God and Evolution: Fundamental Questions of Christian Evolutionism

Introduction: Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Place of Pathology

Introduction Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Place of Pathology [Science and faith] are two distinct autonomous trajectories, but by their very nature they are never on a collision course. Whenever some type of friction is noted, it is a symptom of an unfortunate pathological condition.1 John Paul II Over the course of time, the question of the harmonious unification of scientific theories of anthropogenesis with Christian faith in a Creator who directs the processes of evolution has received new and more insightful answers. This development is possible thanks to new discoveries concerning both cosmic and biological evolution. The introduction of new concepts and subtle distinctions allows one to avoid those oversimplified contradictions of the past, in which God was supposed to act on nature only through extraordinary interventions while the application of deterministic explanations was supposed to exclude definitively the possibility of appeal to any kind of teleological categories. To those changes one must add the desire, characteristic of the pontificate of John Paul II, for interdisciplinary 1 1. “Faith and Science: Gift of God,” Address of Pope John Paul II to the international scientific community during a visit to Ettore Maiorana Research Centre (8 May 1993), published in The Pope Speaks 39 (1993): 5: 297. dialogue among the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology. A document especially important for this topic is the letter of the Holy Father to the director of the Vatican Astronomical Observatory, George Coyne, S.J.2 Ernan McMullin, the well-known Notre Dame philosopher of science, calls the document “the most important Roman statement on this topic since Pius XII’s address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951.”3 In biological circles, the Papal message on the theory of evolution, addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996, evoked even stronger reactions. Many prestigious periodicals in theoretical biology gave their attention to that message, emphasizing that the teachings of John Paul II cannot in any way be brought into agreement with the position of creation science or with various versions of contemporary Biblical fundamentalism which defend the literal interpretation of Holy Scripture.4 In itself the rejection of fundamentalisms does not lead to the elimination of all controversies associated with the theory of evolution . The quarrel between methodological naturalism and ontological naturalism appears as a fundamental line of division. The former is a necessary condition for conducting science according to the methodology worked out in the period of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. The latter expresses a powerful metaphysics, which its proponents attempt to introduce under the guise of new scientific theories showing the mechanisms of evolution. That metaphysics is the expression of 2. John Paul II, “Message to the Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, June 1, 1988,” in R. Russell, W. Stoeger, and G. Coyne, eds., Physics , Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1988), M7 and M8. 3. E. McMullin, “A Common Quest for Understanding,” in R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger, and G. V. Coyne, eds., John Paul II on Science and Religion: Reflections on the New View from Rome (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1990), 53. 4. The Quarterly Review of Biology devotes an entire issue—number 72 (1997)—to the Papal evaluation of the theory of evolution as well as to commentary on it from the pens of Edmund Pelegrino, Michael Ruse, and Richard Dawkins. Only Dawkins is generally critical in his remarks. On the other hand, Ruse concludes his evaluation with the statement: “Were I a Catholic, I would positively welcome Darwin as an ally” (p. 394). 2 Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Place of Pathology an atheistic fundamentalism which suggests that the biological elaborations of evolutionism definitively exclude the existence of God. It is noteworthy that, in the realm of physics, such arguments were still tolerated in the scientism of the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless , no one at present draws the conclusion that our knowledge of the structure of the atom or even of the theory of superstrings is an argument for the non-existence of God. Meanwhile, certain theses of evolutionism introduce changes in our picture of culture and history too deep to allow us to accept them with the same equanimity with which we accept changing information about the values of cosmological constants. Expressing the humanistic resistance to evolutionistic...