Church position in the face of Darwin’s theory
From the Enlightenment, there is a strong movement of intellectual rebellion before the Church to which it is accused of opposing progress and being an enemy of freedom of research (freethinkers).Given these attacks, the Magisterium of the Church frequently adopted defensive positions, which led many ecclesiastical shepherds to maintain an attitude of distrust of science: as if scientific discoveries could question the truths of the Christian faith.
The illustration was a period of time that was born in the middle of the 18th century and lasted until the first years of the 19th century. It was especially active in France, England and Germany. Inspired deep cultural and social changes, and one of the most dramatic was the French Revolution.It was called in this way by its declared purpose of dissipating the darkness of humanity’s ignorance through the lights of knowledge and reason. The 18th century is known, for this reason, as the century of lights and the settlement of faith in progress. Throughout the 16th and seventeenth century, Europe was wrapped in religion wars.
When the political situation stabilized after the peace of Westfalia (agreement between Catholics and Protestants, 1648) and the end of the civil war in England, there was an agitation environment that tended to focus the notions of faith and mysticism on the divine ‘divine revelations’, captured individually as the main source of knowledge and wisdom. Instead, the era of reason then tried to establish a philosophy based on axiom and absolutism as the basis for knowledge and stability.This objective of the era of reason, which was built on axioms, reached its maturity with the ethic of Baruch Spinoza, which exposed a pantheistic vision of the universe where God and nature were one, in the line of biblical expression: ‘inWe live, we move and exist ‘. This idea became the foundation for illustration, from Newton to Jefferson.
Another outstanding 18th -century philosophical movement, intimately related to illustration, was characterized by focusing their interest on faith and piety. His supporters tried to use rationalism as a way to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being. In this period, faith and piety were an integral part of the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to the political theories of the moment. However, prominent illustrated philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau questioned and criticized the very existence of institutions such as the Church and the State.
Illuminism would not have existed not having preceded it a weakening of the power of the Church because of the Protestant reform, which divided the Christian world;and humanism, a philosophical movement that focused on man the object of earthly concerns, removing religion that privilege and discarding theocentrism.
By rethinking in a hypercritical way all the previous knowledge, the illustration looks in a new way of religion and tries to remove any rest of superstition. The history of the Church is examined in a more critical way, for example: Father Enrique Flórez thus dismantles numerous devotions, traditions and false and legendary beliefs in his sacred Spain, and Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijoo does something very similar to what he calls’Common mistakes’ with his universal critical theater. The pedantic preaching whose direct purpose is not to build and correct the believer is thus merciless by the Spanish Jesuit José Francisco de Isla in his satirical novel Fray Gerundio de Campazas.
Under the light of reason the secular also make the first formulations of deism (Voltaire, Volney, Rousseau) and atheism (Diderot, Holbach, Mettrie) and for the first time outline a certain comparison in the history of religions (seecomparative religion), which appears, for example, in Voltaire’s relativism. FREETING (which does not believe in miracles) and freezing extends. But the fundamental thing is a secularism that is installed with an increasing force in the governments of Europe as a natural consequence of the Westphaly Treaty (1648), which consecrated the end of Cesaropapism;The same Catholic monarchs begin to see the economic benefits that report gifts and confiscations for the State: the excessive role that religious orders in universities and their monopoly in general education are discussed, which made the best talents to theEcclesiastical career instead of practical sciences.
The most influential naturalist of all time, the English Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), the author who established the basis of the current central theory in the explanation of life and the phenomena that is associated: the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the work of characters such as the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and other authors in several European countries, will do a lot to spread evolutionary thinking, not only forThe explanation of life, but also to the visions of human history and society. However, the explanatory mechanisms that were proposed were much discussed, while a lack of empirical foundation remained. In addition, ideological reserves, many of a religious nature, were an added cause that hinders this first extension of evolutionism.
Darwin is a typical English citizen example at the time when the British empire reaches its maximum splendor. And this, thanks to a process of colonial expansion throughout the world and the activation of a change in the economic bases of society, with the passage of an agricultural reference in another industrial. Darwin himself was born within a well -off family, related to the thriving ceramic industry of southern England. Son and grandson of doctors, he was not able, however, to continue the tradition, and also failed to follow a usual path of the youth of his condition: the ecclesiastical career.
Darwin found the opportunity to satisfy his vocation as a naturalist when he joined the expedition of the Beagle ship, which had entrusted a scientific mission by the southern seas. The trip, which between 1831 and 1836 was a return to the world, allowed Darwin to access a lot of geological and biological phenomena that changed their perspective on the functioning of the world and life. Once he returned to his country, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, while building a family, a prestige as a scientist was forged thanks to the studies on the materials collected in the expedition and for other research works. The contribution that most fame would end up giving, however, it was still matured in silence.
Darwin reached an immense fame the publication of the origin. His activity, however, continued, and wrote numerous scientific books during the next two decades. One of the most controversial issues discussed Darwin in those years was that of the origin and evolution of humans, because the Darwinist proposal could be seen as a denial of all the distinctive features with which Western thought had adorned humanity to distinguish it from theanimals. This only accentuate the symbolic aspect of Darwin’s figure.
The position of the church was cautious with respect to the theory of evolution (the only conviction was in 1860 in a council of German bishops). Pío IX did not make an explicit sentence to evolution or in the quanta cure or in the Syllabus. The Biblical Commission in 1909 said that scientific rigor must not be sought in the book of Genesis in terms of the creation of the world.
The Church warned and sanctioned only a few ecclesiastics who adhered to the theory of evolution: the Dominican Marie-Dalmace Leroy, the American priest John Augustine Zahm, the Italian priest Raffaello Caverni, the Italian bishop Geremia Bonomelli and Bishop John Hedley. British biologist George Jackson Mivart was excommunicated by the Church but this had nothing to do with his adhesion to evolutionism.
The encyclical humani generis makes it clear that the Church does not oppose the search for the origin of the human body by evolutionism, (oppose that from this we try to explain the origin of the human soul). The same document opposes polygenism, that is, when it is intended to maintain that humanity arose not from a single male and female couple, but from a multiplicity of them. Likewise, Pope John Paul II, remembering the Humani Generis, would resume that topic before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in a message in October 1996, expressing the following: ‘Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledgeThey lead to think that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis’.
Today, according to theology, although the views of revelation and evolution are found in different planes, they cannot remain in conflict, since religious truth does not oppose scientific truth.
Leave feedback