{"id":5729,"date":"2005-07-07T22:55:44","date_gmt":"2005-07-07T22:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/evolving.html"},"modified":"2005-07-07T22:55:44","modified_gmt":"2005-07-07T22:55:44","slug":"evolving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/evolving.html","title":{"rendered":"Evolving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t ask me why, but Cardinal Shonborn in the NYtimes on Intelligent Design, etc.<\/a><\/p>\n

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EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," 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. <\/p>\n

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. <\/p>\n

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.<\/p>\n

….Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The New Republic asks a bunch of conservative pundits their views on Intelligent Design and how evolution should be taught in public schools<\/a><\/p>\n

The link requires registration, but I’ll just go ahead and tell you that most of them say yes to the "Do you believe in evolution" question, and those that don’t say something along the lines of I don’t want to say. Most, as well, don’t give much credence to Intelligent Design.<\/p>\n

This is one discussion that usually drives me bats, being as unnuanced and uniformed as it is. The theory of evolution is far more than adaptation and survival of the fittest, or however the popular mind seeks to characterize it.  The materialism and randomness at the heart of the theory must<\/em> be dealt with by theists, who do their faith no credit by simply saying, "Oh, God could have started it all." At heart, the Darwinian theory of evolution and traditional Judeo-Christian theism are a much harder fit than many people think.<\/p>\n

That said, I’m not for teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. What I am<\/em> for is a more honest instruction in the theory of evolution – acknoweldging the problems, the gaps and the intelligent, scientifically-based challenges to it. One could do this, I’d think, without espousing Creationism. Not that the hysterical Darwinists would want you to think that, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t ask me why, but Cardinal Shonborn in the NYtimes on Intelligent Design, etc. EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance – or at least acquiescence – of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEvolving - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/evolving.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Evolving - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}