VATICAN LETTER Sep-24-2004 (920 words) Backgrounder. With photo. xxxi
Creative tension: omnipotence of God vs. dynamism of a universe
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – A recent Vatican document analyzed evolution in the light of faith, stepping into an area that has long been a religious and scientific minefield.
The document, prepared by the International Theological Commission and made available in mid-September, examined man’s relationship with the created world.
Why bother to get into evolution? Because, as the text said, Catholics have a responsibility to “locate” the scientific understanding of the universe within a Christian vision of creation.
That’s an assignment that challenges even the experts, however.
“That’s a very big task, and a very complicated issue. It’s not settled yet, by any means,” said U.S. Jesuit Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, who has closely followed the evolution debate.
The theological commission operates in conjunction with the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation, and its document is remarkable in several ways.
**First, it accepts as likely the prevailing tenets of evolutionary science: the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in a “big bang”; the earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago; all living organisms on earth descended from a first organism; and man emerged some 40,000 years ago with the development of the larger, human brain.
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**Second, the document does not argue for a “divine design” in specific processes of evolution. While acknowledging that some experts do see a providential design in biological structures, it says such development might also be “contingent,” or dependant on chance.
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**“True contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence,” it said.
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**In other words, God’s plan may have allowed for all kinds of variables to play out. Or, as the document put it, “any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so.”
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But is the emergence of man one of these chance results? Or did God play creationist in this instance?
That’s the crux of the current debate, said Father Coyne.
“Most people would pose the question this way: ‘Did we come out of a necessary process or a chance process? If it’s a necessary process, God did it. If it’s chance, why do you need God?’” Father Coyne said in an interview.
“But I think the question itself is wrong. It’s not just necessity or chance, it’s also opportunity. We live in a universe that statistically offers so many opportunities for the life-building processes to work together,” he said.
“In a universe so fertile in opportunity, it was inevitable – I say inevitable, not necessary – that human beings emerged,” he said.
Pope John Paul II made headlines in 1996 when he told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that the theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis” and had been widely accepted by scientists.
But in opening a dialogue on the subject, **the pope insisted that man was not just a link in the evolutionary chain. He said the emergence of man marked an “ontological leap … the moment of transition to the spiritual” that cannot fully be explained in scientific terms.
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