“Big News” On Evolution?

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn has written an editorial for the New York Times in which he . . . (get ready . . . brace yourself . . . drumroll) . . . explains Catholic teaching.

The New York Times publishing a piece accurately explaining Catholic doctrine is widely regarded by many bible prophecy experts as one of the seven signs of the apocalypse, but the end may not come just yet.

In the piece Shonborn explains Catholic teaching regarding evolution and notes that one cannot as a Catholic say that evolution means a random, unguided process apart from God’s providential control.

READ THE PIECE.

Now, a bit of commentary:

  1. Some secularists (like the NYTNoids themselves) seem to be acting as if this is "big news." It ain’t. Anybody who understands the nature of God would realize instantly that the existence of any process in the universe that exists apart from God’s providence would be an impossibility. Any interpretation of evolution that would advocate such a notion is not compatible with the Catholic faith.
  2. This is not to say that God’s design will always be distinguishable from randomness. His design may be so complex that we cannot perceive the order necessary to distinguish it from randomness. As a result, the affirmation that the process of evolution is non-random may or may not be empirically verifiable. In other words, it may remain a matter of faith.
  3. That, at least, applies as far as observing the process of micro-evolution as it takes place. When it comes to the macro-evolution that is presumed to have resulted in the life forms we see around us, there are signs of order to which one may appeal in arguing that the processes that produced them were non-random. Naturalists would argue against this interpretation, of course.
  4. One should not too quickly dismiss the idea of true randomness being part of creation. If God has given man true free will then he has created a form of rational freedom in the universe. But if he has created rational freedom, he might be able to create non-rational freedom as well. Non-rational freedom would seem to be what we think of as randomness. If he has created such randomness then it does not, and cannot, exist apart from his providence. Nothing can possibly exist apart from the providence of an omnipotent being, but an omnipotent being can create freedom that exists under the umbrella of his providence.
  5. Consequently–and I am not arguing in favor of this, simply suggesting that one would have to argue to eliminate the possibility–one should not too quickly dismiss the possibility that God created randomness in the universe and that he allows it to play a role in natural phenomena, subject to his providence. The situation would be analogous to the way in which he allows human freedom to exist while also setting bounds to what man can do and what shape human history will have. In the same way, he might create randomness in the universe and allow it to play a role in evolution, while also setting bound to what evolution can do and what shape natural history will have.

I’d also like to note something that Cardinal Schonborn mentions towards the very end of his article. Of late many cosmologists have been talking up the idea of a multiverse as a way of avoiding the clear evidence of design in this universe. The idea is that since things look so orderly in this universe, there must be other universes out there in which things are more random. That way the apparent order in this universe can be dismissed as simply the product of randomness.

I have no problem with the idea that there might be a multiverse. If God created this universe, he can create others as well. But I have never been impressed with the use of the concept of a multiverse as a way of getting around the order we see in this one. Since we can’t detect any other universes to see what randomness or order they may contain, postulating a bunch of random universes to explain away the order in this one amounts to postulating the existence of evidence that one does not have in order to explain away the evidence one does have. That’s bad reasoning.

What we have is evidence of order on the cosmological level, and one can’t simply wish up evidence one doesn’t have of an ocean of disorder just over the horizon. You have to go with the evidence you’ve got until you get evidence otherwise.

Cardinal Schonborn doesn’t spell this out in the detail I just did, but I was tickled pink to see one of the princes of the Church enough on top of contemporary cosmological speculation to be able to comment on the situation.

Go, Schonborn!

Oh, BTW, Andrew Sullivan tries to link the Cardinal’s piece to . . . (get ready . . . brace yourself . . . drumroll) . . . Sullivan’s own sex life.

It’s always about sex with Andrew.

(CHT: Southern Appeal.)

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

31 thoughts on ““Big News” On Evolution?”

  1. Jimmy, the mistake you & Cardinal Schonbron make is to confuse “unguidedness” as atheistic credo with “unguidedness” as inescapably inherent to scientific hypothesis.
    Yes “neo-Darwinists” – atheists who misunderstand the rigorous modesty of science (that it cannot make testable scientific predictions about divinity, let alone conclusions) – are deserving of refutation, but science is copping unjustified collateral damage.
    Scientists should stick to science and the religious should check their faith or anti-faith in at the lab door – His Eminence included. Of course there is a designing intelligence but intelligent design is not science.
    Bottom line. Science is neither competing theism nor atheism. It only works – and work it does – by confining itself to the natural and it acknowledges itself to be thus necessarily open-ended and incomplete.
    You and the Cardinal are giving scientific Christians and Christian scientists nothing other than grounds to disrespect their church, or worse, to doubt their faith.

  2. ps
    Don’t get hung up on randomness. Science has recently identified self-organisation and deterministic chaos within what once looked to be randomness. This Christian sees these discoveries as evidence of divine creativity and as scope for a sounder reconciliation between faith and reason.

  3. In my mind, randomness can be a personal quality, as a room “decorated randomly,” while chaos is always an impersonal or sub-personal one.
    The whole “come to be by chance” thing comes down to whether you think Fortuna is a strumpet, like in Carmina Burana, or a pious lover of God, as in Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy. It’s no secret that most scientists, or at least most popularizers, tend towards the former view.

  4. The article says that Benedict encouraged Schonborn to discuss this matter. A collection of homilies by Ratzinger on creation (In the Beginning) was published a few years ago by Eerdmans.
    It would be nice to see a defense of the historicity of Genesis 1-11.

  5. “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
    Here the Catholic Church rejects with equal strength ID, Creationism and Atheistic Evolution.
    The Church has always thought the Genesis not to be a literal text, it has done so since, at least, Augustine. Anyone who claims this is an endorsement of Protestant fundamentalism is being false.
    This text will almost certainly be misinterpreted and misrepresented. Then again, what text with true Catholic teachings on a controversy isn’t?
    I’ve written extensively about this – and debated with Protestants and Atheists. ID is not Science. Materialism is not Science. The Catholic Teachings are not science, too, but they are the only one to actually acknowledge this!

  6. “The Catholic Teachings are not science, too, but they are the only one to actually acknowledge this!”
    Saint Thomas Aquinas considered theology to be a “science”
    No one should check their faith at any door. One is to be Christian at all times and places. You can’t unbaptize yourself on an ad hoc or temporary basis. The obligation to be Christian in all that one does is universal, admitting of no exceptions.

  7. We need to divorce the whole evolution debate from the question of God’s existence. After all, not even one of Aquinas’s five arguments for God’s existence are affected by the evolution debate.
    What does affect the question of God’s existence is the philosophy we use to interpret our facts. Most of society operates with a nominalist world view which sees natural, living things as very complicated machines. On this way of seeing things, evolution seems to confirm that the machine was not built by anyone.
    If we can inculcate a more classical view which sees that there are different levels of being rather than just different arrangments of atoms, things are very different. On this view–the view Aquinas and those before him held–evolution would actually constitute a proof of God’s existence: At the beginning of time there is very little being (slime); at the present there is much more being (humans); nothing gives what it does not have (in this case, being); therefore the extra being must have come from outside the universe. The source of this being we call God.
    This is where faith can rescue reason. A scientist with a Christian worldview will find it much easier to see and understand this more classical philosophical view of the world. It is instinctive to a Christian that there are levels of being (e.g., God and angels have more being than I do), and that natural things act for an end, etc. So a Christian who is a scientist does not bring his faith into his science in the sense of using articles of faith as propositions in his reasoning, but in the sense that his faith informs his basic personal philosophy of the world, and this worldview makes all the difference in the interpretation of scientific data.

  8. What I hated about all the response in the press to this was that it was passed off as “Cardinal redefines Catholic teaching on evolution.” Uh, no. It was simply what was already in the Catechism.

  9. Here the Catholic Church rejects with equal strength ID, Creationism and Atheistic Evolution.
    The Church has always thought the Genesis not to be a literal text, it has done so since, at least, Augustine. Anyone who claims this is an endorsement of Protestant fundamentalism is being false.

    Please identify the documents in which ID or Creationism (or a literal interpretation of the 1st chapter of Genesis) are rejected.
    As far as I know, Catholics are permitted to believe in ID and in special creation but they are not permitted to believe in atheistic evolution.

  10. vinegar,
    Read “Natural Sciences”, like the ones defined by the Scientific Method and Empirical Evidence.
    Neither position is part of it, for the Natural Sciences do not deal with purpose, meaning, and basically anything that religion and philosophy deals with.
    And that’s precisely the problem: both ID and Naturalism make false claims they can be proved by empirical evidence.
    ID gets the blame as unscientific, but the fact is, so is materialism. Neither side can make a claim to have scientific evidence for or against design. The article makes this clear enough.
    And what Jimmy meant, I believe, is that no one should go against the evidence based on his belief system, what is the Catholic teaching.

  11. The entire gripe against “science” is that many scientists have routinely (and un-scientifically) gone beyond the proper scope of science in concluding that the material world is all that exists (because it is all we can measure). A good scientist won’t, but many others do.
    The Church has no quarrel with real science.

  12. It’s sad to see Cardinal Schonborn parrot the Discovery Institute talking points.
    If there’s nothing new here, then there’s really not need to publish.
    And before this op-ed, I was unaware of the category of Papal pronouncments termed “vague and unimportant”. No attempt to explain, clarify or contextualize JPII’s 1996 letter, just a causal dismissal as “vague and unimportant”.

  13. The Church has no quarrel with real science.
    Before Schonbron it didn’t. Now it does, if Ratzinger’s reported go-ahead is for real.
    from a “NYTNoid” in Jimmy’s 2nd link —
    Francisco Ayala, a professor of biology at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest, called this assessment “an insult” to the late pope and said the cardinal seemed to be drawing a line between the theory of evolution and religious faith, and “seeing a conflict that does not exist.”
    From the same link, note the IDers’ sponsorship. You just know how they’ll propagandize this.

  14. I see no line being drawn between evolution and faith, only between blind and godless evolution (material determinism) and faith. That is nothing new.

  15. More Schonborn…

    Interesting debates going on at Amy Welborn’s and Jimmy Akin’s blogs. I especially like Jimmy’s explanation of the key issues here.
    A common theme that seems to be arising from all the comments on those two blogs is that both sid…

  16. Be that as it may, and considering the wisdom of Saint Augustine, not to mention JP2, I think the Church should NOT endorse ID.

  17. Theology never claimed to be a science or the queen of all the sciences, for that matter. It was a “scientia”, a branch of knowledge. (From the Latin ‘scire’, to know.)
    C.S. Lewis can tell you all about the other scientiae; this page about the seven liberal arts is also informative.
    Scientia was used less formally in the middle ages for other branches of knowledge, as well. I well remember coming across, in a translation of the early medieval Irish laws applying to poets and bards, an attestation that St. Patrick had declared things like composing prophecies with the aid of sleeping in a bull’s hide, or laying idol rocks on your chest, as pagan practices unlawful for poets. But “composing from the finger’s ends”, which was also a sort of prophecy, was lawful because it was done by the natural science of the poet.
    Now, this didn’t mean the poet broke out the test tubes and time machine. It meant that he called upon his natural poetic insight — the power of capturing a situation with words and getting to the heart of it — to analyze what was likely to occur and make predictions in the form of extempore poetry. (This was usually something that happened before battles or upon meeting important people.) It wasn’t unnatural; it was the kind of thing you get from people who burst into spontaneous song. If you have the aptitude to do that sort of thing, you can learn to do it and do it well. It’s odd, but not mysterious. It’s scientia.

  18. “Be that as it may, and considering the wisdom of Saint Augustine, not to mention JP2, I think the Church should NOT endorse ID.”
    Since ID is a scientific, not a religious, theory, I think there is precisely zero chance that the Church will ever endorse it.

  19. Btw, just because the law book said St. Patrick said that, didn’t mean it was necessarily true. Law books, like poet textbooks (Irish law was originally written and practiced by poets, but taken away from them for too many technically clever but practically unjust decisions) were an amazing mix of real info and fun stories. One of the surviving poet textbooks said that after the confusion of languages at Babel, the first Irish poet set up a university to study all the new languages. He then took all the most solemn phonemes and created Latin, and all the prettiest ones and created Gaelic. Heh heh. On the other hand, it also had a very learned and useful discussion of phonemes (not under that name) and other linguistic principles. So you got a little bit of everything.

  20. Let’s try to break it down like this:
    – You believe there was an evolution and that it was according to God’s plan: your belief is correct by Catholic doctrine and you are also in accord with modern science.
    – You believe there was an evolution and that no God ever had any influence over it: you are disagreeing with Catholic doctrine, but you are in accord with modern science.
    – You don’t believe species evolved on Earth (without any observation to disprove Darwin’s theory), nor that there is a God: you are disagreeing with Catholic doctrine and you are also refusing modern science without “just cause”.
    – You don’t believe species evolved on Earth (without any observation to disprove Darwin’s theory), but you do believe that God oversaw the birth of life on Earth: your beliefs fall within acceptable Catholic doctrine, but you are refusing modern science for some weird reason (since neither faith nor observation are cause for you to consider evolution theory false).
    [ As an aside, if someone disagreed with evolution on the basis of actual _facts_ which no scientist can explain, rather than ad hoc hypotheses, he would be perfectly following the scientific method by pointing that out to the world. I do not know of any such people or of any observations that may disprove Darwin’s theory, though. ]
    That said, I’ve held a deep respect for Cardinal Schonborn for a long time, but this editorial of him deeply troubled me. It sounds as if he were trying to present Catholic doctrine in a way that is most favorable to his personal beliefs (for example, the way he called JP2’s letter “vague and unimportant”).
    Take a look at this:
    Schonborn, 2005: “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
    JP2, 1985: “To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us.”
    Spot any major differences? I do. JP2 states that you cannot explain the world as it is through chance alone. That is correct not only from a Catholic perspective, but also from a scientific point of view – “this and this came to be because of random chance” is not a scientific claim, as it cannot be proved nor disproved.
    Schonborn, instead, is saying: you cannot teach biology as a science without acknowledging the presence of an intelligence design. This is a dangerous blurring of the confines between Catholic doctrine and science: Schonborn is trying to deny the right of biology to exist independently of Catholicism. Truth is, one can teach biology without mentioning any design – he would be leaving it to the students to interpret the facts in a Catholic or non-Catholic way. If you do mention it, you are teaching biology from a Catholic perspective, which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but is VERY risky. It leads people to believe the presence of a superior design was proved by science, while it is actually proved by FAITH and DOCTRINE. Science cannot and will not make any statement regarding the mark of God in this world, for it’s not within its borders to do so. [Note: I know very well that the Catechism states that “the existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason.” But reason is not just science – science is a particular method based on the observation of nature. The reason-based way we know the existence of God has nothing to do with science.]
    There’s another reason I am so worried about this. As you in America might have heard of, there’s recently been a public consultation here in Italy (very close to Austria!) about a recent law regulating the way doctors should deal with frozen embryos, in-vitro fecundation and other similar issues. The Italian Catholic Church, with the support of B16 himself, correctly opposed the consultation and defended the law as it was – because the reason for modifying the law was to allow several old practices, all of them contrary to Church doctrines.
    My problems with the way Italian bishops, lead by Camillo Ruini (head of Italy’s Episcopal Congregation), approached the confrontation:
    1) They did not ask the faithful to vote against modifying the law. Rather, they asked them not to vote at all: if less than 50% of Italians voted, the consultation would be null. This is frowned upon and considered a cheap trick in Italian politics; several politicians in the past have been criticised for adopting this tactic, which relies less on actual supporters than on uncaring bystanders to achieve one’s goals. One could make a case that on such an important matter you should not take chances, but it seems to me that Ruini just chose the easy way out instead of mobilizing Italian Catholics to the cause.
    2) A few priests publically spoke in favour of the current law – but they did not appeal to Catholic teachings on the matter. Rather, they literally made up scientific arguments in support of it. This is so wrong I don’t even know where to begin – Catholic doctrine is Truth in itself, it does not need science to support it in the slightest. Those priests caused harm to both the Church and the scientific community by speaking that way.
    Cardinal Schonborn’s writing eerily reminds me of those priests I just wrote about. Wien isn’t that far from here, and His Eminence is an important member of the Church – I can only pray this is an isolated incident.

  21. This is frowned upon and considered a cheap trick in Italian politics
    Oh no, the 100 year streak of honour, respect, and decency in Italian politics has been ruined by the Catholic Church.

  22. “Theology never claimed to be a science or the queen of all the sciences, for that matter. It was a “scientia”, a branch of knowledge. (From the Latin ‘scire’, to know.)”
    St Thomas Aquinas taught that theology is a science. He specifically argues for this. “scientia” is just the Latin word which is properly translated as “science” in English, even though in contemporary atheistic culture, science is perceved as being limited to the natural sciences and theology seen as “unscientific.” In this Dominican translatin of the Summa, that is how it is translated:
    “I answer that, Sacred doctrine is a science. We must bear in mind that there are two kinds of sciences. There are some which proceed from a principle known by the natural light of intelligence, such as arithmetic and geometry and the like. There are some which proceed from principles known by the light of a higher science: thus the science of perspective proceeds from principles established by geometry, and music from principles established by arithmetic. So it is that sacred doctrine is a science because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed. Hence, just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on principles revealed by God.”
    http://www.newadvent.org/summa/100102.htm
    Present day magisterial documents, in their English translations, also refer to theology as a “science.”

  23. “Schonborn, instead, is saying: you cannot teach biology as a science without acknowledging the presence of an intelligence design.”
    Since I consider ID to be more of a philosophy of science than an actual scientific theory, the way I see it, all Cardinal Schonborn was saying was that to teach evolution in a manner that actively attempts to divorce it from God’s design (I think “design” here is a philosophical term, not in line with the Discovery Insitute’s belief…the statement does not include the term “intelligence design” and even if it did, it would still be used as a philosophical, not scientific, term) is simply a science in service of wrong propaganda. After all, one must realize that when a bishop or Pope looks at science, the scientific theories and proofs alone are moot without the philosophy behind them. In essence, I believe that those who are despairing of a medieval return here are thinking that Schonborn is commenting on a scientific theory/school of thought on the matter of its science. No, he is going beyond that. He is commenting on a scientific theory on the matter of its philosophy and of its use in the search of truth. (He begins by stating that he is disturbed by the offhand, casual way people assume the intellectually lazy position that Catholicism marches lockstep behind all of evolution and the body of knowledge it produced, which is silly as evolution has generated some dangerous philosophies in the past. The Church’s position has been taken for granted.) That is far more profound than those who make the mistake of thinking he is parroting the Discovery Institute realize.
    Inevitably, one cannot just treat science as science alone, without the guiding philosophy behind it. Especially on a matter like evolution, which has some philosophical implications on the meaning of being human. Which is why I do not find this work of Schonborn to be dangerous, rather, I find it a bold restatement of a necessary outlook. The facts of science cannot stand alone in a vacuum. For to let these facts stand alone in vacuum is not only intellectual lazyness as decried by JP2 in Fides et Ratio, it is an overwhelming jumping point towards a dictatorship of relativism.

  24. Oh no, the 100 year streak of honour, respect, and decency in Italian politics has been ruined by the Catholic Church.
    It’s more like: I didn’t think the Catholic Church would scoop down to that level.
    Inevitably, one cannot just treat science as science alone, without the guiding philosophy behind it. Especially on a matter like evolution, which has some philosophical implications on the meaning of being human. Which is why I do not find this work of Schonborn to be dangerous, rather, I find it a bold restatement of a necessary outlook. The facts of science cannot stand alone in a vacuum. For to let these facts stand alone in vacuum is not only intellectual lazyness as decried by JP2 in Fides et Ratio, it is an overwhelming jumping point towards a dictatorship of relativism.
    Yes, but you will agree with that there are several philosophical interpretation of evolution theory. There’s the Catholic one, the Idealist one, the atheistical one, and many more (I guess Buddhists, for example, have found a way to fit evolution into their cosmology). Presenting as many of them as possible can and should be done, because everyone needs to be aware of this issue; explaining which one is acceptable according to the Catholic faith is also fine (though teachers can’t be required to do that – they must do it out of a desire to clarify this point to their Catholic students); but favoring or opposing one particular stance before going into the religious implications of evolution is bad.

  25. It’s more like: I didn’t think the Catholic Church would scoop down to that level.
    Stoop down to what level? The position of the Church was that the right to life can never be put up to a democratic vote. The boycott was the most dignified possible response to this “referendum”.

  26. “but favoring or opposing one particular stance before going into the religious implications of evolution is bad. ”
    You do realize that the Cardinal is no relativist. Of course they will favor what is right and start with it.

  27. Bravo to the Cardinal. There remains a wide berth for science to explain the physical universe. Genesis does not attempt to explain “how”, but rather focuses on the “why” of creation. God created freely exnihilo a material creation completely other than Himself something very unique in Ancient Near Eastern Cosmologies). The material creation clearly has a beginning and an end in Christian Revelation. Peter tells us that everything will pass away in fire and John of the Apocalypse tells us that there will be a new heavens and a new earth pointing toward a redemption of the spiritual as well as material creation. The crowning glory of physical creation’s redemption is the Resurrection of the Son of Man and the bodily resurrection of both the elect and the condemned.
    Satan tends to play things two ways: on the one hand for those who believe in the spiritual creation he tends toward influencing human beings that the physical world is evil; on the other hand, for those who only believe in the material world that they can sense, Satan influences people toward a refusal to acknowledge something more (agnosticism) or a militant denial of anything more than the physical (atheism).
    Augustine is sometimes claimed by evolutionist because of the work he wrote on understanding Genesis and the two creation accounts in De Genesi ad Litteram. Caution should be taken in equivocating Augustine with Darwin.
    We must allow for the freedom of God in creating. We should never expect we will fully understand the “how” in every aspect but the entirety of God’s Revelation is all about the “why”.

  28. Bravo to the Cardinal. There remains a wide berth for science to explain the physical universe. Genesis does not attempt to explain “how”, but rather focuses on the “why” of creation. God created freely exnihilo a material creation completely other than Himself (something very unique in Ancient Near Eastern Cosmologies). The material creation clearly has a beginning and an end in Christian Revelation. Peter tells us that everything will pass away in fire and John of the Apocalypse tells us that there will be a new heavens and a new earth pointing toward a redemption of the spiritual as well as material creation. The crowning glory of physical creation’s redemption is the Resurrection of the Son of Man and the bodily resurrection of both the elect and the condemned.
    Satan tends to play things two ways: on the one hand for those who believe in the spiritual creation he tends toward influencing human beings that the physical world is evil; on the other hand, for those who only believe in the material world that they can sense, Satan influences people toward a refusal to acknowledge something more (agnosticism) or a militant denial of anything more than the physical (atheism).
    Augustine is sometimes claimed by evolutionist because of the work he wrote on understanding Genesis and the two creation accounts in De Genesi ad Litteram. Caution should be taken in equivocating Augustine with Darwin.
    We must allow for the freedom of God in creating. We should never expect we will fully understand the “how” in every aspect but the entirety of God’s Revelation is all about the “why”.

  29. Intelligent Design Category Mistakes IV

    [parts one, two, and three]
    I first saw Christoph Cardinal Schonborn’s now famous New York Times editorial on intelligent design at a news stand on the morning of its appearance, but I had other matters to attend to. I later noted the comment and controv

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