This week we have a guest post, by Deacon Ned Berghausen of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky. This was a homily that Deacon Berghausen offered for the Archdiocesan Gold Mass for Science (Archbishop Shelton Fabre, celebrant) on November 18, 2024, at Holy Family Catholic Church — with a few small edits.
How many of you listening to this homily have heard of “Tiktaalik?” I’ll say the word again: Tiktaalik. Tiktaalik is the name of an animal that lived 375 million years ago. It was a fishlike aquatic creature that was among the first to evolve the ability to crawl out onto dry land.
Tiktaalik’s fossils were found by paleontologists Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin twenty years ago in the arctic on Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, northern Canada. Tiktaalik is called a “transitional fossil,” which embodies a transition from one major evolutionary stage to another. A second example of this is archaeopteryx, which embodies the transition of dinosaurs to birds. Tiktaalik is sometimes referred to as “a fish with wrists” having fish-like qualities, but limbs that could support its weight as it crawled onto land, as an early ancestor of the amphibians.
I learned about this fossil from my wife who is a paleontologist and who used Neil Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish, in class with her students at Bellarmine University in Louisville. Shubin explains how, as a member of the lineage that made that transition to land, Tiktaalik is an ancestor of the human species, indeed of all land-based vertebrates. If we look at the morphology of our bodies, we can discover vestiges of an inner fish — the structures of an inner Tiktaalik that we evolved from. These clues are visible in the morphology of our inner ears, and the arrangement of the nerves in our head, among other things.
Depending on your knowledge of this topic, you may be surprised to hear me preaching about evolution from the pulpit. But Catholics have seen no conflict with evolution since at least 1950 with Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis.
Of course, as Catholics we believe that our bodies are the image of God — the Imago Dei. The material of our bodies has received its shape in some way through an evolutionary process that unfolded over the last 3.5 billion years. Yet, the shape and design of our humanity also reflects a divine imprint. We creatures, we Homo sapiens, uniquely reflect our creator.
When we picture Christ standing on Mount Tabor, bathed in the uncreated light of his transfiguration, we perceive his divinity in dazzling white. And yet, Jesus by becoming incarnate and dwelling among us as a human being, became a descendant not just of Abraham and Adam, but also a son of the created world. In order to get a fuller picture of the person of Christ, and by extension ourselves, we need to extend his and our own genealogy — our family tree — to include our aquatic ancestors, and everything that came before that. We human beings are created in the image of an inner fish as well as the image of God. The Imago Piscium and the Imago Dei.
My wife typically reads, proofs, and edits my homilies before I give them. In this way, my preaching represents a dialogue between theology and science, happening while editing an early version of a homily. She wrote a long comment on the evolutionary tree that we are part of, writing,
To me this is the most amazing thing. To discover this deep time family tree is an incredible revelation from science about our origins. We gained some sense of this in the mid-19th century with Darwin and his contemporaries, but this story is still being uncovered, with more fossil discoveries and sequencing of genomes. To discover that humanity (including Jesus) has this ancient past, as a part of our created world, is an even more incredible reminder of being created out of the earth itself. It gives us a new understanding of who we are in our physical forms. That Jesus himself is God incarnate, but also creation incarnate.
St. Athanasius famously wrote in his work On the Incarnation, “the Son of God became human so that we might become God.” Sometimes this last phrase is translated to “so that we might become ‘divinized’”, to become like God. By becoming human, human beings became sharers in God’s divine nature. To a scientist, that may sound excessively anthropocentric. The Psalmist agreed, writing in Psalm 8:
When I see your heavens, the work of your hands,
the moon and stars that you set in place —
What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.
Anthropocentric, but somehow, despite the vastness of the tree of life, it is true. It is a beautiful, poetic truth that the transfiguration illuminates for us. Yet, the process of incarnation also went the other way. God, in becoming human, also joined into the great history of evolutionary life.
Jesus’s human body reflected and embodied the 3.5-billion-year journey of life from single-celled organisms to Homo sapiens. His body was a walking time capsule of the ages and organisms that came before, one that even held mementos of the ancient star that formed the carbon atoms in his cells and the Big Bang that formed the hydrogen atoms in them. His body manifested creation itself: the conditions of chemistry, biochemistry, physics, atmospheric science, geology, biology, oceanography and every scientific field that describes our created universe.
Science allows us, in the words of the 13th chapter of the Book of Wisdom, to discern the artist by studying His works, “for the original source of beauty fashioned them” and we can discover the author through “the greatness and the beauty of created things.”
I pray that this Gold Mass can deepen our appreciation for the knowledge that comes from both Reason and Revelation—two sources of wisdom that are not in conflict. As we read in the Collect for St. Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists, on his feast day which we celebrated last Friday, November 15:
O God, who made the Bishop Saint Albert great
by his joining of human wisdom to divine faith,
grant, we pray, that we may so adhere to the truths he taught,
that through progress in learning
we may come to a deeper knowledge and love of you.
Through Christ, our Lord, Amen.
Dcn. Ned Berghausen is the Theology Chair at Assumption High School and a permanent deacon at St. Agnes Catholic Parish in Louisville, Kentucky. He received his M.A. in Theology from St. Meinrad School of Theology and his M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame. He is the father of four children and is married to Dr. Kate Bulinski, a paleontologist. He frequently teaches and preaches about the relationship between faith and science.
