Sunday, August 07, 2005

Father Greely gets it right

In an article from the chicago times, Father Andrew Greely demonstrates his take on Cardinal Schoenborns recent comments about evolution where it was implied we must accept 'design' in nature and anything else is unscientific. I think this is a very good article and he certainly puts the issue into good perspective.

IT appears now that that Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, a student of the current pope, a man with considerable clout at the Vatican, and a likely heir apparent, has intervened in a New York Times article in which he seems to say that Catholics must believe that God's design directs the evolutionary process and thus apparently putting them on the side of the Evangelicals. The cardinal also dismissed Pope John Paul II's comments on the issue as being "vague and unimportant" -- something he would never dare to say while the pope was still alive.

Unless I misunderstand the cardinal completely, he is saying that Catholics must believe that God works within the evolutionary process directing it and guiding it. With all due respect to the cardinal, I don't think that's true. Catholics have to believe that God created everything and set the various natural processes in motion (and sustains the cosmos in existance), but we do not have to believe that God is intervening constantly in the processes, fiddling with them, as it were, to make sure of the outcomes. God did not have to interfere with the results of the Big Bang to make sure that life would be possible on Earth. Rather the biopolymers were inherent in the Bang itself.