Reason is...

The Bow of the Question:
Creation and Evolution
Cardinal Schönborn criticized ideological Darwinism and Protestant creationism, and spoke of reason’s capacity to recognize God from the sign of creature

by Marco Bersanelli

“Nothing concerns us more greatly than man’s fundamental questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going?” With these words, Christoph Schönborn opened his talk on “Reason and Evolution” in a jam-packed auditorium at the Rimini Meeting. There was a great deal of expectation, after a year of intense debate on the theme in Italy and in the world, especially because it had been the Cardinal of Vienna himself who contributed to lighting the fuse of the discussion on the international scene, with his July 7, 2005, New York Times article entitled, “Finding Design in Nature.” In his now-famous piece, Schönborn seemed to support the thesis of the Protestant-inspired neo-creationist movement called “Intelligent Design” (see Traces, Vol. 8, No. 1 [January] 2006). At the Meeting press conference, Schönborn admitted that perhaps his language on that occasion had been a bit “rough hewn,” but he said he was far from regretful for having written it in such a way and having unleashed the controversy, because with such a topic, “nothing is more damaging than immobilism.”
The fact is that those in Rimini who expected to hear Schönborn launch some kind of anathema against evolution were disappointed. The Cardinal clarified that the Catholic Church does not identify herself with creationistic positions that claim to find in the Scriptures a literal description of the history of the world, and that it is not possible to expect an answer to the question on the origin of the design of creation from research operating in rigorously scientific terms: “Rather, it is entrusted to man inasmuch as he is a being that asks and thinks, and is capable of wonder.” Human reason is greater than scientific reason, and human reason in its entirety is entrusted with the possibility of recognizing the Creator from the sign of [the existence of His free human] creature. God preferred not to impose on man the constraint of a demonstration, but wanted to submit to the risk of acknowledgment by a free creature.

Error of perspective
Scientific discoveries continue to reveal more convincingly the profound order inherent in the structure of the universe, of living organisms, even to the apex, the human being. All this contributes to drawing and aiming the bow of the inevitable question of man at the origin and meaning of reality, a question that, as Schönborn said, “is part of man and his reason.” But this does not mean that God can be subjected to laboratory analysis to demonstrate His existence, starting with the phenomena that we observe in nature. God cannot be treated like a force that participates in the organization of the world on the same level as the force of gravity or nuclear forces. Basically, this is the neo-creationists’ error of perspective: certainly not that of having emphasized the rational evidence of a design in the world of living things and their evolution, but of claiming to be able to demonstrate it from within empirical inquiry.

Ideological interpretations
But evolution is one thing; neo-Darwinist ideology is another. In the second part of his talk, Schönborn attacked (this time, for sure!) the ideological interpretations of the phenomenon of evolution promoted by certain currents of neo-Darwinist thought that claim to reduce every reality (biological and others) to a pure game of casual mutations and selections, dogmatically excluding the possibility of any meaning. “Is it legitimate,” Schönborn asked, “to exclude from a given vision of nature the question, ‘What’s the purpose?’? It is not legitimate, and in fact, it is irrational to draw from this the conclusion that there is no finality.” Thus, if everything is evolution, then there is nothing of meaning in the present. Every aspect of reality, including the human person, is a particle that has a place in the world only in function of a becoming that does not involve it. Schönborn proposed a strong criticism of the neo-Darwinist extrapolations in the fields of economics (neo-liberalism), pedagogy (mechanical adaptation to the labor market), and bioethics (man who puts on airs in the role of a new designer of evolution).

False dependencies
The fundamental interrogatives (Who am I? Where do I come from?) concern the ultimate root of our being. Fr. Giussani often pointed out the rational obviousness of the fact that we come from an Other: “At this moment, if I am attentive, that is, if I am mature, I cannot deny that the greatest and most profound evidence that I perceive is that I do not make myself; I am not making myself by myself. I do not give myself being. I do not give myself the reality that I am. I am ‘given.’” (cfr. L. Giussani, The Religious Sense, McGill-Queens Univ. Press). I come from an Other, from Mystery; present experience reveals this, without hesitations, with dramatic force. Now, evidently, the same questions (Who am I? Where do I come from?) imply other levels of response. “I’m the son of Gianfranco and Dinetta,” “I come from Italy, from Milan.” Or, “The structure of my organism comes from a long and formidable process of evolution.” This shouldn’t confuse us! These responses remain, so to speak, more on the surface, but this doesn’t make them false or put them in conflict with the ultimate level. Rather, only if one is conscious that all things have their ultimate root in the Mystery can one recognize fully, affectively, the value of all the other responses: father, mother, people, evolution of living beings, cosmic history. As Lorenzo Albacete observed in the New York Times, “creation and intelligent design did not happen a million years ago; creation is today, every life; it is being. Every reality is a continuous miracle. We are creatures: this truth has never been as important as it is today.” In an unmatched lesson given in long ago 1969, entitled, “Faith in creation and the theory of evolution,” then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote that “creation does not indicate a far-away beginning, but with Adam it means each of us.” Each of us is not only the result of calculable factors of the world, inasmuch as “the mystery of creation is over each one of us.” Reason, illuminated by faith, enables us to embrace reality in its entirety. According to the words of Benedict XVI, quoted by Schönborn in Rimini, “in virtue of its option for the primacy of reason, Christianity today means enlightenment, that is, liberation from false dependencies.”