Last year I started this thread about the possibility of the Catholic Church backing the ID movement.
Recently the issue has come to the forefront again.
If the Pope does endorse this nonsense what ramifications for the scientific community would occur? Commentators on EWTN are jumping for joy that “Darwinism” is going to be declared as contrary to the faith, they believe it is a done deal . I see dark days ahead if the Catholics join with the fundamentalist Christians in denying evolution it will be a disaster for Western science.
Something tells me that what the Italians call Intelligent Design isn’t what the American Fundamentalists do. And something tells me that the Pope is slightly smarter than to declare true something that can be proved false. Especially if he’s honest about his faith.
But, hey, just my opinion. Remember, the Jesuits aren’t stupid, either. And they’re Catholics.
Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin did a lot of work trying to match up the Scientific Truth of evolution with the Faith-based Truth of the bible (caps used to avoid tons of coding). I’ll try to recap his ideas; anybody who wants to know more about them just look his books up.
That’s what we talk about when we speak of Intelligent Design. (I find the notion a bit too human-centric for my taste but I’m explaining Teilhard’s ideas, not mine). Like one of those huge puzzles made of domino pieces, what God did was set things up and then kickstart them, but He hasn’t been moving each atom by hand. The Catholic Church has the notion that the design is actually a lot more free-moving than the dominoes example*
TdC went on to speculate about what comes later, in what’s known as the “Omega Point Theory”:
That’s the part where I stop reading, I’m afraid, but Mom loves it; she used to be able to expound on it for hours.
*Free will exists, it’s not just “the Hand of God moving everything”; “oh, what can one do” is not an acceptable answer in the face of disaster. The Church sees the existence of evil as a necessity: in order to allow us our freedom, God had to allow a second option to exist, He gave us advice/our own deductive abilities to figure out healthy from unhealthy but when we insist in “redefining” it instead (“making ourselves like God”) we screw up. We have the choice between doing what we know is right - or doing something else. A lot of the things that we perceive as evil are of our own making (war), can be solved by us (famine, pestilence) or aren’t evil (death).
Well, the folks at EWTN are only somewhat on the liberal side from Mel Gibson, so I would expect them to act that way. But Joe/Benny Ratzinger is more of an intellectual than even they think, and he would be loath to revert a policy that the beloved and nearly-sainted John Paul II himself set forth. What his administration will push and has already started expressing is that whatever your scientific research, you *must not * conclude “ergo, there is no need for God”.
Like E-Sabbath said, what European Catholic intellectuals call “Intelligent Design” is apparently NOT what the American Fundies do.
BTW, lest anyone think Nava’s quote from Teilhard de Chardin is official doctrine, it actually is one of various Catholic interpretations – Teilhard himself was in life, and is considered still, something of an “alternative” theologian/cosmologist by the Church establishment (specially since some of the science on which he based his theories has since been overrode by later findings).
It seems to me that the underlined statement is profoundly antiscientific. What it says to me is that no matter what the evidence, there are some things that you must not think. That’s not the scientific approach. Science goes wherever the evidence leads. Individual scientists and even large groups of them might very well refuse to act that way and there will be angry debates in the community over some things but in the end if the evidence points in a direction, that’s the direction that will be followed.
Without being a Catholic, I think it’s more along the line of thought (used already at the time of Galileo, but not accepted by the Church then) “The Bible tells people how to get into Heaven; science tells about heaven.” In other words, because Faith in God is outside the realms of science, science can’t answer it; but it would be a mistake to think that if we can explain the mechanism for how humans evolved without needing a placeholder god, we can therefore dismiss God altogether - that is actually a straw man (God). God can still have created humans in a mythological sense (giving the breath of life = soul), that could never be explained by science.
To use another example, science can measure the wavelength of colour blue, and explain why the black sky looks blue to us, and why a sunset looks red. But science can’t explain why we feel the color blue, or how it feels like to watch a sunset. It’s outside the scope of science.
And I hope that Ratzi/Bene will have enough sense not to jump on the Fundies wagon.
Yours is a possible and reasonable explanation of what was meant, but that’s not what the statement I was talking about said. What the statement said was that there are certain things you are not allowed to think, no matter what.
I would like to point out that “never” is a damned long time and I wouldn’t foreclose any possibility as to what we will be able to do in the future. Even scientific “laws” are subject to change. The law of conservation of energy is an assumption based on experience. I don’t think it will happen but it’s entirely possible that it will be discovered in the future that it is merely a special case of an even more fundamental principle and doesn’t hold under all circumstances. Ergo it seems a little audacious to claim that we will never be able to explain mental processes like consciousness, vision and such.
And I think the Pope must be extremely careful in statements to avoid being regarded as having jumped “on the fundies band wagon.” A wide acceptance of the belief, true or not, that the Catholic Church supports Intelligent Design can easily be a tremendous block to early education in evolution which is a basic foundation for modern biology.
Of course it’s “antiscientific”, Simmons. But the thing, that approach is about the Church’s position on a “matter of faith”, namely that “God is Behind it All”. A Catholic biologist can be as Darwinian as can be, but at the end of the day if she is to remain a Catholic in good standing, she has to subscribe to “I believe in One God the Father Almighty…” etc.
How does that differ in principle from the Young Earth Creationists position of “I don’t care what the evidence says, the Bible is the inerrant ‘word of God’ and any contrary evidence must be reinterpreted to fit that assumption?”
One interpretaion of the Church position might be that all evidence must be interpreted in light of the assumed existance of God, as defined by the Church. So, at bottom, and no matter how much surface bowing is done to the scientific method, the Church is anti-science.
All who believe that God is behind it all believe in itelligent design but not necessarily Intelligent Design. It seems to me that if religions believe that science is not qualified to make pronouncements about religion. That the two are forever and ever separate, then religion shouldn’t make any statements about science because religion isn’t qualified to do so.
So, I don’t think that the Church, or any church, should adopt an official religious position regarding a scientific question, like the theory of evolution.
If by that you mean the Church will never say, “Well, it looks like this whole God thing is just a bunch of hooey. Oh well, we had a couple good millenia,” then yes, you’re correct. How exactly could any faith possibly function without insisting that humans exist because God wanted them to, and for no other reason?
The Catholic Church is the largest educational institution in the world. How exactly should they have no opinion on this?
Well, they should separate the religious education from the scientific education. If religion and science are entirely separate domains then in biology the best available biology should be taught with no religious content whatever. Or, alternatively, if it insisted that the religious viewpoint on life processes is to be taught in biology then the scientific evidence regarding religion should be taught in the religion classes.
And, by the way, I never said the Church shouldn’t have an opinion. What I said was they should not adopt an official religious position if religion and science are claimed to be entirely separate fields of study.
To do so is equivalent to having a thermodynamic opinion about the validity on the proof of a mathematical theorem.
Because when a Catholic Scientist, researching evolution all day long, acknowledges his personal faith with “I believe in One God…”, he isn’t required to ignore the evidence collected during the day. As I said, I’m not a Catholic, and part of the problem is that the average Joe Catholic has a simpliefied, and therefore rather distorted straw version of what his own faith requires him to believe. The priests who studied theology and bible science, are much better able to reconcile the facts of science (which of course are accepted) with their personal faith. I don’t know if Catholics are still required to believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, but they certainly aren’t required to interpret the Bible literally as an explanation for how science works. No Catholic is required to believe in Young Earth; several stories in the Bible in religion class are taught as myth - not literal true, but on a higher/different level.
And yes, usually the Church in Europe tries to keep science and religion/faith seperate - they don’t fight against evolution in the schools. That’s a special US phenomenon.
Not really. The Church’s position is that it is opposed to following Richard Dawkins in looking at the scientific evidence and drawing a philosophical position that claims there is no god. Dawkins may be right or wrong, but he has provided no more “proof” of his beliefs than the church has of its beliefs. The position of the church is that if one makes the jump from the scientific analysis to a philosophical position based on that analysis, then to remain in the church, one must not let the that jump be swayed exclusively by non-scientific and atheistic philosophical principles.
The science stays in the realm of “what are the mechanics?” and has no bearing on the theological or philosophical discussion.
Two points I would note regarding the overall discussion:
Cardinal Schönborn, whose odd Op-Ed piece in the New York Times sparked this lartest round of discussion, is reputed to have backed off his declarations once the scientific position of the church was called to his attention. I have not seen his actual follow-up statement, so that may or may not be true.
Pope Benedict has called for a discussion of the topic to clarify the various views of the church. Since most of the people whom I believe will attend are genuine scientists, I am not sure that we have much to fear from the conference.
As noted in The Guardian’s article quoted in the OP, Dominique Tassot is an anti-evolutionist who is promoting his own agenda. According to the National Catholic Reporterinterview with Tassot (.pdf),
So, Tassot is coming from a private group that is generally (but not exclusively) Catholic, composed of about half scientists (with no idea how many are biologists and how many are in non-biological fields), who have joined to push a personal agenda to oppose evolutionary science. Judging by Tassot’s comments in the interview, he will be eaten alive by the actual scientists who hold positions in the Vatican. (Heck, I doubt he could last a week on the SDMB.) I was amused to see him arguing that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences be excluded from the discussion because they were “not Catholic.” If Pope Benedict actually follows that line of thought (something that seems improbable to me), then I suppose we might have cause to worry.
Now, this is not to say that the conference will not issue some declaration that might be seized upon by the forces of Creationism, but the earliest Church statements accepting Darwin’s hypothesis date to the 1870s; Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical that noted no conflict between Darwinian scientific inquiry and church doctrine in 1950, and Pope John II issued a statement that evidence for Darwin’s Theory made it “more than a hypothesis.” It will be difficult for some band of Creationists to overturn those declarations.
I’m pretty sure that was John Paul II. Unless the statement was made in the context of defrocking reconverted Arian priests, but I’m not sure how Darwin has any bearing on that issue.
I certainly agree that Dawkins’ popular work is unpersuavsive. However, the statement that I was talking about was “What his (the Pope’s) administration will push and has already started expressing is that whatever your scientific research, you must not conclude ‘ergo, there is no need for God’.” This precludes any possibility of an effect from future findings that might bear on the existence of God. This stunts free inquiry which I think is the best path to follow.
I have a feeling Benedict. Scientists they may be at this conference, but generally when scientists sit down to write about their faith, as opposed to science, they start mushying up the science. Francis Collins is a good example. It’s not good enough for the Catholic church to be neutral on the issue and merely say that God is a matter of faith: they are commited to the view that the application of reason demonstrates the existence of God. I don’t expect this much more conservative Pope to dance around that issue in deference to scientists in the same way that previous one did. I think we’ll see a rejection of YEC, but an endorsement of some of the mushier pronouncements of the ID movement attacking evolution as biased by “naturalism” and so forth.
It turns out that this is not even an official conference to discuss the issue. It is more of a high-level bull session to let a few guys kick around the ideas associated with Creationism and Evolution: Pope to debate evolution with former students
I’m not sure what aspect of scientific inquiry will ever be able to address the existence of God. The church sees God as transcendant and wholly outside the physical; no discovery of any discipline is likely to endanger that belief. The issue only comes up when someone wants to make a jump from physical science to philosophy; there is no barrier to the inquiry of physical science, at all.