The Story of Creation & Darwin’s
"On the Origin of Species"

As we approach the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, I write to recommend two texts.  My first is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published 150 years ago, is among the classic works of science one of the most accessible to non-scientists – so free is it of jargon.  To read the work is to embark on an adventure into forests, exotic islands, mountain tops, exposed geological strata, the hives of bees, the mouths of whales, and the crops of birds – all in the company of a guide with an eye for details that tell rivetting tales.  Follow him into his backyard, to a six-square-foot clearing where he has been counting the seedlings that emerge and the fate of each – the struggle for existence in miniature; or across the globe to New Zealand, where he will explain why birds occupy niches occupied elsewhere by mammals – a lesson in natural history; or into the past to study the last Ice Age, the deposits that mark its geographical reach, and its effect on the dispersal of fossilized Alpine species – a lesson in paleontology.  Darwin’s knack for out-of-the-way questions is irresistible:  Why did Europeans find no horses in America even though released horses thrive there in the wild?  Why does Bermuda contain no endemic land birds while the Galapagos Islands contain twenty-one species?  We eagerly read on for the answer, attentive Watsons to his Sherlock Holmes.  Assume the book’s theory to be dead wrong; it remains a model of scientific investigation – inquisitive, observant, and thought provoking.

My second text, the Story of Creation in Genesis, has impressed believers and non-believers alike by the majesty of its prose and the dignity of its thought.  Consider its stately repetitions:  “And God said, Let the earth bring forth vegetation . . . And the earth brought forth vegetation . . . And God saw that it was good.  . . And God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures . . . And God saw that it was good.”  The goodness of being has been affirmed elsewhere, but rarely with such magnificent simplicity.  Meditation on the story’s message of hope – whether or not we unwaveringly share it – is good for the soul.  Good books invite reflection on profoundly human questions, and Genesis constantly raises such questions – about our human interdependence (for “it is not good that the man should be alone”); about our special duty as stewards of the earth “to till it and keep it”; or about our desire to become “like God, knowing good and evil” and about the terrible yoke that binds the desire to an agonizing loss of innocence.  Assume the story to be a mere fable; it yet retains a power to nudge us out of routine thoughts into a reawakened state of wonder about our place in the cosmos and the mystery of our origins. 

The Story of Creation and Darwin’s Origin both have a capacity for expanding the reach of their readers.  It seems good, then, that we should read them, discuss their meanings, and explore their claims to truth.  “Not so,” say dogmatic creationists and dogmatic evolutionists:  “These two works contradict each other, and one of them is a pernicious falsehood that should be buried underfoot.”  Whoa!  Do these two texts contradict each other?  Or does the appearance of contradiction rest, as I want now to suggest, on careless reading?

Consider.  According to Genesis, God creates living beings by saying, “Let the earth bring them forth”; but about the causal mechanisms through which the earth brings forth living creatures, Genesis is silent.  Regarding the question whether “the earth brought forth vegetation” by a quick process of fabrication, each species one by one, or by a slow process of evolution, species descending from species, Genesis is silent.  To treat this passage from Genesis as a brief either for the first mechanism or for the second is to treat a big thought as if it were a small thought.  Genesis is silent about secondary causes because its higher object of contemplation is the mystery of our First Cause.

By contrast, Darwin’s book is all about secondary causes, for it is about the mechanisms through which life, howsoever begun, has diversified into the species known to us today.  As Darwin himself states, those mechanisms cannot work except where living creatures already exist and where they are striving to perpetuate their own kind.  So though he has much to say about the origin of species, he says nothing about the origin of life.  In 1863, angered by a reviewer’s suggestion that men like him were on the verge of explaining the origin of life, Darwin wrote his friend, J. D. Hooker, “It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.”  In Darwin’s mind, clarity in biology cannot settle questions of theology:  “My theology is a simple muddle,” he told Hooker in 1870.  With the humility of a good scientist, Darwin refused to present his theory as a Theory of Everything.  In his autobiography, he wrote that “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us.”  On his own understanding, then, his theory of evolution cannot solve the mystery the Story of Creation explores.  Instead of contesting that story, Darwin never entered the field.

Dogmatists want war:  “Either Darwin or Genesis, but not both!”  We escape this false dilemma by reading more carefully and by reading with charity.  In reading as in life, charity hunts for the truth in what another person is trying to say.  The two texts I have recommended are full of insight and imagination and poetry; when read with charity, they enrich life. 

Marc Moreau is chair of the Philosophy Dept. at La Salle University