In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out:
[A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than hypocrisy, the problem being no longer the difference between what people say and what they believe; now the difference seems to be between what people think they believe and what they really believe.) [page 224]
I’d agree heartily and even add that there are many who think themselves to be Christians, Catholic or otherwise, because of a formal adherence to what we might label `Biblical teachings’ while their more deeply held beliefs seem to be paganistic, perhaps a regression toward the baptized form of paganism the Church tolerated, maybe unwisely, during the centuries of bringing the Good News of Christ to the European peoples. I think Professor Lukacs was speaking more of another group, those who have fallen into weak, liberalized forms of Christianity — Unitarians at Mass in a manner of speaking, but I think most Christians willing to publicly call themselves such are pagans, moving along with the herd as Christianity is repaganized. Given the strong religious instincts of human beings and the laziness leading to the acceptance of easily understood ideas, I suspect the repaganized Christians will soon be dominant over atheists, unitarians, and also Christians who adhere to a coherent set of beliefs.
As I see things, a coherent form of Christianity necessarily is allied with that family of philosophical beliefs we can call `moderate realism’. This is the belief that we live in a Creation and we learn about that Creation and about any absolute or transcendental truths not divinely revealed by “examining God’s creatures” in the profound words of St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on 1 Corinthians. Even God’s own revelations are given to a human being by way of physical environments and the sensory organs which deal with those environments. As soon as we bring our favored absolute beliefs, immune from any empirical evidence, to the task of understanding God’s Creation, we have fallen away from that foundation of Christian belief — moderate realism.
Earlier in The End of the Twentieth Century, Professor Lukacs had stated we need to give up Darwinism if we are to recover our faith in the uniqueness and value of human life. I think he was talking about Darwinism as an ideology rather than a scientific theory. (I personally don’t feel any worse for being descended from an apish creature than I would for being descended from a man shaped from the slime of the earth.) Even at that, I think he was a little off because I think the repaganized Christians are the greater danger to the Church and to the Western Civilization built by earlier generations of Christians. Those repaganized Christians tend rather strongly to be anti-Darwinist and often anti-science, though they do tend to like technology. They also tend to pick up their understanding of history from rather strange attempts to literalistically understand the Bible or from the words of strange seers who have visions of the Mother of God or maybe visions of Satan. They don’t tend towards hardheaded understandings of the books given to us by prophets who seem to have been blessed as God’s interpreters of the Almighty’s acts in human history: Isaiah and Jeremiah. I guess those prophets didn’t pay enough respect to the powers of angels and demons. In any case, I don’t value highly the human nature which those repaganized Christians would defend.
Amongst those who have turned parts of modern science into ideologies, there are many who would blur the distinction between those two radically different sets of beliefs labeled as `Darwinism’, confusing the words of a biologist who is an aggressive proselyte of atheism with a hardheaded evolutionary theorist who might hold any religious or anti-religious beliefs, but he holds them in abeyance during his working hours as a biologist. This isn’t because there’s a true wall between God and His Creation. It is because human beings are specialists and need to work together as members of communities, right up to those complex communities we know as civilizations. Most biologists shouldn’t try to be amateur metaphysicians or theologians and most metaphysicians and theologians should accept mainstream scientific ideas, cleansed of obvious corruptions by those who can work in both fields.
Our Christian beliefs, at least in that tradition of moderate realism as developed by St. Paul through St. Augustine and on through St. Thomas Aquinas, teach a trust in God as Creator, a willingness to accept what God has accomplished as Creator and has given to us. We ignore what is contained in the best of modern science, history, literature, and other fields of empirical knowledge at the peril of turning away from He who shaped us from a line of apish primates and He who — as Isaiah and Jeremiah taught us — is the driving force of our lives and the events of our communities. (Note that God is Subject even when grammatically an object.) God is God even when His Creation involves volcanoes and man-eating tigers and genocidal madmen. We retreat from the appropriately honest understandings of Creation only by — at the very least — compromising our faith in an all-powerful God. We seek to justify a belief in a gentler God, one who tried to do well if only Satan hadn’t (temporarily) conquered Creation, only by giving up the core of our Christian beliefs. We might profess a strong faith but we hold a severely compromised form of Christian faith, either unitarian or neo-paganistic.