De-Evolutionary Ideas
Anybody still hoping that the election of Pope Benedict XVI wasn't a huge step back toward the Middle Ages for the Catholic Church should be sure not to miss the opinion piece in Thursday's New York Times, "Finding Design in Nature," by Christoph Schönborn, Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna. For almost ten years, since Pope John Paul II identified evolution as "more than just a hypothesis," most people assumed that the official church position made room for Darwin's ideas. Wrong, writes Cardinal Schönborn. "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."
This sounds suspiciously like the cardinal is buying into intelligent design, suspicions that were realized in a follow-up article in Friday's Times, "Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution." Cardinal Schönborn consulted with the Discovery Institute, one of the leading proponents of that Trojan horse for creationism. Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said he was "very excited" by the essay, and institute president Bruce Chapman claims it "helps blunt the claims" that the Church is willing to coexist with Darwinian evolution. And for anyone who hoped the cardinal was strictly speaking for himself, he told the Times that, although the Vatican had not vetted the piece, he had discussed it with a very encouraging Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger a couple of weeks before Ratzinger's election as Pope. If the message isn't sufficiently conveyed by this shot across the bow, expect a doctrinal note from Benedict himself to follow. This will be a huge step forward toward undermining the hold that the teaching of evolution still maintains in the schools. I'm afraid that it's also just a hint of the backward steps the Church may be in for under Benedict's reign.
posted by Doug @ 11:28 PM
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12 Comments:
Now you know I have to comment on this thread!
There is some question as to whether Cardinal Schönborn’s stance on evolution represents a retreat from the position spelled out in a papal letter from 1996 or not. The letter, written by John Paul II, did say that, “evolution is more than a theory.” But there has always been some question as to exactly what that meant and how strongly the church actually embraced Darwinism or natural selection. For the last decade or so, Catholics seemed to be fine with some ambiguity. Apparently not any more.
The Catholic position has always been closer to theistic evolution than to natural selection. The church, burned by the “Galileo Incident” of 500 years ago, is loath to deny the facts of science, but it still has a real hard time with a full embrace. Yes, organisms have evolved over time. Yes, it does look like all or most life on earth is related. But no, the process hasn’t been blind. And no, the process hasn’t been random or chance driven.
As you can read in Schönborn’s editorial, he tries to separate methodological naturalism from philosophical naturalism: sure, the “technique” of science is a good tool for examining nature, but don’t get carried away and think it is revealing any deep truth. In practice, it’s hard to divide that baby.
There is a very interesting thread on TableTalk over in Salon for those who want to get deeply into ID arguments: Intelligent Design" (Creationism in New Clothes).
The problem, for everyone from Schönborn to Philip Johnson to Henry Morris, seems to be one of authority. Who gets to own the foundation principals – scientists and other smarty-pants, theologians, or average Joes and Janes?
For some reason the link above link to Salon didn't work. If you are interested, follow this ...
http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@775.hTt6aL4Vysk.2@.773a78bb/0
I thought you might notice this one. Schönborn made the point that John Paul didn't really mean evolution was fine by him, but that's what most people took the Pope to mean, and he had the better part of a decade to clarify his position if felt it was misunderstood. I've already clicked over to the Salon discussion, and I'll work my way through the 600-some posts.
One thing I meant to point out in my post but didn't was Schönborn’s continued reference to "reason" for how we know God works in our world. I always thought religion was more of a faith-based institution, myself.
About reason, Catholics embraced it pretty early, as did most Protestants. Catholics, not being tied to tightly to the Bible, didn't much care about the age of the earth or the literalness of the (multiple) Genesis accounts of creation. They were OK with a more remote God. Most Protestants were less sanguine. All hell broke loose with Darwin though.
The genealogical parents of today's more conservative Christian sects unfortunately bought into the design concept hook, line and sinker - Rev William Paley's watch argument “proving” God’s existence and the like – and that made Darwinism a big threat. Catholics were better able to roll with the punch.
Remember, by the time of Darwin's death, even Darwin didn't much believe in natural selection. There were issues with both the age of the earth and inheritance. It wasn't until the 1920s and 30s that the idea came back with force, mostly because of new discoveries in paleontology and population genetics. Most liberal theologians were able, at least in those in-between years, to rationalize evolution with scripture. Even William Jennings Bryan, though not a believer in evolution, more wanted to keep a lid on science-based social policy than deny science its intellectual due.
The big issue with conservative Christians was always The Fall verses Progress. Men and women are, according to conservatives, fallen creatures. Evolution, for most of the twentieth century, was seen as a progressive force. That, these Christians felt, led to conceit and was a path to Satan. Now, interestingly, as science moves toward a less progress-centric view of evolution, Catholics are growing troubled. It was OK to hold the idea that God got all this going knowing that he’d eventually have homo sapiens into which to breath a soul (though one might ask why he took such a roundabout path). But to think that humans are an accident, to believe as the late Stephen Jay Gould used to say, that if you rewound the tape of life you’d never get humans again, is too dangerous a threat to Catholic theology to go unchallenged.
There is also another force at play here – the influence of Eastern European thought and history on Catholic doctrine. JPII and the Benedict, are both old-school anti-communists. For them, the Soviet Union represented the idea of evolution out of control.
As for the Salon thread, you can skip to the last 200 posts or so … to the point a contributor named “Ladouceur de Vivre” steps in.
A better place to start the TableTalk thread:
http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@775.hTt6aL4Vysk.2@.773a78bb/400
As I was slogging through from the beginning, I wondered if that poster was going to show.
I did jump ahead from the beginning to about post #400, but it still took me a while to work through all that. One thing I don't understand about the intelligent design argument is, although proponents claim creationism and religion are beside the point, what are we really left with if we take the religion out of it? Maybe I just haven't heard it presented properly, but the whole thing comes off as just one big handwave to me. Evolutionary theory doesn't explain every single nuance in biology, but proponents of intelligent design just seem to take advantage of that space to use the equivalent of magic to fill the holes. Sure, we can claim that everything we don't understand is really God (or the "Designer" of our choice) working in the world, but where does that get us? Two thousand years ago, we could believe ships disappear when they go over the horizon because God took them somewhere else. But as knowledge and understanding grew, we discovered that there was a rational, nonsupernatural cause. Why should we expect that future advances in knowledge won't be able to explain details we don't understand at this point?
IDist are really divided into two camps (with some considerable overlap). The first group, call them "modern creationists,” are looking for a politically acceptable way to introduce God into science post Judge Overton's 1981 Arkansas decision that ruled Creation-Science a religion. The second group, call them scientific conspiracy theorists, are classic academic wannabes and cranks. They want to "prove" that science is an exclusive club that gatekeeps innovative and radical thinkers (like themselves). Both groups are so sure of their a priori ideas that they are impervious to evidence or disproof.
This is why scientists and other supporters of the teaching of evolution in public schools have stopped debating IDist and other creationists in public forums; why, for example, scientists boycotted the Kansas school board hearings. It’s because facts for these folks are never any more than assertions, and truth is simply a function of political power. It is impossible to debate someone who holds to a truth not because of evidence but because they believe the other side’s opinion is equally faith based.
It does seem sort of pointless to debate, but I'm not sure actual scientists don't cede the PR field to the IDers if they refuse to show up.
In the Salon Table Talk thread, there was one person who seemed sincerely to be taking the ID position, but I was never able to figure out exactly what that poster believed other than "Darwin wasn't all that" and "You won't take me seriously." After you respond to that and they keep repeating it another nine or ten times, what else is there to say?
There is an episode of ST:TNG where Data battles some alien or another in a chess-like game. After being defeated by the alien, Data grows depressed, but late in the episode, employs a strategy that allows him to win: he decides not to play to a defeat, but to a draw, which frustrates his alien opponent to the point where the alien quits.
The question is, is Data the creationist or the scientist?
I think he's the creationist. With nothing to lose, creationists can debate to a draw and win. The only option the rationalist or the scientist has is to not play. At least that's their strategy for now.
Regarding the ramblings of folks like "Ranse" in Salon, the only choice is to change the premises of the debate. While Ranse was in control of the subject, he or she was able to battle to at least a draw. The only trick an opponent has is to turn the debate from one that trades tit-fo-tat "facts" to one that debates motivations and premises. That's hard to do in a forum like a school board meeting where the majority "believe" in ID or creationism and are present not to learn but for the show.
Matt Yglesias talks about this and links to articles in The New Republic (registration required) and on The Weekly Standard's Website. I just found them, so I haven't read any of these myself. Given your interest in the subject, Ron, you're probably already all over them.
I agree that Data is the creationist in that story, which also illustrates why creationists or proponents of intelligent design or whatever their current stratagem is shouldn't be allowed to have the run of the field. I agree that a schoolboard hearing isn't neutral territory on which to take them on, so those of us who'd rather not see a fundamentalist God elbow science out of textbooks need to establish our own home field for the advantage. (Have I mixed enough metaphors yet? I can keep going . . .)
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