Opinion: Theological devolution?
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Forty years ago, when I was a biology student at a Catholic boys school in Pittsburgh, we were told that there was no conflict between evolution and Christian belief in God as Creator. Despite that dust-up between Galileo and the Inquisition, the Catholic Church in the 20th century seemed to be free of the biblical fundamentalism that gave Americans the Scopes monkey trial and “Inherit the Wind.’
Fast-forward to 1996 and the papacy still seemed willing to make its peace with Darwin -– with the obvious provisos about the creative presence of God and the uniqueness of the human soul. In an address that year to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the potential St. John Paul II said that “new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.”
But in July of 2005 the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times in which he dissed John Paul’s comments as ‘vague and unimportant.’ The cardinal conceded that “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
The news side of the NYT sussed out that Schonborn’s essay ‘was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.” As my high school English teacher Brother Benedict used to write in the margins of questionable essays: “Hmmm.”
In my view, Schonborn’s essay committed what philosophers call a category mistake. But what’s the view of the new pope? According to Time magazine, Benedict XVI in a new book straddles the issue, rejecting both “a creationism that fundamentally excludes science” and “an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science.” But The Times of London’s account suggests more of a tilt toward Intelligent Design, and notes that Benedict said that “the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.” That will be music to the ears of creationists and the ID movement.
As with his controversial remarks about Islam, Benedict’s musings about evolution may have political consequences he didn’t anticipate, especially in the United States. He needs to be careful not to lend the pope’s divisions to the armies of neo-creationism.