Darwinian Evolution Incompatible with Catholic Faith says Cardinal and Author of Catholic Catechism

LifeSiteNews.com ^ | 07.11.05

[Coleus]

On July 7, after years of media-generated confusion, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, a theologian who helped author the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, wrote in the New York Times clarifying the Church’s understanding of human origins.  Since 1996, the world’s secular media have claimed that Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as being “more than a hypothesis.” The remark, taken out of context, established in some minds that the Catholic Church was ready to abandon its adherence to the notion of a personal God who created life, the universe and everything.  In his article, Schonborn said, that the “defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.”

“This,” the Cardinal says bluntly, “is not true.”

Schonborn unequivocally establishes that the Catholic Church does not endorse Darwinism. “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.”  Cardinal Schonborn, a close associate of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, continued, saying, “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”

The New York Times, never missing an opportunity to bash prominent Catholic prelates, has suggested that Schonborn has changed his tune regarding the legitimacy of Darwinian evolution. But Darwinism, the idea that life sprang and developed into its myriad forms by means of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” has never been supported by Catholic teaching.

As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that it is Catholics teaching that all human beings in some way are biologically descended from a first man, Adam. “The faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all,” Pius wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis.  Two days after the Cardinal’s article appeared, the New York Times followed up with an interview with Schonborn in which he reiterated that he had been encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI to continue to refine Catholic teaching on evolution.

Read Cardinal Schonborn’s essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html
Read New York Times coverage of scientific reaction (free registration may be required):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?pa...

[Vive ut Vivas]

When I look a painting, I know there is a painter.

You know this how?

[AntiGuv]

Oh, and perhaps you should go back and double check what we're talking about. We are talking about this statement from OK:

Either God created the universe or the universe created itself. Which is more fantastic?

As I pointed out, whatever answer works for God works for the universe. So, it is no less "fantastic" to think that the universe created itself, or that the universe is eternal and uncreated, than it is to think that God created itself, or that God is eternal and uncreated.

Whatever the answer it doesn't matter. It will work equally well for the one as for the other, in terms of rational credulity.

Well, except for the fact that the universe demonstrably exists.

[Varda]

"Anyone who believes a magical deity created decided to create human out of mud is certainly not following modern science."

Well... except for stories like this -

Study suggests life sprang from clay
WASHINGTON (Reuters) --
" Science backed up religion this week in a study that suggests life may have indeed sprung from clay -- just as many faiths teach..."

[AntiGuv]

Uh yeah, which is what I said that you took exception to. Why? I have no idea.

Science doesn't operate by faith. I took exception to any role whatsoever for faith in science. However, I free acknowledge that if one considers faith to be a satisfactory answer then one can equally have faith in the universe springing out of nowhere or in God springing out of nowhere. Neither is more incredible than the other if one looks beyond the fact that God is rationally indistinguishable from a phenomenon that doesn't exist.

[jwalsh07]

Like I said, I have no idea what you took exception to. Creationism is a faith based belief. Believing the universe created itself is a faith based belief. You disagree?

[AntiGuv]

No, I agree with that. But science does not hold that the universe created itself. That was a false dilemma set up by a random freeper. Science holds that we do not know how the universe originated.

[divine_moment_of_facts]

"The second law of thermodynamics (entropy) dictates that an infinite amount of organization (hence, design) existed in the singularity of the Big Bang.

Life is organization. From prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells, tissues, and organs, to plants and animals, families, communities, ecosystems, and living planets, life is organization, at every scale. The evolution of life is the increase of biological organization, if it is anything. Clearly, if life originates and makes evolutionary progress without organizing input from outside, then something has organized itself. Logical entropy in a closed system has decreased. This is the violation that people are getting at, when they say that life violates the second law of thermodynamics. This violation, the decrease of logical entropy in a closed system, must happen continually in the darwinian account of evolutionary progress. Most darwinists just ignore this staggering problem. When confronted with it, they seek refuge in the confusion between the two kinds of entropy. Entropy [logical] has not decreased, they say, because the system is not closed. Energy such as sunlight is constantly supplied to the system. If you consider the larger system that includes the sun, entropy [thermodynamic] has increased, as required.

It is surprising that mixing entropy and biology still fosters confusion. The relevant concepts from physics pertaining to the second law of thermodynamics are at least 100 years old. The confusion can be eradicated if we distinguish thermodynamic from logical entropy, and admit that Earth's biological system is open to organizing input from outside."

That outside source is God. ;)

[jwalsh07]

OK.

[divine_moment_of_facts]

http://www.near-death.com/physics.html

[Candor7]

He doesn't want to admit that all those Roman Catholics who use birth control , who practise abortion, and who are oragnizing demographic warfare against the USA from Mexico, are particpating in their own natural selection process to strengthen the human species.

[bvw]

Pennsylvania's Federal Judge-Dictator Jones will surely rule that this Catholism is not a religion.

[buffyt]

Statue of Giordano Bruno in Campo de Fiori, Rome, Italy.

This monument was erected in 1889, by Italian Masonic circles, in the site where he was burned alive for opposing the Catholic church authority.
Giordano Bruno (Nola, 1548–Rome, February 17, 1600) was an Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist. Bruno is known for his system of mnemonics based upon organized knowledge and as an early proponent of the idea of an infinite and homogeneous universe. Burned at the stake as a heretic, Bruno is seen by some as a martyr to the cause of free thought.

One of his "sins" was that he said that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. He was called a heretic and burned alive. We were in Rome in July and saw the statue in the Camp di Fiori. He committed other "sins" and some of them were pretty outrageous. But saying that the earth revolved around the sun, he was correct on that one. At the time the Catholic chrch called that heresy.

[AntiGuv]

Anyhow, as I've noted before, if one could "prove" the existence of God from a rational standpoint then by definition faith would be irrelevant. You would then need faith to believe in God no more so than you need faith to believe that 1+1=2.

[AntiGuv]

I am not sure what Dawkins believes, but I know that what I believe is that we do not know how the universe originated. I am content with that because there is no rational alternative and I'm not interested in faith. So far as I'm concerned, if God does exist then nothing can be other than what God wants it to be anyhow, so if God wishes for me to believe in him then at the appointed time I will. Until then, I will bebop along as I am.

[ExtremeUnction]

I'm a Catholic, and Darwinism happens.

[RobbyS]

I don't think we know HOW the universe originated, but we do know that it DID, at least that is as certain as anything else that science knows. Aristotle did not believe that the universe had a beginning in time but that all motion somehow has a beginning. Scientists today have concluded otherwise, based on greater evidence than the Greeks has access to. But it is not HOW but What or WHO brought it into being that is the question here. Dawkins, by the way, has no more to say about the matter than Thomas Huxley did. BTW, he called himself agnostic on the issue, but that was a term he coined to distinguish hims self from the clerics who had dominated the scientific socities of the time and were sometimes called "gnostics."

[RobbyS]

Darwnism happens, but so does communism. And your point is?

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

ping. (if you didn't already get pinged).

[Tanniker Smith]

the notion of a personal God who created life, the universe and everything.

42!

TS

[Tanniker Smith]

Seriously, the inclusion of the phrase "life, the universe and everything" makes it impossible to take the rest of it seriously.