The Catholic Church and Evolution

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna caused something of a stir recently when he wrote a New York Times editorial on the Catholic view of evolution. To read the Times mournful follow-up piece one got the impression that the Vatican had issued a policy reversal--now rejecting evolution instead of accepting it. "Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution" screamed the headline, as the article proceeded to survey a series of gravely concerned members of the scientific community, expressing trepidation at this deep slide back toward the dark ages.

What Schonborn actually did was clarify what he considered a popular misconception of the church view. The Church accepts the concept of evolving species and common ancestry; what Shonborn takes issue with is one particular cornerstone of neo-Darwinian theories--that the process was, in his words, "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation..." Unguided. Unplanned. Random. These are the words that cause problems.

The Cardinal had reportedly grown irritated over the years reading references to the Catholic Church's acceptance of evolution, references he thought implied a wholesale endorsement of neo-Darwinian theories. Hoping to re-emphasize the church's core belief in a Divinely-guided process he conferred with the new Pope Benedict and penned his article. Schonborn, suspicious of the currently prevailing evolutionary theories, wanted to make clear that the Catholic Church insists on God as the guiding force in the creation of all nature and life.

His piece has caused a lot of consternation but I'm not sure how much disagreement actually exists if the two sides would only drop their points of emphasis and use softer language.

The reason the Schonborn essay provokes such loathing in the scientific community is because it makes appeal to the concept of intelligent design. Intelligent Design is a movement to observe in biological nature an order and sophistication that bears the unmistakable sign of a higher cause. The most usual form of Intelligent Design has a stronger claim--that the evidence demands, or requires, a Creator. That it (in a sense) proves the existence of a Creator God. Unfortunately scientists currently only know this theory and movement as a means of assaulting Darwinian evolution, which is a shame. The current crop of biologists will not be convinced that random natural selection is insufficient to have produced the full range of species we see today (an implication of the design hypothesis). Thus there is a considerable impasse on this point.

But I'm not sure Schonborn and others would reject the following statement about the origins of life: that God created life on earth by a seemingly random process of natural selection spanning thousands of years. Christians can surely maintain their rock solid faith that God orchestrated the creation of all life without insisting that the available evidence on earth demands the conclusion. And it seems equally possible that cool-headed biologists could embrace an entirely naturalistic explanation of origins without definitively closing the door on the God question.

It seems to me that most biologists wouldn't care to make the point either way if they didn't feel that they were backed against the wall by opponents of Darwinian evolution who insist that the natural world answers the existence of God question, definitely and affirmatively. And this, I believe, is the Christian mistake.

For someone like myself, a mountain range, an ocean, or a sunset is a work of Divine art--I can't look at the world any other way. Seeing the natural world as God's creation heightens my own appreciation of its splendor. But it would be foolish to seek in this beauty a God proof. In fact I think it's an important aspect of Christianity that we lack an objective proof of God's existence.

Intelligent Design could be a wondrous undertaking for scientists of faith who wish to trace the hand of the Creator they trust in. But as an antagonistic prop in the culture war, it surely fails to achieve its greatest purpose, which should not be to target and implode another theory, but instead to cast light on the wonder of life.

By appealing to design language Schonborn frightened many. Only a change in the attitude of that movement, and of those who sneer at it, will help that fear cede. But Christians also should not be afraid to entertain this thought: that God created the world perfectly and exactly according to his intention, but that observable biological phenomena might not objectively require such an interpretation. This concession, about available evidence and not metaphysical truth, would do much to cool the fears of secular science. Here's hoping for a cease-fire.