EDIT: Let’s not forgot what Cardinal Schonborn has already said about Darwin:
"With this ‘Origin of Species’], his major work, Darwin undoubtedly scored a brilliant coup, and it remains a great oeuvre [work] in the history of ideas. With an astounding gift for observation, enormous diligence, and mental prowess, he succeeded in producing one of that history’s most influential works. He could already see in advance that his research would create many areas of endeavor. Today one can truly say that the ‘evolution’ paradigm has become, so to speak, a ‘master key,’ extending itself within many fields of knowledge." (
Cat Lec for 10/2/2005, re-translated for his book
Chance or Purpose)
Sorry to disappoint all you Darwin haters.
Phil P
Why didn’t you quote what the Cardinal said in the preceding and following paragraphs? Not quite an endorsement of Darwin’s theory.
< When in 1859 Darwin’s famous book The Origin of Species appeared, the basic message was indeed that he had found a mechanism that portrays a self-acting (selbsttätig) development, without the need of a Creator. As he said himself, his concern was to find a theory which, for the development of the species from lower to higher, did not require increasingly perfective creative acts but rather relied exclusively on coincidental variations and the “survival of the fittest.” Here was thus the notion that we have found a means for dispensing with individual acts of creation. >
< His success should not be attributed entirely to scientific causes. Darwin himself (but above all his zealous promoters, those who promulgated what is called “Darwinism”) imbued his theory with the air of a distinct worldview. Let us leave aside the question of whether such is inevitable. What is certain is that many saw Darwin’s The Origin of Species as an alternative to what Darwin himself called “the theory of independent acts of creation.” To explain the origin of species, one no longer needed such one-by-one creative activity.
The famous concluding sentence added to the end of the second edition of the work certainly provides a place for the Creator, but it is substantially reduced. It reads:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, all quotations translated from English are taken from the original sources)
I believe that Darwin sincerely intended this in a spirit of reverence, but it is a conception of creation that in the realm of theology we call “Deism.” In the very beginning there is an act of creation: God breathed into a seed, a single form, the germ of all life. It developed from this primeval beginning, according to the laws that he, Darwin, had endeavored to discover, describe, and formulate. No more divine interventions are required. I think that we shall have to concern ourselves with this question in particular from the aspect of faith. >