Lafferty and Theistic Evolution
- Jon Nelson
- Oct 8
- 5 min read
Today, theistic evolution and an unexpected connection to Lafferty's unpolished “Claudius and Charles.”
By the time I was growing up, most Catholics had made their peace with theistic evolution, an ongoing attempt to bring Christian theology into harmony with the modern synthesis. That effort is not new, and it long predates Darwin. Early Church Fathers like St. Augustine of Hippo spoke of rationes seminales, or “seminal reasons.” He believed that God had placed hidden potentialities within creation that would unfold and develop over long periods of time. In this way, Augustine can be seen as one of the theological figures who helped prepare modern Catholics to accept the idea of a developing universe.
The threat many Christians felt when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 had less to do with the idea of a developing universe and more to do with the problem of evil. Natural selection is a wasteful process. It entails a massive amount of suffering. The Victorians were already feeling this before Darwin. Tennyson captured it for posterity
Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law — Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed — Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal’d within the iron hills? — In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 56 (1850)
One person who worked hard to think through this problem was Asa Gray (1810-1888), a devout Presbyterian and American botanist. He corresponded with Darwin and argued that evolution was not a threat to faith. In fact, he believed it was likely the method God had chosen for creation. In England, the Anglican priest Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) took a similar view. He said that evolution gave a higher view of God,one who made creatures so advanced that they could develop themselves.
In the 20th century, this became more metaphysical. There were sweeping efforts to integrate science and faith. The most famous of these came from Lafferty’s bête noire, the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He saw evolution as deeply teleological—cosmically teleological. He believed it would lead to the Omega Point, a final and complex convergence of the cosmos with Christ. Lafferty saw this as more than reconciliation. He thought it was a full-force attempt to rewrite sacred tradition and the deposit of faith.
Then we have had Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, John Polkinghorne, and all others, but the core theological issues are immovable, with the evidential problem of evil still being foremost among them.
The most complete example of Lafferty explaining his views on evolution appeared in Theistic Evolutionists’ Forum (1985), and it only happened because Ed Babinski was a Lafferty fan.
Babinski was the editor of the zine, and he liked both G. K. Chesterton and Lafferty. This led him to send the first issues to Lafferty. It is not surprising that Lafferty’s reply was explosive. You can see how one editorial choice triggered it: the zine quoted Archipelago—Lafferty’s personal favorite of his books—as if it supported evolutionary ideas.
Lafferty’s response was fierce. He came out swinging, and Babinski was flabbergasted.
Rather than ignore it, Babinski dedicated the next issue to his exchange with Lafferty and published the full letter. This turned the small forum into a place where people could clearly state their positions, even if it was not a space for real debate. As I have said before, Lafferty did not really debate.
Lafferty was scathing. As expected, he used his combative humor to launch a full attack. He accused Babinski of “flogging dead mice,” “jousting against gnats and being unhorsed by them,” and going after “straw men... with a big noise.” What makes the letter especially interesting is that it confirms something I had suspected. Lafferty strongly opposed theistic evolution and was probably a young-earth Creationist.
“Theistic Evolution is a total contradiction and anomaly,” he wrote. “Evolution is by its nature atheistic.” To support this, he pointed to Darwin, claiming that Darwin “wrestled with the problem for thirty years trying to find a loophole” before finally “giving up his belief in God.” For Lafferty, this showed that trying to combine religious faith with a science rooted in positivism was pointless. In his view, evolution is, by definition, an atheistic theory.
Theologically, this helps us understand how Lafferty handles science in his work. It also shows why he often uses precise technical detail alongside irony, hyperbole, invective, understatement, and nonsense. The result is his technical mimicry, theological satire, and moral judgment. We could call this something like Hierotastasis, a rhetorical act of sacred counterposing. Lafferty employs a bit of secular or scientific reasoning in its own idiom and then attempts to demonstrate, through its internal logic, its opposition to divine order. This amounts to a dramatized contradiction: the sacred truth standing in opposition to what he takes to be an inflated knowledge claim.
For him, evolution is the clearest example of trying to force scripture into harmony with something that contradicts it. It's one of the great targets of his hierotastastis. He saw this as blasphemous. He wrote that theistic evolutionists “depict [God] as asinine.” They presume to correct Him. They “offer God help to get himself out of the holes he has dug himself into” and “amend God’s words to show what God would have said if he were as smart as are the Theistic Evolutionists.” He believed the demand for immediate answers—wanting something now even if it is wrong—is blasphemous. It drives people to fill the gaps in knowledge with foolish ideas like evolution. And to him, evolution was not just wrong. It was also ugly. He called species-to-species transformation both “squalid” and “disgusting.”
At one point, Lafferty says that evolutionists should argue with the creationist Henry M. Morris, whom Lafferty seems to have read closely. At least then, he says, they would be arguing with a real person, not a straw man.
Always ready for a language argument, he challenges Babinski over the Hebrew word raqia (firmament). Babinski had presented what is still the standard academic view: that the word comes from the root raqa, which means “to beat out” or “hammer flat,” like metal. This suggests that the ancient Hebrews imagined a solid dome above the Earth. Lafferty called this “Hebraist-fiction.” He claimed that an adjectival form of the word means “spherical.” To him, this was proof that the author of Genesis knew the Earth was round. He used a similar move to solve the “cud-chewing rabbit” problem in Leviticus, saying that the correct translation is that the hare “chews its chewing.”
The “Claudius and Charles” connection comes when Lafferty praises Henry Morris’s vapor canopy theory, calling it a “pleasant one.” This theory explains everything from frozen mammoths to the source of the Flood’s water. In contrast, Lafferty views Darwinism as a modern version of the old Ptolemaic system, characterized by “slander and persecution” that relies on endless “epicycles after epicycles” to defend its inherent absurdity.
People who accept it, he suggests, are under the control of the Crystal Insect, though he doesn’t use that term here. Instead, he puts it more bluntly: “[T]here is a cloven hoof in the boots you lick.”
Lafferty recommends giving theistic evolution no quarter. Its adherents “bleat in unison and they walk in lockstep."
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My thanks to Ed Babainski for sharing the background on this.
