[Republican] Catholic [convert] Candidate Denies Evolution

Friday, May 04, 2007 | Catholic Candidate Denies Evolution

Absolutely surreal. When asked who did not believe in evolution, three of the ten Republican candidates for president raised their hands: Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, and Sam Brownback. Now, Brownback is a Catholic convert from evangelicalism, and a darling of the right. Clearly, some of his evangelical mode of thinking has not left him.

As I discussed recently, there is no inherent conflict between faith and evolution, as long as boundaries are respected. Therefore a person of faith should not castigate scientific findings about evolution that are accepted by all but a handful of quacks, and a scientist should likewise refrain from arguing that evolution proves the absence of a Creator (it proves no such thing). Way back in 1950, Pope Pius XII declared that there was no opposition between evolution and the Christian faith. While Pius was tentative, Pope John Paul II stated very clearly in 1996 that "new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis." Cardinal Schonborn, who has reflected a lot on the topic, sums it up: "I see no difficulty in joining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, but under the prerequisite that the borders of scientific theory are maintained." And Pope Benedict recently voiced similar thoughts: "The question is not to either make a decision for a creationism that fundamentally excludes science, or for an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science."

The title of John Paul's 1996 address was "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth", which is quite apt. ...