Religion: Parsing a cardinal: Are Roman Catholics to give up on evolution?
Schönborn's interpretation of Roman Catholic teaching as being consistent with belief in purposeful and guided evolution could also have drawn on theologian Jacques Maritain's 1966 (pre-intelligent design) argument for a Thomistic-Aristotelian view of guided purpose behind the evolutionary process. In Maritain's view of evolution, simpler physical forms are "intended" to become more complex physical forms, culminating in man and his soul. "The ultimate end of all generation is, therefore, the human soul, and matter tends to this as its ultimate form," Maritain wrote.
But Maritain was not a pope, or even a cardinal. How do his thoughts bear on official church teaching? Well, in fact, Maritain's line of Thomistic thinking does seem present in the teaching of Pope John Paul II, which Schönborn points to in his op-ed. First of all, Schönborn notes that too much is made of the former pope's 1996 comment praising scientific research that "has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis." He was, Schönborn implies, simply giving science its due. Schönborn could have added that John Paul II, in those same comments, gave no ground on the matter of soul. In fact, to the dismay of biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote critically of the pope's comments, John Paul II insisted that theories of evolution (and he used the plural) that "consider the mind as emerging from forces of living matter . . . are incompatible with the truth about man."
Schönborn emphasizes the former pope's 1985 pronouncement on evolution in which he gave his own convictions about a purposefully ordered direction to the process. "The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge obliges one to suppose a mind which is its inventor, creator."
Obliges one to suppose. Note the words carefully. John Paul II was as much as saying that the world appears to have an order and design that can only oblige the faithful to be open to seeing the possibility of purpose and intention in the world. As a matter of faith, he was saying, he believed that science would lead to the confirmation of a belief in a purposefully created world, and in its creator.
Schönborn concludes that "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as a result of 'chance and necessity' are not scientific at all, but as John Paul II put it, an abdication of human intelligence." That may be too harsh a view of the work of scientists who do not share Schönborn's faith and convictions. But it is true that positing the nonexistence of order and design to the universe is no less a matter of faith–a very different faith–than positing such an order and design to the universe. Science, whether it will ever confirm either faith, proceeds by established methods to explain, among other things, the causes of phenomena. And as long as scientists do not ignore the method or fudge the findings, they will continue to do the science that may, or may not, confirm their ultimate beliefs.
In the meantime, though, despite much hand-wringing to the contrary, it does not appear as though Roman Catholics have been ordered to desist from contemplating or exploring the elaborate mechanism of evolution. They have been asked to keep an open, even hopeful, mind about the answers to which such exploration might lead.
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