One hundred and forty-six years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, it remains widely controversial whether the modern theory of evolution (neo-Darwinism) can be reconciled with the world’s three great monotheistic religions. In particular, there is still widespread dissent among Christians—both within and between denominations—about whether neo-Darwinism is truly consistent with their faith. The debate stems both from differing interpretations of scripture and, more subtly, from disagreement about what the theory really implies about the ultimate causation of life and its development. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, which rejects fundamentalist interpretations of the Creation Story, opposition to evolution has recently sprouted. In the July 7, 2005 issue of The New York Times, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, published an opinion-editorial (op-ed) in which he claims that neo-Darwinism is in no way compatible with Christian faith. Two days later, The New York Times printed another article about Schönborn’s position, entitled, “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution.” Despite the sensationalist title, Schönborn’s letter hardly redefines the Church’s traditionally supportive stance on evolution, although it does make several simultaneously shocking, disappointing, and misleading assertions that require a response. Schönborn misunderstands the modern theory of evolution itself, and even worse, he misrepresents the Catechism of the Catholic Church and downplays the viewpoint of the late, much beloved John Paul II.

In his letter to The New York Times, Schönborn writes:

…defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance—or at least acquiescence—of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith. But this is not true… Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.

Cardinal Schönborn’s assertion represents an intellectual and theological break with the Catholic Church’s long-standing recognition of Darwinian evolution. Even in a 1950 encyclical written expressly to attack contemporary heresies, Pope Pius XII acknowledged the legitimacy of evolutionary research:

…the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that … research and discussions… take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

John Paul II, in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, went even further, saying:

…[Pius’] encyclical Humani Generis considered the doctrine of “evolutionism” a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis… Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.

Schönborn’s op-ed completely ignores the implications of Pope Pius’ encyclical, and it discounts John Paul’s 1996 comments as “rather vague and unimportant.” But John Paul’s viewpoint was neither vague nor unimportant. In his address, John Paul explicitly called evolution a unified theory, a framework for explaining a series of independent observations, which has been corroborated by the convergence of results from several disciplines. Furthermore, John Paul realizes that there are numerous philosophical interpretations that often accompany the theory, including the so-called materialist and spiritualist ideologies, and that the real distinction lies in the interplay between philosophy and science. Following Pius XII, John Paul asserts that the only condition necessary for uniting evolution with Catholicism is the admission that—whatever the origins of the physical body—the human spirit is created by God. He rejects only those neo-Darwinian ideologies that regard the soul as an emergent property of living matter. John Paul goes on to propose “an ontological leap” between man and his evolutionary predecessors, a discontinuity associated with the appearance of souls in human beings. He admits that his leap seems to contradict notions of physical continuity in the universe, but he points to the fundamental differences between science and theology, between the physical world and the supernatural. The methods of science are inherently incapable of describing events like “the moment of transition to the spiritual,” as John Paul calls it, and the lessons about continuity drawn from the physical sciences cannot be applied to the supernatural. John Paul’s vision of the physical evolution of man, combined with the mystical infusion of his soul by the Lord, is both beautiful and logically consistent. John Paul developed a coherent theological system for linking evolution with Catholic dogma, and he did it in the most germane of settings: in an assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a group of elite scholars charged with informing the Vatican about modern scientific developments.

Almost unbelievably, and despite complaining that John Paul’s 1996 statements were vague and unimportant, Cardinal Schönborn refers instead to comments the late pope made eleven years earlier to a general audience. Nowhere in the statements quoted in Schönborn’s letter does John Paul explicitly mention the compatibility of evolution with Catholicism; in fact, his remarks are more a denunciation of materialism than a commentary on evolution. Continuing his inexplicable trend of alluding to loosely related material, Schönborn cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative compilation of Catholic dogma. But, again, the catechism on creation does not even mention the theory of evolution, although it does reject deism and materialistic philosophy.

If anything, the catechism suggests a way to soothe the common complaint that evolutionary theory seems to rule out a causal role for God in the development of life. In the catechism we read:

And so we see the Holy Spirit, the principal author of Sacred Scripture, often attributing actions to God without mentioning any secondary causes. This is not a “primitive mode of speech,” but a profound way of recalling God’s primacy… God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creatures’ co-operation… For God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of his plan.

The idea that the Church acknowledges here is that God acts through secondary causes, which can be free and stochastic, but that the existence of those secondary causes does not lessen His ultimate authority. If the Lord allows His living creatures to interactively contribute to His plan, we should all the more expect Him to grant the same privilege to the physical, logical, and mathematical rules that characterize His universe. We can simply assert that, very broadly, all of the physical, biological, and mathematical mechanisms enumerated by neo-Darwinism are secondary causes implemented, and potentially swayed continuously, by God. Allowing biological organisms to evolve (more or less) freely and stochastically according to the logical underpinnings upon which God built the universe is perhaps more elegant than rigidly controlling Creation. Moreover, it is false to assert, as Schönborn does, that neo-Darwinism necessarily implies that evolution is “unplanned and unguided.” Evolution is a scientific theory that does not, and cannot, contradict the idea that the mechanisms of evolution follow immediately and necessarily from the logical structure of a universe created by an unmoved Mover. The very construction of a universe whose rules lead to Darwinian evolution implies that the consequences of evolution are not strictly “unplanned.” Nor does the theory preclude the possibility that natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow are mechanisms, or secondary causes, that God uses (directly or indirectly) to implement His plan.

Cardinal Schönborn has fundamentally failed to recognize the notion John Paul alluded to in 1996. The question is not whether the major mechanisms of evolution really occur; they almost certainly do. The issue is how theology and philosophy relate to the theory. The crucial task is to distinguish between the scientific theory of evolution and the different ideological adornments that so often shroud the underlying theory.