Godly Evolution
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
23 May 2010
Every Pentecost Sunday I publish a statement for the parishes and senior students.
Today is Pentecost Sunday and this year my topic is God himself, why we believe in Him.
The three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe the one and only God created the universe.
How did God create everything there is?
The Judaeo-Christian scriptures are not scientific books, which lay out in an historical and precise way how God made the world, stars and space. They do claim God is the creator and they explain why humans exist. You could say science tells us how the universe is made and religion sets out to tell us why.
Some Christians are creationists, who take the biblical account of the seven days of creation in the book of Genesis as literally true. The Young Earth Creationists believe the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that each "day" was only 24 hours. I respect these believers but do not share their views.
Other Christians believe in a theory called "Intelligent Design" developed in 1991 by a Christian lawyer from California called Phillip Johnson. They point out, quite correctly, that the theory of evolution cannot account satisfactorily for the stunning complexity of life. Some talk about the "irreducible complexity" found in nature.
They point to organs composed of billions or trillions of cells, which cannot be explained by chance. One such example is the human eye. Another is the bacterial flagellum. This is a tiny outboard motor possessed by many cells to propel them in various directions.
Intelligent Design theory seems to reduce God to a "god of the gaps", who intervenes supernaturally when natural processes are insufficient. However the unknown need not be unknowable to us and neither might the unsolved problem of today always be unsolvable.
The Intelligent Design theory shows that the odds are impossibly high for the universe to have evolved by chance, but does not explain how these Godly interventions occur every so often.
Francis S. Collins led the team which mapped the human genome, the 3 billion letters coding the DNA of our species, the hereditary code of life. He is a Christian believer, who espouses theistic evolution.
He claims St. Augustine, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides and Pope John Paul II had similar beliefs and that there is a compatibility between science and belief.
Theistic evolution (or biologos) deserves a later column to itself.
