Dangerous

Andrew Marr was on about Darwin last night, although a programme on William Jennings Bryan would have been far more interesting, since it might have included anything new to the general viewer, not least how very much more there was to him than the Scopes Trial.

And what was then on trial, anyway? Only the teaching as scientific fact that the human species descended from another, the only descent of one species from another to be of any moral importance. And for that descent, not the slightest evidence has ever been produced, though certainly not for want of trying. The dog and the duck may or may not be close cousins, but they are in the same moral category either way.

There is simply no particular species from which our own has been shown to have descended. We remain in a wholly different moral category from everything else. At least until such time as “the missing link” turns up, we need ordinarily do nothing more than state the fact of its absence in order to make this earth-shatteringly important point.

By contrast, Marx, Hitler, Dawkins and all the rest are wholly dependent on a sort of blind faith such as has no relationship to serious theology or religious belief. Dawkins most of all, since he knows perfectly well that the “link” is still “missing”, yet he knows that it will eventually turn up, it will, it will, it just will. He knows the latter, which has no evidential basis whatever, far more definitively than he knows the former, which is a fact.

Dawkins’s philosophically (if not actually) illiterate blather about “selfish genes” was treated by Marr with the BBC’s customary reverence. At least there was no mention of “memes”. And the same uncritical deference was shown to dear old Sigmund Fraud, who has arguably done even more damage than Marx.

I will revise my view of this series if by the end of it if Andrew Marr has explained that “of course, no descent of human beings from any other species has ever been established, and for all anyone knows the first man was created directly from inanimate matter before the first woman was created out of the first man”. I am not holding my breath.

But at the very least he might correct his assertion that the study of animal behaviour is somehow related to the theology of the soul, so that that study somehow (he did not condescend to explain how) discredits the Catholic Church’s teaching that the soul is created and infused directly by God rather than being formed out of the genetic material of the parents.

Or he might even point out that the Church’s insistence on monogenism (the descent of the entire human species from a single pair) is not only perfectly consistent with science, but also logically inescapable simply in itself.

I am not holding my breath for that, either. But note that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that the BBC cannot turn into an excuse to attack the Catholic Church, though never as a result of having found out the first thing about Her or about what She teaches.

As with Hollywood or the State of Israel, that leaves one wondering what all the bending over backwards since Vatican II has been for. But as with the Guardian and the No Popery toffs alike (insofar as they are not the same people), it does gladden the heart to see that the success of the Catholic schools in “taking the sons (and daughters) of dockers and turning them into doctors” has so very badly riled exactly those whom it ought to rile.