For many years, Catholicism and evolutionary theory have been perceived as being compatible rather than in conflict. That may be changing in the wake of an article written by Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. He seems more interested in defending the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design than the science of evolution.

Schönborn 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.

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.

Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein write:

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schönborn. He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.

Cardinal Schönborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.

So, there is "design" in nature and evolution is just one of "many theories." Sound familiar? It should:

Mark Ryland, a vice president of the [Discovery Institute, which promotes Intelligent Design], said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. ... The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute. ... "How did the Discovery Institute talking points wind up in Vienna?" wondered Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which advocates the teaching of evolution. "It really did look quite a bit as if Cardinal Schönborn had been reading their Web pages." [The New York Times]

PZ Meyers comments:

There is no evidence, let alone "overwhelming evidence", for design in nature. Scientists do not have the goal of explaining away design, but rather of putting together the best, most accurate explanation of the real world—and many scientists are religious, and the answers they've come up with are in spite of any religious desires. His article is simply bad science, transparently infiltrated by the dishonest vapors of that gang of creationists in Seattle.

Read it with an eye to his sources; his arguments are based entirely on interpretations of a letter by Pope John Paul in 1996, comments he made in 1985, the Catholic Catechism, and Pope Benedict's writings and homilies…how quaint and theological. No reference is made to observations of the real world around us, that thing that good Catholics would call God's Creation.

From Body and Soul:

Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, says it looks like Cardinal Schönborn has been reading the talking points on the Discovery Institute's web page, and now that he mentions it, the essay does sound a lot more like that than like anything anyone has learned about evolution in Catholic schools in the past forty years or so. And it looks less like an attempt to clarify the Church's position than another swoon into the arms of the Christianists.

It's really sad when a 2,000-year-old Church starts going through a mid-life crisis and following its offsprings' fads.

What's wrong with objecting to seeing evolution as an unguided process? Because evolution should be treated like everything else in science — there is no more reason even for a devout believer to insert a god into the mechanisms of evolution than there is insert a god into the mechanisms of chemistry or physics. A comment at Body and Soul reads:

The Cardinal seems to be saying that an unguided naturalistic process is something that God couldn't be behind. Which is funny, because most branches of science and engineering use probability theory as a basic tool and even ordinary reproductive biology says that the collection of genes we inherit from our parents is a random selection from each of them. Is the Cardinal claiming that God supernaturally intervenes in every sex act which leads to conception to make sure that the right combination of genes makes it into the right sperm and egg cell and then carefully guides the right sperm unerringly to the egg ahead of all its competitors? Should the biology textbooks be rewritten to reflect that? Or can Christians who are scientists think that processes which are random to us might be under God's control in a way that is totally inaccessible to science?

If the Cardinal wants to pick a fight with Darwinism over the issue of randomness, he's going to have to extend it to every area of science, because if God's sovereignty over creation is logically incompatible with random natural processes, then Darwinism is only a small part of the problem. I haven't even touched on quantum mechanics--what's the Cardinal going to say about the measurement problem? Is there going to be an official Catholic teaching on that?

Well, it is true that Intelligent Design is a movement that is ultimately dedicated to undermining all of science in order to eliminate materialism, so it wouldn't be surprising if that's Schönborn's goal as well. Another comment suggests that Schönborn is trying to make it easier for conservative Catholics to move even further to the right and closer to conservative evangelicals because disagreement over evolution has been a sticking point between the two groups for years.

Amanda Marcotte writes:

I think overall there's a more fundamental problem between Bible-thumpers and even more conservative Catholics, which is their respective stances on the idea of education and intellectualism themselves. To be blunt, there is a fundamental anti-intellectualism at the heart of American Protestant wingnuttery that isn't shared by Catholics. The different models of private schooling that Jeanne alludes to are perfect examples of this--Catholics I know tended to yank their kids out of public schools and put them in private schools so they'd get a better education, whereas the fundie home schooling movement is about shielding kids from learning about stuff that might challenge their religious beliefs. Go to a Catholic school, for instance, and you will learn probably more about evolution than you will in your average public school.

Americans United points out:

In a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the late Pope John Paul II said, "New knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."

Cardinal Schonborn, in his Times column, dismissed the pope's address as "vague and unimportant."

Schönborn's letter is an attack on evolution. It's even an attack on the previous pope's support of evolution and evolutionary science. The letter is an attack on science, which describes events in a naturalistic and materialistic way. Schönborn is defending the principles and goals of the Intelligent Design movement which seeks to supplant secularism and science with a religious ideology of their own making.

Schönborn's letter is a disservice to Catholicism as well as science, reason, and reality.

Read More:

• Evolution vs. Creationism
• Science vs. Religion
• What is Intelligent Design?
• What is Science?
• Roman Catholicism
• Catholicism News