Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Last week when it was announced that Fr. Coyne had been replaced as director of the Vatican Observatory, the Daily Mail was all a flutter with the speculation that he was “sacked” because he went afoul of Benedict’s position on Intelligent Design.

Their article was quite ridiculous, frankly. They claim that Benedict favors Intelligent Design over Evolution and this was the source of Coyne’s “sacking.” I suppose they ought to be granted some allowance because if they listened to Fr. Coyne’s criticism of Cardinal Schönborn’s NYT’s article as their only education on the topic, perhaps their confusion is understandable (see my analysis of Fr. Coyne’s confusing comments from his talk in Palm Beach in January of this year).

If Fr. Coyne was removed for cause, I would suspect it is more because he publicly seemed to espouse at least Deism if not a Process philosophy (again see my above linked analysis). However, there is an article in an English language, Italian news source that is claiming that Fr. Coyne requested to be replaced as he battles cancer.

Well, the U.K. Guardian is continuing to fan the flames of confusion. They are claiming:

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of “intelligent design” taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

They cite Cardinal Schönborn’s talk at a conference in Rimini (see CNS news story) recently in which he proposed an open debate on Darwin. However, the point is still very much lost on the popular media and on many Catholic intellectuals to boot.

Cardinal Schönborn has been trying to uncover the scientistic thinking that has captured Western thought in his entry into this issue. He is criticizing the presumption that a Baconian type methodology is necessary to detect design in nature. This thinking shows the widespread capitulation to the reduction of knowledge to solely that which is “scientific” that has infected academic thinking since at least Hume. Now popular thinking accedes to this gnostic attitude and assumes if it does not come from a “priest” of science then it falls into the category of opinion (and even in this realm a scientist’s opinion is better than anyone else’s regardless of the other’s expertise or the scientist’s lack thereof).

What the Cardinal, and I assume Benedict, wish to do is to restore speculative knowledge to the realm of public discourse. This is also the mission of the Institute for the Study of Nature. They all recognize that, in general, modern thinkers have something of an emaciated view of reality.

It is clear that when orthodox Catholic scientists reject the idea of formal causality as an active principle then they have succumbed to a reductionist view of reality. In other words, the view that an entity is nothing but the sum of its parts. If the Aristotelian form is not an active principle then it is just the entity’s cognitive content to be extracted. If it is simply a passive description of the entity it “informs” then perhaps all knowledge does belong to purview of modern science and no one has anything valid to say about the material world if they don’t have a Ph.D. in some field of “hard” science. There are philosophical and theological difficulties with this view that we have discussed here before.

I look forward to these efforts to reframe the creation – design debate in an auspiciously Catholic context where it is no longer one of biblical exegesis vs. materialistic atheism under a thin veneer of Darwinian theory. Rather, it will be a recovery of classical tools of thought that can show how the common sense that all humans possess can see and know of God’s handiwork in nature by apprehending its form, without having to verify it with mathematical calculations and complex theoretical models.