Being Reasonable

It's a rare moment when I find myself in agreement with the Vatican.

The New York Times today carried an Op-Ed by Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, detailing the Catholic Church's present thoughts on evolution. I was ecstatic to read it.

Religious fundamentalists have done the integrity of Christianity a tremendous disservice by insisting on the intrinsic inerrancy of the collection of writings we call "The Bible." Their repeated assertions that everything in the Bible is literally and constantly true reveal their own ignorance of Scripture, because they choose to deny, ignore or disingenuously explain away the Bible's internal contradictions.

For a fine example, see my satirical and unintentionally timely "letter" to Moses in the post below. Genesis Chapter 1 says birds and fish were created on Day 5, and that land animals and man were created on Day 6. Chapter 2 does not mention a 7-day timeframe, but makes clear that God created man first, and then created all land animals and birds in order to provide him with a companion. Now, this is perhaps a fairly minor inconsistency, but there it is, nonetheless.

Fundamental hysteria over the literal veracity of the Bible, and the current prominence of evangelicals in our media and government, has the unfortunate effect of promoting the belief that religious faith is by definition in opposition to science. The irrational behavior of fundamentalists comforts non-believers, who feel that atheism is somehow an enlightened position. In fact, what you have are two groups who refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Atheism isn't enlightened, it's ideological radicalism. Creationists aren't faithful, they're willfully blind.

A friend of mine insists he belives in "reason," not religion, as if they are mutually exclusive, but Cardinal Schönborn smartly rebuts in his editorial, "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science."

So what is the Catholic position on evolution?

"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."

No atheist has ever successfully explained to me how an utterly random, purposeless, causeless series of events resulted in the astounding world in which we exist. In fact, that is a far more unreasonable ideology than accepting the obvious order and structure of life and the universe and concluding that there has been a guiding hand in the process.

Pope John Paul II wrote, "To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."

Schönborn concludes, "Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence."