Whoa, man, that’s like, heavy, man.
The article quotes Cardinal Schönborn’s 2005 interview, where he said “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process – is not”.
Yes, he said that. And yes, it was misinterpreted as support for Intelligent Design. Which is what you get when you have an Austrian cardinal who was probably unaware of what “Intelligent Design” really means in an English-speaking cultural context. When local Austrian media found out that our good old Cardinal Schönborn was being quoted as supporting creationism**, he had some clarifying to do.
What did he really intend to say?
Well, recall that Catholicism teaches (like most other Christian denominations) that there’s an all-powerful, all-present supernatural being, who caused the world to exist and who is still “there for us”, who is still guiding and influencing the world.
No one will deny the theory of gravity, but believers might still thank god if that falling piano misses them.
To the believer, nothing in the universe is an entirely unguided, unplanned process.
Disclosure: I live in Austria, was born into Catholicism, got 12 years of Catholic religious education classes at an Austrian public school. I am 100% atheist, but I still see the local brand of Catholics** as much more benign than the raving American-style evangelicals I only hear of on the internet, so I will defend them from being lumped together with the latter group.
* creationism: is generally viewed as something for crazy people here. And for Americans.
** I don’t know if this is true, but American Catholics strike me as far more conservative than Catholics elsewhere. In predominantly Catholic countries like Austria, Catholicism was always the default option, and no one expects the average church-goer, or even the average priest, to believe more than half of the official teachings. I assume that due to the longer tradition of religious freedom, Americans are more likely to just switch to a different church if they disagree.
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As someone who has had a lot of debates on evolution with fundamentalists, they actually lead to be converting to Catholicism. (That and partly due to family reasons for my kid.)
It seems the fundamentalists just lack faith. I mean an omnipotent god could start a process ~14 billion years ago, knowing the laws he put in place would lead to where we are now. THAT is true power, IMHO. They can’t seem to wrap their heads around it.
As others pointed out, the Catholics have been ok with evolution for awhile. I know Pope John Paul II had said there was too much evidence to ignore it and it didn’t go against the faith. They actually have an academy of sciences, where the Pope and clergy get educated on matters so they can make an educated decision on different topics. For example their anti-abortion stance stems from the fact we can’t really discern when one is and is not alive - when are you a human? Since we can’t determine that they err on the side of caution.
While I don’t necessarily agree with life at conception, they have a logical reason for their stance. In fact a lot of their dogma comes from reason, vs scripture, which the fundamentalists accuse them of all sorts of things for. For example the Immaculate Conception.
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I can imagine Maimonides uttering “so NOW you get it?” from his grave.
Chiming in with my usual FYI, Leibnitz was not original here, this has been standard rabbinics for a few thousand years. That is to say, there is no Problem of Evil to begin with, such an idea is by our POV just as nonsensical as “The Devil made me do it” as both violate the fundamental precept of free will.
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I dunno, my Polish Catholic ex-Mother in law seems much more hardline and conservative than Americans. I think it is a mix here. I know some places are more conservative, and while most are pro-life, there are places that are much more liberal about some issues, such as immigration, charity, gays, etc. Remember too there are factions within the church struggling for different things, such as women priests or allowing priests to marry again. I know at my local church there are a fair number of Obama stickers still on cars.
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How is God not a magician? Every time I see evidence of an ‘engineering solution’ in nature I don’t see evidence of a Grand Engineer. I see the absence of The Great Magician. If God wanted people to function they wouldn’t need a power source or a circulatory system or muscles or anything. they could be filled with peanut butter top to bottom and powered by magic.
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“If the creator didn’t need to be created, then neither did the big bang require a creator, therefore the creator is an unnecessary addition/complication…” Forget about creator for the moment, are you saying that the Big Bang requires no ancillary cause or explanation of any kind, and that the mystery of cosmological origins is now completely understood, and explained by the brute fact of the Big Bang?
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I don’t believe failquail is saying the big bang doesn’t have a cause, but rather that it wasn’t created by an intelligent being. Like if it rains today, there’s a reason why it’s raining but that doesn’t mean it’s raining by design.
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“I don’t believe failquail is saying the big bang doesn’t have a cause, but rather that it wasn’t created by an intelligent being.”
Yes, I appreciate that, but I’m trying to get to the get at the weakness of the argument. What type of thing would you substitute for an intelligent being as a possible cause/explanatory model for the Big Bang?
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This has been the Catholic Church’s position for decades. No idea why it’s getting press now.
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Can you appreciate the hypocrisy of pointing out “factual errors” that were themselves a factual error?
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Finally some sense. I guess the hardcore christians can now denounce the Pope
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Didn’t they do that in 1517?
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A traditional problem with this idea of a benevolent clockmaker God is that it contradicts the concept of free will. The whole point of the story of the Tree of Knowledge is supposed to be that people can make their own decisions. If God knows ahead of time that Eve is going to eat the apple (or Moses is going to strike the rock, or Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, or Lot’s wife is going to look back, etc etc,) because that’s how he set things in inevitable motion, then the idea of divine punishment or reward is meaningless also. You can’t “punish” a shoe for falling to the ground when you drop it.
Personally, I think this highlights the never-ending fallibility of Scripture, rather than indicting the clockmaker postulate.
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(Also, any religious system that denies free will is abdicating its role of controlling the populace. If you don’t have free will, you can do whatever the hell you want and simply blame it on God’s timeless plan.)
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It’s Big Bangs all the way down.
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Hmmm, Poland seems to be on the conservative side of the European spectrum overall. And it is so Catholic that it is hard to compare Polish Catholics with other Polish denominations.
In Austria there seems to be a pretty broad consensus among Catholics that the church is “behind the times”. Things like re-marriage after divorce and the use of contraception enjoy universal support. Where the Church actually gets involved, they’re usually pro-immigration. Abortion currently isn’t much of an issue in Austria, our “first three months or medical reasons” compromise from 1974 seems to be holding. A couple of years ago, an openly gay man was elected to the parish council in a small rural parish. With 80% of the votes. Cardinal Schönborn confirmed the vote; the pastor resigned in protest (he was from Poland, though).
But maybe my impression stems mostly from the fact that Catholicism is the “default religion” in Austria; 70% of Austrians identify as Catholic, but less than 10% of those will actually attend church on any given Sunday (even less among the younger generation). And those 10% are not the most conservative 10% of Austria. Views on gay marriage seem to correlate much more strongly with age than with church attendance (but church attendance strongly correlates with age, so it’s hard to tell).
So if you believe that “there is a God”, or at least you aren’t entirely convinced that there is none, you will probably be Catholic in Austria. I get the feeling that in large parts of America, that niche is filled by other denominations.
He still isn’t accepting that humans evolved from other life forms, though. From the article: “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment”. If human beings were “created”, that’s not evolution.
Are you telling me that the secret of the universe is that it’s A MICHAEL BAY FILM?
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Yup.
Contemplate this truth at your own peril.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
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