WE'RE ALL EVOLUTIONISTS, IT'S DARWIN AND DESIGN THAT ARE WRONG:

Creation or Evolution? Here Is the View of the Church of Rome: Creationists versus Darwinists, “intelligent design” versus random selection, the controversy is as heated as ever. The pope is studying the issue with a team of experts. Keep reading to find the truth he wants to reassert. And the confusion he wants to clear up (Sandro Magister, August 11, 2006, Chiesa)

All those who are expected to attend Benedict XVI’s private seminar with his former theology students at Castel Gandolfo in early September will come with the necessary documents tucked away in their briefcases.

Among the papers, an article published by “L’Osservatore Romano” on January 16, 2006, stands out. It is signed Fiorenzo Facchini, who is both priest and scientist, and teaches anthropology at the University of Bologna. He has written extensively on the question of evolution.

The importance of this article – which appears in its entirety below – is confirmed in the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica”, a Jesuit journal published in Rome under the control and with the authorization of Vatican authorities.

In the August 5-19 issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica”, Jesuit Giuseppe De Rosa reserves ten pages to evolution and its workings, from Lamarck and Darwin up to today. He signs off his piece with a reference to Facchini’s “L’Osservatore Romano” article which he considers the most up-to-date synthesis of the position of the Catholic Church in the matter.

In his article, Father De Rosa sums up where the scientific controversy now stands point. He writes:

“A clear distinction must be made between what evolution is and what theories try to say about it. While it is certainly true that phenomenon itself is real, theories about it must be experimentally verified before they can be considered scientifically valid. So far this has not happened. And for this reason, the last word on evolution has not been said. Ahead of us therefore there is much work to do before we can fully understand the mechanisms of the evolutionary process.” [...]

Benedict XVI himself has addressed the issue of evolution several times.

He mentioned it for the first time during the homely of his pontificate’s inaugural mass on April 24, 2005. At that time he said:

“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.”

He spoke about again on April 6 this year when he addressed young people who had come in St. Peter’s Square in anticipation of World Youth Day. Then he stated:

“Science presupposes the trustworthy, intelligent structure of matter, the ‘design’ of creation.”

Evolution and Creation (Fiorenzo Facchini, January 16, 2006, L’Osservatore Romano)

When John Paul II spoke to the plenary of the Pontifical Academy of Science in October 1996, he acknowledged that evolution was a scientific theory because of its coherence with the views and discoveries of various scientific disciplines. Yet he also said that the evolutionary process had more than one theoretical explanation; among them theories that believers cannot accept because of their underlying materialist ideology. But in such cases, what is at stake is not science but ideology.

In “Communion and Stewardship”, the evolutionary process is taken for granted. What must be reaffirmed in theology (and in any rational argument) is the world’s radical reliance on God, who created things from nothing, even though we know not how.

From this comes the importance of the current debate on God’s plan for creation. It is known that supporters of intelligent design (ID) do not deny evolution, but they do claim that certain complex structures could not have appeared as a result of random events. For them, such complexity requires God’s special intervention during evolution and therefore it falls within the purview of intelligent design. Apart from the fact that mutations to biological structures cannot by themselves explain everything since environmental changes must also occur, by introducing external or corrective factors with respect to natural phenomena, a greater cause is included to explain what we do not know yet but might know. In doing so though, what we are engaged in can no longer be called science but is something that goes beyond it. Despite shortcomings in Darwin’s model, it is a methodological fallacy to look for another model outside the realm of science while pretending to do science.

All things considered, the decision by the Pennsylvania judge therefore appears to be the right one. Intelligent design does not belong in science class and it is wrong to teach it alongside Darwin as if it were a scientific theory. All that it does is blur the boundary between what is scientific and what is philosophic and religious, thus sowing confusion in people’s minds. What is more, a religious point of view is not even necessary to admit that the universe is based on an overall design. It is far better to acknowledge that from a scientific point of view the issue is still open. Putting aside the divine economy which operates through secondary causes (and almost shies away from its role as creator), it is not clear why some of nature’s catastrophic events or some of its meaningless evolutionary structures or lineages, or dangerous genetic mutations, were not avoided in the intelligent design.

Unfortunately, one must in the end also acknowledge that Darwinist scientists have a tendency to view evolution dogmatically, going from theory to ideology, upholding a way of thinking that explains all living phenomena, including human behavior, in terms of natural selection at the expense of other perspectives. It is almost as if evolution ought to make creation redundant so that everything was self-made and reducible to random probabilities.

As Mr. Facchini acknowledges by the end, the problem is that Darwinism isn't science either, but an ideology that is contradicted by observation and experimentation and, therefore, unscientific. Neither Darwinism nor ID belongs in a science class, unless taught together with Creation as competing philosophies seeking to supplant our received understanding.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2006 8:12 AM