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Cardinal Schonborn has been delivering a series of catechetical lectures on Creation and Evolution since last October, in large part as a response to the controversy raised by his articles for the New York Times and First Things.
The third lecture in this series, “He created each thing according to its kind,” has just been translated into English. The first and second lectures are available through our online texts section (cardinalschonborn.com/texts.html)
"He created each thing according to its kind"
Third catechesis by Christoph Cardinal Schonborn on December 4, 2005 in the cathedral of St. Stephan in Vienna. Translated by Prof. John F. Crosby.
In the second catechesis we dealt in general with our faith in God as creator: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” According to this faith, all that exists owes its being to the sovereign act of the creator, who does not have to create. We profess this in the Creed when we profess our belief in the one God, the Father and Creator of heaven and earth.
But things get more difficult as soon as we try to approach the matter more closely and ask what all of this means concretely. According to Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible, God created everything “according to its kind.” Does this mean that God performed for each kind a distinct act of creating? This was the belief for centuries, into the 18th and 19th century: the different kinds are unchangeable and each is created separately by God. The idea of a “transformation of kinds” arose in the 19th century: the kinds have gradually developed from the simplest beginnings to the highly complex mammals and to man; the kinds are not unchangeable and there are good natural explanations for the way in which they have come into being.
Darwin’s main work is called The Origin of Species, which I repeat is an epoch-making work, a classic, even if there is much in it that can be criticized. At the end of the Introduction to the work Darwin sums up as follows his main concerns and the core of his theory: I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification. (Darwin, The Origin of Species, Modern Library edition, p. 14)
After struggling honestly and intensely with his earlier, biblically-based view that, as he put it, “each kind is separately created,” Darwin broke with it. In a letter to his friend, Joseph D. Hooker, he wrote in 1844 that “it is like confessing a murder” to give up the idea that the natural kinds are created as fixed and unchangeable by God, and to develop in its place the idea of the kinds emerging in a very natural way without “any particular creative acts of God.”
This is the dramatic situation in which Darwin went public with his ideas and had tremendous success with them. Many say today that his theory is no longer just a theory but rather a fact. Some react in an overly sensitive and irritable way if anyone calls Darwin’s theory into question or even just asks questions about it. The debate of the last months has shown clearly that there is still plenty of room for questions and that it is necessary to allow questions to surface. It has also shown that critical questions are raised not only by quarrelsome folks or “narrowminded fundamentalists,” but also by serious scholars probing and searching for truth. In doing this they are performing a real service to the objective issues, for nothing is worse for science than to prohibit questioning and searching.
Today I want to make a bold attempt: I want to examine the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, searching not for its scientific teaching, for it is surely not a scientific text in the sense of modern natural science, but searching for the fundamental message that engages our critical reflection and is thus important for the dialogue with science.
**Read the rest of this lecture: **
stephanscom.at/edw/katechesen/articles/2006/01/24/a10066
The third lecture in this series, “He created each thing according to its kind,” has just been translated into English. The first and second lectures are available through our online texts section (cardinalschonborn.com/texts.html)
"He created each thing according to its kind"
Third catechesis by Christoph Cardinal Schonborn on December 4, 2005 in the cathedral of St. Stephan in Vienna. Translated by Prof. John F. Crosby.
In the second catechesis we dealt in general with our faith in God as creator: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” According to this faith, all that exists owes its being to the sovereign act of the creator, who does not have to create. We profess this in the Creed when we profess our belief in the one God, the Father and Creator of heaven and earth.
But things get more difficult as soon as we try to approach the matter more closely and ask what all of this means concretely. According to Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible, God created everything “according to its kind.” Does this mean that God performed for each kind a distinct act of creating? This was the belief for centuries, into the 18th and 19th century: the different kinds are unchangeable and each is created separately by God. The idea of a “transformation of kinds” arose in the 19th century: the kinds have gradually developed from the simplest beginnings to the highly complex mammals and to man; the kinds are not unchangeable and there are good natural explanations for the way in which they have come into being.
Darwin’s main work is called The Origin of Species, which I repeat is an epoch-making work, a classic, even if there is much in it that can be criticized. At the end of the Introduction to the work Darwin sums up as follows his main concerns and the core of his theory: I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification. (Darwin, The Origin of Species, Modern Library edition, p. 14)
After struggling honestly and intensely with his earlier, biblically-based view that, as he put it, “each kind is separately created,” Darwin broke with it. In a letter to his friend, Joseph D. Hooker, he wrote in 1844 that “it is like confessing a murder” to give up the idea that the natural kinds are created as fixed and unchangeable by God, and to develop in its place the idea of the kinds emerging in a very natural way without “any particular creative acts of God.”
This is the dramatic situation in which Darwin went public with his ideas and had tremendous success with them. Many say today that his theory is no longer just a theory but rather a fact. Some react in an overly sensitive and irritable way if anyone calls Darwin’s theory into question or even just asks questions about it. The debate of the last months has shown clearly that there is still plenty of room for questions and that it is necessary to allow questions to surface. It has also shown that critical questions are raised not only by quarrelsome folks or “narrowminded fundamentalists,” but also by serious scholars probing and searching for truth. In doing this they are performing a real service to the objective issues, for nothing is worse for science than to prohibit questioning and searching.
Today I want to make a bold attempt: I want to examine the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, searching not for its scientific teaching, for it is surely not a scientific text in the sense of modern natural science, but searching for the fundamental message that engages our critical reflection and is thus important for the dialogue with science.
**Read the rest of this lecture: **
stephanscom.at/edw/katechesen/articles/2006/01/24/a10066