Why do you think that religious apologists never hold Darwin up as a great scientist who believed in a religious god, yet constantly try to pretend that Einstein was, when he wasn't?
I suspect it is because of the nature of their work.
I don't know about 'apologists', but scholars certainly do.
To quote a professor of theology at Boston College on sacramentality.
For anything--any person, place, thing, event, any sight, sound, taste, touch, smell--anything that exists
can be sacramental
if one views it in its rootedness in the grace of God. So, how many sacraments are there? How many things are there in the universe?
. Grace is here. What is needed is someone to see it. What is wanted is the beholder. The entirety of Catholic liturgical life--indeed, of Catholic spiritual, intellectual, and ethical life--is geared toward producing sacramental beholders, people who see what is there in its full depth.
And I suggest to you that sacramental beholders are what Catholic universities and colleges are supposed to be producing.
Before I move on to my second point, I must clarify this statement about Catholic education with the help of one of the most remarkable Catholic intellects of this century, Frederick von Hugel. Von Hugel, who despite his Austrian name was an Englishman, was invited to address a group of religiously interested students at Oxford in 1902. In the course of his talk, he referred to the person whom he regarded as the most extraordinary example of asceticism in the century that had just ended. It must have startled his hearers to learn that von Hugel's example of asceticism, which most of them undoubtedly associated with fasting, penitential discipline and mortification, was Charles Darwin. And why Darwin, of all people? Because, Baron von Hugel said, Darwin had been willing to submit his wonderful intellectual powers and his great energy over a long period of time to the patient and painstaking observation of the development of barnacles, to the shapes of pigeons' beaks and the varieties of organisms. For asceticism is not about self-punishment; it is the gradual stripping away of the self so that one can see what is there. Not to see what one would like to be there, or what one hopes is there or fears is there, or what one has been told by others is there, but to see what is, in fact, there.
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