More from TNR: Gregg Easterbrook has a nice, if awkwardly premature, obituary for Pope John Paul II. I’ve always liked JP2, and the article contains some interesting facts about his life, including this:
Bornin 1920, Wojtyla was a university student when the Nazis invadedPoland; he joined an underground movement that kept learning aliveduring the Nazi darkness by holding university classes in secret andsometimes performed as an actor in plays staged in secret.
Idid not know that. It certainly explains his modern-seeming attitudestowards acknowledging Holocaust victims, advocating against the USSR, etc. But there was one aspect of the Pope’s modernizing influence that just leapt out at me:
JohnPaul II moved the Church toward rationalism and reconciliation withscience; he was the first pope to say that he believed Darwin’s theoryof evolution.
Huh. Is it me, or did this sort of coincidewith religious conservatives’ attempts to inject creationism intopublic schools? Obviously, a lot of those people aren’t Catholic, butstill, this strikes me as troubling. It’s nice for the Pope toacknowledge science, but attempting to find a place for science inreligion ultimately means finding a place for religion in science. ThePope, essentially, tried to convince millions of his followers toincreasingly subject their faith to empirical verification. Thisdegrades both faith and empiricism.
Mixing faith and science is a dangerous business. Sure, modernizingthe church’s stance may give devout Catholics a little more purchase incocktail party conversations with secular friends. But where does itstop? Who draws the line at which empiricism obviates any meaningfulidea of faith? The Pope seems poised to die without providing a clearanswer to this question; it’s unclear that he still wields enough powerto direct world opinion on this anyway. And surely, modification of ourtextbooks isn’t what he had in mind. But still, it’s hard not to wonderif the nuts on the PTA in Kansas and Georgia aren’t the direct descendants of the Pope’s efforts to give religion a little science.
Clarification: A number of commenters have pointed out that the Pope never came close to advocating the kind of creationism-as-science that's currently invading our classrooms. But my broader point was this: The Pope seemed to couch his acknowledgement of evolution in the idea that the Catholic faith needed to "modernize," without establishing a bookend on the other side to denote where "modernization" needed to end. This lack of an outer boundary, I'm concerned, is the same phenomenon that allows people to think our science classes need more stuff about two naked kids and an apple.
Preemptive Clarification: I know that intelligent design theory isn't "two naked kids and an apple."
