Well, it looks as though Austrian Cardinal Schoenborn is back in the news again, still trying to keep a back door open for acceptance of intelligent design within the Catholic Church. In the Reuters story quoted above, he tries to have it both ways, saying that he respects evolution as a scientific theory, and that “Christian teaching about creation is not an alternative to evolution.”
That sounds good, but then he turns around and tries to have it the other way as well.
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“Can we reasonably say the origin of man and life can only be explained by material causes?” he asked. “Can matter create intelligence? That is a question we can’t answer scientifically, because the scientific method cannot grasp it.”
“Common sense tells us that matter cannot organize itself,” he said. “It needs information to do that, and information is a manifestation of intelligence.”
Well, next time the cardinal is back in Austria he might want to rethink that last point. He might want to look up at the mountains and consider the humble snowflake. Each of which tells my common sense at least that matter is perfectly capable of organizing itself into a highly coordinated state.
How is this possible, when we all know that clocks wind down, coffee grows cold, and teenagers’ rooms tend towards chaos? It’s because that bit of organization that we see in the snowflake is more than compensated for by a greater amount of disorder (entropy) somewhere else that we’re not seeing.
Crystals form deep in the Austrian mountains in the same way. Random winds organize themselves into hurricanes and tornadoes. Dust in space gloms together by gravity and static attraction to form planets and moons in an intricate ballet around a star. Stars whirl through space in the majesty of a spiral galaxy.
Matter can’t organize itself? Balderdash. Open your eyes to the everyday miracles in the world around you!
” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – John Keats
Life is the same way, just more intricate, and taking longer to get organized for that reason. A few billion years is a lot longer than the few seconds that it takes for cold moist air to form snowflakes, but the same principles are at work, and science is increasingly coming to understand the details of how order arises from chaos. The cardinal might want to look into the work of the Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine; here is his Nobel acceptance speech (pdf) from 1977 where he shows with technical rigor just how order can and does arise from disorder in the world around us. Here is the layperson’s discussion of self-organizing systems with plenty of links to get you started.
He might also check out the work of Booman’s personal favorite, Stuart Kauffman, who is continuing to push the frontiers of understanding along these lines today.
He also might want to go back and consider the spirit, and not just the letter, of his St. Thomas Aquinas; in his lifetime this “Doctor of the Church” was viewed with great suspicion for attempting to bring the latest (rediscovered) ideas of Aristotelian science into discussions of theology. It seems that even theology can evolve, albeit slowly.
Of course, down that path lie great dangers, for if scientific discoveries are going to inform theological thought then the provisional nature of scientific truth might taint theology with a dose of uncertainty, not to mention humility, before the mystery of reality. And we couldn’t have that; it might encourage free thought and loss of discipline. Better to cling tightly to the “timeless truths” we “know with certitude;” or as we call it today, Fundamentalism: Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew that, and so does Jerry Falwell. The cardinal might do well to consider the company he will keep on the path he has chosen, and whether this might be a sign unto him.
