The fundamentalists are yelping with glee over Cardinal Schönborn’s July 7 New York Times Op-Ed piece, in which he writes:
“The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
I welcome this statement. Biological science may get by with the categories of “chance and necessity” (Monod) and see the universe as a blindly produced purely accidental formation. But to assert that these categories exhaustively account for the splendour of creation is a stance of reductive materialism comparable to that which would reduce human thought, feeling, ethics and religion to some motion of brain cells. The scientistic mentality is not only blind to religion, it suffers from what Heidegger diagnosed as blindness to Being.
The Church may have wrong-footed itself in its earlier reactions to evolutionary thinking, in Humani Generis and the monitum directed at Teilhard de Chardin. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church in its rather literalistic approach to original sin and to eschatology is based on a rejection of evolutionary insight. Christian apologists such as Keith Ward often resort to a “God of the gaps” thinking whereby various thresholds or leaps in the evolutionary process are identified and are declared to be inconceivable, inexplicable without the active intervention of God.
The challenge of evolution cannot be met in this way. Rather, we must cultivate a metaphysical vision, which recognizes the irreducibility of the transcendental realities which emerge in the evolved universe -- the realities of cosmic order, intelligibility, creative abundance, beauty, goodness, truth, and the givenness of being itself. Listen to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, nourished by the springs of cosmic order and creativity, sustained on that abundance as on a mighty flood, and you will hear the Christian response to the cosmos, the recognition of purpose and design and the active collaboration in that design. This issues in a hymn of praise.
There is a tension between this vision and the details of cosmic evolution, which are not always edifying, and which betray no obvious divine fingerprints. The metaphysical vision is not one in which we can complacently rest. It is challenged by many surds, which writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett put challengingly before us. Yet the total picture is one of mighty advances from threshold to threshold, testifying to a force of creation that the machinery of natural selection does not account for.
Schools must present the scientific picture, but they should also indicate the possibilities of metaphysical reflection based on intellectual, ethical, aesthetic and religious receptivity to the depth dimension of the phenomena that lie before us. Theories of “intelligent design” intended to thwart science on its own terrain succeed only in bringing this metaphysical vision into discredit, much as fundamentalist literalism in regard to the resurrection narratives casts discredit on the apostolic witness to the resurrection as eschatological event. The frenzy about orthodoxy and the panic about perceived threats to the faith gets in the way of the cultivation of the broad vision that is required today.
The universe has evolved – since the big bang. The earth has evolved – beyond the Hadean. The biosphere has evolved – since it came into existence several billion years ago.
The Cardinal’s words are probably meant to apply mainly to the biosphere. And he is probably targeting 2 macro-molecules – DNA and RNA.
Extant nucleic acids would seem to have appeared by a process of copying pre-existing molecules. Current concepts in biology, would trace all DNA in the present biosphere back to the origin of “life” during the Archaean period.
DNA mutation is not entirely random. The Cytosine nucleotide is more likely to be replaced by Thymine, than would be expected on the basis of pure chance. Duplication and deletion of strands of DNA obviously are not purely random changes in nucleotides. I judge that the basis for this non-random change in DNA is to be found in the laws of physics and chemistry.
The Cardinal’s statement that “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation … is not (true)” seems to suggest that mutations which are advantageous, are more likely to occur, than mutations which are disadvantageous. I tend to think that biologists would not agree with him. And I judge that he is not “qualified” to make this particular contribution to biological thought.
Similarly his statement that “unguided, unplanned natural selection - is not (true)” suggests that factors other than those which confer a “reproductive advantage” determine the likelihood that a particular mutation will become more prevalent. I doubt that this biological insight can be successfully defended.
I am convinced that the concept of body versus mind/soul makes sense. I lack the ability to speak coherently on the topic. And I have to reflect that the first sentence in this paragraph needs revision to express what I think/feel; but, I cannot do so satisfactorily. The mind is obviously “dependent” on the brain; again, I lack the ability to express myself with clarity here.
Evolutionary “theory” clearly contributes to our understanding of mental processes. The brain has evolved and mind is “tied-up with” the brain. But, I have passed from the realm of biology toward that of metaphysics and religion.
To say that I am the product of evolution is both true and untrue. Evolution is a theory regarding the behavior of matter. I am matter - but matter is not central to who I am.
Evolutionary theory is concerned with the behavior of matter – and in particular with the behavior of Carbon. I do not judge the Cardinal competent here. But I do not know him very well.
Posted by: John | June 12, 2009 at 06:47 AM