Recent Catholic views on evolution

Several prominent Catholics have been in the news recently talking about evolution.

The Catholic News wrote:

The influential Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna has suggested that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

In the New York Times op-ed the Cardinal wrote:

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.

New York Times 7th July 2005

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, said that Catholics can believe in evolution - as long as it's understood to have been guided by God rather than chance.

Two prominent Catholic scientists Kenneth Miller, author of Finding Darwin's God and former Dominican Francis Ayala have now written to Pope Bededict XVI to ask him clarify the situation.


Perhaps unsurprisingly, some journalists have resuscitated the conflict model and trotted out the Galileo myth:

In closing, we should note that it is not just Darwin with which the church has difficulty. The church still can’t make up its mind about Galileo. Here is a quote from Benedict XVI when he was still just Cardinal Ratzinger and the head of the Inquisition: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” And the Sun goes around the Earth.

Thomas Riggans