Cardinal Schönborn not Representative of Catholic Depth of Tradition

'Intelligent' Design?: [Commonweal]

"As I told my atheist friend, it is a mistake to equate randomness with meaninglessness. Darwin himself was troubled by the apparent cruelty and heartlessness of the process, and this led him, as it has led others, to reject the idea of a beneficent God. "

Writing in this month's Commoweal, John Garvey notes where there is "voodoo economics", intelligent design is dubbed as "karaoke science." It isn't even biblical, but harps back to a deist view of God, a God of the gaps that's convenient for simple faith and of no consequence to science, but hardly the biblically close and confounding God of Hebrew scripture or the New Testament transcendent mystery encoutered in the word made flesh.

John Haught's Darwin & the Cardinal, also in this month's Commonweal, points out the all too familiar refrain that intelligent design is both bad science and bad theology. It "sets back the dialogue of religion and science" by conflating the two disciplines and does a disservice in the process to the Catholic view of reason and faith.

Has the Church changed it's position on evolution, writes Haught, "In a word, no."