Bellarmino's Revenge?

Bellarmine’s Revenge? On Some Recent Trends in the Roman Catholic Church Concerning the Relation of Faith and Science

Mario De Caro and Telmo Pievani

At least since the time of Galileo, the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward science has been ambivalent, but by the end of the twen-tieth century, it seemed that an open-minded and tolerant tendency had definitely prevailed. Now, however, in the early years of the new century, the antiscientific stance has made a vigorous comeback, and sometimes in surprisingly outmoded guises. Although it is probably a position still held by only a minority in the Church, this antiscientific stance appears to have been adopted by members in the highest ranks of the Catholic Church, including the pope. This article analyzes the roots, nature, and cultural and political implications of this antiscientific renaissance within Catholicism by looking at two of its main expressions, which concern, respectively, the atti-tude one should take toward the natural sciences and the social sciences.

boundary 2 37:1 (2010) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-035 © 2010 by Duke University Press

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

2 boundary 2 / Spring 2010

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Almost four centuries have passed since Galileo struggled for the right to offer a realistic interpretation of scientific theories, regardless of whether they contradicted orthodox religious beliefs. In the longest of his famous Copernican Letters, sent in 1615 to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Cristina di Lorena, Galileo famously proposed a way of solving the poten-tial conflicts between natural science and religion. When based on careful experimentation and sound mathematical proofs, we can be sure that the sciences explain the real structure of the natural world—a structure that is mathematical in essence. Therefore, in case of a conflict between a solid scientific belief and a religious belief (for example, one grounded in the literal reading of the Bible), the former is the one we have to keep, while the latter should be considered metaphorical and reinterpreted. In Galileo’s words,

I think that in disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of scriptural passages, but with sensory experi-ence and necessary demonstrations. For the Holy Scripture and nature derive equally from the Godhead, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the obedient executrix of God’s orders; moreover, to accommodate the understanding of the com-mon people it is appropriate for Scripture to say many things that are different in appearance and in regard to the surface meaning of the words from the absolute truth . . . and so it seems that natural phe-nomena which are placed before our eyes by sensory experience or proved by necessary demonstrations should not be called into ques-tion, let alone condemned, on account of scriptural passages whose words appear to have a different meaning.�

If ingenious and audacious, Galileo’s proposal was not entirely new. Several Christian thinkers had previously recognized a sort of epistemic priority of natural science over faith with regard to the interpretation of the physical world. Tertullian, for example, writes, between the second and third centuries CE, “We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.”� During Tertullian’s time, however, this

1. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1989), 93.2. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, ii, 18.

De Caro and Pievani / Bellarmine’s Revenge? 3

was an innocuous claim to make in practice, since natural science had not yet developed enough to conflict seriously with religious beliefs. On the contrary, by the time Galileo reiterated it, the claim that science has episte-mic priority over faith with regard to knowing the natural world had become problematic. The powerful growth of modern science, in fact, threatened important passages of the Holy Scriptures. For example, the Copernican system evidently conflicted with a realistic interpretation of Joshua 10:13, according to which Joshua commanded the sun (and not the earth) to stand still. The contradiction was striking. Which belief had to go? The Coperni-can idea that the earth orbits the sun, or the opposite one, based on a lit-eral interpretation of the Bible? The Catholic Church opted for a simple way out of this predicament: it denied the realistic interpretation of the Copernican system. The inspira-tion actually came from a Lutheran theologian, Andreas Hosemann, better known by the humanistic name of Andreas Osiander. In 1543, he edited Copernicus’s masterpiece, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,� adding an anonymous preface to it. There he claimed (against Copernicus) that the heliocentric view defended in the book was intended only as an instrument for calculating the orbits of the planets, not as a true theory. According to Osiander, “[Since the astronomer] cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past. . . . [His] hypotheses need not be true nor even probable.”� In the following century, the instrumentalist interpretation of the Copernican theory was advocated by the very influential Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the protagonists of the Counter-Reformation. Bellarmine was a vigorous Defensor fidei against religious and philosophical heterodoxies (he was the zealous prosecutor in the trial against Giordano Bruno, who, after seven years in jail and some routine torture, was sent to the stake in 1600). Consistently, Bellarmine also defended the truths of faith against Galileo’s scientific realism. In his view, the heliocentric theory had to be interpreted “hypothetically and not absolutely [ex suppositione e non assolutamente].” This way, he thought, “saves all the appearances . . . has no danger in it, and . . . suffices for mathematicians.”� Scientists could still use the Copernican theories for their calculations, but they should not

3. Andreas Osiander, preface to On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Nico-laus Copernicus, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995).4. Osiander, preface, xvi.5. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 67.


insist on the impious idea that “their science” could explain the real struc-ture of the natural world. According to this view, then, religious belief (which is grounded in faith) had absolute epistemic priority over scientific belief (which is grounded in reason). In 1616, Galileo tried to defend his opinion about the relation between science and faith in front of the Holy Office, led by Bellarmine.� The out-come was that Bellarmine personally handed Galileo the admonition not to advocate Copernicanism anymore. As is well known, Galileo disregarded this. In particular, his famous Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) deeply irritated the Roman Curia and the pope himself, Urban VIII—Galileo’s former friend, Maffeo Barberini. As a result, in 1633, Galileo was brought before the Inquisition and was given a much harsher sentence.� Science suffered in the countries in which the Church had politi-cal and cultural influence, especially in Italy, because of the severe antisci-entific stance that was officially adopted by the Church in the trial against Galileo (Descartes, for example, was so worried that he did not publish his treatise Le Monde, in which he defended Copernicanism). Moreover, in subsequent centuries, even if many Catholic scientists, including numerous clergy members, made important contributions to science, the official atti-tude of the Church toward science, and secular reason in general, remained unstable and was sometimes confrontational—as proven, for example, by Pope Pius X’s influential antimodernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907). It took some time for the Church to come to terms with Galileo’s claim that, when there was conflict over the interpretation of the natural world, science should have priority over faith. In particular, the highest hier-archy of the Church was still on Bellarmine’s side with regard to the next big conflict between traditional faith and science—the Darwinian theory of evo-lution. A clear example of this was offered by another famous encyclical, Pope Pius XII’s Humani generis (1950), which, besides attacking material-ism and modernism, also attacked evolutionism, which was defined as a

6. Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible: Including a Translation of Foscarini’s Letter on the Motion of the Earth (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).7. Galileo had to abjure Copernicanism and declare that the immobility of the sun was “absurd in philosophy and formally heretical” and that the mobility of the earth “at least erroneous in faith.” He was ordered imprisoned and later put under house arrest for the rest of his life. His Dialogue was banned, and the publication of any of his works, including the future one, was forbidden.


hypothesis among others, not “a certain and demonstrable doctrine.” In a representative passage, for example, this encyclical criticized people who “audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution.”� In this light, it may not be so surprising that, in 1930, after centuries of controversies, Pope Pius XI canonized Robert Bellarmine, making him the patron saint of canonists and catechumens, and then named him a “Doctor of the Church”—a title that has been attributed to only thirty-three saints, to honor their magisterial theology, orthodoxy, and sanctity.

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It should be noted, however, that in Europe, the official anti-evolutionism of the Catholic Church had no great cultural or scientific impact. This was because, since the second half of the nineteenth century, the general cultural atmosphere on that continent had become more and more secular and open-minded toward science. More specifically, notwith-standing the views of the Church, a widespread secularism and a well-established habit of metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic interpretations of the Holy Scripture (according to Galileo’s proposal) effectively prevented the potential conflicts between faith and science. Therefore, in Europe, the idea that science was independent from religion became the preponder-ant view among both intellectuals (including many Catholic scientists and philosophers) and the general public. Indeed, until very recently, the Euro-pean anti-evolutionist movement has not had as much influence as the U.S. evangelical fundamentalist movement has had. Both because of this general cultural amiability toward the sciences and because of a remarkable internal process of modernization begun with John XXIII, the Catholic Church became more and more open toward sci-ence, and this tolerance became most explicit after the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962–1965). At that point, things also changed with regard to the “Galileo affair.” Completing a process of rehabilitation begun in 1757 by the Holy Office, and following a thirteen-year investigation by a specifically appointed Vatican commission, in 1992 Pope John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła) officially overturned the 1633 conviction of the great Italian scientist. Puzzlingly enough, however, while Galileo was declared not guilty,

8. The encyclical can be found at http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_pi12hg.htm; the quotation is at § 5.


the Holy Inquisition judges of that trial were said to be correct as well. In fact, according to John Paul II, the judges did the right thing when they asked Galileo not to claim the truth of the Copernican system, since at that time there was no “irrefutable proof” in its favor.� In any case, in its new course, the Catholic Church seemed to have come to terms with Galileo’s claim concerning the relationships between scientific and religious beliefs. A very important confirmation of this new attitude was shown in an address concerning evolution that John Paul II gave in 1996 to the Papal Academy of Sciences. On that occasion, the pope explicitly said that “in order to mark out the limits of their own proper fields, theologians and those working on the exegesis of the Scripture need to be well informed regarding the results of the latest scientific research.” John Paul II, opposing Pius XII, wrote that “new findings lead us towards the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis” (our emphasis). He also offered an epistemologically accurate comment on the findings of the scientific fields connected with evolution, from molecular biology to pale-ontology: “The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.”�0 Indeed, in his statement, John Paul II did not specifically mention the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Instead, he spoke of different “theo-ries of evolution”—both in the sense of a plurality of scientific explanations of evolutionary mechanisms and in the sense of a plurality of philosophi-cal interpretations of those explanations (the “materialistic and reductive ones,” on the one hand, and the “spiritualistic” ones, on the other). In his view, no matter what experimental research may find out about human life, it will never be able to understand “the experience of metaphysical knowl-edge, of self-consciousness and self-awareness, of moral conscience, of liberty, or of aesthetic and religious experience.” John Paul II also took up Pius XII’s words about the “two methodological conditions” that specify how the theory of evolution “can be compatible with the Christian faith”—that is, “one could not adopt this opinion as if it were a certain and demonstrable

9. John Paul II, Communication Papal Academy of Sciences, Plenary Session, Octo-ber 31, 1992 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1992). See Mariano Artigas and Melchor Sánchez de Toca, Galileo y el Vaticano: Historia de la Comisión Pontificia de Estudio del caso Galileo (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2008).10. John Paul II, “The Truth Cannot Contradict the Truth,” Papal Academy of Sciences, Plenary Session, October 22, 1996 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1996).


doctrine, and one could not totally set aside the teaching [of] Revelation on the relevant questions.” However, notwithstanding these qualifications and caveats, John Paul II’s statement showed that the attitude of the Catholic Church con-cerning the theory of evolution, and the autonomy of science in general, had deeply changed. Bellarmine’s stance seemed like it was destined to be forgotten. Unfortunately, this would not last long.

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At the end of the pontificate of John Paul II and, more clearly, since Joseph Alois Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, in April 2005, the Catholic Church’s attitude toward science, and particularly toward the theory of evolution, began to change again—this time in a direction that Galileo would not have appreciated. In the last few years, in fact, important members of the Catholic Church have been increasingly talking about the alleged errors of the Darwinian, or neo-Darwinian, theory of evolution and, more generally, of the ethical, political, and spiritual dangers of the exces-sive allegiance to science within contemporary Western societies. The hope to find a new, religiously more palatable version of the theory of evolution tempted, for example, the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, one of Benedict XVI’s closest aides and the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. On July 7, 2005, Schönborn wrote an article for the New York Times (signifi-cantly entitled “Finding Design in Nature”) in which he maintained that, while the old-fashioned literalist creationism was wrong-headed and unsal-vageable, “neo-creationism,” centered on the so-called intelligent design doctrine, was a very interesting view—and one that Catholics should take into serious consideration. Schönborn noticed that, differently from the hopeless literalist version of creationism, the theory of intelligent design does not dismiss the empirical evidence that supports the thesis of a com-mon descent and transformation of all species. However, it rejects factors (such as mutations, natural selection, genetic drifts, migrations, and other macroevolutionary features) typically adopted by the scientific community in order to explain the evolutionary processes as unsatisfactory or simplis-tic, and appeals instead to a hypernatural and purposive designer. This view, Schönborn hinted, could work for Catholics as a serious alternative to materialistic Darwinism.


In his article, Schönborn adopted—without explicitly saying so—some of the arguments typically employed by the North American advocates of intelligent design. He presented the ordinary controversies related to the interpretation of the theory of evolution (those concerning, for example, the rhythms of change, the units of evolution, and the actual power of selec-tion) as if they represented insoluble problems for neo-Darwinian theory; he wrote that the explanation by random variation and natural selection, excluding any “design” and final cause acting in nature, cannot be true and, in any case, is incompatible with the Christian faith; finally, he pre-supposed intelligent design as the only acceptable scientific explanation of evolution (“any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science”). Schönborn’s conclusion was that “the Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern pur-pose and design in the natural world, including the world of living beings.”�� It is remarkable that Schönborn did not write that the nature of intelligent design can be discerned by faith, but “by the light of reason.” This implies that the biologists who do not see the overwhelming evidence of design are, ipso facto, practicing poor science. In his picture, standard natural sci-ence is presented as a kind of minor rationality, a method of inquiry that can be useful only for investigating the “details” of natural history, while the deepest truths of natural history can only be understood by a sort of theo-logical science. For Schönborn, in fact, the role played by blind chance in the Darwinian theory of evolution is not only a threat for the Christian faith but is also “irrational” from the point of view of human intellect. The only acceptable scientific explanation of evolution is the one that claims that nature is shaped according to an intelligent design. Meanwhile, it has gone almost unnoticed that Benedict XVI adopted a view similar to the one advocated by Schönborn with specific regard to the theory of evolution, in his famous “Regensburg Lecture” from Septem-ber 12, 2006, in which he, among other things, also discussed the general role and scope of natural science. As is well known, that lecture (whose meaningful title was “Faith, Reason, and the University”) triggered a huge controversy concerning the relationship between Islam and Christianity. Its main claim, however, was the primacy of the “broader reason” of theology

11. Christoph Schönborn, “Finding Design in Nature,” New York Times, July 7, 2005; avail-able at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html; our emphasis.


and philosophy, which should include and integrate the “narrow reason” of the natural sciences. Moreover, on the same day, during the homily given at Islinger Field (Regensburg), the pope stressed the “irrationality” of the opinion that man is “an accidental result of evolution”—a very “unreason-able” view, according to him, when compared with that of the “creating Reason” of the universe, man, and everything else.�� From this perspective, besides including and completing the natural sciences, the “broader rea-son” of theology seems also to have the power to assess what is true and false, and what is rational and irrational, in the sciences. The idea that Benedict XVI’s and Schönborn’s theologically con-strained science is actually a resurgence of the once discredited Bellar-minian view (according to which faith has epistemic priority over natural science) is not so far-fetched.�� At any rate, the impression that Schön-born’s article stressed a radical change of policy by the Church with regard to the theory of evolution was confirmed by the passage in which he dis-credited John Paul II’s message to the Papal Academy of Sciences as “a rather vague and unimportant letter.” Schönborn quoted several times a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, which at that time was headed by Cardinal Ratzinger. According to that document, John Paul II’s message could not “be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.” Indeed, according to Schönborn, there is a plurality of “theo-ries of evolution,” and only several of them are acceptable. Moreover, a crucial test of acceptability for those theories is whether they acknowledge the “truly causal role” played in nature by Divine Providence. In this light, “an unguided evolutionary process—one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence—simply cannot exist.”�� Summarizing, Schönborn made

12. Benedict XVI, “Homily of the Holy Father,” Islinger Field, Regensburg, Germany, September 12, 2006, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, text available at http://www.vatican .va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20060912_ regensburg_en.html.13. It should be noted that while Bellarmine at least granted an instrumental value to Copernicanism, Schönborn did not to Darwinism. The difference, however, is not very relevant, since for Bellarmine the instrumental value of the Copernican theory depended on the fact that it could be used to make accurate predictions—and while making predic-tions is a central task for astronomy, it is not for evolutionary biology.14. International Theological Commission, “Communion and Stewardship: Human Per-sons Created in the Image of God,” July 23, 2004, La Civiltà Cattolica 2004, IV, 254–86,


it clear in his New York Times article that he was not making philosophical speculations but was concerned with natural events. As he wrote, “The Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real.” Special attention should be paid to the wording here: intelligent design is “real,” “immanent,” and “evident in nature,” and can be understood by human reason. It follows that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution should be refused for at least two reasons: it is not good science (it is not even a good scientific hypothesis), and it contributes to generating and strengthening immoral and impious philo-sophical views. Benedict XVI himself, by the way, had begun his pontificate with a homily in which he proclaimed, “We are not the casual and meaning-less products of evolution.”�� A programmatic statement upon which, in his article, Schönborn commented, “Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and necessity’ are not scientific at all, but an abdication of human intelligence.” Schönborn had set the stage for a powerful attack against the neo-Darwinian theory (and the autonomy of science in general). His strategy was based on three steps. First, he discredited the neo-Darwinian theory by referring to the spurious neo-creationistic distinction between the empirical evidence of evolution (which he recognized as a fact) and its standard sci-entific explanation (which he presented as untenable). Second, he insisted on the allegedly very dangerous ethical and political consequences of Dar-winism and naturalism. Third, the defense of intelligent design was pre-sented as necessary in order to protect pluralism and liberalism in our society. The idea that science should use faith as its compass had returned to the European cultural scene. Bellarmine was back. Many in the scientific community were irritated, among them, sev-eral leading Catholic scientists, including the eminent biologist Francisco J. Ayala. On November 3, 2005, the French Cardinal Paul Poupard, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, declared that any attack on the Darwinian theory of evolution on religious or dogmatic grounds had to be considered a form of fundamentalism. The highly respected Vatican Observatory director, the Jesuit Father George V. Coyne, in a talk delivered

available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_ con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html.15. Benedict XVI, homily for the “Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate of Pope Bene-dict XVI,” April 24, 2005, text available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_ xvi/homilies/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050424_inizio-pontificato_en.html.


at Palm Beach Atlantic University (West Palm Beach, Florida), on Janu-ary 31, 2006, was even clearer. He, in fact, restated Galileo’s claim by argu-ing that religion and science are totally separate enterprises.

I would essentially like to share with you two convictions in this pre-sentation: (1) that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while evok-ing a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God, makes her/him too small and paltry; (2) that our scientific understanding of the universe, untainted by religious considerations, provides for those who believe in God a marvelous opportunity to reflect upon their beliefs. Please note carefully that I distinguish, and will continue to do so in this presentation, that science and religion are totally separate human pursuits. Science is completely neutral with respect to theistic or atheistic implications which may be drawn from scientific results.��

Maybe it was a coincidence, but the new pope did not confirm either Poupard or Coyne in their respective positions. In general, the new course that Schönborn had set found many supporters, especially among the European conservative media.�� With regard to this, it is worth noting that in an interview published on August 24, 2006, Schönborn recognized that his New York Times article had been intentionally provocative and “inflam-matory.”�� If that was Schönborn’s purpose, surely the article was very effective, particularly in Italy. Since then, in fact, several Catholic Italian theologians have begun to express doubts about the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, claiming that “signs of a direction,” “an arrow of time,” or “a final cause” can be found in nature;�� some authoritative publishers have published books explicitly attacking Darwin and defending creationism;�0

16. George V. Coyne, “Science Does Not Need God, or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution,” Catholic Online, January 30, 2006, available at http://www.catholic .org/national/national_story.php?id=18504.17. Schönborn also found an influential supporter across the Atlantic Ocean. In a public speech delivered on August 2, 2005, George W. Bush praised Schönborn’s article, claim-ing that both Darwinism and intelligent design should be taught, as alternative but legiti-mate scientific explanations of life.18. Gian Guido Vecchi, “Schönborn e il darwinismo: non mi pento delle mie critiche ma erano tagliate con l’accetta,” Il Corriere della Sera, August 24, 2006.19. The list includes influential theologians such as Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Fiorenzo Facchini, and Bruno Forte.20. See, for example, Rosa Giannetta Alberoni, Il Dio di Michelangelo e la barba di Darwin (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007).


and some of the major national newspapers and magazines have reviewed these books in very positive terms.�� Finally, the theory of evolution has been attacked during the evening news on Italy’s national public television (RAI 2). On November 29, 2007, in the context of an aggressively anti-Darwinian report, the influential Italian Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, was quoted as saying that the Darwinian theory of evolution is “the child” of Marxism and implies an atheist, materialist, and relativist ideology. The cardinal then rhetorically asked the interviewer if she really felt like she was the descendant of a chimpanzee. “I do not!” the cardinal emphatically added.

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In 2006, Benedict XVI and Cardinal Schönborn decided to publish the proceedings of a private workshop that had been held in September of that year at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome (besides Benedict XVI and Schön-born, some of the pope’s former students also attended the meeting). The subject of the workshop was the relation between Christian faith and the theory of evolution.�� Notwithstanding the presence of one of the most important German-speaking evolutionists—the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster—the Castel Gandolfo proceedings clearly favored a form of neo-creationism. Benedict XVI, in particular, explic-itly endorsed the position advocated by Schönborn in his New York Times article. The new pope, very differently from his Polish predecessor, stated that “the theory of evolution [Evolutionslehre] is not yet a complete and sci-entifically verified theory [komplette, wissenschaftlich verifizierte Theorie].” Indeed, that theory “is, to a large extent, non-demonstrable experimentally [nachweisbar], simply because we cannot reproduce 10,000 generations in a laboratory. This means that there are significant gaps [erhebliche Lucken] in the experimental verifiability and falsifiability of that theory because of the immense period of time it covers.”�� These statements by the pope

21. These include Il Foglio, Il Giornale, and, more unexpectedly perhaps, both of the most authoritative Italian newspapers, Il Corriere della Sera and its Thursday supple-ment, Magazine.22. Benedict XVI, Stephan Otto Horn, and Siegfried Wiedenhofer, Schöpfung und Evolution: Eine Tagung mit Papst Benedikt XVI. in Castel Gandolfo (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich; Rome: Editrice Vaticana, 2007).23. Benedict XVI, Horn, and Wiedenhofer, Schöpfung und Evolution, 150.


do not represent, of course, the official doctrine of the Church or an ex cathedra pronouncement. But their difference from the above-mentioned 1996 address, in which John Paul II defined evolution as “more than an hypothesis,” is striking. In the Castel Gandolfo proceedings, Schönborn—possibly encour-aged by the pope’s explicit approval—for the first time openly endorsed the whole panoply of would-be scientific arguments traditionally offered by the supporters of intelligent design. As is well known, from that perspective, neo-Darwinism is considered ideology more than genuine science, since allegedly it cannot respond to some fatal objections. These include the so-called missing links (the “many lacking intermediate forms between species, which simply do not exist even after one hundred and fifty years of intense research”); “the fact, frequently admitted, that until now scientists have showed not even one form of evolution from one species to another”;�� and the complexity of many biological structures that cannot be explained by reference to any indefinite number of tiny mutations. Furthermore, accord-ing to the Castel Gandolfo proceedings, “ideological evolutionism” (that is, the theory of evolution accepted by the whole scientific community) once was “the scientific pinchbeck of both communism and national-socialism,” and is the pinchbeck of “economic social-Darwinism.” In short, all of the most destructive recent ideologies were said to descend genealogically from the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is clear that these views overlap substantially with those presented by the advocates of intelligent design. It would be wrong, of course, to conclude that these are majority views within Catholicism or that they go unchallenged in that world—in fact, the reaction of many progressive Catholics is vehemently and intellectually sophisticated. Still, it cannot go unnoticed that Catholic creationism is a fast-growing movement and that some of its advocates occupy very high positions within the Church. At the same time, some non-predominantly Catholic European countries are also experiencing outbreaks of creationism (the evolutionism-creationism struggle, for example, has recently reached the orthodox regions, generating inflamed public discussions). In 2007, the rapid spread of the creationistic movements throughout Europe produced a formal criti-cal response by the Council of Europe (“The Dangers of Creationism in Education”).�� In its document, the European Committee on Culture, Sci-

24. Benedict XVI, Horn, and Wiedenhofer, Schöpfung und Evolution, 96.25. Council of Europe, “The Dangers of Creationism in Education,” Resolution 1580, text


ence and Education stated that the teaching of creationism in schools can-not be considered as an expression of freedom of thought, but only as a form of religious fundamentalism, which threatens both the freedom of sci-ence and the freedom of teaching.

5

The political consequences of this new attitude are now evident, especially in Italy—a country in which the Vatican’s political and social influ-ence has been traditionally strong. A clear example of this influence was offered in March 2004, when John Paul II’s pontificate was declining and the theo-con movements started to spread across Europe. That year, the Italian minister of education, a member of a rightist coalition, announced some important changes in the curriculum of the Italian public school sys-tem. This included canceling, without any public discussion, all the pas-sages that, in the old curriculum of the secondary schools, concerned the theory of evolution. The decision provoked strong protests by the Italian scientific community, and eventually the minister had to agree to appoint a special scientific committee of four members, whose goal was to find a satisfactory way of reintroducing the theory of evolution into the school curriculum. This committee worked very slowly but eventually produced a docu-ment that was never made public, probably because of differences in opin-ion among members of the committee. The infamous name Darwin was reinserted in the curriculum, but within a very ambiguous context, which vaguely referred to the co-evolution and the interactions between the geo-sphere and the biosphere. Then, in 2006, the new minister of education (a Catholic from the leftist coalition, which had just won the elections) pro-posed another revision to the curriculum. The result was that the passages concerning natural history were written in an even more vague and meta-phoric language, and the words “Darwin,” “evolution,” “biological evolution of human species,” and “natural selection” disappeared altogether. In this way, Italy has become a sort of laboratory for religious fundamentalists in the Western world to experiment with the possibility of manipulating the curricula of public schools to advance their own agenda, which includes the following beliefs: (1) there is not a single theory of evolution, but many

adopted by the European Parliamentary Assembly on October 4, 2007, available at http://www.assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta07/ERES1580.htm.


different versions of it, which frequently contradict each other; therefore, the various versions of this theory are equally hypothetical and conjectural; (2) the theory of evolution requires the capacity for abstraction and the ability to use sophisticated mathematical tools, which are rather demanding of the average high school student; therefore, it suits the undergraduate curriculum much better than the high school curriculum; and (3) Darwinist evolutionism—conceived as one of the many possible theories of evolu-tion—could easily inspire dangerous materialistic and atheistic visions of reality in the young minds of the students. These are, obviously, weak and specious arguments. First, other scientific theories—comparable to the theory of evolution for complexity and comprehensiveness (for example, quantum mechanics)—are, in fact, also interpreted in radically different ways. Nobody, however, seriously thinks that, for this reason, those theories should not be considered valu-able and relevant. Why should we have a different attitude toward the Dar-winian theory of evolution? Second, the technical difficulties of the theory of evolution should not be overstated; and, at any rate, they are no worse than the difficulties met by other scientific theories being taught in schools without controversy. Finally, the idea that we should protect our students from being exposed to one of the most important scientific theories of our time (because of its alleged bad consequences for the students’ immature minds) seems to come directly from a dystopic Orwellian novel—one worth reading, perhaps, but not one that we should desire to implement in reality. If an important and well-established scientific theory has problematic con-sequences for the political, ethical, or religious point of view, then these consequences should be discussed in religion or philosophy classes, with-out removing that theory from the scientific curriculum (for a similarly con-troversial, if less well-known, case, one could think of the highly contentious consequences that deterministic theories have for our intuitions about free will and moral responsibility). It may be surprising that these pseudoarguments have been taken so seriously in a developed, democratic, and secular country—and one that should have a memory of the damages that may derive from hindering the progress of science. More generally, it may be surprising that, given the general secular attitude of European culture, this anti-evolutionist and more generally antiscientific attitude has now gained powerful political and cultural momentum. The offensive, however, is strong, and there are good reasons to think that the pope is also on board.


6

As we have seen, the new attitude toward the theory of evolution is based on a new way of assessing the relationship between faith, on the one hand, and science and reason, on the other hand. This attitude is so general and resolute that one can expect it to have relevant implications for other scientific theories, not only in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences. So, for example, it could have consequences for the evaluation of the methodological standards used by the social sciences (such as history or textual science), which are relevant for the interpretation of religious history and writings. This expectation is actually confirmed when one reads the book Benedict XVI published in 2007, which was dedicated to the first part of Jesus’s life (the book covers the period up to the Transfiguration; a second volume should follow concerning the rest of Jesus’s life).�� The most strik-ing aspect of this book concerns its methodology, which could be described as a Christ-centric hermeneutic, which presupposes that the Catholic read-ing of the Gospels is the correct one.�� From this perspective, the book questions the traditional historical-critical method of investigation and deliberately belittles the results of decades of patient empirical exegesis and inquiry of the historical sources. In one word, the book launches an attack against the standard methodology of the human sciences. Explicitly, Benedict XVI challenges the distinction—shared by legions of modern and contemporary scholars, of all religious tendencies—between the transcendent, theophanic Christ and the historical Jesus. His idea, in fact, is that if one does not want to miss the most important truths, overcoming the gap between the divine and the human Christ is not only possible, it is methodologically indispensable. The underlying assumption is that faith in the divinity of Christ has to be presupposed if one wants to understand the real meaning behind the historical data (the methodological criteria that inspire the book are explicitly said to require faith).��

26. Benedict XVI, Gesù di Nazaret (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007). Translated from the German by Adrian J. Walker as Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007).27. This methodology owes much, of course, to traditional Christology but bypasses entirely the critical acquisitions of many authoritative contemporary Christian theolo-gians, such as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, and Edward Schillebeeckx.28. Benedict XVI, Gesù di Nazaret, 19.


Gianfranco Ravasi, the very erudite and highly respected new presi-dent of the Pontifical Council for Culture and one of the leading Italian Catholic intellectuals, summarizes precisely the methodology of the pope’s book. Ravasi writes, “The authenticity of the figure of Christ is not obtained by carving out the verifiable historical data and sending to the theologian’s competence its Christological components, but by keeping everything bound together, in the unity of a person who is ‘historically reasonable and convincing,’ even if he in himself contains a transcendent dimension.”�� The “even if” clause is crucial here. The goal of the book is to give historical support to the thesis of Jesus’s divinity, according to the Catholic faith, which is presupposed. The question that immediately comes to mind is, What happens when a conflict arises between faith and historical find-ings?—which is, by the way, exactly the issue that opposed Galileo to Bel-larmine. As an authoritative Catholic critic has written in a polemical tone, “In Ratzinger’s Jesus . . . the sum of the texts and the stories has only one meaning, which is perfectly identical with the faith expressed by the [Catho-lic] creed and is perfectly represented by the Church.”�0 A consequence of this approach is that, since faith perfectly justi-fies one in believing that the Catholic creed is true, the historical data and theories can only confirm that creed. In this light, while historical belief is obviously fallible, religious belief is not. Therefore, when there is conflict, it is the former belief that should be given up. A related consequence of this approach is that sharing one’s faith with the pope becomes a necessary condition (if not a sufficient one, perhaps) for understanding the historical Jesus. The prevalence of religious faith over scientific belief is a fundamen-tal feature of Benedict XVI’s new Christological methodology. Several critical voices against the methodology of this book were immediately raised within the Catholic field. An interesting case was that of the very influential Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a Jesuit, considered the front-runner of the progressive faction in the Catholic world, who publicly commented on the pope’s book at a meeting of UNESCO in Paris.�� On first

29. Gianfranco Ravasi, “Il Papa scrive Gesù di Nazareth: L’impresa più suggestiva,” avail-able at http://www.atma-o-jibon.org/italiano4/rit_ravasi6.htm; our emphasis.30. Alberto Melloni, “In difesa del porporato,” Corriere della Sera, May 25, 2007, available at http://paparatzinger-blograffaella.blogspot.com/search?q=In+difesa+del+porporato.31. Carlo Maria Martini’s review, “‘Gesù di Nazaret’ secondo Carlo Maria Martini,” is available at http://paparatzinger-blograffaella.blogspot.com/2007/05/gesu-di-nazaret-secondo-carlo-maria.html. A longer but milder version of his review of the book has been published in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica 2, no. 12, quad. 3768 (2007): 533–37.


reading, Martini’s review of the book sounds positive, even highly so (the cardinal, for example, concludes his remarks by wishing that other readers felt the same joy he experienced in reading the book). Many, however, have read Martini’s comments as critical, ironic, and even condescending. One who interprets Martini in this way is the writer Vittorio Messori, a strong supporter of Benedict XVI, who published an article in the most authori-tative Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, attacking Martini’s alleged hypocrisy.�� According to Messori, Martini’s comments on the pope’s book would be an example of the proverbial Jesuit ambiguity. In this reading, Martini, although officially praising the book, would, in fact, intend to move it from the biblical exegesis shelves “to those containing texts of spirituality, edifying reflections, personal testimony.”�� Messori, if not sympathetic at all to Martini, seems to have a point. About Benedict XVI’s scholarly competence, for example, Martini writes that “he is not a Biblist, but a theologian and—even if he shows compe-tence concerning the exegetical literature of his own time—, he has not done first-hand study, for example on the critical text of the New Testa-ment.”�� According to Messori, here the pope is maliciously described by Martini as competent only about “his own” time’s exegetical literature (that is, until 1977, when he was a university professor), and therefore as incompetent about the subsequent developments in the field.�� Be that as it may, Martini also makes some explicit criticisms of the book. The cardinal stresses, for example, that the pope wrongly wrote that the fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedeus (not a minor mistake, by the way!) and that he mistranslated several crucial biblical terms. It seems plausible that, even if in a prudent, Jesuitic way, Cardinal Martini wanted to hint at how distant his methodological persuasion is from the new kind of Bellarminian hermeneutics defended by the pope. What appears without doubt, at any rate, is that the claim that history can at most

32. Vittorio Messori, “Il distinguo prudente dell’esegeta (e figlio di Ignazio),” Corriere della Sera, May 25, 2007, available at http://www.et-et.it/articoli2007/a07e25.htm. It should be noted that, in 1985, Messori wrote with Benedict XVI (who then was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) a best seller, Rapporto sulla fede (1985; Cini-sello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2005). Translated into English by Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison as The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (Ft. Collins, Colo.: Ignatius Press, 1985).33. Messori, “Il distinguo prudente dell’esegeta (e figlio di Ignazio).”34. Martini, “‘Gesù di Nazaret’ secondo Carlo Maria Martini.”35. Messori, “Il distinguo prudente dell’esegeta (e figlio di Ignazio).”


confirm what faith tells us with certainty sounds very much like a vindica-tion of Bellarmine’s views against Galileo’s.

7

On November 30, 2007, when the would-be last draft of this article was ready, a new encyclical by Benedict XVI entitled Spe salvi (Saved in Hope) was published.�� The encyclical covered many issues—some of which were not particularly fashionable, such as the reality of Purgatory and who will be saved at the Last Judgment. An important part of that encyclical, however, treated some issues regarding the question of how faith should relate to science and reason. It seemed useful to us, then, to end this article with some brief remarks on that encyclical. The main claim of the encyclical is that religious faith, by giving hope to us, is indispensable for the flourishing of human reason. The pope writes, “Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. . . . Reason therefore needs faith if it is to be completely itself: rea-son and faith need one another in order to fulfil their true nature and their mission” (§ 23). According to Benedict XVI, then, only religious faith can offer the hope that “redeems man.” More specifically, such hope can be found only in Christianity, since Jesus Christ is the One who has “redeemed” us (§ 26). This is not the place for discussing several controversial issues raised by this view (such as, why is only religious belief able to give hope, and, within that, why only Christian belief?). What is directly relevant for us, however, is the interpretation that the encyclical offers about the intellectual history of the Modern Age, a reading that can be seen as a theological backing of the new Bellarminian course of this papacy. One of the main claims of Spe salvi is that in modernity, reason has detached itself from religious faith, in its arrogant attempt to reach “a ‘Kingdom of God’ accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone.” Such an attempt, however, “inevitably ends up as the ‘perverse end’ of all things” (§ 23). Therefore, as said, only a new alliance between reason and Christian faith can give human beings the hope that can save them, according to St. Paul’s saying Spe salvi facti sumus (“In hope we

36. Benedict XVI, “Encyclical letter ‘Spe salvi,’” November 30, 2007, available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by section number.


were saved,” Rom 8:24). According to the encyclical, a crucial thinker in detaching reason from faith was Francis Bacon, interpreted in this book as an ideologue of the complete secularization of life. According to the pope, for Bacon, faith in scientific progress, and in the possibility of a technical dominion over nature, made religion irrelevant for our lives. In this light, “[T]he restoration of the lost ‘Paradise’ is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. . . . As the ideology of progress devel-oped further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a con-tinuing confirmation of faith in progress as such” (§ 17). This is a rather superficial reading of Bacon’s work, though.�� For example, he simply did not believe that science alone could restore the Paradise lost. In order to understand that, it is enough to read the last para-graph of Book 2 of Bacon’s Novum Organum: “For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences” (§ 52). According to Bacon, therefore, human beings can recover their original innocence in and dominion over the natural world only in part (nonnulla ex parte). Moreover, science is only supplemental in reaching this goal; science can only build upon religious belief, which is indispensable. Given this, how could one reasonably say that Bacon did not leave any space for religion, or that he thought that, through science, man could attain com-plete control over the human world? Bacon carefully distinguished the tem-perate goals of science, which do respect the jurisdiction of religion, from the impious hybris of magic. So, for example, in the preface to Instauratio Magna, Bacon writes,

I humbly pray, that things human may not interfere with things divine, and that from the opening of the ways of sense and the increase of natural light there may arise in our minds no incredulity or darkness with regard to the divine mysteries; but rather that the understand-ing being thereby purified and purged of fancies and vanity, and yet not the less subject and entirely submissive to the divine oracles,

37. A very convincing response to the pope was offered by Paolo Rossi (“Speriamo con Bacone,” Il Sole 24 Ore, December 9, 2007, 47), the leading Italian expert on Bacon’s philosophy, some of whose arguments we mention in this section of the article.


may give to faith that which is faith’s. Lastly, that knowledge being now discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it, and which makes the mind of man to swell, we may not be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity.

Spe salvi also discusses at length the problems caused by “the myth of progress,” which spread over Europe at the beginning of the Enlight-enment. In the pope’s interpretation (probably inspired by a tendentious reading of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment), the spirit of modernity is identified with a blind faith in the idea that the progress of scientific knowledge, interpreted as necessarily incompatible with real reli-gious faith, will carry on spectacular human and moral progress and will finally generate a perfect human community. In his words,

[T]he new correlation between science and praxis would mean that the dominion over creation—given to man by God and lost through original sin—would be reestablished (§ 16). . . . [Today] the restora-tion of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis (§ 17). . . . Progress is the overcoming of all forms of dependency—it is progress towards perfect freedom. . . . Reason and freedom seem to guaran-tee by themselves, by virtue of their intrinsic goodness, a new and perfect human community. The two key concepts of “reason” and “freedom,” however, were tacitly interpreted as being in conflict with the shackles of faith and of the Church as well as those of the politi-cal structures of the period (§ 18).

The pope’s reading seems rather cursory, however. Although a naïve faith in progress can perhaps be detected in the writings of Nicolas de Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon, or Auguste Comte, this faith was far from being universally shared; indeed, even some of the main philosophers of the Enlightenment refused it—as any reader of Voltaire’s Candide or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile or even David Hume’s Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth would easily recognize. At any rate, after World War I, the so-called myth of progress, which naïvely equated scientific progress with human progress, has become extremely marginal in philosophy. Today, even if there are naturalistically oriented philosophers who are still rather optimistic about the epistemic potential of the natural sciences (that is, they believe that, potentially, all knowledge is scientific knowledge), almost no one claims that scientific progress ipso facto generates human progress.


Moreover, other philosophers, of a more moderate naturalistic orientation, defend the centrality of science in our culture, but are also very careful in explicitly defining its limits—in a way that certainly does not fit the pope’s description of contemporary secularized philosophy.�� In the light of this encyclical, then, we can see that the new papacy’s project of putting science under the protection of religion again is based on unfair portrayals of science and secularized philosophy—of what they have been and what they are now. Indeed, as Philip Kitcher, a well-known con-temporary naturalistic philosopher, puts it, if one adopts the proper under-standing of the relationship between science and religion, there is no rea-son for seeing science as an attack on either religion in general or Christian religion in particular. “The scientific evidence tells decisively against the literal truth of Genesis. That fact does not mean that religion is refuted. Nor should it perturb anyone who believes, in the tradition of Tertullian and Kierkegaard, that faith can and should transcend any scientific findings.”�� Kitcher presents a version of the old view that, from Galileo to the late Stephen J. Gould, saw science and philosophy as two practices which, if autonomous of each other, are perfectly legitimate in the respective fields. The new Bellarminian project of placing science under the guardian-ship of faith, however, belongs to a totally different tradition, one which only a few years ago seemed to have been finally forgotten within the Catholic world. It is very questionable, however, whether we should welcome its resurgence.

38. See, for example, Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2004).39. Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 6.