Cardinal Schönborn and the Catholic Church's Position on the Creation-Evolution Controversy

Abstract

I present a controversy surrounding the cardinal Christoph Schönborn's op-ed article in New York Times, titled "Finding Design in Nature". In his paper, Schön-born challenges the claim that pope John Paul II accepted neodarwinian evolution as a possible method of God's creation of life forms and, especially, human beings. Moreover, cardinal says that neodarwinism contradicts Christian doctrine of creation. In Schönborn's view, neodarwinism excludes the possibility that there is a real design in nature and this is contradictory to the Catholic Church's stand that this design could be and is recognizable by human reason. I argue, just like cardinal Schönborn, that neodarwinism actually is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of creation. I find also that his views, as well as some of the recent utterances of pope Benedict XVI, echoes the claims of intelligent design theory's proponents, who are skeptical of neodarwinism's validity and argue that they formulated scientific methods of detection of design in nature. Therefore, one can have a valid suspicion that these two leading hierarchs of Catholic Church attempt, though not explicitly, to embrace intelligent design theory as an appropriate view of origins for Christians in contrast with the currently dominating scientific view of biological evolution.