CATHOLICS BACKING OFF EVOLUTION?

A cardinal viewed as an ally of evolutionary theory appears to be backing off:

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schönborn.

He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

Of course, no one who holds to a Biblical understanding of Creation could in any way endorse a theory that proposes "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection". If man was created in the image of God, he could not have been so created randomly. To imagine that God rolled the dice with His fingers crossed that man might turn out to reflect His nature is ludicrous on its face.

Of course, the random nature of evolution is a key tenent of the theory. Once you remove that one begins to question what the need for Darwinism is in the first place. Then it is realized that Darwinian evolution is not a scientific choice, but rather a philosophical one. And that's what has the evolutionists nervous.