By DONALD DeMARCO
These two expressions — Natural Selection and Natural Law — sound very much alike. Yet their implications are radically different. In fact, they differ to the degree that matter differs from spirit.
Charles Darwin’s major opus, The Origin of the Species, is immensely influential. Despite its influence, few have read or properly understood this 500-page tome. The unabbreviated title is On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
It may be surprising to many that the term “evolution” does not appear in the first edition. Darwin had toyed with the idea of titling it simply as Natural Selection. The notions of the “preservation of favoured species” and “struggle for life” merely reinforce the concept of “natural selection.”
According to Darwin, chance was the major factor in producing changes in animals that gave survival advantages to some and survival disadvantages to others. In the struggle for life, the favored ones tended to survive while the others tended to perish.
Applying this theory to human beings made morality and religion doubtful. If accidental biological changes were the cause of development, then spiritual factors, such as intelligence and will, were not in the picture.
The Scottish philosopher and essayist Thomas Carlyle perceived the problem accurately. A contemporary of Darwin, he immediately took sides against the theory of natural selection: “That the weak and incompetent pass away, while the strong and adequate prevail and continue, appears true enough in animal and human history; but there are mysteries in human life and in the universe not explained by that discovery.”
Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old friend and teacher, denounced “natural selection” as “a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked and served up merely to make us independent of a Creator.” Both Carlyle and Sedgwick feared that the denial of the moral and metaphysical aspects of man would ultimately brutalize and degrade mankind.
The “Natural Law,” on the other hand, a notion championed and well articulated by Catholic philosophers and theologians, operates on an altogether different level. It is the natural inclination that each human being has toward what is good for him. This inclination (or appetite) for the good, sets the human being on a path toward his proper destiny. However, man must choose to follow his inclination. Therefore, he must use intelligence to discover what is good and his will to embrace it. His development as a person requires his free choice of what is good.
The natural law, then, outlines the trajectory of human morality. It is moral to choose what is good for a human being as a human being; it is immoral to choose what is not good for the human being as a human being. Morality and religion are squarely on the side of the natural law.
Natural selection, as a development through chance, is essentially purposeless. The natural law, on the other hand, in providing a direction toward what is good, establishes a purpose. The purpose of human life is to become, through free choices, one’s fullness as willed by the Creator. Natural selection describes what happens to us. It is about the chance events that bring about biological changes. The natural law invites us to use our God-given freedom to achieve our purpose. The former occurs automatically; the latter is volitional.
Natural selection, for Darwin, fails to recognize the various charitable activities that benefit the weak, the poor, and the disadvantaged. Thus, it is fundamentally at odds with the Christian mandate to love everyone, including the “least of the little ones.” It is neither a broad nor a scientific theory. In truth, it is narrow and unscientific. We live by the natural law. We die by natural selection. Darwin and his various supporters of “the survival of the fittest” have bequeathed to the modern world an image of the culture of death.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest work, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad, is available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum.)
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