Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, offers his thoughts on Charles Darwin. Excerpt:
“This week we will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, one of Britain’s most extraordinary scientists. His theory of evolution, one of the greatest discoveries of all time, gives us a way of understanding the connectedness of all life and the uniqueness of human life within it. Together with other branches of scientific exploration, evolution begins to unfold and illuminate the interplay of forces that make our universe such an extraordinary dynamic reality. In this sense, science is itself a journey of learning and exploration. This I find exciting and humbling.
“Towards the end of his life Darwin wrote: ‘It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.’ The science opens me not only to puzzles and to questions about the world I live in; it leads me to marvel at its complexity. Here, I find science is a good friend to my faith. It also calls me to a journey of learning and understanding. One of the things that mars our culture is the fracture between faith and science. It impoverishes our inquiry into the realities that make up our life and world. This is a false opposition. [...]
“Darwin’s theory does not take away the reality of that freedom and the moral responsibility it gives us. It also teaches us a certain humility before the wonderful complexity and process that life is. Yet because humanity is a free agent in this, we cannot ultimately predict the future. Christianity understands human freedom. It knows that all life, but especially human life, is summoned to a perfection that it cannot attain through natural processes or through human agency alone. That future is God’s gift and it summons us to a new spiritual and moral maturity. Could it be that this is the next stage in that evolutionary adventure? The discovery that God is the destiny of life; that Christ is not only the Alpha, the one in whose image we are made, but also the Omega, the one in whom we are completed.
“Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. They are partners on the journey of a mystery that unfolds, a truth that is everywhere present in the very creativity and variety of life itself. As St Augustine wrote, ‘Let us seek with the desire to find, and find with the desire to seek still more.’”
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February 10, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Jay
“His theory of evolution, one of the greatest discoveries of all time, gives us a way of understanding the connectedness of all life and the uniqueness [Darwin Says: "or lack thereof!"] of human life within it.”
I watched the lecture on Darwin’s Loss of Faith that you posted. Apparently, as his children recalled, Darwin sometimes got in a tizzy over religious reactions to his theory and often remarked, “A bench of bishops is the devil’s flower garden.” I think that third paragraph especially might have triggered one of Darwin’s infamous vomiting fits!