by dogs in a common English pastime in the countryside; and it would be false. But then one might nowadays say that it employs an image or metaphor, and so in some other nonliteral or “spiritual” sense it is true. Augustine on the other hand does not think that literal truth excludes the use of metaphors to say something true about the world; the literal sense of a text consists of the facts about the world the author intends to convey, however she intends to convey them. So “Rommel was a fox” can be literally true for Augustine, since the author in- tends to say that Rommel’s battle plans were very clever, or some such. It was precisely to combat the “spiritualist” readings of scripture offered by the gnostics in the setting in which orthodox Christianity was developing the doctrine of creation ex nihilo that Augustine insisted upon this account of what “literal” interpretation is. Why we now use “literal” in a different way from Augustine and Aquinas after him is explored in Carroll (2001). 3. In Aquinas’s case, it is significant that his discussion rejects the view that there are preexisting Forms to creation, or that one can make sense of “the best possible world.” Since there is no maximal combination of preexist- ing Forms, there could always be a better world. See Aquinas (1949, Q.1, 3). 4. It is interesting to consider in this respect the concurrence of gen- eral relativity with this particular position on God and temporal relations. Insofar as general relativity would hold that temporal relations are insepara- bly bound up with spatial relations, it would seem that a religious believer who thinks that God is not subject to spatial relations, and is in some sense creatively responsible ex nihilo for those spatial relations, ought also to con- sider that God would not be subject to temporal relations, and would be in some sense creatively responsible for them ex nihilo. Conversely, a religious believer who held that God is in some sense bound by temporal relations, and thus not creatively responsible for them, ought also to hold that God is Evolution and Catholic Faith | 297 in some sense bound by spatial relations and not creatively responsible for them. This is admittedly highly speculative on my part, but nonetheless wor- thy of serious reflection for religious believers. 5. It is important to note that in the work of Thomas Aquinas, it is not necessary for creation to have an initial moment of time in order for it to be created ex nihilo. Aquinas argued with many of his contemporaries that even if creation had had no first moment of time, it would still be created ex nihilo, since the latter signifies total dependence in existence, not a temporal starting to exist. For this reason, even if there were temporal facts that pre- cede what is popularly called “the Big Bang,” that would not disprove the fact of creation as at least Aquinas understood it. And one can take Aquinas’s view on creation as having something of a normative weight on this particu- lar issue in RC. 6. I am allowing this for the sake of argument. 7. 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