Church needs better evolution education, says bishops' official

Catholic News Service ^ | 2-1-2005

[mike182d]

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Catholic educators need better teaching programs about evolution "to correct the anti-evolution biases that Catholics pick up" from the general society, according to a U.S. bishops' official involved in dialogue with scientists for 20 years.

Without a church view of human creation that is consistent with currently accepted scientific knowledge, "Catholicism may begin to seem less and less 'realistic' to more and more thoughtful people," said David Byers, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Science and Human Values from 1984 to 2003.

"That dynamic is a far greater obstacle to religious assent than evolution," he said in a bylined article in the Feb. 7 issue of America, a weekly magazine published in New York by the Jesuits. The article discussed the value of the dialogues with scientists organized by the bishops' committee.

"Denying that humans evolved seems by this point a waste of time," he said without mentioning specific controversies in the United States.

[mike182d]

Try Copernicus and Galileo for starters.

Galileo's helio-centric theory was loaded with mathmatical errors (i.e. he believed that the orbits of the planets were perfectly elliptical per Aristotelian philosophy). When the Church was unwilling to embrace his theory entirely because of the many errors initially found in it, Galileo decided to persecute the Church and pronounce it evil and oppressive. Hence the house arrest.

Galileo was about poor politics and had nothing to do with science.

[tjwmason]

God is supernatural. He has no limits. Why limit Him on Creation and (pretend?) to believe in God, a virgin birth etc.?

What is the most amazing part of creation? Is it that God took a load of existing matter and turned it into us? Or rather is it the actual act of creation?

By far the most important part of creation is the dialogue "fiat lux" "erat lux", or put another way, the big-bang. This doctrine of creation ex nihilo is what is important.

The means by which God took that matter, and turned it into the universe as we now know it, is on a totally difference level. Many theorists suggest that He used evolution; other believe that there is evidence of Intelligent Design. The act of creation is what is important.

[LibFreeOrDie]

"The betrayal lies in the fact that it is not the role of the Church to make judgements on the truth of scientific theories, nor is it supposed to. The role of the Church is to make assesments on matters of faith and morals and these bishops and Jesuit priests have clearly out-stepped their bounds by demanding Catholics adhere to a theory of science in order to not disuade true "intellectuals.""

The person interviewed in the article, David Byers, is not a bishop or a Jesuit priest. He is speaking his own opinions. No one else is quoted in the article. Notice that his term on the science committee ended in 2003. (I looked up the "America" magazine article noted, but it's pay-per-view.) You are getting upset over one lay person's opinion.

[Miles the Slasher]

"Certainly, but in that case, you are dealing directly with science that conflicts with matters of faith and morals, and so the Church would be in a position to put its foot down."

In Pius XII's view, the evolutionary view of the origin of man's body was not proven. I haven't seen a formal papal teaching, with the same weight as Humani Generis, that concedes the opposite 5 decades later. Consequently, evolution - as taught in public schools - is contradictory to the Catholic faith in that it does not allow discussion of the alternatives (Humani Generis 36). So, I have no problem with evolution in the context Pius XII spoke of it. However, Pius XII's teaching is PRECISELY why the U.S. bishops should be beating up on the schools in this instance, not biblical literalists.

The truth is, the bishoops are pricing the average, practicing Catholic family (large families) out of Catholic schools, which are becoming more elitist as a result. Thus, they themselves are 'forcing' Catholics into public schools where the faith is undermined by the secularists who don't teach the subtleties of Catholic theological opinion on evolution. You see, the secular educrats are not as enlightened as the salaried bureaucrats on the bishops' committees.

[R. Scott]

Catholic educators need better teaching programs about evolution "to correct the anti-evolution biases that Catholics pick up" from the general society…

Yes, considering that most of the anti-evolution arguments I’ve seen here are based on century old science.

[HamiltonJay]

The Bible is God's truth revealed to man.. Does that mean that every world is 100% literal? Of course not. In revelations they spean of the 12 time 12,000... this is not a literal number of 144,000... it is the symbolic representation of the 12 tribes of Israel multiplying in abundance.

If you truly have great theological questions, go study it. With nearly 2,000 years of history, and some of the brightest minds of their ages, I highly doubt any question you have has not been asked and answered before.

[HamiltonJay]

Yes, considering that most of the anti-evolution arguments I’ve seen here are based on century old science.

That and they are generally products of fundamentalist religion factions that long ago left Catholicism.

[tjwmason]

The Bible never changes. Evolution changes constantly. Every time a new piece of evidence comes to light that disproves some long-held tenet, a brand new series of conjectures is whipped up and put into place to make it fit once more.

That is because the Bible is the plan of our salvation and the deposit of faith; whereas evolution is a scientific theory which is subject to amendment on the basis of presented evidence.

The truth about our origins is unchanging, as we explore the available evidence we can get closer to it. A better analogy than yours would be to say that there is a truth about our origins which we can explore; as we dig further and experiment further we get closer. Similarly the Bible is truth, but a comparative stage would be the early Church before the Bible's canon had been set. There people moved among the various texts, and finally the Holy Ghost inspired the Church to define the 70-odd books which we call the Bible.

[Mark Felton]

I couldn't care less about who you are my friend. If you want to remain in ignorance so be it."

But you do care, otherwise you would not have attempted to fabricate falsehoods about me.

The problem for you is not who I am but the questions I challenge you with.

I have forced you to expose yourself as someone who is ignorant about scientific reasoning, yet preaches about scientific "conclusions".

I have exposed you as someone who has a religious, emotional zealotry for Evolution.

I have exposed you as a person that does not answer scientific questions but instead attacks the character of a person. (you are the zealot chasing "heretics")

In other words, you are doing far more harm to Evolutionary theory than good. Your lack of credibility casts doubt on the credibility of evolutionary theory.

BTW: The Bible does address cross-species evolution;

"An empty-headed person won't become wise any more than a wild donkey can bear human offspring!" -- Job 11:12

[Emmett McCarthy]

And your point is...? And did I mention a "Christian version" of the origins of life? I don't remember doing so. I believe we have clear and compelling scientific evidence for adaptative changes within species. I don't see any such hard evidence for either of the two competing "theories" beyond that.

[orionblamblam]

> if I'm walking through the woods and come across a book laying on the ground, is it more reasonable to assume that an intelligent being created a book full of information or that the book naturally came into being after "random" genetic mutations over millions and millions of years.

*One* book on it's own implies an intelligent agent. A planet covered in books busilly consuming each other and available natural resources and breeding more books... that implies natural forces. Weird natural forces, maybe, but natural.

That's why the lame watch/Mustang/book analogy is just... lame. It's not well thought out, in that it does not do a good job of analogizing reality. There *is* more than one organism on the planet, you know.

[GarySpFc]

Why Kansas Catholics Opposed The Teaching of Evolution
By Jack Cashill, Ph.D.

Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs.

Willfully or otherwise, the science educators misconstrued the Pope's position. This disturbed the Catholics at Topeka to be sure, but it did not surprise them. What has surprised them, shocked them really, are the dismissive editorials by their fellow Catholics who understand the Pope's position only superficially and who understand the science educators' not at all.

For the record, Pope John Paul II and the U.S. Bishops have no objection to certain theories of evolution as long as they allow for God's creation of the world and the special creation of man. This is a shrewd posture on the part of the Pope as it allows for the Church to adapt to new scientific discoveries without a challenge to the faith.

Unfortunately, the Church's position does not wash with evolutionary biologists of any repute or ambition. They may avoid conflict with the Vatican by either ignoring or misquoting the Pope, but in fact, Catholic teaching is antithetical to their own, and they know it. A little background here is in order. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This elegant and timely work made two basic claims: One is that living things experience what Darwin called "variations" or what we call "mutations"--genetic changes that occur randomly. The second is that a process he called "natural selection" preserves favorable variations and rejects harmful ones.

The best evidence Darwin could cite for this theory was the breeding of domestic animals. These obvious changes within a species--called microevolution--no one could deny then, and no one denies today, certainly not the Church, nor the much maligned Kansas Board of Education.

The question Darwin had to ask himself--the tough question--was whether this theory could account for macroevolution, the presumed bridge from one species to another and the mechanism he thought responsible for the vast diversity of life.

Darwin and his philosophical heirs answer an unequivocal "Yes." Richard Dawkins, today's most influential evolutionist, describes natural selection as "a blind, unconscious, automatic process" that is "the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life."

That's a quote. The explanation. All life. What room does that leave for, well, say, God? Not much.

"In the evolutionary pattern of thought," said Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, "there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved."

No need. No room. And Huxley's sentiment is the rule, not the exception. The renowned biologist Stephen Jay Gould praises Darwinism as "a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution." Darwin made it possible," boasts Richard Dawkins, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

These are their own words. As to the inescapable ramifications of Darwinism, distinguished Cornell University Professor Will Provine, evolutionary biologist and neo-Darwinian, happily cites the impossibility of either free will or life after death.

The larger philosophy is often called naturalism, nature is all that there is; or materialism, matter is all that there is. In its most extreme forms, scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the terror of Nazi eugenics and the tyranny of communism. Wrote Marx to Engels of Darwin's The Origin of Species, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

Pope John Paul II has preached often against materialism and specifically so in an evolutionary context. Aware of this, the Catholics at the Topeka hearings objected not only to the undeniable connection between today's science establishment and the eugenics movement, but also to the implicit materialism of the proposed science standards themselves.

For all its harsh consequences, materialism would present a real challenge to the faith only if its own particular creation myth, Darwinism, was irrefutable. But Darwinism is hardly that. There is, after all, no evidence of existing transitional species as Darwin presumed there ought to be. None. There's no hard evidence of the same in the fossil record. Most species haven't changed at all. The major animal groups did not emerge gradually as Darwin predicted, but they exploded on to the scene. Nor did they die out gradually as Darwin said they would. Those that vanished, vanished in a geological heartbeat.

It gets worse. In one of his bolder moments, Darwin said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Darwin knew nothing of the electron microscope and cellular biology. His champion, Richard Dawkins, knows a lot. As Dawkins notes, the nucleus of each cell contains more information than all 30 volumes of the encyclopedia Brittanica put together, complex, specific and perfectly ordered.

Richard Dawkins imagines the cell as a Xerox machine, capable, he says, "of copying its own blueprints," but "not capable of springing spontaneously into existence." So picture Dawkins on the brink of infinity, pumping what Darwin called "secretions" from his barely evolved brain, trying desperately to figure how this this wonderfully complex machine came to be. His best guess? No joke: "sheer, unadulterated, miraculous luck." It must have slopped itself together, he surmises, from some imagined chemical soup.

Luck indeed, it's a task scientists have never been able to duplicate in the lab. Not to be outdone, Nobel laureate Frances Crick argues that these first primitive life forms might have come to earth, hang on, in a spaceship sent by a dying alien civilization.

In truth, neither Dawkins nor Crick have a clue where these first cells came from. Neither do their peers. Indeed, when biochemist Michael Behe searched the scientific journals looking for a Darwinian explanation, he found instead "an eerie and complete silence."

Said Darwin , "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent." One wonders how he would feel about utterly whimsical "additions" like spaceships or luck.

Still, America's public school teachers can present this goofiness in class as science but can not even address the rational possibility of a willful, intelligent creation of life. And the editorialists, even the Catholic ones, cheer on this kind of teaching, fearing to be cast among the anti-Darwinian few whom Dawkins calls the "ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked."

Ironically, the loud, spiteful resistance from the establishment bodes well for the future. It is a sign not of confidence but of confusion. It may even portend a genuine shift in the paradigm.

Richard Dawkins himself admits that "the beauty and elegance of biological design" gives us "the illusion of design and planning." But trapped by a lifetime of scornful pride and self-congratulation, he will abandon his weary materialism no more eagerly than the Soviets abandoned theirs.

The very Catholic (9 children) Michael Behe is not so trapped. "Over the past four decades," he writes in the ground breaking book, Darwin's Black Box, "modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell." "The result," he adds, "is a loud, piercing cry of DESIGN." In Behe's opinion, this observation is "as momentous as the observation that the earth goes round the sun."

Try as they might, the science establishment and their friends in the media cannot suppress this kind of news forever.

Jack Cashill, Ph.D., has written and produced an hour long documentary, The Triumph of Design and The Demise of Darwin, in collaboration with Phillip Johnson. Jack is a Fullbright scholar and a regional Emmy Award winner. See Jack Cashill News: America's Conservative Information Resource.

[dmz]

Perhaps it was the reference to your Jesuit education, and your snide comments about secularists that led to me to believe you took a Christian view of the origins of life.

If i'm incorrect, my bad.

[nmh]

God didn't use "evolution".

He spoke what He created into existance. The Hebrew also bears this out. He created in six twenty four hour days and rested on the seventh. THAT is what the Bible says. Of course you are free to believe whatever you wish.

[nmh]

LOL:

"I would suspect becuase being a Christian involves things other than believing vague creation myths as literal fact."

LOL! Creation is no "myth" and it is not "vague". It's rather clear that He created in six twenty four hour days and rested on the seventh. The Hebrew confirms this. Believe it or not.

> Why limit Him on Creation

"That's what a great many Christian evolutionists ask Christian creationists. "

Psst - there is no such thing as a "Christian evolutionist". Either you believe what He says in the Bible or you do not. The Bible does not support evolution in any manner.