The Meriol Trevor Lecture in Bath by Fr Tim Finigan, M.A., S.T.L.

One of the most prolific Catholic women writers of the twentieth century has been honoured in Bath, her home town, by an annual lecture series initiated and organized by the Catholic chaplain of the University of Bath and Bath Spa University, Father Bill OSM. Meriol Trevor was one of the great biographers of John Henry Newman, and would have been delighted to find his cause for beatification currently advancing with such speed. The first Meriol Trevor lecturer was that doyen of Newman scholars, Ian Ker, but subsequent lectures reflected the great breadth of Miss Trevor’s work and interests. James Mawdsley spoke on human rights, Leonie Caldecott on children’s literature (Miss Trevor was a prolific writer of children’s books as well as historical studies), John Pawlikowski, OSM on Jewish-Chistian relations and Aidan Nichols OP on Pope Benedict’s concern for inter-religious dialogue.

This year’s lecture at the University’s Ecumenical Chaplaincy Centre was on a topic – faith and evolution – that fascinated Miss Trevor in later life, and she would undoubtedly have relished the way the lecturer reconciled religion with modern science. Fr Tim Finigan is a priest of the Faith Movement who has a long interest in science as well as theology, and his talk was a response to the increasingly virulent attacks on religious faith by Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins. Fr Finigan had no problem with the science offered by Professor Dawkins: like the Faith Movement in general he accepts the theory of evolution as a reasonable account of how the present diversity of life came about. What he did object to was the half-baked philosophy and ignorant polemics that Dawkins throws into his presentations whenever he discusses religion, as though faith were the “root of all evil” in human affairs.

The lecture pointed out that modern science and even genetics itself developed as a Christian project, as Stanley Jaki and Peter Hodgson have convincingly shown. Furthermore the “God of the gaps” that Dawkins is so concerned to demolish bears little if any relation to the God of Christian belief discussed by St Thomas Aquinas. (Fr Finigan had little time for the theory of “Intelligent Design” which seems vulnerable to Dawkins’ critique.) As for creationism, Catholics even in the earliest period did not interpret Genesis “literally” in the way modern fundamentalists do, but simply as a “story” (one of Miss Trevor’s favourite themes) designed to capture important truths about the goodness of creation, God’s ultimate sovereignty over it, and the drama of human freedom. This leaves the scientist plenty of scope for discovering exactly how God used the process of evolution to bring about the vast diversity of life, including human life.

The one question left hanging at the end of the lecture was perhaps the biggest of all: what exactly is meant by the human “soul”, which the Church teaches was created directly by God rather than being allowed to emerge spontaneously from matter? This is probably where the debate between faith and science will have to turn next, but it would be a mistake – as this lecture demonstrated – to assume that Catholic dogma will prevent the advance of rational enquiry into this or any subject. What will prevent the advance of reason is a blind prejudice that regards religion – or science – as an enemy to be defeated.