IB I CHRONICLESnshould have felt even more ashamed for having spoken innhis Autobiography of his imperceptibly slow “evolution”nfrom belief into mere agnosticism. As one who throughnmuch of his adult life had to dissimulate his true views lest andeeply religious and beloved wife be hurt, Darwin finallyncame to believe that he was not dissimulating anything.nHe might have been cured of his illusion about thenevolution of his religious beliefs had he reread in his latenyears his early Notebooks. Available since the early 1970’snin easily accessible edition, those Notebooks make it absolutelynclear that the Darwin of the late 1830’s was a crudenand crusading materialist.nThere was no gradual evolution from the official naturalistnof the Beagle who, as behooved a good fundamentalist,nhad lectured shipmates with Bible in hand on the evil ofnswearing, to the author of those Notebooks. The transitionnwas rather rapid, indicating a sudden and thorough disillusionnwhich turns one’s erstwhile object of love into a targetnof hatred to be exposed and destroed by all possible means.nDarwin quickly isolated the notion of species as thencentral target of his attacks on God, supernatural, revelation,nand Bible. This showed not so much his acumen asnthe patently indefensible character of the production on .thenthird and fifth days of plants and animals “according to theirnkinds” as a divine warrant of the fixity of species. What is anproof of uncommon acumen is Darwin’s relentless spottingnof data, direct and circumstantial, in support of his evolutionarynvision in which all, from the simplest organism tonman, followed with inevitable necessity once the originalnsoup of life was available. To his credit, Darwin did notnmake the claim made by Haeckel and others that sciencenhad ascertained the existence and qualifies of the originalnsoup. But his conicfion was firm about the purely naturalnemergence of sucha soup some billions of years ago.nHowever, Darwin never appreciated what at one pointndawned on his most trusted ally, T.H. Huxley, that thenmental spectacle of a fore er-evolving life was a metaphysicalnvision. That Herbert Spencer, who with enormousnverbal skill kept portraying the evolution of the mostnnonhomogeneous from the most homogeneous, was fornDarwin one of the greatest philosophers of all times, showsnsomething of Darwin’s blindness to elementary fallacies innreasoning.nReason commanded no encomiums on Darwin’s part.nHis contemptuous remarks about the minds of geniusesnwere so many defense mechanisms against facing up to thenproblem of the mind, the greatest and most decisivenproblem to be faced by evolutionists. Darwinian or other.nNot once did Darwin ponder the nature of purposefulnaction. Not once did he ask himself the question whethernhis lifelong and most purposeful commitment to the purposenof proving that there was no purpose was not a slap innhis own mental face.nThe only time when Darwin performed creditably innphilosophical matters relating to his evolutionary ideologyn. came when he jotted on a slip of paper, which he kept in hisncopy of Chalmers’ Vestiges of Creation, the warning addressednto himself: “Never say higher or lower.” He did notnfully remember the gist of that warning, namely, that anscientific theory (as distinct from a scientistic ideology)npermitted no value judgments.nnnHe never suspected the irony of his answering within thenframework of “how” the questions about “why” and “fornwhat purpose.” He recognized, however, that there wasnsomething unsatisfactory with the “how” he held high, ornthe selective impact of environment on the fact thatnoffspring were always, however slightiy, different from theirnparents. That “how,” supported by genetics as it mav be, isnstill elusive. Indeed, so elusive as to have produced anunique feature in the history of science. Whereas in physicsnand chemistry the conversion of scientists to a new majorntheory becomes complete within one generation, in biologyna respectable minority has maintained itself for now overnfour generations against the majority position representednby Darwinists.nThe latest evidence of the deep dissatisfaction felt aboutnDarwinism has come from strictly Darwinistic circles.nDespair about Darwinism is the driving force behind thatnrecent rush to the idea of punctuated evolution. In no sensenan explanation, the theory of punctuated evolution is anmere verbalization demanded by the fact that the geologicalnrecord almost invariably shows bursts of new forms andnhardly ever a slow gradual process as demanded b classicalnDarwinism. The radical opposition to religion in generalnand to Christianity in particular on the part of the chiefnspokesmen of punctuated evolution is of a piece with thenantireligious origins of Darwinism.n• Many Christians have only themselves to blame if theirnreaction to Darwinism justifies Huxley’s remark that “extinguishedntheologians lie about the cradle of e cry science asnthe strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.” There is nonintellectual saving grace for those who oppose long geologicalnages and the exceedingly variegated fossil record with answearing by the six-day creation story as a literal record ofnwhat happened. It is rarely remembered that their haplessnwrestling with Scriptures and science is but the latest act innthat intellectual tragedy which Luther and Calvin initiatednby their lengthy commentaries on Genesis 1-3. The strictestnliteral interpretation of the creation story told there wasnupheld by both to the hilt. Present-day Lutherans andnCalvinists cater only to the uninformed when, proud of then”main-line” status accorded to them by the secularistnmedia, they hold high the “reasonableness” of their traditionnagainst the “unreasonability” of fundamentalistnProtestants.nA hermeneutics which sets limits to the literal interpretationnmust come to terms with the fact that the Scripturesnwere born within the Church and not the other waynaround, and that therefore only a Church with an infalliblenmagisterium can guarantee the inerrancy of the Scriptures.nThis, of course, brings us to the branch of Christendomnknown as Roman Catholicism. The near-escape of papalninfallibility from the clutches of the Galileo case taughtnCatholics a lesson which stood them in good stead in thendecades immediately following Darwin. Their resistance tonDarwinism was from the start done more with an eye onnplain philosophy than on scriptural or dogmatic texts. Thenessentially philosophical objections of St. John Mivart, anCatholic biologist, to Darwin’s theory represented one ofnthe two main attacks that upset Darwin considerably. Thenother was the demonstration by F. Jenkin, a Scottishnengineer, that the laws of statistics did not favor at all then