A reader comments on Belovsky, Darwin, and Catholicism

Regarding my post, from a few days ago, about this essay by Notre Dame's Professor Gary Belovsky, "Darwinism and Catholicism Should Be Compatible," a friend, MOJ reader, and Ph.D. candidate in Theology, Harold Ernst, writes:

I am afraid I do not share your sense that [Belovsky's] essay is helpful -- indeed, I think it only exacerbates the apparent rift between the "scientific" and "theological" perspectives on the matter.  Schonborn and Belovsky (and various proxies) are really talking past one another, such that each iteration more inflames indignation than engenders understanding.  It seems to me that what is called for on both sides is somewhat greater intellectual humility, and an awareness of the limits one's discipline and proper area of competence.

As a theologian, I would simply suggest that the Church should have no particular view, much less objection, to legitimate evolutionary science (other than to support its research, as in all fields of knowledge pursued according to their proper methods, as a salutary expression of human reason in search of truth).  But of course the Church must issue a caution when, either overtly or in the popular imagination, scientific theories are taken as demonstrating theological conclusions that can in no way be established by scientific methods (e.g., that there is no transcendent Creator who remains immanently active in the created order).  Distinguishing legitimate evolutionary science from the metaphysical assertions entailed by a philosophy of reductionistic materialism is therefore strictly necessary.

The rub is that scientists and theologians are rarely speaking the same language when referring, for example, to the "mechanics" of micro-evolution.  Belovsky protests that Cardinal Schönborn would have us deny what we can observe," while Schonborn is concerned that scientists (perhaps even inadvertently) are *asserting what they have not, and cannot, observe.*  That is, that what appears as "random" and "chance" within the physical realm in which biology properly functions, does not require that theology abandon as obscurantist the "wish to see God intimately involved in each and every event."  In a theology of creation where God is affirmed as the universal causa causarum, the Creator is everywhere operative in all that exists, insofar as it exists.  But the transcendence of this Creator is such that divine immanence throughout the created order does not preclude the real proper causality of creatures, and so what really is a chance occurrence within the physical realm can nevertheless be part of the divine plan for creation (what is at stake here, of course, is the doctrine of divine providence).

Thus the title of Belovsky's essay is spot on, but much of his reasoning is misdirected or worse.  In addition to the failure to distinguish between physical and metaphysical claims, you are quite right to question his description of the distinction between science and religion.  Perhaps understandably, given the subtlety of these questions and the unfortunate history of their consideration, Belovsky appears to want to "privatize" religion as much as possible so that there is no risk of it interfering with science.  Thus he suggests that faith is at least a-rational (if not irrational), that no knowledge of God is available from the material realm (a view rejected at

Vatican

I, precisely against fideism), and that religion should restrict itself to questions science cannot answer (like "how did the 'big-bang' creation of the universe get its start?").

But the Church decisively rejects this radical separation.  Theology, it is sometimes said, is the result of a confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason.  Faith is itself a kind of knowledge, and while it reaches to what is above reason it is never against reason (suprarational, not irrational).  And faith assertions make claims about reality as such, how things *really are* and not just how we "believe" them to be.  Thus theology is limited merely to considerations of how the universe "got started," as in Deism, but encompasses a properly theological account even of evolutionary development, drawing upon the legitimate findings of biological science.

In short, I worry that the Belovsky essay only confuses these question still more, because it reflects the poor state of catechetical training even among otherwise well-educated Catholics.  And that is the aspect of this debate that I am concerned with, quite apart from its possible part in the "culture wars" and all that.

Rick