Angry in the Great White North

Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn

From the Globe and Mail:

The Vatican's chief astronomer said Friday that “intelligent design” is not science and does not belong in science classrooms, the latest high-ranking Roman Catholic official to enter the evolution debate in the United States.

Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs is “wrong” and is akin to mixing apples with oranges.

“Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be,” the ANSA news agency quoted Father Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. “If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”

And in the other corner:

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI waded indirectly into the evolution debate by saying the universe was made by an “intelligent project” and criticizing those who in the name of science say its creation was without direction or order.

Questions about the Vatican's position on evolution were raised in July by Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

In a New York Times column, Cardinal Schoenborn seemed to back intelligent design and dismissed a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul II that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis.” He said the late pope's statement was “rather vague and unimportant.”

The Pope, as head of the Roman Catholic Church, fulfills two functions.

First, as any Head of State, his office is what provides the authority with which the Church functions as an organization. In other words, when a bishop signs a cheque to spend Church money, he does so with the authority derived from a formal chain of command leading back to the Holy See.

This is no different than the authority any bureaucrat in Canada has to do his or her job in the name of the Queen, or the authority of an American government official to act because of the executive power vested in the President. It is a purely secular role.

It is the second function that the Pope fulfills that is more subtle, more easily misunderstood, and also more carefully circumscribed, and that is as a source of moral authority for the Church (note that there multiple sources).

This is what is called papal infallibility.

Many people believe that whatever the Pope says, Catholics must believe in or do. Well, it's more subtle than that.

The Pope cannot say that the sky is green, invoke the charism of infallibility, and doom to hell all those who insist the sky is blue. He must be speaking on a matter with a clear and precisely defined moral component.

Another requirement for a statement to be infallible is that it cannot contradict what has always been taught by the Church. This is in line with the Pope's role as pastor of the Church.

Yet another requirement is that the Pope has to say that he is speaking as the spiritual head of the Church, and not merely as a theologian. He has to say that he is using his supreme Apostolic authority. And finally, he has to make it clear that to disagree with what he is saying is intended to apply to the whole Church, and to disagree is to put you outside of the Church.

So how does this apply to the question of Intelligent Design? First of all, the Pope cannot invoke infallibility to state that the universe is too complex for natural processes to have brought it to that state. Such a statement is an opinion on the level of complexity exceeding some arbitrary threshold, and not a statement of morality.

Can the Pope demand that Catholics believe that God created the universe? Well, the Church has always taught that, since it is in Genesis. As such, he is merely exercising "Constant Magisterium". The statement is infallible, but in a distinctly ho-hum sort of way.

But can the Pope decide as to how to overlay God's creative role in scientific theory? In other words, can the Pope decide that this is the point where God starts and not that point? As a theologian, he can express an opinion, but as Pope, it doesn't meet the standard for an infallible statement.

At least in my view, and I'm certainly not a theologian.

But as I see it, the decision about where to put God into the equation logically assumes the equation itself is correct. In other words, if you demand that God be credited with the negative pressure vacuum energy that drove the inflation of a nascent universe into a low entropy state, you are requiring that inflation theory itself be part of that moral framework. So supporting an ekpyrotic model (in which the universe lies on a four-dimensional brane moving through higher dimensions, and that a collision of two branes is what drove the expansion of the universe) is a ticket to hell?

Obviously, these are questions outside of the realm of morality, indeed outside Pope Benedict's sphere of competency, and so clearly not candidates for the invocation of papal infallibility. As such, any attempt to demand a belief of a God as a creator above and beyond what has always been taught is problematic at best. In other words, the clerics teach that God created the universe. The scientists try and tease out how the universe came to be. But it is not for the clerics to attempt to direct the scientists into shoving God into their theory in a specific and identifiable way.

That is the problem with Intelligent Design. It attempts to force the science to come to a conclusion on the existence of God (on the basis of a value judgment on the complexity of the universe). Father Coyne is right to point out that this is bad science.

For that matter, it is bad religion. What if tomorrow a theory is proposed that shows that all that "complexity" is just a mirage, and that the rules governing the universe can be expressed in a few simple equations? Don't scoff -- James Maxwell did exactly that with his four famous equations of electromagnetism. Wouldn't the Intelligent Designers look right some stupid if suddenly the complexity justification for God's existence was pulled out from under their feet?

That's why I'm not worried. With Father Coyne offering his opinion based on reason, and the rules of the Church preventing anyone from pulling an infallible rabbit out of the hat, I don't expect the Church will be trying to shove Intelligent Design down my throat.