There has been a consistent pattern in these discussions. Science is given immediate and definite credibility, doubts are ignored or debunked by force of words.
No matter how often Church documents like Human Persons Created in the Image of God or Humani Generis are brought up, the argument for perceived loopholes is brought up. Or the broken record repetitions begin, i.e. evolution is a fact.
This is a Catholic forum. The Catholic perspective should be preeminent. But God is just a footnote. The explanation revolves around how great the mind of man is and how much new, new knowledge we (meaning scientists) now have. It doesn’t appear to matter to those who repeat the same tired phrases about the glory of evolution and how “beautiful” it is but give no glory to God, who is added as a kind of sugar coating so that Catholics might more easily swallow the evolution “pill.”
Even Cardinal Schoenborn writing in the publication First Things has noticed the resistence of the defenders of evolution against the open and honest asking of questions. In the New York Times article, Finding Design in Nature, the Cardinal tells us Pope Benedict is not a satified evolutionist and that much of what passes as science today is actually ideology. But the defenders of evolution do not engage the substance of those comments lest their theory fall into the tiniest level of disrepute. This ‘united front’ approach fits an ideological movement better than it does real scientific inquiry.
Over the last 40 years, the Catholic Church has seen fewer people going to Church and gradually abandoning their day to day lives as Christians, replacing it with listening and acting according to the secular world.
Finally, those who profess science here are not simply saying, here is some information that we’d like to share with Catholics. On the contrary, if they meet any resistance, the strategy is to attack Genesis, the identity of Adam and Eve, Noah and the global flood. Whereas on the one hand they state science is a search that goes wherever the evidence may lead and always subject to revision, these theological matters and their debunking by science are set in concrete by them. No, none of it happened, they tell us. You’ve got it all wrong.
Well, are we, as Catholics, to listen to the Church which can and does guide us in our everyday lives, including providing us with a rational guide to viewing science and so-called modern developments, or do we listen to those who profess that the words of science are fact and self-evident, and especially regarding certain “stories” in the Bible, “proof” that science (though subject to change, paradoxically) is absolutely right about the Bible? Because that is what’s going on here. We’re right - you’re wrong.
Just like Christopher Hitchens (author of God Is Not Great) said in the National Catholic Register, he would be inclined to doubt the evidence of his own eyes if he saw a miracle. Why doubt? Why not express a scientific curiosity at least before thinking, no, I don’t believe that?
So regardless of the supposed mountains of interpretations, Pope Benedict, Cardinal Schoenborn and the Catholic Church in general is reaffirming the fact that science is not and cannot be the whole answer. That it operates with a strict naturalistic bias (which is fine and appropriate for observation and gathering facts), and that too many scientists have decided that the purely naturalistic explanations represent the whole of reality and reject God in the process. The atheists are now seizing the opportunity to say - it’s not just personal disbelief anymore, we’ve got science on our side and you can’t argue with the facts.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, heaven and earth may pass away but Christ tells us, my word will not pass away. That all things that are to be accomplished will be accomplished. And that this current manner of thinking and living is talked about in the Bible. We are living through a time when men will no longer endure sound doctrine.
God bless,
Ed
