Darwin Day
Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin. Even Google is celebrating, turning their trademark logo into a nature scene.
The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy,has been sending me mail about their big blowout today in honor of Darwin. Who are they? A group “dedicated to building, educating, and nurturing a diverse community of Humanists, agnostics, atheists, and the non-religious at Harvard and beyond.” For the past few academic years, the chaplaincy has actively been engaging the Harvard community, philosophers, scientists, scholars and the media over the question “what is humanism?”, with lectures, seminars and discussions. They currently refer to humanism as “an evolving tradition, not bogged down in dogma but rather responsive and responsible to new knowledge and human experience.”
The Church and the STOQ project are reaching out to engage that same crowd in the rich teaching of “the new humanism.” Lost in the divisive public debates, centered on celebrity atheists, is the view the Church holds of how God relates to the world in creation and providence. This view fully respects the competence of science to explain the world, while at the same time allowing us to treat the scientific understanding of the world as partial knowledge of a much deeper mystery of creation and providence.
When the media get an inkling of this, they can get excited. Like the New York Times did here.
“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L’Osservatore Romano…
Advocates for teaching evolution hailed the article. “He is emphasizing that there is no need to see a contradiction between Catholic teachings and evolution,” said Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, professor of biology at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest. “Good for him.”
There’s a false and unnecessary tension between science and religion, and the Church is working harder now to point that out.
In the Osservatore article, Dr. Facchini wrote that scientists could not rule out a divine “superior design” to creation and the history of mankind. But he said Catholic thought did not preclude a design fashioned through an evolutionary process.
“God’s project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction,” he wrote.
So in this Darwin Year, this debate not only continues, it’s getting a lot more interesting as the scholars and scientists, philosophers and theologians work together to see what each contributes to the full understanding of man’s origins, and his destination.
