[asa] Review of Schornborn's new book

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Review of Schönborn\'s new book
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/columnists/20080113_A_Catholic_theologian_on_God_and_science.html

A Catholic theologian on God and science

By Frank Wilson

Chance or Purpose:
Creation, Evolution,
and a Rational Faith
By Christoph Schönborn

Ignatius. 181 pp. $19.95

During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist
tracts, notably Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher
Hitchens' God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Less
attention was paid to a spate of books by scientists who happen also to
be believers - biologist Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian
Faith, astronomer Owen Gingerich's God's Universe, and geneticist
Francis Collins' The Language of God.

Though the media buzz has tended to focus on the science-vs.-religion
angle, it is worth noting that only four of the aforementioned books are
by scientists and three of those argue against such a conflict. That
said, it is also worth noting that none of the books is by a theologian,
and Dawkins' book suffers - as does Hitchens' - not only from a
relentlessly hectoring tone, but also from a tenuous understanding of
both philosophy and theology. (In fairness, Dawkins seems to have read
the Bible pretty thoroughly and is openly appreciative of the Authorized
Version's glorious language and literary significance.)

Christoph Schönborn's Chance or Purpose offers a look from the
theologian's side. Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, studied
theology under Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Together, they
edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Schönborn's new book may be said to have evolved out of an article of
his that appeared in the New York Times in July 2005 headlined "Finding
God in Nature," in which the cardinal seemed to place Catholic doctrine
uncomfortably in alignment with intelligent design theory.

In his book, however, he goes out of his way repeatedly to differentiate
between evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how
species come about and evolution as an ideology maintaining that natural
selection has rendered all religious faith untenable.

In doing so, he says a number of quite interesting things, among them
this: ". . . nowadays, whenever people talk about 'design' and a
'designer,' they automatically think of a 'divine engineer,' a kind of
omniscient technician. . . . Here, in my view, lies the most profound
cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the 'intelligent
design' school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a
constructor of machines, but a Creator of natures."

Schönborn does not regard "the methodical exclusion of divine
involvement" - sometimes called "methodological atheism" - as amounting
necessarily to a denial of God's existence. It is, rather, "a
straightforward method of science [which] cannot assume the existence of
a 'clockmaker' who intervenes. [It] is looking for mechanisms and sets
of conditions that can explain the way things happen."

What the theologian's perspective contributes most to this debate is
that the term God, as theologians understand it, simply cannot be an
object of scientific inquiry: God "is not just one cause among others. .
. . He does not shape something that already exists. . . . [His] act of
creation is not in time. . . ."

Science studies nature, and God is not a part of nature.

What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which Schönborn is
sympathetic to the views of the controversial Jesuit paleontologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose 1960 book The Phenomenon of Man
(boasting a foreword by no less an evolutionist than Julian Huxley) gave
a Christological spin to evolutionary theory (Christ "becomes the
visible center of evolution as well as its goal, the 'omega-point' ").

Linking evolution to Christ may sound bizarre, but it is central to the
point of Schönborn's book, evident in its title. Need evolution be
thought of as a matter of pure chance? Or might it be purposeful?

There is much to be said for Teilhard's attempt to harmonize faith and
science. The prologue to the Fourth Gospel refers to Christ as the
Logos. Schönborn points out that the Greek word logos, while it does
mean "word," can also mean "essential determining factor." In this
respect, it has much in common with the Chinese word Tao; in fact, the
Chinese translation of the Fourth Gospel begins with the phrase, "In the
beginning was the Tao. . . ."

The idea that a living principle of intelligence and personality inheres
in being itself and is essentially connected to a supernatural
intelligence and personality that transcends being is fundamentally what
authentic religion is about.

Institutions and doctrines and even revered texts, to say nothing of
flawed human beings, may obscure and confound that insight - and indeed
often have, and with grave consequences - but it is no less profound and
worth upholding for that.

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," the
Psalmist tells us. "But," as D.H. Lawrence noted, "it is an even more
fearful thing to fall out of them."

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Received on Mon Jan 14 13:00:47 2008