|An Excerpt From "Truth and Tolerance"
ROME, 1 SEPT. 2005 (ZENIT)
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's July 7
editorial in the New York Times entitled "Finding Design in Nature"
provoked a flurry of reactions, both supportive and critical.
Requests have begun to arrive in Rome for Benedict XVI to make some sort
of clarification on the Church's stand regarding evolution.
The following text, delivered in 1999 as part of a lecture at the
Sorbonne in Paris by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI)
and subsequently published in the 2004 book "Truth and Tolerance"
(Ignatius), can give some clue as to the Holy Father's thoughts on the
question. The length of the paragraphs was adapted here slightly for
* * *
The separation of physics from metaphysics achieved by Christian
thinking is being steadily canceled. Everything is to become "physics"
again. The theory of evolution has increasingly emerged as the way to
make metaphysics disappear, to make "the hypothesis of God" (Laplace)
superfluous, and to formulate a strictly "scientific" explanation of the
world. A comprehensive theory of evolution, intended to explain the
whole of reality, has become a kind of "first philosophy," which
represents, as it were, the true foundation for an enlightened
understanding of the world. Any attempt to involve any basic elements
other than those worked out within the terms of such a "positive"
theory, any attempt at "metaphysics," necessarily appears as a relapse
from the standards of enlightenment, as abandoning the universal claims
Thus the Christian idea of God is necessarily regarded as unscientific.
There is no longer any "theologia physica" that corresponds to it: in
this view, the doctrine of evolution is the only "theologia naturalis,"
and that knows of no God, either a creator in the Christian (or Jewish
or Islamic) sense or a world-soul or moving spirit in the Stoic sense.
One could, at any rate, regard this whole world as mere appearance and
nothingness as the true reality and, thus, justify some forms of
mystical religion, which are at least not in direct competition with
Has the last word been spoken? Have Christianity and reason permanently
parted company? There is at any rate no getting around the dispute about
the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental
philosophy and about the exclusive validity of the positive method as
the sole indicator of systematic knowledge and of rationality. This
dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a
willingness to listen, by both sides
something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent. No
one will be able to cast serious doubt upon the scientific evidence for
micro-evolutionary processes. R. Junker and S. Scherer, in their
"critical reader" on evolution, have this to say: "Many examples of such
developmental steps [microevolutionary processes] are known to us from
natural processes of variation and development. The research done on
them by evolutionary biologists produced significant knowledge of the
adaptive capacity of living systems, which seems marvelous."
They tell us, accordingly, that one would therefore be quite justified
in describing the research of early development as the reigning monarch
among biological disciplines. It is not toward that point, therefore,
that a believer will direct the questions he puts to modern rationality
but rather toward the development of evolutionary theory into a
generalized "philosophia universalis," which claims to constitute a
universal explanation of reality and is unwilling to allow the
continuing existence of any other level of thinking. Within the teaching
about evolution itself, the problem emerges at the point of transition
from micro to macro-evolution, on which point Szathmary and Maynard
Smith, both convinced supporters of an all-embracing theory of
evolution, nonetheless declare that: "There is no theoretical basis for
believing that evolutionary lines become more complex with time; and
there is also no empirical evidence that this happens."
The question that has now to be put certainly delves deeper: it is
whether the theory of evolution can be presented as a universal theory
concerning all reality, beyond which further questions about the origin
and the nature of things are no longer admissible and indeed no longer
necessary, or whether such ultimate questions do not after all go beyond
the realm of what can be entirely the object of research and knowledge
by natural science. I should like to put the question in still more
concrete form. Has everything been said with the kind of answer that we
find thus formulated by Popper: "Life as we know it consists of physical
'bodies' (more precisely, structures) which are problem solving. This
the various species have 'learned' by natural selection, that is to say
by the method of reproduction plus variation, which itself has been
learned by the same method. This regress is not necessarily infinite." I
do not think so. In the end this concerns a choice that can no longer be
made on purely scientific grounds or basically on philosophical grounds.
The question is whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning
of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The
question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and
necessity (or, as Popper says, in agreement with Butler, on the basis of
luck and cunning) and, thus, from what is irrational; that is, whether
reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an
ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether
the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian
faith and of its philosophy remains true: "In principio erat Verbum"
at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now
as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority
of reason and of rationality. This ultimate question, as we have already
said, can no longer be decided by arguments from natural science, and
even philosophical thought reaches its limits here. In that sense, there
is no ultimate demonstration that the basic choice involved in
Christianity is correct. Yet, can reason really renounce its claim to
the priority of what is rational over the irrational, the claim that the
Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself?
The explanatory model presented by Popper, which reappears in different
variations in the various accounts of the "basic philosophy," shows that
reason cannot do other than to think of irrationality according to its
own standards, that is, those of reason (solving problems, learning
methods!), so that it implicitly reintroduces nonetheless the primacy of
reason, which has just been denied. Even today, by reason of its
choosing to assert the primacy of reason, Christianity remains
"enlightened," and I think that any enlightenment that cancels this
choice must, contrary to all appearances, mean, not an evolution, but an
involution, a shrinking, of enlightenment.
We saw before that in the way early Christianity saw things, the
concepts of nature, man, God, ethics and religion were indissolubly
linked together and that this very interlinking contributed to make
Christianity appear the obvious choice in the crisis concerning the gods
and in the crisis concerning the enlightenment of the ancient world. The
orientation of religion toward a rational view of reality as a whole,
ethics as a part of this vision, and its concrete application under the
primacy of love became closely associated. The primacy of the Logos and
the primacy of love proved to be identical. The Logos was seen to be,
not merely a mathematical reason at the basis of all things, but a
creative love taken to the point of becoming sympathy, suffering with
the creature. The cosmic aspect of religion, which reverences the
Creator in the power of being, and its existential aspect, the question
of redemption, merged together and became one.
Every explanation of reality that cannot at the same time provide a
meaningful and comprehensible basis for ethics necessarily remains
inadequate. Now the theory of evolution, in the cases where people have
tried to extend it to a "philosophia universalis," has in fact been used
for an attempt at a new ethos based on evolution. Yet this evolutionary
ethic that inevitably takes as its key concept the model of selectivity,
that is, the struggle for survival, the victory of the fittest,
successful adaptation, has little comfort to offer. Even when people try
to make it more attractive in various ways, it ultimately remains a
bloodthirsty ethic. Here, the attempt to distill rationality out of what
is in itself irrational quite visibly fails. All this is of very little
use for an ethic of universal peace, of practical love of one's
neighbor, and of the necessary overcoming of oneself, which is what we