The Catholic Church’s actual stance with regard to the scientific fact of the existence of the evolution of living orgamisms by random mutations followed by natural selection, contrary to popular interpretations, has never really been anything close to logically coherent and free from internal contradictions.
In his famous 1996 Papal letter, “Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences”, Pope John Paul II tried desperately to reconcile the scentific evidence of the evolution of all living organisms from a common ancestor with the anthropocentric “revelation” or dogma that man is somehow seperate, distinct from and above the rest of the animal kindom:
Revelation teaches us that [man] was created in the image and likeness of God. … if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God … Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. … With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say.
But the Pope went on to admit that the two positions were fundamentally irreconcilable:
However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry?
The solution: meaningless obfuscation and sophistry.
Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seen irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being.
The “moment of transition to the spiritual” refers to the lengendary theological phenomenon of “ensoulment” which, in the case of ontogenetic questions like abortion and the fundamental rights of the morula and the the blastocyst takes place at conception, but with respect to phylogenetic questions like the status of species can occur, apparently, anywhere along a vast spectrum running from Australopithecus africanus to Homo habilis to Homo erecutus or Homo Sapiens.
But the arbitrary intervention of a supernatural power into the physical chain of cause and effect is a violation of the principle of the causal closure of the physical world. The problem is that the hypothesis of even one such possible intervention implies that the process of evolution itself is not nomologically necessary (i.e. it doensn’t occur as a result of unalterable physical and chemical laws univerally) and therefore is not scientific.
Well, this position was already deeply problematic for philosophers of science and evolutionary theorists, but did not necessarily carry with it the much more unacceptable practical implication that evolution was only to be regarded as a hypothesis among other competing explanatory hypotheses such as “intelligent design.”
Or, at least, it didn’t seem to. Now, we have this from an editorial by a German Cardinal in the New York Times of Thurday:
EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was “more than just a hypothesis,” defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance – or at least acquiescence – of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.
But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, 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.
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. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.
The first thing to notice here is the attempt to adversely label, and hence discredit, the whole of so-called neo-Darwinian theory (what is this shibboleth precisely? is he actually refering to the New Synthesis of the 1930’s which helped to put Darwin’s theory on an unassailable scientific footing by incorporating the matehmatical mechanism of Mendelian heredity or has it something to do with the discovery of genes, the struture of DNA and the eventual decoding of the genome) as a “dogma.” It is not a dogma. The fact of random variation and natural selection can be observed under a microscope as one generation of bacteria in culture is subjected to increasing amounts of a particular variety of antibiotic to the point where most of the organisms die off with the exception of a hardy few, perhaps one, who are capable of adapting to the new environment because of a random mutation in its genetic code. These mutations are the result of “errors” in the meiotic reproduction or copying of the DNA sequences of an organism from one generation to the next. These surviving specimens will then pass their genes on to the next generation of bateria who will them be subjected to a different variety of antibiotic specifically designed to knock them and their hardy gene out of the ball game and the process will repeat itself for many generations preceisly because the mutations are absolutely random and not pre-determined. If the process of mutation were deterministic in nature, then it would be fairly easy to identify which genes will mutate at what time and bacterial resistance to antibiotics would no longer be a problem. The process of natural selection is, on the other, perfectly deterministic.
Moreover, if the universe is to be consistently viewed as governed by divine pre-determinition even down to the microscopic level, it becomes extremely difficult to see how the Chruch can maintain it’s traditional belief in the existence of free will.
Second, notice the disingenuous claim that “neo-Darwinians” reject the idea of “design” in nature. Darwinians do not reject the [b]appearance of design [/b] as a consequence of the long and arduous process of natural selection. The probablity that an “eye” will spontaneously appear somewhere on earth is extremely low. But the probabality that a photo-sentive cell will appear is much higher. The probablity that the parts of the photo-sensitive cell will appear and aggregate themslves togther over a period of hundreds of thousands of years becomes very high indeed. “Design” results from the accumulation of these infinitesimal and random (in the sense of heads or tails in the tossing of a coin) but highly probable (50% in the case of the coin) developments over many generations.
What Darwinians do reject is [b]intelligent design [/b]. This is the idea that nature looks designed and ordered because someone or something must have planned it that way. But what is the probability that an enormously complex designer came into existence without any planning and designing of its own?
This is not proof againt the existence of god or gods, but it takes the idea of his necessity in the complex “design” of natural organisms out of the picture.
The rest of the article essentially consists in dogmatic assertions about the existence of God, borrwed mostly from the late John Paul II, and his fundamental role in the universe which seem designed to assimilate the position of the vast majority of modern evolutionary biologists to the denial of the existence of god. This strategy is designed to marginalize Darwininian evolution in the consciousness of the Catholic religious community by equating it with atheism and philosophical materialism. The consequence is to leave room for doubt about this “dangerous” hypothesis which rejests the key buzzword, mentioned about seven or eight times in the article, of creationist “design”.
He [Wojtyla] went on: “To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. 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. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek….
Note that in this quotation the word “finality” is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, “It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity.”
Naturally the Chruch is opposed to “materialistic philosophies”. If it weren’t then it would have to reject the existence of God and accept atheism. But this has nothing to do with the fact of evolution as interpereted by modern science and philosophy.
In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of “evolution” as used by mainstream biologists – that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.
Here, neo-Darwinism is finally defined and indentified with “mainstream biologists”. The new Pope, Benedeict XVI, is implicity dissociated from these horrid and terrifying “mainstream biologists”, a group of strawmen who all believe, ex hypothesi, that the universe is run by chance and that god cannot possibly play a role in its existence.
The commission’s document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of (intelligent?) design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul’s 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that “the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.”
Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, 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.
Decoding this last paragraph gives us some indication of where the CC is really heading:
At the beginning of the 21st century, faced with dangerous truths like the evolution of species by natural selection and intersting hypotheses such as the one about the exitence of multiple universes which do nothing more to threaten faith in the existence of god and supernatural forces than Copernicus’ theory that the earth orbited the sun, the Catholic Churh will again exploit the irrational fears of the scientifically illiterate by proclaiming that intelligent design is true and that all theories which contradict it are false and dangerous.
