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Intelligent
design: not a Catholic issue
PRAISED BE JESUS
CHRIST!
(Now and Forever)
“Intelligent design” has received a lot of attention in recent months. A
judge or two has gone on record stating intelligent design is not to be
taught as an alternative to evolution in public schools. A school
district in Georgia was ordered to remove stickers from textbooks that
called evolution a theory. In Kansas, the road was recently cleared for
schools to teach intelligent design. A school board in Dover, Penn.,
back in 2004 required students to read a statement about intelligent
design before ninth-grade lessons on evolution. The statement said that
the Darwin theory of evolution is “not a fact,” has inexplicable “gaps”
and referred students to an intelligent design book. After the school
board was voted out of office, the statement was rescinded.
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, lead editor of the 1992 Catechism of
the Catholic Church and archbishop of Vienna, recently offered
Catholic thought on this issue to the readers of the New York Times.
The Catholic Church, he wrote, “proclaims that by the light of reason
the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design
in the natural world, including the world of living things … the
Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the
immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try
to explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and
necessity’ are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an
abdication of human intelligence.”
Catholics profess faith in “one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of
Heaven and Earth.” We uphold the fact that God is the Creator. But, our
faith does not bind us to any particular scientific theory about the
origins of the universe. The Bible reveals religious truth, not science.
An International Theological Commission which advises the Vatican
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and whose members are papal
appointees pointed out in 2004 that there is general agreement among
scientists that the first organism on earth lived about 3.5 to 4 million
years ago. It added: “Since it has been demonstrated that all living
organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that
all living organisms have descended from this first organism.” How is
that for drawing a line in the creationism sand! The commission
continued: “Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and
biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of
evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on
earth.”
It should not surprise the informed that the Catholic Church supports
the teaching of both cosmological and biological evolution as the best
available account of how nature works. Some even point to John Paul II,
who in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, said
that the theory of evolution is more than hypothesis. The Holy Father,
referring to Pius XII’s neutral position on biological evolution in his
encyclical Humani Generis, said “new knowledge has led to the
recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” That
statement, however, must be put in the context of Catholic teaching. The
Church does not accept theories that attribute development to the
effects of random mutation and competitive selection. Known as
Neo-Darwinism, this conflicts with Catholic teaching.
God is the cause not only of existence, but also the cause of causes.
His action does not displace or supplant the activity of creaturely
causes, but enables him to act according to their natures and to bring
about the ends he intends. To the Catholic mind, any system of thought
that denies or seeks to explain away intelligent design in biology is
ideology and not science. It is God who causes those conditions required
for the emergence and support of living organisms and, furthermore, for
their reproduction and differentiation (Theological Commission).
Our Catholic faith also teaches that the human person, “while in
physical continuity with the rest of life on the planet through the
processes of evolution … is qualitatively different from other living
beings” (U.S. bishops’ Committee on Science and Values). We are
possessed of a soul created by God. As John Paul II pointed out: “With
man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological
difference, ontological leap, one could say.” There are in fact
“dimensions of human existence that cannot be objects of scientific
investigation. Catholic theology affirms that the emergence of the first
members of the human species represents an event that cannot have a
purely natural explanation but must be attributed to divine
intervention” (International Commission).
Science can study the change by which God prepared the way for such an
ontological leap, but it falls to theology to locate this account of the
special creation of the human soul within the over-reaching plan of the
Triune God. While the scientific method is a very powerful instrument
within its realm of competence, it is not of itself sufficient to answer
all the questions that human beings inevitably pose about themselves and
the world (Committee on Science and Human Values).
The Catholic Church embraces the teaching of evolution as long as it is
understood as a scientific account of the physical origins and
development of the universe. It does not, however, give blanket
approbation to all theories of evolution, specifically those which
explicitly deny to Divine Providence any truly causal role in the
development of life in the universe. An unguided evolutionary process,
one that falls outside the bounds of Divine Providence, in Catholic
thought, simply cannot exist (Cardinal Schonborn). As Our Holy Father
Benedict XVI said recently: “We are not some casual and meaningless
product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each
of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”
Here’s the bottom line. Scientific truth and religious truth cannot be
in conflict. Catholic schools teach evolution as a scientific theory.
They also teach that God is Creator. It is not a question of either/or,
but both placed in a context of Catholic thought. The freedom to do so
uninhibited by governmental interference is one of the reasons Catholic
schools exist.
At the same time, Catholic parents whose children are in public schools
should ensure that their children are receiving appropriate catechesis
at home and in their parish on God as Creator. Students should be able
to leave their biology classes and their courses in religious
instruction with an integrated understanding of the means God chose to
make us who we are.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Nothing exists
that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when
God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of
nature, and all of human history are rooted in this primordial event,
the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time began”
(338). |
