In the history of the reception of Darwinism within the Catholic Church, theologians' over-hasty desire to achieve calm in the relationship between biology and theology (in order to avoid a new "Galileo Affair") has sometimes led to the construction of philosophical readings of scientific data, which "sweep under the carpet" essential elements of Darwinism, in order to naively conform to theological constraints. It's no longer a question of bringing science and theology directly into line, but of tuning them up by constructing an ad hoc philosophical field between them that unfortunately obliterates certain innovative and essential aspects of the sciences. This brings to light a new, more subtle form of concordism, but one that cancels out the originality of scientific achievements by giving them an inadequate philosophical meaning.
The issue at stake in the debate posed by these stories of believing scientists, whose itineraries we'll be evoking, is how to construct a logically coherent philosophical framework which, while taking scientific achievements into account as far as possible (but without twisting them!), satisfies the constraints induced by the theological framework we've adopted.
This "articulation of meaning", as Jean Ladrière called it, is a respectable undertaking, but one which is not won in advance, and which must be taken up again at each moment of scientific progress and of the deepening of theological or scriptural hermeneutics, if we are in the tradition of the book.
