Lenten campaign 2026
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I hate talking about evolution. Yet, talk about evolution we must — because it has increasingly been cited as a reason that people leave Christianity or the Catholic Church.
It broke my heart to hear that Rhett from the Good Mythic Morning YouTube show lost his faith over evolution. He didn’t have to. And he might be surprised to know that many scientists are losing their faith in scientism over creation right now, also.
I get where he’s coming from, though.
I’ve gone through a whole intellectual journey with regard to evolution in my adult lifetime.
At first, when I returned to the faith, I assumed the Bible’s story and Darwin’s couldn’t possibly both be true. I would have to choose between them. I chose the Bible, because it told me so many good things I relied on in the rest of my life, and tried to just ignore the question of evolution altogether.
But then, during a particularly dark time in my life, I started to question my faith. I took an online course to learn what science can — and can’t — tell us about human origins, and I studied what the Church does — and doesn’t — say on the same topic.
I learned that scientists can describe a lot about how human beings developed — but are baffled that we developed complex, abstract language. And I learned that neither the Catholic Catechism, nor Doctors of the Church from Augustine to Newman, nor the magisterium, see the Genesis account as a scientific description. They all remain open to evolution.
I learned that my fear of evolution is misplaced.
Christians have the impression that evolution means God kicked off the universe a long time ago, at the Big Bang maybe, and then checked out as trial and error took over. Rhett was unconvinced by Christian apologists who try to account for fossils by saying God kept intervening in creation to come up with new versions of the animals we find in fossils.
That’s “the God of the gaps” approach that says “God did it” about whatever science doesn’t yet understand.
But Christians who argue that way are making a fundamental mistake about God: They are treating God like he is timebound, like a creature. But God is outside of time and space. God is the “First Cause” not chronologically, in history, but metaphysically, right now.
Take my dog Bosco, for instance.
God is the “First Cause” of Bosco, not because he packed the Big Bang with the chemicals necessary such that, over billions of years, with the right meteors bumping into the right planets and the right chemical reactions commencing, Bosco’s ancestors, and then Bosco himself, would result.
No. Think of it this way: If I want to understand everything about Bosco, I need to first ask a dog behavioral expert, like Cesar Milan. He will tell me why Bosco acts the way he does. But he can’t explain why Bosco’s muscles and organs work the way they do. For that, I need to ask a biologist. But she can only tell me so much. I need a molecular biologist to explain more, then a particle physicist, then a quantum physicist to look at the tiniest fractions of my dog.
But at some point, I need to ask: Okay, so why are the particles here at all? Why something and not nothing?
And that is where I have to find a First Cause — or to be precise, a non-contingent cause. A cause beyond muscles and hormones and chemicals and molecules and atoms — beyond space and time. God is, right now, outside of time, creating everything — past, present, and future — as the ground of being and the intelligibility of the universe.
And here, we discover that evolutionists fear creation.
Christians have no problem believing in a cause outside of space and time, sustaining the universe in every moment — but nonbelieving scientists are petrified of that possibility. It does not compute.
The problem: This universe seems fine-tuned to support life, and if one small variable here or there was changed, the universe would lose its stability and become hostile to life. So scientists posit multiverse theory, or string theory, or other theories to explain how it is possible that we have a universe this stable. Call it “the science of the gaps.”
They needn’t worry. The universe is the way it is, because it was made that way, for a purpose. And the more we learn about it, the more we learn about that plan.
As Cardinal Christoph Schonborn put it at Benedictine College, “I have never met any scientific discovery that has made my faith shrink. I always have been comforted in my faith through scientific discoveries. To believe that all this is mere chance, randomness, is stupid. It’s irrational.”
For more, see my series on Hallow: The Big Questions.
