Fr. Stanley Jaki on Evolution

Recently, Fr. Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and philosopher of science, made an appearance at Detroit's Sacred Heart Major Seminary. I missed his lecture due to its early time. After reading his short (32 page) pamphlet on evolution, I could kick myself for missing his lecture! Reading his pamphlet--or rather little book, because it contains far more sense than many a magnum opus by others, I experienced again the thrill of reading someone who can really light up one's mind.

Here is a delightful excerpt as he slices away at the Darwinian ideology and metaphysics that has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate, non-ideological scientific version of evolution. In this excerpt, Fr. Jaki describes the intellectual intolerance I recently wrote about in Catholic Analysis concerning those evolutionists who seek to crush anyone daring to criticize their ideology. Now, let me be clear that Fr. Jaki has no quarrel with evolution as a duly restrained scientific explanation. He does not seek to replace evolution within the proper boundaries of science. But he does capture the ideological intolerance of those evolutionists who go beyond science into metaphysics and seek to crush any hint of criticism from whatever quarter:

Man sees through a glass darkly, but he sees nevertheless in a sense which is not merely sensory. And, as has already been noted, any evolutionary biologist stands in need of such a vision, even though he may be most unwilling to admit it. Such a reluctance can at times take the form of inquisitorial tyranny. In a great American university, where the biology department has renamed itself a department of "evolutionary biology," students were urged not to touch with a "ten-foot pole" a book on Darwin and Darwinism, though its author, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was not a believer but an agnostic Jew. No wonder. For a major threat to Darwinistic ideology, so different from Darwin's science, must be seen in a book which sets forth at least something of the non-sequiturs which any judicious reader of the Origin of Species finds in it again and again, and finds almost to the saturation in books that sell Darwinism as an ideology. Their authors invariably fail to weigh the fact that man alone of all primates writes books.

Stanley L. Jaki, Evolution for Believers (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books, 2003), p. 31 (ISBN 1-892548-35-6) (emphasis added).

There are other equally pungent and even better lines in the book. Here is the link to Fr. Jaki's homepage which in turn directs you to his series published by Real View Books, now apparently located in Port Huron, Michigan.