Rejecting the “materialists” while preserving some Darwinist components
For Al-Mashrîq, the theories of transformation and of evolution included a range of claims some of which were dangerously contrary to the truth whereas others represented the end-product of an intuition or a conjecture. All told, nothing compelled the mind to accept them whether out of faith or reason. It therefore mattered first and foremost to repel Haeckel's materialist beliefs when he claimed, upon observing the world's great age, that life appeared on earth through the sole drive of nature. With the support of individuals and nations that did not know the Creator, Haeckel negated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, which contradicts Revelation. The Jesuits considered that Louis Pasteur[1] himself had rejected the phenomenon of spontaneous generation, showing that a living thing could only arise from a preceding living thing. If Haeckel's system could successfully hold out it was only because it allowed some of its followers to break free from religion and indulge their whims, even as its “spuriousness” was exposed by “people of faith and of wisdom”. In other words, for Al-Maqrîsh the materialists set forth several hypothesese that they gave as immutable scientific facts without however backing them up with actual data in contravention with the rationality of scientific methodology. The Intellectualists, who also supported Darwin's theory, upheld the idea of a Creator, considering it the best proof of the evolution of beings, along with their progression even as they issue forth from the Creator's hand. This ran counter Materialist thinking while still providing them with most of the evidence they clung to.
Al-Maqrîsh asserts that Darwin admitted of a God creating animals and plants whom he thereafter left to their own instinctive force. Thus animals and plants could, without the Creator's intervention, yield new species that endured thanks to the blind factors chance effected. Accordingly, in order to prove their point the Darwinists resorted to natural selection arguing that in successive generations, beings endowed with new characteristics were begotten and perfected with time. This, according to the Jesuits, was but fantasy further undermined by the theories of necessity and environmental input, which could in no way achieve the results ascribed to them. The geologists' discoveries, stratigraphic digs, and archaeological antiquities disprove, they went on, the claims of Darwinian thought which brings the full range of species down to a few prototypes while still unable to prove the derivation of species one from another nor their progression from lesser to more perfected form. Those species have endured into the present, or they have disappeared altogether, they may even have ended up as fossils, replaced by other species that endured. As for “soft Darwinists”, they allow for God's intervention at several stages to create new models and new types.
The result of this confusion, Al-Maqrîsh went onto explain was that honest scientists who had at first backed Darwin's ideas have ended up casting them aside and aligning with “the camp of reason”. The Jesuits relay the observations of an authority on geology, Albert de Lapparent[2] who comments this reversal, expressing surprise at how contemporary scientists have shun the theory of evolution and transformation which they had supported. He notes that scientists barely admit of the formation of species by stages and reject Darwin's theory about transformation and progress, further referring to those who hold for a concurring evolution of those species for as long as they can go back in time.” They also quote opinions found in the Revue des questions scientifiques published since 1877 by Brussels' Scientific Society and the Catholic Union of French Scientists. They have come to the same conclusion that materialist Darwinism has had its time: “Darwinian thought has been long dead to enlightened minds”; “Darwinism is bankrupt and hast lost credibility as a general theoretical doctrine”; “Darwinism cannot be considered as a scientific doctrine”. Al-Mashrîq sees in this proof that Darwnism was being invalidated both by Catholics and non-Catholics.
The Jesuits drew a distinction between the theory of evolution and materialist Darwinism because the former does not a priori refute the existence of God or the divine origin of creation. This principle proposes that species may evolve one from another under the impulse of a God-given instinctive drive: it thus ascribes to the “Almighty” the creation of the first exemplar and his conceding a limited energy fit to reproduce already known species. However, while some circumscribed this transformation to the restricted generation of a few species, others set out to broaden its scope. The former say that God created the first link in each genus and that species came out of the genera over generations; the second claim that God created only at the origin of the world models of plants and animals such as the vertebrates or the insects whence came orders genera and species. Yet this idea, widespread in some scientific circles did not convince the others given that it does not exclude either a good deal of intuition and conjecture. In Al-Mashrîq's view, it has been brought to nil by geological discoveries as geologists found in the most ancient strata of the earth, closer to its origins, animal shells, molluscs in their diversity and vertebrates, that have not to date undergone any significant transformation.
