True Humans

The Catholic Church never condemned the theory of evolution nor came close to doing so. One might have expected otherwise: Many of the factors that had led to the Galileo fiasco two centuries earlier were present again. Darwin, like Galileo, was proposing a radical theory that struck many people as absurd—and that seemed contrary to the “plain meaning” of certain scriptural verses as they had generally been construed. Both theories were at first controversial even among scientists and faced weighty scientific objections, both observational and theoretical, which could not be resolved until decades later. Both theories contradicted aspects of the Aristotelianism that prevailed among Catholic theologians. Finally, both Galileo and Darwin promulgated their theories at times when the Church faced powerful challenges to her credibility and authority, as a result of which her doctrinal defense mechanisms were on high alert. Even if the Vatican’s condemnation of Galileo did not formally and irrevocably commit the Church doctrinally, it put the Church, for a time, on the wrong side of a scientific issue. The same could easily have happened with On the Origin of Species.