Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Philip Fothergill, a Catholic botanist at King’s College, England, though an
evolutionist, was quite sympathetic to criticisms of Darwinism. He considered purely
naturalistic evolution unsatisfactory, and argued that Darwinian natural selection was but
a reflection of the naturalistic, mechanistic philosophy of the times. In Historical
Aspects of Organic Evolution (1953), he quotes and discusses many of these anti-
Darwinian scientists approvingly. Mentioning that he argued at length about evolution
with creationist Douglas Dewar, he provides a list of the leading anti-evolutionist
biologists. In Evolution and Christians (1961), Fothergill expands on his dissatisfaction
with purely naturalistic evolution and the “deification” of natural selection. “It is right
that any theory which seeks to prove that man is merely a product of evolution and
nothing more should be combatted and exposed for all its fallacy,” he wrote. He presents
evidence supporting evolution, but also presents criticisms and difficulties. Fothergill
said he considered evolution the “penultimate” expression of all life, but man alone the
“ultimate.” Fothergill’s last two chapters concern evolution from the Catholic viewpoint.
He generally affirms Papal opinions regarding evolution, and discusses ways of
reconciling these with evolutionary biology. Adam may have been the first true human,
he speculated, or the first of his race with spiritual capacity. It was Fothergill who
devised the hypothesis, mentioned above, that Adam could have passed on his fully
human genetic complement by marrying his offspring.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, because of his enormous influence, is another
Catholic “evolutionist” who deserves mention in a discussion of anti-evolutionism.
Teilhard was a Jesuit priest who became an active and enthusiastic paleontologist; he was
involved in the Piltdown excavations and the “Peking Man” excavations. He became a
geology professor at the Catholic Institute, and director of the Laboratory of Advanced
Studies in Geology and Paleontology in Paris, and spent his final years with the Wenner-
Gren Foundation in New York. Teilhard was influenced by Bergson and German
Naturphilosophie, and advocated a mystical view of all-embracing evolutionism,
presented in an obscure poetic style in several books, especially The Phenomenon of Man
(1955). Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s champion T.H. Huxley, wrote a laudatory
introduction to the 1965 English translation. (Like Teilhard, Huxley, who contributed to
the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, found cosmic significance in evolution. Huxley advocated
a Religion Without Revelation in his 1941 book of that title: an evolutionary, secular
humanism, a wholly naturalistic faith.)
Teilhard posited an immanent progressive drive embracing the entire universe:
evolution as the fundamental unifying process of everything. Through love, people grow
closer; eventually humans will evolve into a single super-organism. This final
destination of evolution is Teilhard’s “Omega Point.” People would retain their own
individual souls, but would also merge into the world soul, which Teilhard somehow
equates with Christ. Man thus becomes deified; transmuted with the divine cosmic
center. “Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of
itself,” explains Teilhard. Man’s brain “proves that evolution has a direction.” Teilhard
apparently did not intend this as metaphor; he declared that his book was not to be read as
metaphysics of religion, but “purely and simply as a scientific treatise.”
The Catholic Church considered Teilhard’s view most unorthodox, and did not
allow him to publish this book during his lifetime. Creationists vigorously condemn
Teilhard as the chief inspiration and patron saint of theistic evolutionism (and often