8G4 KAYMOND J. NOGAR 



evolutionism are confined to the exponents of atheistic human- 

 ism (Huxley) or atheistic materialism (Marxists) . They take 

 many forms, one of which is found in the writings of those who 

 claim that the " fact of evolution " necessitates a diametrically 

 opposed religious hypothesis, namely, a revealed supernatural 

 religion (Fr. Teilhard de Chardin) . The starting point for the 

 philosophy of evolutionism is ever the same: 



Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: 

 it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all 

 systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if 

 they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating 

 all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.®^ 



The vision which follows in The Phenomenon of Man is quite 

 different in what it prophesies from that of Huxley, for, as the 

 assumptions are modified, the prehistory of the cosmos tells a 

 different story. One story ends with an immanent god, man 

 himself; the other ends with a transcendent God, the God of 

 the Christian revelation. But the basic rules according to which 

 both accounts are fashioned are identical. 



Whether the suppositions be supernaturally revealed truths, 

 assumptions of monistic materialism, dialectical materialism 

 or humanism, the first step is the elevation of the " fact of 

 evolution " to the status of law, a necessary series of scientifi- 

 cally demonstrated events. The next step is to elevate the " law 

 of evolution " to the level of a narrative world- view to which 

 everything else must bow and in the light of which everything 

 else must be understood. The third step is to personalize this 

 new world view with a highly personalized rhetoric of con- 

 viction. 



In its final stages, the philosophy of evolutionism is an essen- 

 tially personalistic, un verifiable intuition, rhetorically involved 

 in ideological feeling and emotion, using a life-self-cosmos 

 narration as the key to the meaning of reality. The rhetoric 

 of evolutionism usually can be distinguished from mere phi- 



** T. de Chardin, S. J., The Phenomenon of Man (New York, 1959) p. 218. 



