Pope fails to address 'intelligent design' theory of evolution

Pope Benedict and his former doctoral students spent a weekend pondering evolution without discussing controversies over intelligent design and creationism raging in the United States.

The three-day closed-door meeting at the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo outside Rome ended as planned without drawing any conclusions but the group plans to publish its discussion papers, said participant Father Joseph Fessio S.J.

Media speculation had said the debate might shift Vatican policy to embrace "intelligent design," which claims to prove scientifically that life could not have simply evolved, or even the "creationist" view that God created the world in six days.

"It wasn't that at all," Fessio, who is provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, said from Rome. The Pope's session with 39 former students was "a meeting of friends with some scholars to discuss an interesting theme".

"We did not really speak much about intelligent design," said Fessio, whose Ignatius Press publishes the Pope's books in English. "In fact, that particular controversy did not arise."

Creationism -- the view that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- was "almost off the radar screen of the people in this group," he added. The Catholic Church does not read the Genesis account of creation literally.

Fessio said Benedict took part in the discussions but said nothing different from previous public statements, in which he has recognised evolution as a scientific fact but argued that God ultimately created the world and all life in it.

As the Pope put it at his inaugural Mass after being elected in April 2005, "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God."

Benedict, who taught theology at four German universities before becoming archbishop of Munich and then the Vatican's top doctrinal official, has held these annual get-togethers since the late 1970s. The international group debates in German.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has long been rejected in the United States by conservative Christians who want to have a Bible-based view of creation taught in public schools, where the church-state separation bars the teaching of religion.

More recently, Darwin's critics have campaigned to have "intelligent design" taught as a scientific alternative to evolution. President George W. Bush and other conservative politicians support this drive to "teach the controversy".

The "ID movement" does not name the designer as God, but its opponents say that is the logical conclusion and call this an unacceptable bid to sneak religion into the teaching of science.

Schools in some parts of the United States teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution but a Pennsylvania court banned it there last year, saying it was religion in disguise.

Catholic teaching accepts evolution as a scientific theory but disagrees with what it calls "evolutionism," the view that the story of life has no role for God as its prime author.

Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, a close associate of the Pope, was one of four speakers who addressed the meeting. He raised eyebrows last year with a New York Times article that suggested the Catholic Church supported the "ID movement".

Schoenborn and Benedict have said several times over the past year that intelligence in the form of God's will played a part in creation and that neo-Darwinists who deny God any role are drawing an ideological conclusion not proven by the theory.

They say they use philosophical reasoning to conclude that God created the world, not arguments which intelligent design supporters claim can be proven scientifically.

Patrick, I'm just going to follow up what I posted to you in that other thread yesterday and say just a little more about why the Catholic Church would violate its own doctrine if it were to make a statement in support of Creationism and/or Intelligent Design which, contrary to the speculative reports suggesting that the Pope might be moving in this direction, was never in the cards. And it really does reflect what VictoryGal said when she remembered she learned in Catholic School that science is the way we understand the genius workings of God, something doc30 and Vaquero have applauded her for posting. I want to add my own voice in support of VictoryGal here, because I specifically remember learning in my Catechism classes -- I went to public schools -- that I should never fear what science might produce because science was of the material world and was therefore limited in what it has to offer mankind and that it can never bring humanity to an understanding of God.

Though we have seen no official statement coming out of this seminar -- it seems that its participants will post papers on their own -- it should have been obvious from the beginning to anyone who has read Pope John Paul II's "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth" address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in November, 1996 that the focus of the Catholic Church when dealing with the Theory of Evolution would be to delineate the separation between distinct epistemological lines of inquiry as they relate to the Theory of Evolution; and especially with the impossibility of establishing a transition from Materialism to Theology based upon observations of material phenomena. In the Catholic view, it is only through Theology, the highest form of Metaphysical philosophy, that we can even begin to approach an understanding of God. As a scientific pursuit, the Theory of Evolution is entirely within Materialistic inquiry, which does not offer anything in the way of approaching God. This is where Intelligent Design runs directly contrary to Catholic Doctrine because it holds, and quite falsely in my opinion, that there is scientific evidence which proves the physical intervention of a designer, who is generally considered to be God. If Intelligent Design were to be supported by the Catholic Church it would represent a departure from its doctrinal assertion that evidence for the existence of God cannot be inferred from observation of specific phenomena because that would represent a transition from and linkage between materialistic inquiry and Theology. Pope John Paul II was very clear on this point when he stated the sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation ("Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," part 6). So the possibility that Intelligent Design could have been endorsed by the Catholic Church was a dead issue even before the inquiry began.

But going back to VictoryGal's statement that science is the way we understand the genius workings of God, it is possible for Roman Catholics to look at the wondrous and systemic harmony in nature as evidence of a Divine Causality which is removed from any direct intervention in the workings of the natural order, and includes within it the contingent materialistic processes upon which the Theory of Evolution relies for its scientific justification. I'm going to quote the Vatican web site document Patrick was kind enough to link me to yesterday to illustrate this point, excerpted from paragraph 69:

. . . The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. . . . it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. . . .

This is why most Roman Catholics who have been schooled in the religious traditions of the Church do not fear the debate over the Theory of Evolution, Abiogenesis, and the Biblical story of creation. We still see the wondrous hand of Divine Causality at work even as scientific evidence supporting evolution and abiogenesis is advanced because there is no conflict between a truly contingent natural process and God's divine plan.

"This heathen does not have a clue what the above means. There are too many inside baseball terms used - "divine casuality," "true contingency," etc."

"Divine causality" means "caused by God." In Catholic doctrine -- you would really need to read that Vatican document I linked, perhaps paragraphs 67 - 70, to get a theological introduction to these concepts -- there are two levels of "divine causality," God as the primary cause, meaning he did it himself outside of any natural process he created, and God as the secondary cause, meaning that is from within a natural process he created but without his direct intervention. "True contingency" is another way of expressing secondary causes and it means a natural process that unfolds of its own accord without the supernatural intervention of God. The implication you draw from this is that evolution and Christianity are not incompatible because a natural process that unfolds of its own accord still does so according to God's plan because it is God's process.

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