For whatever reason – flavor-of-the-month journalism, dwindling readership or election backlash – the mainstream media has decided that there is some value in publishing opinion pieces – emphasis on opinion – that denounce, renounce or, one way or the other, call into question the validity of evolution or that present creationism – or its gussied-up, prettier sister, intelligent design – as a competing theory to evolution.
The New York Times, for example, published on its august opinion page – in July – the religious musings of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on the incompatibility of evolution with Church doctrine.
Never mind that the conclusions reached by Schönborn -- a former pupil of Pope Benedict XVI -- seemed to contradict the pronouncement made by Pope John Paul II in 1996, that acknowledged that "new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis."
And far be it for me – in the wake of so much medieval fury – to mention that God’s own astronomer, Fr. George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory and professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, rebutted Cardinal Schönborn’s claim, accusing the Austrian prelate of ““darken[ing] the already murky waters” in the relationship between Church and science.
Writing in The Tablet, the official Catholic magazine of the Catholic Church in England, Fr. Coyne, a Jesuit priest, argued that even the most random occurrences of evolution do not contradict the notion of a God creator, declaring, “God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution.”
Not to be out-religioned, on Tuesday, USA Today – the Weekly Reader of adult newspapers – asked its enlightened readers to turn out the lights of reason, forget everything they ever learned about science, and swallow the soporific rants of a state senator from Utah, one D. Chris Buttars, whose credentials on the subject are a BS degree in Marketing and Economics from Utah State University. (I didn’t know Utah had a State University.)
I won’t assume that Senator Buttars is Mormon – lest I be accused of religious profiling – and I won’t make any references to godly underwear. Oops! I just did.
At least Cardinal Schönborn had some claim to religious authority – albeit spurious and suspiciously tainted by self-interest. Don’t forget he is a former star pupil of the Pope, who grants those cushy jobs at the Vatican. By the way, Fr. Coyne might not want to quit his teaching gig in Arizona.
Did I mention that Buttars is a Republican AND a lifetime member of the Rotary Club International? Or that he was born on April 1st? There’s something relevant in there somewhere. But all this talk of creationism has caused my brain to atrophy.
In 333 words, Buttars offers nothing scientific – in fact, nothing cogent – to refute evolution or to bolster any argument in favor of intelligent design, which he also refers to as divine design – also known as the older, not-so pretty sister of intelligent design – a term that was first coined by an 18th-century English theologian named William Paley, whose writings Darwin discovered while himself a theology student at Cambridge, where Paley had studied – and later lectured – a half century before Darwin.
On a sober note, it merits mention that Darwin did not begin scientific life as an atheist who set out to disprove the existence of God. On the contrary, he was a religious man who – through years of study and observation – merely arrived at the conclusion that science disproved creation as it was proposed in the Old Testament, which explains why Darwin considered himself an agnostic, not an atheist.
But back to Buttars. (Consider that a gratuitous alliteration and not a butt joke.) What begins as a thinly veiled assault on atheists and their attempt to remove God from the classroom, morphs – by the last paragraph – into the ridiculous and untenable conclusion that “evolution is really about the determined drive by activists to eliminate any reference to an intelligent power in the universe.”
Really? Some people might say that creationism – or divine design – is an attempt to eliminate any sign of intelligence from the universe.
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