Sir, Your correspondent, Mr Ben Walsh (May 7th), opposes evolution to what he calls creationism. This opposition is quite mistaken, I believe. What is opposed to evolution is the view that the various species of living being are fixed in their kinds from the beginning, a view that might appropriately be called "fixism". The essential idea of creation is total causality, i.e., that whatever is created depends totally on its cause or source for its origin, its maintenance and its development. The idea that higher forms of living beings should develop from lower forms is not at all incompatible with creation. Evolution could very well be the mode of creation.
Unfortunately, when Darwin's theory was first published, it was attacked by Bishop Wilberforce and a number of supporters as being incompatible with creation as presented in the Bible. They were relying on too literal an interpretation of the Book of Genesis. They could have learned a lesson from St Augustine, who realised that Genesis was a poetic account. Augustine used the Stoic theory of "seminal reasons" (logoi spermatikoi) to account for the emergence of higher forms of life in successive "days" or stages of creation.
I am not in the least tempted to defend fixism, but I am surprised to see Mr Walsh appeal to the case of the Manchester moths changing colour during the Industrial Revolution. As the environment became polluted, the lighter coloured moths were more easily seen and destroyed by their natural predators, and the darker ones fared better. But that is hardly evidence for the arrival of new species, is it?
It seems to me that evolution is an indispensable conceptual scheme, whatever about the obvious inadequacies of Darwin's account of how it might have happened. And, as I have said, the idea is quite distinct from the idea of creation. - Yours, etc.,
The Abbey,
Galway City.