Astronomer Argues with Vatican over Evolution

ROME, August 9, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In recent weeks, a highly placed Vatican Cardinal rattled the liberal media establishment by making statements to the effect that the Church cannot accept an essentially atheistic understanding of evolution. Christoph Cardinal Schonborn wrote in the New York Times that the neo-Darwinian understanding of evolution, that of random mutations and development of species, is incompatible with belief in the Christian God.

Now the UK’s liberal Catholic magazine, the Tablet, has run an article by a priest astronomer, the director of the Vatican Observatory, who takes Schonborn to task for his defence of the Catholic understanding of who God is. George Coyne, a liberal Jesuit, has attempted to refute Schonborn and in doing so, has revealed the foundational bias of his – and the media’s – secularist mindset.

In his article, Schonborn wrote that the “defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.”

The mainstream media and the overwhelmingly secularist scientific community responded with howls of outrage. Particularly vexing to them was the Cardinal’s refutation of the popular misconception that in 1996, John Paul II had changed the Church’s stand to allow for Darwin’s theory that mere chance, not God, guides the development of life.

Schonborn said the “defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.”

“This,” the Cardinal says bluntly, “is not true.”

Coyne writes in the Tablet, that John Paul’s statement was “epoch making” in which, Coyne claims, John Paul declared to the the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that “evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.” He claims that it ended the Church’s argument against the atheistic and secularist philosophies of science.

The news that the Vatican’s astronomer has claimed that the Church accepts “the principle of chance” in the development of life has made headlines all over a mainstream media (MSM) that is dedicated to establishing secularist ethics. The MSM pounced on the dispute as an example of the Catholic Church’s hostility to rationality and science; one of the oldest and most popular anti-Catholic canards.

In the online edition of the Independent, the gleefully hopeful headline runs, “Evolution Dispute Now Set to Split Catholic Hierarchy.” The Independent’s Michael McCarthy called it a “conflict at the highest level of the Catholic Church,” and said that Cardinal Schonborn’s remarks had “provoked alarm among many scientists and liberal Catholics around the world.”

This “split,” however, exists mostly in the fond imaginings of the media. An objective observer can see that the argument of a secularized American Jesuit in favour of the prevailing atheism and against the existence of God and an ordered universe is unlikely to be taken with much seriousness within Catholic hierarchical circles.

Michael McCarthy implies that there is further evidence that the liberal establishment’s worst fears about the election of the “hardliner” Ratzinger to the papacy are about to come true. He writes, “Some fear that the cardinal would never have published such a controversial article in such a prominent medium without his personal approval. But nothing will be known for certain until the Pope speaks for himself.”

But Benedict has already addressed the issue as Pope prominently mentioning it in his homily at his inaugural Mass. He said, “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

The adherence of most of the scientific, as well as the medical, establishment to an essentially atheistic outlook, is an absolutely necessary foundation of modern medical ethics that allows a host of practices, including abortion, in vitro fertilization, cloning and embryo research, that are abhorrent to believers in the Judeo/Christian God. High level de-populationists and eugenicists within and without the Catholic Church are also believers in Darwinian ideology as giving credibility to their dark schemes against the sanctity and divinely ordered nature of human life.

The eagerness with which the MSM supports and promotes internal dissent within the Catholic Church is a testament to the credibility of traditional Christian teaching on the meaning, purpose and worth of every human being and the danger this teaching poses to the media’s aggressively secularized worldview.
 

Read George Coyne’s article in the Tablet:

“Evolution Dispute Now Set to Split Catholic Hierarchy”

Darwinian Evolution Incompatible with Catholic Faith says Cardinal and Author of Catholic Catechism