Jul 7, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In a New York Times piece published yesterday, Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christof Schonborn called “neo-Darwinian”, evolution, or the idea that there is no intelligent design behind creation, incompatible with the Catholic Church and in conflict with nature itself.
While noting that the late John Paul II accepted evolution as “more than just a hypothesis”, he clarified that, “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.”
Many, he said, mistakenly use John Paul’s undefined openness to evolution as an open door to align the Christian faith with the neo-Darwinian dogma, as he calls it, this can never be true.
Evolution, in the sense of common ancestry may be true, the Cardinal wrote, but he sees neo-Darwinism, what he describes as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” as completely false in the eyes of the Church.