On the face of it, Catholic teaching would seem to be as compatible with Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution as classical music devotees would be with the audience at a grunge rock concert, but there has been a rapprochement over the course of the past decade, among the former pair of schools of thought if not the latter sets of music fans.
“New scientific knowledge has led us to the conclusion that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis,” Pope John Paul II stated in 1996 in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Not too surprisingly, evolution’s adherents within the Church have seized on the late Pontiff’s statement as virtually a Catholic endorsement of evolution. Father George Coyne of the Vatican Observatory calls it “a fundamental Church teaching which significantly advances the evolution debate.”
The late pontiff’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI may not be as amenable to Darwin’s theories. “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution,” The Bible Creation Society quotes the current Pope as saying. In a talk here in Washington, D. C., at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Father Coyne said, “We humans are nothing more than beams thrust into the expanding universe.”
While still a Prince of The Church, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was even more acerbic in his observations of evolution. “The theory of evolution seems to have surpassed the doctrine of creation,” then-Cardinal Ratzinger said at the Sorbonne, “knowledge of the origin of man surpassed the doctrine of original sin.”
Actually, Father Coyne, an accomplished scientist, admits to gaps in scientific knowledge. “Why is the human being at the top of the evolutionary tree?,” Father Coyne asked rhetorically at AEI, “because we don’t know what else to put there.”
The kindly Jesuit divides his time between the Vatican and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where the Church maintains observational labs. Ironically, the Baltimore native came across as more orthodox in an interview on the PBS TV network than he did in his recent appearance at the conservative-to-moderate AEI.
In the PBS interview, for example, he always referred to God using the masculine pronoun in upper case. He was more gender-neutral at AEI. Father Coyne wrote in his prepared remarks (with the gender pronouns in lower case), “…the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while invoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God, makes him/her too small and paltry.”
Intelligent Design is a school of thought among scientists and philosophers that questions the basic premises of evolution. In his extemporaneous comments at AEI, Father Coyne made at least two other multiple-choice references to the deity:
— “The Intelligent Design movement actually belittles God and makes him or her an object of ridicule”
–“It does not make God the great God that he or she is.”
Such an approach to the Higher Power makes the teaching of the sign of the cross to children difficult. As of this writing, it is still, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
