A mile west, as the crow flies, of Shepherd of the Valley Catholic Church in Central Point, Oregon is the Crater Rock Museum, a popular tourist venue set unobtrusively among some homes. Alice and I had family visitors recently and took them there. Quite unexpectedly, we found ourselves caught up in a remarkable story. Southern Oregon, we learned, was once part of a vast inland sea teeming with exotic fish, and on whose shores thrived now extinct reptiles, vertebrates, and bird life whose remains folded into earth that later hardened into stone.
This is a saga measured in eons. Four hundred million years ago, trilobites in the form of spineless and soft-bodied creatures, some over 25 inches long, were found on every continent. A million years later, the age of trilobites was followed by the age of fishes, creatures in the form of spiders, ferns, and simple lands plants. Another 200 million years passed before the appearance of dinosaurs, flowers, and primitive mammals. The first human being appears very late in this story, a mere 100,000 years ago, and the dateable elements of the biblical accounts, beginning with our Father in Faith, Abraham, trace back barely 4000 years.
There is transcendent beauty to this world. It can be seen in the teeth of ocean creatures, the vertebrae of dinosaurs, and skeletons of long extinct birds. There is also drama: It is the story of how higher forms, subsumed lower ones, of dominant species that eventually became extinct, of titanic geological changes as mountains rose out of the seabeds, and river valleys formed.
Although the museum describes all of this in a geography stretching west from the Mississippi Valley, it focuses on the climate and fauna of the Rogue Valley, and some of this lost world is still with us. On the north crests of the Klamath-Siskiyou Range, hikers still find fossil remains of undersea mollusks, semi-tropical ferns, and exotic insects.
The first-time visitor looks upon these things with amazement, and the religious person even more so. There is an inescapable faith dimension to this story. “The vaster the world appears,” a Catholic writer notes, “the greater, our concept of God continually grows… our growing consciousness of evolution has given us a new vision of God’s majesty.”
Those who believe in the literal interpretation of a natural world created in six days would find some of this disconcerting. But some Catholics might be disturbed as well. The topic of creation is rarely mentioned in Catholic sermons, and many are unsure about evolution. The concept, in fact, is well articulated in Church teaching. In a 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope St. John Paul II, tells how Pope Pius XII in his 1950 Encyclical Humani Generis “affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points.” John Paul II went on to explain how “more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” Pope Francis has been more explicit: “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve… God is not… a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life.”
The Crater Rock Museum in Central Point houses the finest displays of rocks, minerals, and gems on the West Coast. But the museum also sheds fresh light on the living, breathing planet that is our common home — and it challenges our faith. Creation of animal and vegetative life are only early chapters in the history of salvation. It is the story of a cosmos that originated in divine love, and an endpoint in the recapitulation of all things in his Divine Son. This earth we live on is an evolving changing reality, whose mysteries are broader and deeper than the human mind will ever fathom.
