Monday, July 11, 2005
Evolution Tussles
Getting into it over evolution seems to be the topic of the month at St Blogs, here and on other web sites. Cardinal Schönborn's op-ed last Thursday caused dismay and concern. The NY Times dug a little deeper on Sunday.
"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."
Cardinal Schönborn does need to read a bit more than the Discovery Institute material. I have no problem with a cardinal weighing in on an important matter of science and public debate, but for such opinions to be taken seriously, a thorough grounding in the disciplines at hand are essential. Discovery touts the book (and now the video) The Privileged Planet as serious stuff. I read the book a few months ago, and would largely agree with Amy Coombs' assessment from Astronomy magazine last December. Gonzalez and Richards do muster a wide range of scientific insights, and while I'm generally convinced of the notion that the Earth is nearly unique in the universe, I thought the book was somewhat lightweight, harping too much on the notion that our ability to make practical science observations has somehow come out just right.
I found some of the cardinal's opinion piece to be lacking, especially:
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.
As I understand it, evolution favors life that adapts optimally to its environment. Human beings can certainly guide and plan their fate to some extent, at least in the physical universe. Some scientists might consider randomness as part of the equation. Either it is a fact or it isn't. If species began with small populations susceptible to random natural acts, then it is hard to deny an element of the random in evolution.
Genetics tells us that all living human beings had a single male ancestor. Genetics was not my favorite college subject, and I'm willing to concede competence to those who say this common father existed. Was this man ever near death? Did he have a sense of praying to God? Could that have saved him and enabled him to father children who populated the world? Such questions are beyond the realm of science. A scientist looking at the natural facts might see on the surface that it was sheer good fortune than human beings didn't die out on the African savannahs. A scientist of faith might attribute that fortune to God's protective hand. I would too. But attributions are not science, simply because they cannot be verified by observation of the physical universe. But that doesn't make God's hand of protection a matter beyond fact.
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.
This is a big stretch for the cardinal. Design is hard to prove; I don't see how it can be said to be "real," at least from the scientific view. If Intelligent Design is true, the debate, by definition, has moved off the science square and into the lap of the "soft" sciences. Science would have nothing to say about evolution if God decided to tweak DNA every few generations until he arrived at Adam and Eve. I think we can say that much of evolution has a direction, namely optimum adaptivity. That's how human beings genetically engineer their animals and plants of choice.
Multiverses (parallel universes in which every possibility exists) are very much in the hypothesis stage, and not terribly relevant to the evolution debate. If they exist, God has a reason for them. But you don't begin with the premise that since "I find them incompatible" the Church finds them so, therefore God does too. This kind of backwards reasoning has tripped up Church leaders in the past. Like the best scientists, theologians need to confront the facts of the universe as they are discovered, affirm that God's creative hand was in it, then deal with the aftermath of theology, finding meaning for the person of faith and guiding the faithful from that point.
People tell me Cardinal Schönborn is a great intellect. But wise leaders know when to step back from disciplines of which they have a scant or middling grasp. Why did the cardinal need to run his essay through a think tank? I'd have a higher respect for the man if he were to have submitted an opinion piece directly to the Times editors. If need be, consult his advisors in paleontology and cosmology ahead of time, then formulate a coherent and original opinion from there. Running an essay through the Discovery Institute looks plain bad. A smart person wouldn't have done it, no matter how much they knew about evolution and faith.
