Creation, Evolution, and Thomas Aquinas

WILLIAM E. CARROLL

Investigations of the nature and origins of life concern various scientific,

philosophical, and theological disciplines. Although any discussion of
evolution and creation requires insights from each of these three areas, it is not
always easy to keep these disciplines distinct: to know, for example, what is
the appropriate competence of each field of inquiry. Nor is it always easy to
remember that a truly adequate view of life and its origins requires the
insights of all three. As Jacques Maritain observed, we must distinguish in
order to unite. (1)

The debate in the United States about what ought to be taught in the schools
reveals how discussions about creation and evolution can easily become
obscured in broader political, social, and cultural contexts. Evolution and
creation take on cultural connotations, serve as ideological markers, with the
result that each comes to stand for a competing world-view. For some, to
embrace evolution is to affirm an exclusively secular and atheistic view of
reality, and evolution is accordingly either welcomed or rejected on such
grounds. As Daniel Dennett would say, (2) Darwin's ideas are truly
dangerous, especially for anyone who wishes to embrace a religious view of
the world. Or, as the author of the entry on "evolution" in the fifteenth edition
of The New Encyclopedia Brittanica put it: "Darwin did two things: he
showed that evolution was a fact contradicting scriptural legends of creation
and that its cause, natural selection, was automatic with no room for divine
guidance or design."(3)

There are two fundamental pillars of evolutionary biology which are

important for contemporary discussions of the relationship among biology,
philosophy, and theology. The first is the claim of common ancestry: the view
that all living things are historically and organically interconnected.
Commentators describing the recent publication of a kind of rough draft of the
total genetic constitution of the human species, its genome, have been quick to
point out that, since human genes look much like those of fruit flies, worms,
and even plants, we have further confirmation of common descent from "the
same humble beginnings and that the connections are written in our
genes."(4) To affirm a fundamental continuity among living things challenges
the notion that distinct species were created by God through special
interventions in nature. Common descent challenges as well the theological
view that human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, represent
an ontological discontinuity with the rest of nature.(5) Specifically, it would
seem that any notion of an immaterial human soul must be rejected if one is to
accept the truths of contemporary biology.
More troublesome, so it seems, is the commitment to natural selection as the
mechanism by which biological change has occurred.(6) As a result of chance
variations at the genetic level, variations in organisms result in some being
better adapted to their environment and, as a result, nature "selects" these
better adapted organisms and eliminates competitors. It is through this process
of natural selection that evolutionary biology explains the way in which we
can account for the diversity of species in the world Although there are
debates among evolutionary theorists about the randomness and contingency
at the basis of evolution, many biologists argue that at the very least biology
itself does not reveal any fundamental order, purpose, or meaning in nature.
For some the randomness of evolutionary change is conclusive evidence that
there is no purpose whatsoever in nature. Richard Dawkins once remarked
that "although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin,
Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (7) On
another occasion Dawkins wrote that the universe revealed by evolutionary
thought "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless
indifference."(8) Daniel Dennett writes in no less stark terms: "Love it or hate
it, phenomena like this [DNA] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian
idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular
machinery is the ultimate basis of all agency, and hence meaning, and hence
consciousness, in the universe." (9) Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the
double-helix structure of the DNA molecule, writes at the beginning of The
Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,'
your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
personal identity and your free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a
vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Despite some oversimplifications in this brief summary, it ought to be clear

that the contemporary natural sciences, and in particular biology, present
challenges to traditional theological and philosophical notions of nature,
human nature, and God. (10) Too often, however, these perceived challenges
are the result of fundamental confusions. As we shall see, those scientists like
Dawkins and Dennett fail to distinguish between the order of biological
explanation and the order of philosophical explanation. They do not recognize
that creation is first of all a category of metaphysical reflection and that,
furthermore, the materialism which they embrace is a position in natural
philosophy not required by the evidence of biology itself. Similarly, many of
the critics of the general conclusions of evolutionary biology, as we shall see,
also confuse the order of biological explanation and the order of philosophical
explanation. Defenders of "special creation" and of "irreducible complexities"
in nature think that divine agency will show up in such gaps of nature. But
"gaps" of nature are the provenance of the specialized empirical sciences.
Divine agency, rather, ought to be seen in the fundamental teleology of all
natural things, in the need for a First Mover, and in the complete dependence
of all things on God as the source of their existence. It is natural philosophy, a
more general science of nature than the specialized empirical sciences which
examines the first two topics, and it is metaphysics which proves that all that
is comes from God as cause.

I think that we can find important parallels between the reactions to

Aristotelian science in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and the
reactions to Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian theories of evolution in the
modern and contemporary world. By re-visiting the mediaeval discussion of
creation and the natural sciences, especially as found in the thought of
Thomas Aquinas, we may be able to resolve a good deal of confusion
concerning the relationship between creation and evolution. Obviously, the
contemporary natural sciences are in crucial ways quite different from their
Aristotelian predecessors. Aquinas and others in the Middle Ages would have
found strange indeed Darwinian arguments of common descent by natural
selection. Nevertheless, I think that the understanding of creation forged by
Aquinas and the principles he advanced for distinguishing between creation
and the natural sciences remain true.

To understand how the thought of Aquinas is important for contemporary

discourse on creation and evolution we need to return, however briefly, to the
intellectual world of the Latin Middle Ages. Throughout the thirteenth
century, brilliant scholars such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas
wrestled with the implications for Christian theology of the most advanced
science of their day, namely, the works of Aristotle and his Muslim
commentators, which had recently been translated into Latin. Following in the
tradition of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides, Aquinas developed an
analysis of creation that remains, I think, one of the enduring
accomplishments of Western culture. In emphasizing the contribution of
Aquinas, I do not want, however, to deny the sophisticated analyses of his
Muslim and Jewish predecessors, analyses which Aquinas often cited. (11)

Thomas Aquinas' Understanding of Creation

It seemed to many of Aquinas' contemporaries that there was a fundamental

incompatibility between the claim of ancient science that something cannot
come from nothing and the affirmation of Christian faith that God produced
everything from nothing. Furthermore, for the Greeks, since something must
always come from something, there must always be something; the universe
must be eternal.

The scientific works of Aristotle and several of his mediaeval commentators

provided an arsenal of arguments which appear, at least, to be contrary to the
truths of Christianity. In particular, how is one to reconcile the claim, found
throughout Aristotle, that the world is eternal with the Christian affirmation of
creation, a creation understood as meaning that the world is temporally finite,
that is, has a temporal beginning of its existence? In 1215 the Fourth Lateran
Council had solemnly proclaimed that God created all that is from nothing [de
nihil condidit] and that this creation occurred ab initio temporis. In 1277 the
Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a list of propositions condemned as
heretical, among them the claim that the world is eternal. As chancellor of the
University of Paris, the bishop was well aware of the debates about creation
and the eternity of the world which raged through the thirteenth century. (12)
The controversy was part of the wider encounter between the heritage of
classical antiquity and the doctrines of Christianity: an encounter between
those claims to truth founded on reason and those founded on faith. If faith
affirms that the world has a temporal beginning, can reason demonstrate this
must be true? What can reason demonstrate about the fact of creation itself, as
distinct from the question of a temporal beginning? Indeed, can one speak of
creation as distinct from a temporally finite universe? These are some of the
questions which thirteenth century Christian thinkers confronted as they
wrestled with the heritage of Greek science. These questions are distant
adumbrations of discourse in our own day about the meaning of creation in
the context of the insights of evolutionary biology.

A master principle which informs Aquinas' analysis of creation is that the

truths of science cannot contradict the truths of faith. God is the author of all
truth and whatever reason discovers to be true about reality ought not to be
challenged by an appeal to sacred texts.

On the specific questions of creation out of nothing and the eternity of the
world, the key to Aquinas' analysis is the distinction he draws between
creation and change. The natural sciences, whether Aristotelian or those of our
own day, have as their subject the world of changing things: from subatomic
particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be
something that changes. The ancient Greeks are right: from nothing, nothing
comes; that is, if the verb "to come" means to change. All change requires an
underlying material reality.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of
whatever exists. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a
change in something, is not to work on or with some existing material. If, in
producing something new, an agent were to use something already existing,
the agent would not be the complete cause of the new thing. But such
complete causing is precisely what creation is. To build a house or paint a
picture involves working with existing materials and either action is radically
different from creation. To create is to cause existence, and all things are
totally dependent upon a Creator for the very fact that they are. The Creator
does not take nothing and make something out of nothing. Rather, any thing
left entirely to itself, wholly separated from the cause of its existence, would
be absolutely nothing. Creation is not some distant event; it is the complete
causing of the existence of everything that is. Creation, thus, as Aquinas
shows, is a subject for metaphysics and theology; it is not a subject for the
natural sciences. Although Scripture reveals that God is Creator, for Aquinas,
the fundamental understanding of creation is accessible to reason alone, in the
discipline of metaphysics; it does not necessarily require faith. Aquinas
thought that by starting from the recognition of the distinction between what
things are, their essences, and that they are, their existence, one could reason
conclusively to an absolutely first cause which causes the existence of
everything that is. (13) Aquinas shows that there are two related senses of
creation, one philosophical, the other theological. The philosophical sense
discloses the metaphysical dependence of everything on God as cause. The
theological sense of creation, although much richer, nevertheless incorporates
all that philosophy teaches and adds as well that the universe is temporally
finite.

Aquinas saw no contradiction in the notion of an eternal created universe. He

thought that it was a matter of biblical revelation that the world is not eternal.
He also thought that reason alone could not conclude whether the world had a
temporal beginning. But even if the universe were not to have had a temporal
beginning, it still would depend upon God for its very being, its existence. The
root sense of creation does not concern temporal origination; rather it affirms
metaphysical dependence.(14) For Aquinas, there is no conflict between the
doctrine of creation and any physical theory. Theories in the natural sciences
account for change. Whether the changes described are cosmological or
biological, unending or finite, they remain processes. Creation accounts for
the existence of things, not for changes in things. An evolving universe, just
like Aristotle's eternal universe, is still a created universe. No explanation of
evolutionary change, no matter how radically random or contingent it claims
to be, challenges the metaphysical account of creation, that is, of the
dependence of the existence of all things upon God as cause. When some
thinkers deny creation on the basis of theories of evolution, or reject evolution
in defense of creation, they misunderstand creation or evolution, or both.

Divine Agency and the Autonomy of Nature

For some in the Middle Ages any appeal to the autonomy of nature, that is,
any appeal to the discovery of real causes in the natural order, seemed to
challenge divine omnipotence. One reaction, made famous by some Muslim
thinkers, known as the kalam theologians, was to protect God's power and
sovereignty by denying that there are real causes in nature. Thus, they would
say that when fire is burning a piece of paper it is really God who is the true
agent of the burning; the fire is but an instrument. Accordingly, events that
occur in the natural world are only occasions in which God acts.(15)
There is another dimension to this argument about God's power and the
existence of causes in nature. Averroes, for example, rejected the doctrine of
creation out of nothing, because he thought that to affirm the kind of divine
omnipotence which produces things out of nothing is to deny a regularity and
predictability to the natural world. Thus, for Averroes, to defend the
intelligibility of nature one must deny the doctrine of creation out of
nothing.(16) Averroes' position seemed to Muslim theologians to be a direct
threat to orthodox belief in God: for Averroes denies God's omnipotence in
the name of the sciences of nature. This debate between kalam theologians
and Averroes (17) anticipates, as we shall see, discussions in our own day
about evolutionary biology and divine action in the world.

Contrary to the positions both of the kalam theologians and of their opponent,
Averroes, Aquinas argues that a doctrine of creation out of nothing, which
affirms the radical dependence of all being upon God as its cause, is fully
compatible with the discovery of causes in nature. God's omnipotence does
not challenge the possibility of real causality for creatures, including that
particular causality, free will, which is characteristic of human beings.
Aquinas would reject any notion of divine withdrawal from the world so as to
leave room, so to speak, for the actions of creatures. Aquinas does not think
that God "allows" or "permits" creatures to behave the way they do.(18)
Similarly, Aquinas would reject a process theology which denies God's
immutability and His omnipotence (as well as His knowledge of the future) so
that God would be said to be evolving or changing with the universe and
everything in it.(19) For Aquinas such views fail to do justice either to God or
to creation. Creatures are what they are (including those which are free),
precisely because God is present to them as cause. Were God to withdraw, all
that exists would cease to be. Creaturely freedom and the integrity of nature,
in general, are guaranteed by God's creative causality. On the other hand, the
occasionalism of kalam theologians (e.g., al-Ghazali) protected the God of
revelation from being marginalized from nature and history, but at too high a
price, the denial of real causes in nature. If we follow Aquinas' lead, we can
see that there is no need to choose between a robust view of creation as the
constant exercise of divine omnipotence and the explanatory domain of
evolutionary biology.(20)

Aquinas shows us how to distinguish between the being or existence of

creatures and the operations they perform. God causes creatures to exist in
such a way that they are the real causes of their own operations. For Aquinas,
God is at work in every operation of nature, but the autonomy of nature is not
an indication of some reduction in God's power or activity; rather, it is an
indication of His goodness. It is important to recognize that divine causality
and creaturely causality function at fundamentally different levels. In
the Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas remarks that "the same effect is not
attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly
done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both,
according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the
instrument and also wholly to the principal agent."(21) It is not the case of
partial or co-causes with each contributing a separate element to produce the
effect. God, as Creator, transcends (22) the order of created causes in such a
way that He is their enabling origin. Yet the "same God who transcends the
created order is also intimately and immanently present within that order as
upholding all causes in their causing, including the human will." For Aquinas
"the differing metaphysical levels of primary and secondary causation require
us to say that any created effect comes totally and immediately from God as
the transcendent primary cause and totally and immediately from the creature
as secondary cause."(23)

Creation and Genesis

Some defenders as well as critics of evolution, as we shall see later, think that
belief in the Genesis account of creation is incompatible with evolutionary
biology. Aquinas, however, did not think that the Book of Genesis presented
any difficulties for the natural sciences, for the Bible is not a textbook in the
sciences. What is essential to Christian faith, according to Aquinas is the "fact
of creation," not the manner or mode of the formation of the world. In
commenting on different views concerning whether all things were created
simultaneously and as distinct species, Aquinas remarks: "There are some
things that are by their very nature the substance of faith, as to say of God that
He is three and one. . . about which it is forbidden to think otherwise. . . .
There are other things that relate to the faith only incidentally. . . and, with
respect to these, Christian authors have different opinions, interpreting the
Sacred Scripture in various ways. Thus with respect to the origin of the world,
there is one point that is of the substance of faith, viz. , to know that it began
by creation. . . . But the manner and the order according to which creation
took place concerns the faith only incidentally." Aquinas notes that although
the interpretation regarding successive creation, or what we might call
"episodic creation," is "more common, and seems superficially to be more in
accord with the letter," still that of simultaneous creation is "more conformed
to reason and better adapted to preserve Sacred Scripture from the mockery of
infidels."(24)

Aquinas' firm adherence to the truth of Scripture without falling into the trap
of literalistic readings of the text offers valuable correction for exegesis of the
Bible which concludes that one must choose between the literal interpretation
of the Bible and modern science. For Aquinas, the literal meaning of the Bible
is what God, its ultimate author, intends the words to mean. The literal sense
of the text includes metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech useful to
accommodate the truth of the Bible to the understanding of its readers. For
example, when one reads in the Bible that God stretches out His hand, one
ought not to think that God has a hand. The literal meaning of such passages
concerns God's power, not His anatomy. Nor ought one to think that the six
days at the beginning of Genesis literally refer to God's acting in time, for
God's creative act is instantaneous and eternal.(25)

Aquinas, following the lead of Augustine, thinks that the natural sciences
serve as a kind of veto in biblical interpretation. Augustine observed that
when discussing passages of the Bible that refer, or seem to refer, to natural
phenomena one should defer to the authority of the sciences, when available,
to show what the text cannot mean. In examining, for example whether the
light spoken of in the opening of Genesis (before the creation of the Sun and
the Moon) is physical light, Augustine says that if physicists show us that
there cannot be physical light without a luminous source then we know that
this particular passage does not refer to physical light. (26) The Bible cannot
authentically be understood as affirming as true what the natural sciences
teach us is false.

Creation and Evolution in the Contemporary World

If we look at the way in which the relationship between creation and evolution
is presented today we often see creation identified with the view that the great
diversity of living things is the result of specific divine interventions; that
God, for example, produced in a direct way, without intermediaries, the
different kinds of minerals, plants, and animals that exist. If this were true,
then the record of the past, regardless of its age, would reveal fundamental
discontinuities: discontinuities which could only be accounted for by an
appeal to direct divine action in the world. Arguments in support of this view
are advanced on the basis of evidence adduced from both Scripture and
science. (27)

To insist that creation must mean that God has periodically produced new and
distinct forms of life is to confuse the fact of creation with what Aquinas
would call the manner or mode of formation of beings in the world. Such an
insistence has its source in a literalistic reading of Genesis, which Aquinas
would reject. Proponents of "episodic creation" also appeal to a variety of
arguments based on science to support their claims. Thus, we have the
argument that evolutionary continuity is scientifically impossible because, for
example, the fossil record fails to support Darwin's idea of the gradual
development of new forms of life and that, accordingly, we must recognize
the sudden appearance of new kinds of life. Another claim is that the only
kind of genetic transformation that can be demonstrated produces variation
within kinds — what is called microevolution — but not macroevolution, that
is, from one kind to another. There are also appeals to the second law of
thermodynamics to argue that it is not possible for more complex forms of life
to develop from less complex forms, since the principle of entropy would be
violated. (28) One of the more sophisticated defenses of what has been called
"special creation" can be found in the work of Alvin Plantinga, (29) who
thinks that to argue that God created man, as well as the many kinds of plants
and animals, separately and by special acts, is more probable than the thesis of
common ancestry. Plantinga takes the famous example of the development of
the mammalian eye, points to the extraordinary complexity of it and of the
whole visual system, and concludes: "That it [the evolution of the eye in
Darwinian terms] is possible is clear; that it happened is doubtful; that it
is certain, however, is ridiculous." (30) Plantinga's real opponents are people
such as Dawkins and Dennett who argue that the grand evolutionary synthesis
necessarily implies a commitment to a naturalism which excludes
God.(31) For Plantinga, creation, understood in the Christian sense, must
mean special or episodic creation.

Perhaps the best known of the scientific arguments against the master
narrative of evolution is the work of the biochemist, Michael Behe, who
argues that there are specific life forms (e.g., the cell) and biotic subsystems
which are, in his terms, "irreducibily complex," and which could not possibly
be brought about by means of natural selection.(32) Irreducibly complex
systems and life forms disclose "intelligent design" and lead us, ineluctably, to
the existence of a designer.

The theological arguments based on Behe's work are similar to arguments for
creation based on Big Bang cosmology. Traditionally, the Big Bang has been
seen as a singularity at which the laws of physics break down. Physics cannot
explain the primal Big Bang; thus we seem to have strong evidence, if not
actual proof, for a Creator.(33) Philosophers such as William Lane Craig have
argued that contemporary Big Bang cosmology confirms the doctrine of
creation out-of-nothing since it shows that the universe is temporally
finite.(34) It does not seem, however, that the singularity affirmed in modern
cosmology encompasses the absolute beginning of the universe. As we have
seen, Aquinas does not think that the sciences themselves can conclude
whether or not the universe is temporally finite. Obviously, as Aquinas was
aware, if we were to know that there is an absolute beginning to the universe
we would know that the universe is created out of nothing and that God
exists.(35) Of course, what some cosmologists have termed an inexplicable
singularity, recent theorists have sought to make explicable. Alexander
Vilenkin has developed an explanation of the Big Bang itself in terms of
"quantum tunneling from nothing." Stephen Hawking argues that an
understanding of quantum gravity will enable us to do away with the notion of
a singularity altogether, and he concludes that without an initial singularity
there is nothing for a Creator to do. Hawking identifies creation with a
temporal beginning of the universe. Thus, he thinks that by denying such a
beginning he denies creation. But Big Bang cosmology, even with recent
variations, neither supports nor detracts from the doctrine of creation, since
cosmology studies change and creation is not a change. The Big Bang is not a
primal event before which there is absolutely nothing.(36)

Behe's "irreducible complexities" are biological "singularities." In the hands

of defenders, the existence of such "singularities" is strong, if not conclusive,
evidence for an agent outside the regular course of nature. Most biologists
respond to Behe's claims of irreducible complexity by distinguishing between
our not being able to explain the origin of complex structures like the cell in
terms of evolutionary biology and Behe's conclusion that in principle no such
explanation is possible and that, therefore, we must admit the role of an
intelligent designer. They might very well accept the former — the
epistemological claim — but they would reject the latter — the ontological
claim. As several commentators have observed, those, who argue for
"irreducible complexity" and then move to claims about intelligent design,
represent a contemporary version of what has been called the "god of the
gaps." This is the view that the natural order itself and the changes in it require
an appeal to a divine agent operating within the world as a supplement to other
agents and causes in the world. Seventeenth century "physico-theologians"
such as Robert Boyle were exponents of this type of argument from design. In
the same tradition, early in the eighteenth century, William Whewell, defender
of the geological theory of catastrophism, argued that a uniformitarian
explanation of change in terms of natural causes could not explain the
diversity of species in the world. "We see in the transition from an earth
peopled by one set of animals to the same earth swarming with entirely new
forms of organic life," he wrote, "a distinct manifestation of creative
power, transcending the known laws of nature: and, it appears to us, that
geology [i.e., catastrophism] has thus lighted a new lamp along the path of
natural theology."(37) In an important sense, if we have belief in God depend
on the existence of "gaps in the explanatory chain . . . [we ultimately] pit
religion against science. . . . It is also to make evolution and creation seem
like exclusive concepts. Creation [in such a view] is portrayed as a series of
interventions in natural process, and evolutionary natural process is held to be
in principle insufficient to bring about major features of the world. A theory of
evolution thus necessarily appears as a threat to the foundations of religious
belief."(38)

It seems to me that if we recognize that there are sciences of nature, then such
gaps can only be epistemological difficulties to be overcome. If nature is
intelligible in terms of causes discoverable in it, we cannot think that changes
in nature require special divine agency. The "god" in the "god of the gaps" is
more powerful than any other agent in nature, but such a god is not the God of
orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Such a god can easily become a
disappearing god as gaps in our scientific knowledge close.(39)
The "god of the gaps" or the intelligent designer of Behe's analysis is not the
Creator; at least this god is not the Creator described by Aquinas. Nor is the
argument from design to the existence of a Designer really the same as
Aquinas' argument for the existence of God from order and purpose in nature.
According to Aquinas, natural things disclose an intrinsic intelligibility and
directedness in their behavior, which require that God be the source. Finality
and purpose, keys to an argument for the existence of God, have their
foundation in nature as a principle in things. Eight hundred years before
Aquinas, Augustine makes a crucial distinction between God's causal activity
and what in our own day has come to be called "intelligent design." "It is one
thing to build and to govern creatures from within and from the summit of the
whole causal nexus — and only God, the Creator, does this; it is another thing
to apply externally forces and capacities bestowed by Him in order to bring
forth at such and such a time, or in such and such a shape, what has been
created. For all things were created at the beginning, being primordially
woven into the texture of the world; but they await the proper opportunity for
their existence."(40)

An important fear that informs the concerns of many believers is that theories
of evolution, cosmic and biological, "transfer the agency of creative action
from God" to the material world itself, and that this transferral is a rejection of
the religious doctrine of creation.(41) The theological concern is that to
recognize the complete competence of the natural sciences to explain the
changes that occur in the world, without any appeal to specific interventions
by God, "is essentially equivalent to . . . [denying] divine action of any sort in
this world."(42) We have already seen how Aquinas responded to very similar
fears in the Middle Ages. Aristotelian science seemed to threaten the
sovereignty and omnipotence of God. But remember that Aquinas recognized
that a world in which the natural processes are explicable in their own terms
does not challenge the role of the Creator. One need not choose between a
natural world understandable in terms of causes within it and an omnipotent
Creator constantly causing this world to be. Aquinas thinks that a world of
necessary connections between causes and effects, connections which he
thinks are the hallmarks of its intelligibility, does not mean that the world is
not dependent upon God.(43) Necessity in nature is not a rival to the
fundamentally different kind of necessity attributed to God.(44)

Those like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who argue for a denial of
creation on the basis of evolutionary biology, see the incompatibility between
evolution and divine action in fundamentally the same way as theistic
opponents of evolution.(45) They fail to distinguish between the claims of the
empirical sciences and conclusions in natural philosophy and metaphysics.
That is, they assume that the natural sciences require a materialist
understanding of all of reality.(46) Furthermore, they mistakenly conclude
that arguments for creation are essentially arguments from design in nature,
and, thus, the creation which Dawkins and Dennett deny is really not the
fundamental notion of creation set forth by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.
We can see some of these misunderstandings in the following quotation from
the Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin:

When science speaks to members of the general public the problem is to get
them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the
demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social intellectual
apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth. . . . We take the side of
science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its
failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of
the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories,
because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not
that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a
material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we
are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus
of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no
matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in
the door.(47)

The reference to science as "the only begetter of truth" follows logically from
the philosophical commitment to materialism. Even Francisco Ayala, a
distinguished biologist familiar with theological arguments, writes the
following:

[I]t was Darwin's greatest achievement to show that the directive organization
of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural
selection, without any need to resort to a creator or other external agent. . . .
Darwin's theory encountered opposition in religious circles, not so much
because he proposed the evolutionary origin of living things (which had been
proposed many times before, even by Christian theologians), but because his
mechanism, natural selection, excluded God as accounting for the obvious
design of organisms. . . . This is the conceptual revolution that Darwin
completed — that everything in nature, including the origin of living
organisms, can be explained by material processes governed by natural laws.
This is nothing if not a fundamental vision that has forever changed how
mankind perceives itself and its place in the universe.(48)

To refer to "a creator or other external agent" or to be concerned about not

letting "a Divine Foot in the door" mistakenly locates creation on the same
metaphysical level as agency in this world, and makes divine causality a
competitor with other forms of causality. In such a scenario, the more we
attribute causality to nature, the more we must reduce the causality attributed
to God — or vice versa. As I have argued, Aquinas helps us to see the error in
this kind of opposition.

Human Nature and the Creation of the Soul: A Preliminary Approach

Can "everything in nature," as Ayala says, "be explained in terms of material

processes?" Surely not everything about nature can be explained in terms of
material processes. As we have seen, that everything is created — that is,
completely dependent upon God as cause of existence — is a
truth about nature which cannot be explained by material causality. Aquinas
would say that the natural sciences are fully competent to account for the
changes that occur in the natural world, but this does not mean that
"everything in nature" can be explained in terms of material causes. Before we
can judge whether all things in nature can be explained by material causes we
must know what the things in nature are which need to be explained. To know
what the natural world is like we need both the empirical sciences and a
philosophy of nature.

Throughout this essay I have sought to make a clear distinction between

creation and change: to argue, that is, that creation is a concept in metaphysics
and theology, not in the natural sciences. But I would argue, in addition, that
the natural sciences alone, without, that is, a philosophy of nature, cannot
provide an adequate account of the natural order itself. Furthermore, an
exclusively material explanation of nature, that is, an explanation which
relies only on the discovery of constituent parts, does not describe nature as it
really is. A thorough refutation of materialism is not within the scope of this
essay; it would involve a recognition that any whole, whether it be a chemical
compound or a living organism, is more than the sum of its material parts. The
whole exists and behaves in ways different from the existence and behavior of
its constituent parts. Water, for example, exhibits properties not found in
either oxygen or hydrogen. We cannot account for the "more" of the whole in
terms of the sum of the material parts. At the very least, we should recognize,
as Richard Lewontin did in the passage quoted above, that to claim
that only materialist explanations of reality are acceptable is a philosophical
assumption not required by the "methods and institutions of science."

When Aquinas remarks that the sciences of nature are fully competent to
account for the world of physical reality he includes in the category of
"sciences of nature" what we would call philosophy of nature. This is a more
general science of nature than is proper to any one of the empirical sciences.
Thus, a philosophy of nature, as distinct from the metaphysical study of
creation, discusses questions such as what is change; what is time; whether
bodies are composed of matter and form; is a materialist account of nature, or
a dualist, or some other account true? The debate about randomness and
chance in biological processes and whether there is purpose or finality
discoverable in nature are also topics to be examined in natural
philosophy.(49)

A good example of the kind of analysis needed, which brings a sophisticated

philosophical reflection to the discoveries of the empirical sciences, is
William Stoeger's discussion of chance and purpose in biology. Stoeger points
out that the natural sciences discover an order and directedness inherent in
physical reality: "in the laws, regularities, and evolving conditions as they
function together to constitute the processes and relationships which emerge at
each stage of cosmic history." These laws and conditions are more than a
pattern of regularities that we observe; "that pattern must have some sufficient
cause in nature itself." Although "chance events are frequent and important in
biological evolution, rendering its actual course indeterminate or
unpredictable in exact outcome from any particular stage, these events and
their short- and long-term effects — whether they be of point mutations at the
level of molecular DNA, or the impact of a meteorite — are always within a
context of regularities, constraints, and possibilities." Thus, to refer to such
events as "pure chance" or "to assert blithely that evolution proceeds by purely
chance events is much less than a precise description of this source of
unpredictability in biological evolution." To speak of regularities in nature, or
of there being laws of nature, means that there are processes oriented towards
certain general ends. "If there were no end-directed or end-seeking behavior in
physical reality, there would be no regularities, functions, or structures about
which we could formulate laws of nature." Furthermore, even though the
contemporary natural sciences often seek to discover efficient causes without
reference to purposes (final causes), "any ordering of efficient causes and their
effects implicitly acknowledges and presupposes that the efficient causes and
the processes which embody them are directed towards the realization of
certain specific types of ends. Efficient causes always have certain
specifiable effects. "(50)

It ought to be clear that to recognize, as Aquinas does, that reason alone is

sufficient to describe the various processes that occur in nature does not mean
that current theories of evolution do in fact provide a fully adequate scientific
account of the origin and development of life. If we were to seek a complete
analysis of biology in light of Thomistic natural philosophy there would be
many questions which would have to be raised: not the least of which would
be the arguments Aquinas advances for the existence of the human soul and
the fundamental ontological distinction between human beings and the rest of
nature.(51) Aquinas thinks that the human soul, given that its proper function
is not that of any bodily organ, must be both immaterial and therefore
specially created by God. Such an application of his doctrine of creation to the
human soul depends on his arguments about the existence and nature of the
soul, arguments which he advances in natural philosophy. Any understanding
of the human person as the composite of body and soul which is consistent
with evolutionary biology requires an understanding of the doctrine of
creation and the compatibility of divine agency and natural causes. Hence the
importance of the analysis of creation I have been offering for the particular
discussion of human nature and contemporary biology. It is not my purpose
here to examine Aquinas' conception of human nature and, in particular, how
he defends the view that man is composed of body and soul. Let me just note,
however, that Aquinas is not a dualist; he does not think that the body is one
entity and the soul another. A human being is one thing, understood in terms
of the unity of two principles, one material, the other spiritual. Aquinas'
analysis of the human soul is an integral part of his explanation of living
things, which is itself part of his even broader understanding of the distinction
between form and matter, the co-principles of all physical reality.(52)

A rejection of Aquinas' specific claims about the human soul would not in any
way challenge the truth of his analysis of creation. Nor does Aquinas' analysis
of creation and its compatibility with contemporary evolutionary thought
require us to accept or reject any evolutionary theory. Analyses of
evolutionary theory occur in the disciplines of biology and natural philosophy.
It is important to remember the point I made at the beginning of this essay,
that we must recognize the appropriate competence of each of the various
disciplines which investigate the nature and origins of life. Throughout I have
sought to show the value of Aquinas' thought for distinguishing creation from
evolution. Whatever exists is caused to be by God; this is a conclusion in
metaphysics; whether human souls are among the things that exist is a
question to be answered in natural philosophy; whether living things have
evolved by natural selection is the subject of evolutionary biology.

Conclusion

We should remember, however, that evolutionary biology's commitment to

common descent by natural selection is essentially an explanation of origin
and development; it is a historical account. Several years ago Carl Friedrich
von Weizsäcker wrote: "For philosophers, the most important discovery of
modern science has been the history of Nature."(53) However much we
recognize the value of this insight, we need to guard against the genetic
fallacy: that is, making judgments about what things are exclusively on the
basis of how things have come to be. There is also the danger of historicism
— an embrace of flux and change as the only constants — which denies
essences, natures (and species), and according to which the only explanatory
principle is historical development. However necessary evolutionary biology
is for understanding nature, it is not a substitute for the complete study
of what things are and how they behave. These are questions which engage
not only the empirical sciences but also the philosophy of nature. What things
are and how they function involve discussions in terms of matter and form,
potentiality and actuality, substance and accident, the nature of change, etc. It
would be wrong to say that there is nothing in the natural order which cannot
be accounted for by causes which the empirical sciences discover since the
human soul exists in the natural order. The discovery of the existence of the
human soul takes place in the realm of the philosophy of nature, not in that of
the empirical sciences.(54) Thus we must recognize that any evolutionary
theory remains an incomplete scientific account of living things. At the very
least the question of the completeness or incompleteness of evolutionary
theories as accounts of living things is a philosophical question, not resolvable
by the empirical sciences themselves.

Although we do not have to appeal to divine action in the natural world to

account for what the empirical sciences discover, it does not follow that a
materialist account of reality is true. As we have seen, materialism is a
philosophical position; it is not a conclusion of the empirical sciences. We
must not confuse the order of explanation in the empirical sciences with the
orders of explanation in natural philosophy and in metaphysics.

Thomas Aquinas as biblical exegete, metaphysician, and philosopher of nature

offers us a rich array of insights for contemporary discourse on the
relationship among sacred texts, the natural sciences, and philosophy. He can
help us to avoid the whirlpool of a reductionist materialism as well as the
stumbling block of biblical literalism. His principles continue to serve as an
anchor of intelligibility in a sea of confusing claims. Rather than excluding
Darwin from the curriculum, the schools should add Aquinas.
ENDNOTES

1. Distinguer pour unir, ou Les degrés du savoir (Paris: de Brouwer,

1932).

2. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

3. Gavin de Beer, "Evolution,"The New Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th

edition (1973-74).

4. David Baltimore, writing in The New York Times, 25 June 2000, p. 17.
Baltimore thinks that the discoveries of the human genome project
"should be, but won't be, the end of creationism." Ernan McMullin,
commenting on the contributions of molecular biology to the thesis of
common ancestry, writes that a comparison of the DNA, as well as of
the proteins which DNA encodes, among different types of organisms
"shows that there are striking similarities in chemical composition
among them. These similarities are just the kind that one would expect
from the hypothesis of common ancestry. . . ." The molecular-level
differences among species give an indication of the relative order of
 branching among the species. "What is impressive here is
the coherenceof the results given by examining many different
macromolecules in this light. Without common descent, this intricate
network of resemblances would make no sense." McMullin does not
think that evidence from molecular biology in some sense proves that
there is a common ancestry; he claims that there is a remarkable
"consilience" between this evidence and the hypothesis of common
ancestry. "Evolution and Special Creation," Zygon 28:3 (September
1993), pp. 299-335, at pp. 317 and 319.

5. Jon Seger, an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, observed that the

human genome project is "evolution laid out for all to see. There's
nothing peculiar or distinctive about us." According to Nicholas Wade,
editor of the special science section of The New York Times dedicated
to the announcement of the successes of the human genome project,
"[t]he conditions of human existence, the reach of human abilities, the
purpose of life — at least in a biological sense — have boundaries that
are engraved in the genome's gnomic text." The New York Times, 28
June 2000, pp. 21 and D1.

6. For a good recent book on the challenges of evolutionary biology to

traditional theology, see John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A
Theology of Evolution (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000).
Another good source on this subject is: Mariano Artigas, Las fronteras
del evolucionismo (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1991).

7. The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton,1986), p. 6.

8. River Out of Eden (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 132-3.

9. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 203.

10. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, in summarizing

recently the importance of Darwin's influence on modern thought, sees
a fundamental incompatibility between Darwinian biology and
traditional theology and philosophy: "Darwinism rejects all
supernatural phenomena and causation. The theory of evolution by
natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world
solely materialistically. . . . Darwinism refutes typology [essentialism].
. . . Darwin's theory of natural selection made any invocation of
teleology unnecessary. . . . Of all of Darwin's proposals, the one his
contemporaries found most difficult to accept was the theory of
common descent applied to Man. For theologians and philosophers
alike, Man was a creature above and apart from other living beings."
 Ernst Mayr, "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific
American (July 2000), pp. 79-83, at pp. 81-2. See, also, Mayr, One
Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern
Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993).

11. For an account of Aquinas' indebtedness to his Muslim and Jewish

predecessors, see Steven E. Baldner and William E. Carroll, Aquinas on
Creation (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press,
1997), pp. 12-34.

12. See Luca Bianchi, L'errore di Aristotele: La polemica contro l'eternità

del mondo nel XIII secolo (Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1984); Il
Vescovo e i Filosofi: La condanna parigiana del 1277 e l'evoluzione
dell'aristotelismo scolastico (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editrice,
1990); and Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l'université de
Paris (XIIIe - XIVe siècles), (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999).

13. An account of Aquinas' first magisterial discussion of creation can be

found in Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation.

14. The complete dependence of the creature on the Creator means that
there is a kind of priority of non-being to being in any creature, but this
priority is not fundamentally temporal. It is, as Aquinas said, a priority
according to nature, not according to time. Both Albert the Great and
Bonaventure argued, contrary to the view of Aquinas, that to be created
necessarily means to have being after non-being. Thus, unlike Aquinas,
they inextricably linked creation with temporal origination. See Baldner
and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation.

15. The best known representative of this position in Islam was al-Ghazali
(1058-1111); see The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. by
Michael E. Marmura (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press,
1997). Maimonides (1135-1204), an ardent critique, describes the
position of the kalam theologians in this way: "They [the theologians]
assert that when a man moves a pen, it is not the man who moves it; for
the motion occurring in the pen is an accident created by God in the
pen. Similarly the motion of the hand, which we think of as moving the
pen, is an accident created by God in the moving hand. Only God has
instituted the habit that the motion of the hand is concomitant with the
motion of the pen, without the hand exercising in any respect an
influence on, or being causative in regard to, the motion of the
pen." The Guide of the Perplexed I.73; trans. by S. Pines (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 202.
16. Averroes (1126-1198) thought that if one were to maintain that what
exists could come from what does not exist (i.e., creation out-of-
nothing), then "anything whatever might proceed from anything
whatever, and there would be no congruity between causes and effect. .
. ." Tahfut al-Tahfut 452, trans. Simon Van den Bergh (Cambridge: E.J.
Gibb Memorial Trust, 1987), 1:273.

17. A good account of this debate in mediaeval Islam and Judaism can be
found in: Herbert Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation, and the
Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987).

18. Aquinas' view of divine causality raises the specter of the so-called
"problem of evil." Aquinas is able to respond successfully to objections
that his view of God's causality makes God the source of evil; an
exposition of Aquinas' views on this matter are, however, well beyond
the scope of this essay.

19. Aquinas' understanding of divine action and its relation to biological

change would allow us to avoid various attempts to accommodate the
contingency affirmed in some evolutionary theories by re-thinking
divine omnipotence, omniscience, and God's a-temporality. Keith
Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, is a good example of this
latter approach. Ward thinks that the traditional attempt to make God
the "efficient cause of all things, without compromising the simplicity
and unchangeability which are characteristics of the Aristotelian picture
of God" was "an heroic failure," since it "could not account for the
contingency of the universe." This is so because "[t]hat which is wholly
necessary can only produce that which is necessary. A contingent
universe can only be accounted for if one makes free creativity a
characteristic of the First Mover, which entails placing change and
contingency within the First Mover itself." Religion and
Creation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 202. According to Ward,
God's omniscience "is the capacity to know everything that becomes
actual, whenever it does so. . . . The classical hypothesis [of a God who
does not change] does not . . . seem compelling." (italics added, p. 188)
In a sense, God must wait to know what is actual since there is an
inherent contingency in nature itself, and, as actualities change so does
God's knowledge. Ward's arguments are far more sophisticated than
can be adequately set forth in a footnote, but for the claim that the
Thomistic view of divine agency and the world of change is a great
success, rather than "an heroic failure," see William E. Carroll,
"Aquinas and the Metaphysical Foundations of
Science," Sapientia 54:1 (1999), pp. 69-91.
20. There is a temptation in some circles to examine genetic mutations in
the light of the insights of quantum mechanics and to discuss divine
action in the context of the ontological indeterminism associated with
the quantum world. It was William Pollard, who in 1958, wrote: "The
phenomenon of gene mutation is the only one so far known in these
sciences which produces gross macroscopic effects but seems to
depend directly on changes in individual molecules which are in turn
governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle." Chance and
Providence: God's Action in a World Governed by Scientific
Law (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 56. Recent reflections on
genetic mutation and divine action are part of the wider notion that
quantum mechanics shows us that there is a kind of metaphysical space
which allows for divine action which does not "interfere" with nature.
Thus special divine action can be seen as the "providential
determination of otherwise undetermined events. . . . God's action will
take the form of realizing one of several potentials in the quantum
system, not of manipulating sub-atomic particles as a quasi-physical
force." In an excellent essay on this topic, Robert J. Russell adopts "the
theological view that God's special action can be considered as
objective and non-interventionist if the quantum events underlying
genetic mutations are given an indeterminist interpretation
philosophically. If it can be shown scientifically that quantum
mechanics plays a role in genetic mutations, then by extension it can be
claimed theologically that God's action in genetic mutations is a form
of objectively special, non-interventionist divine action. Moreover,
since genetics plays a key role in biological evolution, we can argue by
inference that God's action plays a key role in biological evolution. . . ."
Russell, thus, presents a sophisticated form of theistic evolution. Robert
J. Russell, "Special Providence and Genetic Mutation: A New Defense
of Theistic Evolution," in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology:
Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, edited by Robert J. Russell,
William R. Stoeger, and Francisco J. Ayala, pp. 191-223, at p. 213 and
p. 206, italics in original (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory
Publications, 1998).

21. Summa contra Gentiles III 70.8

22. For a discussion of the sense of divine transcendence as used by

Aquinas and how it differs from the modern conception of
transcendence (as contrasted with immanence), see Kathryn
Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or
Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and William
Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence (Louisville, KY:
Westminster Press, 1996).
23. Brian J. Shanley, O.P., "Divine Causation and Human Freedom in
Aquinas," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72:1 (1998), pp.
100 and 108. Shanley argues that no real explanation of exactly how
God's causality functions is possible, since God transcends the
mundane world of causation. Recently, Michael Miller has argued that
Bernard Lonergan, following in the tradition of Aquinas, provides a
more philosophically satisfying account of divine causation without
sacrificing divine transcendence: in "Transcendence and Divine
Causality," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 73:4 (Autumn
1999), pp. 537-554. David Burrell observes that the "terms 'primary'
and 'secondary' [causality] come into play when we are faced with the
situation where one thing is by virtue of the other. So each can properly
be said to be a cause, yet what makes one secondary is the intrinsic
dependence on the one which is primary. This stipulation clearly
distinguishes a secondary cause from an instrument, which is not a
cause in its own right: it is not the hammer which drives the nails but
the carpenter using it." Burrell, Freedom and Causation in Three
Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p.
97. See also William E. Carroll, "Aquinas and the Metaphysical
Foundations of Science," Sapientia 54:1 (1999), pp. 69-91.

24. Thus Aquinas concludes, "this last opinion [Augustine's] has my

preference;" yet he adds that he will undertake to defend both positions.
In II Sent., dist. 12, q. 3, a. 1.

25. Throughout his commentary on Genesis, Aquinas adheres to the

following principle: there is a distinction between primary and
secondary material in the Bible. When writing about the codifying of
articles of faith in a creedal statement, Aquinas responds to the
objection that "all things contained in Holy Scripture are matters faith"
and because of their multitude "cannot be reduced to a certain number."
"[O]f things to be believed some of them belong to faith, whereas
others are purely subsidiary, for, as happens in any branch of
knowledge, some matters are its essential interest, while it touches on
others only to make the first matters clear. Now because faith is chiefly
about the things we hope to see in heaven, 'for faith is the substance of
things hoped for,' [Hebrews xi.1] it follows that those things which
order us directly to eternal life essentially belong to faith; such as the
three Persons of almighty God, the mystery of Christ's incarnation, and
other like truths. . . . Some things, however, are proposed in Holy
Scripture, not as being the main matters of faith, but to bring them out;
for instance, that Abraham had two sons, that a dead man came to life
at the touch of Elisha's bones, and other like matters narrated in
Scripture to disclose God's majesty or Christ's incarnation." Summa
theologiae II-II, q. 1, a. 6, ad 1
26. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis I:38-39

27. For an excellent analysis of this view, see Howard Van Till, "The
Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?' Theology
Today /55:3 (October 1998), pp.344-364.

28. Van Till, p. 350.

29. Alvin Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the
Bible," Christian Scholar's Review 21 (1991), pp. 8-32; "Evolution,
Neutrality, and Antecedent Probability: A Reply to McMullin and Van
Till," Christian Scholar's Review 21 (1991), pp. 80-109.

30. Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash . . ." (italics in the original),
p. 26.

31. One well-known critic of evolutionary thought, Philip Johnson, rejects

attempts to accommodate evolution and belief in the Creator: "I think
that most theistic evolutionists accept as scientific the claim that natural
selection performed the creating, but would like to reject the
accompanying metaphysical doctrine that the scientific understanding
of evolution excludes design and purpose. The problem with this way
of dividing things is that the metaphysical statement is no mere
embellishment but the essential foundation of the claim." Darwin on
Trial, 2nd edition (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1993), p.
168.

32. Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to

Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

33. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet cosmologists were prohibited from
teaching Big Bang cosmology; it was termed "theistic science."

34. Among William Lane Craig's many works in defense of this position
one should examine the book he co-authored with Quentin
Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993). Robert J. Russell claims that, whereas Big
Bang cosmology does not confirm creation out of nothing, the notion of
t=0 in that cosmology remains relevant for the doctrine of creation.
Robert J. Russell, "T=0: Is it Theologically Significant?" in Religion
and Science: History, Method, and Dialogue, edited by W. Mark
Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman, pp. 201-224 (New York:
Routledge, 1996).

35. Although Aquinas does not think that one can use reason alone to
conclude that the universe is temporally finite and thus know, on this
 basis, that it is created out of nothing, he does think, as we have seen,
that in the discipline of metaphysics one can know that the universe is
created. Remember the distinction Aquinas draws between creation
understood philosophically, as dependence in the order of being, and
creation known through faith, which does affirm an absolute temporal
beginning.

36. The fact that the natural sciences, including cosmology, study change
excludes an absolute beginning of the universe from their purview,
since such a beginning could not be a change. Any change presupposes
some reality which is there to change. For a detailed discussion of the
relationship between Big Bang cosmology and creation, see: William
E. Carroll, "Thomas Aquinas and Big Bang
Cosmology," Sapientia 53:1 (1998), pp. 73-95; "Big Bang Cosmology,
Quantum Tunneling from Nothing, and Creation," Laval théologique et
philosophique 44 (1988), pp. 59-75.

37. W. Whewell, "Lyell: Principles of Geology," British Critic 9 (1831), p.

194. Cited in Ernan McMullin, "Introduction: Evolution and
Creation," Evolution and Creation, edited by Ernan McMullin (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 35. Italics added.

38. McMullin, ibid.

39. This, in part, is the theme of Michael J. Buckley in At the Origins of

Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

40. De trinitate III.9. Also: "All the normal course of nature is subject to its
own natural laws. According to these all living creatures have their
determinate inclinations. . . and also the elements of non-living material
things have their determinate qualities and forces, in virtue of which
they function as they do and develop as they do. . . . From these
primordial principles everything that comes about emerges in its own
time and in the due course of events." Augustine, De genesi ad litteram
IX.17. Howard Van Till has written a great deal on the relationship
between patristic discussions of creation and the contemporary debate
about evolution and creation, and he argues that Augustine and others
recognize a "functional integrity" to nature: that the universe was
brought into being in a less than fully formed state, "but gifted with the
capacities to transform itself, in conformity with God's will, from
unformed matter into a truly marvelous array of physical structures and
life forms." Howard Van Till, "Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of
Creation's Functional Integrity," The Canadian Catholic Review 17:3
(July 1999), p. 35. This article originally appeared in Science and
Christian Belief 8:1 (April 1996), pp. 21-38.
41. Howard Van Till, "Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of Creation's
Functional Integrity," The Canadian Catholic Review 17:3 (July 1999),
p. 24.

42. ibid., p. 28.

43. The Aristotelian idea of scientific knowledge requires the discovery of

such a causal nexus. Contemporary theories of science often eschew an
appeal to the discovery of such necessary connections in nature.
Furthermore, the "intelligibility" of the world is frequently seen
exclusively in terms of mathematical formalism rather than in the
intrinsic principles found in nature and in the relations among things,
where Aquinas would locate it.

44. Aquinas distinguishes between necessary things which have a cause of

their necessity and God who is necessary in Himself. See Summa
contra Gentiles II, 55; Summa theologiae I, q. 22, a. 4; Baldner and
Carroll, Aquinas on Creation, pp. 28-29; and Carroll, "Aquinas and the
Metaphysical Foundations of Science," op. cit. , p. 79, n. 38.

45. We have already seen Alvin Plantinga's argument that creation must
mean "special creation," and, in note 31, I quoted Philip Johnson's
rejection of theistic evolution because he thought it was an oxymoron.

46. Although many authors writing on the relationship among philosophy,

theology, and the natural sciences recognize the philosophical and
theological shortcomings (and errors) in analyses like those of Dawkins
and Dennett, I think that a Thomistic approach is the best way to have a
constructive engagement among these disciplines.

47. Richard Lewontin's review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted

World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, in the New York Review of
Books (January 9, 1997).

48. Francisco J. Ayala, "Darwin's Revolution," in Creative

Evolution?! edited by John H. Campbell and J. William Schopf
(Boston: Jones & Bartlett, 1994), pp.4-5. See his recent "Arguing for
Evolution," in Science Teacher 67: 2 (February, 2000), pp. 30-32.

49. The debate about contingency in evolutionary processes and the

implications of such contingency for notions of purpose, meaning, and
finality in nature occurs in the domain of natural philosophy, and is, as
I have suggested, quite separate from the topic of creation and
evolution. Perhaps the most famous representative of theistic evolution
is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who claimed that evolutionary change
reveals a steady "complexification" as part of "a grand orthogenesis of
 everything living toward a higher degree of immanent
spontaneity." The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1965), p.
151. He was so convinced of the progressive directionality of evolution
that he thought its goal was an Omega Point in which consciousness
will be fully realized and would provide an ultimate explanation for the
entire course of evolution. With greater circumspection, Christian
DeDuve, has argued that the kind of progressive development revealed
in the history of evolution follows almost inevitably given the right
environment. The universe, as he says, is "pregnant with life." "In this
organic cloud, which pervades the universe, life is almost bound to
arise, in a molecular form not very different from its form on Earth,
wherever physical conditions are similar to those that prevailed on our
planet some four billion years ago. This conclusion seems to me
inescapable. Those who claim that life is a highly improbable event,
possibly unique, have not looked closely enough at the chemical
realities underlying the origin of life. Life is either a reproducible,
almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions,
or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in
between." Vital Dust (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 292. De Duve,
a Nobel laureate in biochemistry, is particularly concerned to refute the
views of Stephen J. Gould, who rejects any appeals to "trends" or
directionality in the course of evolutionary history. Commenting on the
appearance of the human species, Gould writes that if we were to
"replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning. . . I doubt
that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again." Gould
describes man as a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent
limb on a fortunate tree." Wonderful Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), pp. 289, 291. Ernan McMullin provides an
excellent account of the dispute in contemporary biological theory
about purpose and randomness in: "Cosmic Purpose and the
Contingency of Human Evolution," Theology Today 55:3 (October
1998), pp. 389-414. For the same issue in a wider context, see Mariano
Artigas, The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and
Religion (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000) and Ian
Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or
Partners? (San Francisco: Harper, 2000).

50. Stoeger also raises the theological question of the relationship between
chance events and God's action in the world. He correctly observes that
the fundamental issue here is the problem of temporality and divine
action, a topic discussed above in this essay. William R. Stoeger, "The
Immanent Directionality of the Evolutionary Process, and its
Relationship to Teleology," in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology:
Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, edited by Robert J. Russell,
 William R. Stoeger, and Francisco Ayala, pp. 163-190, at pp. 169, 172,
179-180, and 187.

51. Recently, Pope John Paul II, after noting that evolution was "more than
a hypothesis," referred to the need to reject, as "incompatible with the
truth about man," those philosophical interpretations of contemporary
biology which see "the mind as emerging from the forces of living
matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter." The Pope asked
rhetorically whether the "ontological discontinuity" which separates
man from the rest of nature does not "run counter to that physical
continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution
in the fields of physics and chemistry." He answered his own question:
"The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple
manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with
the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the
object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at
the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is
specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical
knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience,
freedom, or again, of aesthetic and religious experience, falls within the
competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology
brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator's plan." John
Paul II, "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences," (22 October
1996), reprinted in a special edition of The Quarterly Review of
Biology 72:4 (December 1997), pp. 381-283, at p. 383. This edition of
the review also contains commentary on the Pope's message by
Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins, and others.

52. That the rational soul is the informing principle of each human being
follows from Aquinas' view that each individual substance, inanimate
and animate, must have an informing principle, and that the differences
among informing principles are correlative to the differences among
existing substances. Soul (anima) is the term used to indicate the form
of a living thing, and Aquinas would distinguish among the souls
characteristic of plants, those of animals, and those of human beings.
We might remember here, a famous remark by Aristotle: "There is no
part of an animal which is purely material or purely immaterial." Parts
of Animals I. Charles Kahn notes that Aristotle (and by extension,
Aquinas) was neither a dualist nor a monist, for Aristotle "treats the
issues of thought and perception not within the dual categories of mind
and matter but within the fourfold scheme of natural bodies, living
things, sentient animals, and rational animals (i.e., humans). . . .
[Aristotle's conception of the soul puts him] outside the post-Cartesian
tradition . . . and is thus exempt from the Cartesian curse of mind-body
opposition with all the baffling paradoxes and philosophical blind
 alleys that this antithesis gives rise to." Kahn, "Aristotle on Thinking,"
in Essays on Aristotle's 'De Anima' edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and
Amélie Oksenber Rorty, (Oxford: Calrendon Press, 1992), p. 359.
Aquinas would add to this fourfold list, angels and God. "Both Aristotle
and Aquinas understand the human being as occupying a certain level
on the ascending scale, as a special kind of animal. An animal is a
special kind of physical body. If the level below always constitutes a
conditio sine qua non, each level is nevertheless qualitatively
irreducible. No bottom-up explanation will work. Soul is not something
added to, or which falls inside, or is united to a physical thing. Soul is
what makes you the kind of living thing you are, and a human soul
makes you a human being. . . . The incorporeality of nous and of
intellect means that we, human beings, are of a very special sort,
irreducible to physical things or sentient animals, not that we are
trapped in a material world. . . [so that we] must look into ourselves for
a transcendent voice that can only be heard by turning away from the
physical." Roger Pouivet, "Aristotle and Aquinas on Soul," unpublished
paper presented at the Institute of Thomistic Studies, Jacques Maritain
Center, University of Notre Dame, 14-21 July 2000.

53. Forward to Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Der Ursprung biologischer

Information (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1986); Information and the
Origin of Life, trans. By Paul Wooley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1990), p. xi.

54. However much we recognize that the existence of the human soul is a
topic in natural philosophy, we need to remember that natural
philosophy must always be grounded in the discoveries of the empirical
sciences. Contemporary biologists need not concern themselves with
what it is that makes the living body just the sort of body that it is. The
answer to this question in natural philosophy is the soul. Biologists may
very well be content to say that living beings are what they are and do
what they do because they have the sort of bodies they have; they may
feel no need to ask the further philosophical question of why the living
body is just such a body. The philosophical answer to that question is
the soul, the substantial form of the living being, and nothing about the
biological sciences requires the gratuitous philosophical reductionism
which denies or ignores the existence of the soul. If one accepts the
reductionism and materialism of authors such as Dawkins and Dennett,
there would be no justification in reality for treating living things
differently from non-living things, nor for making distinctions in the
treatment of different living things.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
William E. Carroll "Creation, Evolution, and Thomas Aquinas." Revue des
Questions Scientifiques 171 (4) 2000: 319-347

Reprinted with permission of the author, William E. Carroll.

THE AUTHOR

William E. Carroll is Professor of History at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon,

Iowa. He is the author of La Creación y las ciencias naturales. Actualidad de
Santo Tomás de Aquino (Santiago: Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Press, forthcoming December 2001) and Aquinas on Creation which he co-
authored with Steven E. Baldner (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1997) and Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages, editor
(Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985)