Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Bad Theology

Justin E. H. Smith is suspicious of theologians that seek a partial rapprochement with Evolution. The result he says, is not only bad science, but bad theology too.

In general Protestants are more inclined than Catholics to neo-occasionalism, the view that God is behind just about every single thing that happens in the universe. High Church theology on the other hand is less comfortable with the notion of Nature as a kind of permanent miracle. Liebniz for example, wholeheartedly rejected the idea of God as micro-manager, because he felt that it undermines the imporance of what the Church sees as the really big miracular distubances in the natural order − such as the incarnation and the resurrection.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn recently observed in the NYT that 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.”

The trouble with this view, Smith concludes, is that it a Divinely-planned version of the process would require God not only to mess with the genetic mutations that lead to the variable traits within each population necessary for Natural Selection to work properly, but also to rig all of the environmental conditions that determine the relative fitness of each organism.

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