The Impossible Wonderland

“Our high school science teacher told us that matter was born of absolute chance and evolved by incalculable multiplications of accident to the formation of galaxies, planets, fish, mammals, minds, and high school science tests. This always seemed to me more fantastical than any of the creation myths science was here to supplant.” — Joel Agee, Harper’s, January 1989

It’s not exactly breaking news, but over the past century and a half the bold little doctrine of evolution, all but cakewalking where angels fear to tread, has been increasingly taking center stage away from the glory that is revelation and the grandeur that is spirit. It was bad enough in Darwin’s time, but today, with agnosticism in the ascendant and the naughty thumb of science blithely decanting human life into test tubes, evolution is riding higher than ever. More and more, the deep and ancient teachings of Holy Writ find themselves looking on from the wings while the Stephen Jay Goulds of this world prance across the footlights to make their pitch with the grinning assurance of Joel Grey in Cabaret: “So, life is disappointing? Forget it. And forget faith. With evolution, life is beautiful! We anthropoids are beautiful! Even the mutations are beautiful!”

And this is not, needless to say, a harmless state of affairs. Even with the help of divine grace, men have never found it easy to live virtuously. Set grace aside, replace worship with belief in a self-evolving universe with no ultimate authority to answer to, and suddenly such things as abortion, euthanasia, sexual anarchy, and brave-new-world genetics look very different. Evolution isn’t the only thing behind these dark realities, of course, but it’s definitely one of the pillars.

And make no mistake: it’s one tough customer. It walks, it talks, it dazzles, it deconstructs, it shapes minds and shakes souls, and it offers no apologies whatsoever for having evolved itself into that grander thing — evolutionism, the “ism” that speaks for the all. More phantom than fact it may be, but it has nonetheless become the sacred monster that explains and illuminates man and the universe — taught jealously in the schools, hammered home in PBS nature programs, and quoted with fierce certainty both at scientific conferences and in dinner-table conversations. It was even called “more than a hypothesis” by Pope John Paul II, but, praise be, when he was speaking ex tempore and not ex cathedra.