Why Aquinas and Darwin Don’t Mix
On this episode of ID the Future, host Jay Richards talks with Fr. Michael Chaberek about Charles Darwin and medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential of all Western philosophers, and especially central in Roman Catholic thinking. Many Catholic scholars support neo-Darwinism and insist that Aquinas’s work nicely harmonizes with neo-Darwinism. Chaberek, author of the recent book Aquinas and Evolution, and creator of the new website Aquinas.design, offers several reasons to conclude otherwise.
A clarifying note on terminology: When Chaberek and Richards speak of “accidents” and “accidental changes,” they don’t mean it in the common sense of “not on purpose.” In Thomistic philosophy, an “accident” is a feature of some being that’s not essential to its nature–for example, the height of a tree or the length of a horse’s tail.