Some months ago Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn got in trouble for saying, in effect, that the Church had not signed off on the entire Darwinian project.
Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange and a weekly columnist for the National Catholic Register. You may visit his website at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, or purchase his books and tapes here.
We Believe in God the Creator
It turns out that even though the Church believes (as she always has) that grace perfects nature and that Catholics can therefore suppose that God may have used creatures in the creation of the bodies of the first humans (as John Paul II had said in 1996 and Pius XII had said before him and Augustine had said before him), nonetheless the Church did not and could never endorse a purely materialistic account of the origins of the human person. At the end of the day, we Catholics still believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We still believe that man is created by God in His image and likeness and is not (as one classic definition of evolution claims), “the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
“Fearful and Defensive”?
One would think that a cardinal would not surprise people by affirming that God created the world and us. But there you'd be wrong. Various media voices were lifted in horror to ask, in the words of the National Center for Science Education, “Is the Church Pulling Back on Evolution?” We were informed by John Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown that “John Paul's statement [on evolution in 1996] was one of strength and support for science, whereas I think the statement by Cardinal Schoenborn was fearful and defensive.” Dark muttering and whispers were heard in the press. A cardinal of the Catholic Church seemed to be suggesting there was something to (cue sinister music) Intelligent Design.
What's that? Intelligent design (ID) is the assertion that evidence supports the conclusion that the universe in general and life in particular are deliberately designed by some sort of intelligent agent. If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's basically the same view of the natural world that St. Paul had: “Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Rom 1:20). Perhaps because of this, it's very common for ID critics to charge ID with trying to pervert science with a religious agenda. In an extremely common bit of rhetorical legerdemain, ID theory was derided by columnist John Derbyshire as “the theory that life on earth has developed by a series of supernatural miracles performed by the God of the Christian Bible, for which it is pointless to seek any naturalistic explanation.”
But neither St. Paul nor ID advocates nor Cardinal Schoenborn argue that one needs to be a Christian, or even to have read the Bible, to infer the existence of God from nature. All three insist, along with the Catholic Church and St. Thomas Aquinas, that inferring God's existence is not a matter of supernatural revelation at all, but of common sense. That's why Vatican I tells us God “can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.”
Yet, when a cardinal says exactly this, he is condemned as “fearful and defensive”. Why?
Jittery Philosophical Materialists
The longer I listen to the debate, the more I do detect a real note of fearful defensiveness — from the partisans on the ramparts of the Citadel of Evolutionary Orthodoxy.
Take the Derbyshire quote. The simple fact is, ID proponents make no appeals to “the God of the Christian Bible.” So why say they do? Because it's a cheap way to associate ID proponents with six-day creationists, flat-earthers, snake-handlers and geocentrists as cranks, quacks and religious fanatics.
If that fails, there's always the “Ring Lardner Strategy” (named for the man who coined the famous phrase “'Shut up!' he explained.”). Don't underestimate this relic from the days of the Soviet press. The Columbia Journalism Review, for instance, recently informed us in a piece called “Undoing Darwin” that the obligation of editors is to simply ignore advocates of ID since they are all religious kooks and nobody cares what they think anyway. True Journalism[TM], we are informed, is journalism which only tells readers that we are a Glorious Accident.
Unfortunately, this Soviet technique is not workable anymore, even for those who wish to sanitize the news for your protection. The Internet and other alternative media have annihilated the ability of the media to be the gatekeepers of What You Should Be Thinking About. So the fearful guys on the citadel must shout louder and claim that ID “charlatans” want to damage science education in this country by “banning” the teaching of evolution.
This, again, is patently false. The basic request of the ID advocates is not that public schools cease to teach evolution; it is that schools “teach the controversy.” Indeed, most ID advocates don't deny that natural selection has much merit to it. In floods, fish live and cattle die. Organisms that are better equipped to survive tend to do so and have baby organisms which are also more likely to live as well. There is abundant evidence of common descent. What is in dispute is not natural selection per se, but the vast metaphysical claim that this and various other purely naturalistic processes Explain It All and, in the words of Carl Sagan, leave “nothing for a Creator to do.”
Lousy Philosophy in a Lab Coat
That this materialist atheism is, a very large part of the time, part and parcel of the Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian account of things is surely beyond question. Just count the number of “Darwin” fishes on car bumpers the next time you go for a drive. Each one constitutes a claim that Darwin refutes Christianity. Richard Dawkins, apostle of evolutionary atheism, makes it clear that Darwin made it possible to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Despite attempts to pretend otherwise, the simple fact is that along with the hard science, a great deal of bad philosophy has been taught for the past 150 years to the effect that “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” Slice it however you like, that is not simply saying “You can't use science to prove that God made man.” It is saying “You can use science to prove that God did not make man.”
Until the Mandarins of Evolutionary Orthodoxy in the academic and scientific community admit that a huge amount of evolution rhetoric is not about science, but about promoting a philosophy of atheistic materialism, they can only expect the ID advocates to continue gaining ground. For the truth is that man is the creation of a purposeful and loving God who “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. He destined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph 1:4-6). Any so-called “science” that claims to refute this is just lousy philosophy and worse theology in a lab coat.
