25 June 2015, The Tablet

Catholic moral theology still sometimes sounds ‘as if’ Creationism were true


 
The scientific consensus in support of Darwinian evolution is probably stronger even than that in favour of global warming. Yet in Laudato si’ Pope Francis treats the latter as sound enough to be a base for strong moral teaching, while he remains tentative about the former. At one point he uses the phrase “even if we postulate a process of evolution”, as if there were still some doubt. Certainly he has said in the past, as other popes have done, that evolutionary theory is not contrary to the Catholic faith. But that doesn’t get us very far. With the new encyclical we now have an elegant and challenging theology of nature. If we are to gaze in awe at the complexity and beauty of the natural world as it is, we should equally be in awe at the processes by which it wa
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User Comments (1)

Comment by: Speighdd
Posted: 29/06/2015 22:42:31

Theology, being based on God’s revelation of Himself, through His accredited spokespeople, prophets, and finally Christ, concerns directly, not nature, but supernature. Nature integrally as a whole, is the subject of philosophy, and in its detailed areas of operation and levels of existence, the subject of the whole range of academic disciplines feeding into philosophy. So, physics and chemistry cover all the basic materials of the universe, biology the formation out of those materials of increasingly advanced forms of life, history and psychology the development of the highest of those life forms, human beings. Finally, cultural and moral studies, cover human assessment of the kind of life that is, and is destined to be proper to them, as human beings, against the background of their development as such, in spite of the many setbacks that have occurred in it along the way. The yardstick or measure of progress, as against regress, higher as against lower forms of existence, refinement as against primitiveness, justice as against power, destiny as against fate, can only be perfection itself of existence, or goodness itself, in other words, the Supreme Being, God. He is the standard or pattern ordaining all developmental selection, essentially natural and only incidentally random, so that, if creationism is not true, nor is any so-called ‘theology’ of nature.