Why Evolution Theory Cannot Get to the Bottom of Things

Father Stanley Jaki's book on the influence of the doctrine of creation on science is his most popular book The Savior of Science, which I have yet to read. I read his more detailed Science and Creation which goes into the scientific bankruptcy of the different civilizations' notions of time and numbers (because of their irrational belief in eternal cycles of the world) in comparison with the Judeo-Christian timeline based on God's revelation of creation.

The basic idea is that creation and redemption give a starting point and a final purpose to human earthly existence and thereby make all the intermediate points significant. Because the absolute entered the ephemeral the ephemeral also takes meaning.

Or, said another way, God's intervention in history makes the space and time coordinates important for the first time in history. Our dating of history with the Incarnation as the focal point is indicative of that God-involvement perspective which opened up the human mind to the fullness of reality.

Man began to take his reality seriously because God formed a relationship with man.

Evolution theory, while claiming to be concerned just with the scientific facts is actually filled with skewed notions of origins and meanings, just when it pretends to not be dealing with meaning at all. For example, Darwin's On the Origin of Species is all about material and efficient causality, and the presumption of the entire evolution theory is a scientific contradiction, viz. that less yields more, thereby contradiction the principle of sufficient reason.

Whence the world, life, rationality and intelligence, human conscience and freedom? All of these scientific realities exist and are completely void of reasonable explanation from the evolutionist. The intelligibility itself of creation, presumed by the evolutionist, is a reality which is entirely unexplained by the evolutionist's supposed explanation of everything.

Conclusion. The evolutionist needs the doctrine of creation and of creation's God (who creates out of nothing and for love and accompanies creation), in order to provide the gaping "missing links." We need to speak seriously about the origins and the purposes of things if we are to really consider their nature. Without personal love as the essence behind all of reality nothing makes sense.

"The question...is whether the theory of evolution can be presented as a universal theory concerning all reality, beyond which further questions about the origin and the nature of things are no longer admissible and indeed no longer necessary, or whether such ultimate questions do not after all go beyond the realm of what can be entirely the object of research and knowledge by natural science...[The question behind the theory of natural selection]...is whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity (or, as Popper says, in agreement with Butler, on the basis of luck and cunning) and, thus, from what is irrational; that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and its philosophy remains true: 'In principio erat Verbum'--at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason."

Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004, 180-181.