The New Year is a time for new beginnings. Its significance goes beyond personal resolutions and is connected with the religious values of beginnings, of birth and renewal.
As Christians, we look to Christ to make all things new. But man's original beginning, his origin, is also important and much disputed these days. Cardinal Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, deems this "beginning" so important that he has devoted a series of catechetical lectures on the topic of creation and evolution at his cathedral. Creation and evolution have come to represent two radically different explanations of our origins. Evolutionism (note the "ism") claims to have no need of any God or Creator. And so we have two clashing stories competing to be "The Story" that will determine man's understanding of himself.
Cardinal Schönborn set off a firestorm a little over a year ago when he published the article "Finding Design in Nature" in the New York Times. Schonborn subsequently clarified that his intention was not to make a scientific argument, nor a theological argument, but a philosophical one. He said his essay was "designed to awaken Catholics from their dogmatic slumber about positivism in general and evolutionism in particular." He wants Catholics to wake up to the largely ideological nature of modern science. He specifically objects to the tendency, even among Catholics, to accept the tenets of scientism through a kind of dualism, which Schönborn understands as a "habit of thought in which physical reality is conceived of according to the reductive claims of modern science (which is to say, positivism), combined in a mysterious way with a belief in the immaterial realities of the human and divine spirits as known only by faith (which is to say, fideism)."
This view concedes the whole realm of human experience to the authority of science and relegates spiritual things to the level of pure fantasy or revelation. On the contrary, Schönborn is concerned to emphasize that the Church has always proclaimed that man's reason, unaided by faith, can know of the reality of God the Creator and His providence. In other words, the reality of God, and therefore religion, is rooted in human experience, not just in divine revelation. And if it is rooted in human experience, it is also possible that it could be found in that kind of experience with which science deals.
That debates about evolution are ideological in nature is exemplified by last year's decision by a federal judge in Pennsylvania who ruled that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement was religion and could not be considered science. Besides the ridiculousness of a court deciding what can be considered science and what can't, the judge proved too much. Not that long ago, cosmology was shaken by a story about the beginning of the universe called the "big bang theory." Like ID, it was resisted and ridiculed, not so much because it didn't have anything going for it, but because of its religious ramifications.
By the judge's reasoning, the inflationary view of the universe should not be considered science because there are obvious religious implications to the fact that the universe was not always here. The big bang theory must be religion because the theory was developed by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest, who was obviously trying to impose the biblical creation story on the universe. But this is absurd; the big bang theory is accepted by nearly all scientists today, and it is irrelevant to the theory's scientific status if Lemaitre was inspired by Genesis or not. And if he was inspired by Genesis, it was precisely this inspiration that helped him to discover the origin of the universe, while it was the materialist prejudice that was blinding scientists to discovering it. But those prejudices still prevail in the scientific world. The possibility of design in nature is dismissed as religion simply because of its ramifications, or because some of its advocates are religious.
But real science will continue despite all efforts by judges to define it or atheists to tell us what science can imply and what it can't. Science is, above all, a pragmatic enterprise; it is spurred on by whatever it happens to find useful, and no one will be able to stop teleology from coming back to biology with a vengeance if it proves to be more reasonable, more stimulating and more fruitful. What happened in the beginning affects us today and tomorrow, and so it is crucial that we understand our true origins.
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