Did the Pope Bless Darwin?
A Sidebar in John Mark Reynolds’s “Afraid of Reason”
by Terry Mattingly
No one will ever accuse Pope John II of being a master of the media-friendly “sound bite.” Thus, his highly nuanced theological pronouncements often produce two quite different, or even contradictory, waves of information. First come the headlines and video clips, as reports crunch complex texts into clusters of words. Then, days later, the pope’s actual text circulates via fax machines and the Internet.
A case in point: John Paul’s recent speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences inspired headlines such as “John Paul II Embraces Darwin” and most experts declared that the Vatican had endorsed evolution and taken a belated step into modernity.
Once again, the pope had delivered an address that defied easy editing. Also, it should be noted that one popular quotation—in which he supposedly said that “new knowledge leads us to recognize that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis”—does not appear in many translations of his text.
Instead, he said: “Rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based. Hence the existence of materialist, reductionist and spiritualist interpretations.”
John Paul went on to reject materialism and any evolutionary theory that says humanity is the product of a random, uncaring cosmos. In other words, he attacked the philosophy that forms the dividing line between today’s scientific establishment and those who insist that the creation contains evidence of a Creator.
“Theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man,” he said. “They are therefore unable to serve as the basis for the dignity of the human person.”
This presents a problem, since the National Association of Biology Teachers has officially defined evolution as an “unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process . . . that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.”
John Paul obviously didn’t endorse “evolution” in that sense of the word, noted Phillip E. Johnson, author of the controversial book Darwin on Trial and a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Darwinists who read the full papal address will quickly realize that this pope is not their ally.
“To the materialists who dominate the scientific culture,” said Johnson, “any theory of evolution involving a non-material spiritual element is as unscientific as outright creationism.”
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