Pope endorses intelligent design of each and every species (not being a Catholic it doesn't matter to me, but I find it interesting that the Pope's encyclical embraced by secularists is so infused with ID):
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Pope Francis’ references to God’s design of each and every living species – and in particular, the human species – pervade his latest encyclical. I shall simply list them here, in order:…Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wis 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20). (Para. 12)
In the first creation account in the Book of Genesis, God’s plan includes creating humanity. After the creation of man and woman, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good” (Gen 1:31). The Bible teaches that every man and woman is created out of love and made in God’s image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26)…
The Creator can say to each one of us: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jer 1:5). We were conceived in the heart of God, and for this reason “each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary“.[39] (Para. 65)
[ Note that this guy is definitely not going to okay abortion. ]
The Catechism clearly and forcefully criticizes a distorted anthropocentrism: “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection… Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things”.[43] (Para. 69)
76. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the word “creation” has a broader meaning than “nature”, for it has to do with God’s loving plan in which every creature has its own value and significance. (Para. 76)
77. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Ps 33:6). This tells us that the world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance, and this exalts it all the more. The creating word expresses a free choice. (Para. 77)
The Spirit of God has filled the universe with possibilities and therefore, from the very heart of things, something new can always emerge: “Nature is nothing other than a certain kind of art, namely God’s art, impressed upon things, whereby those things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give timbers the wherewithal to move themselves to take the form of a ship”.[52] (Para. 80)
The Pope’s quotation in the foregoing passage is taken from Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, lectio 14. [ Aristotle, another ID guy. ] Curiously, leading Intelligent Design advocate Dr. William Dembski discusses the very same passage in his 2001 online essay, ID as a theory of technological evolution, where he remarks that “at the heart of the current debate over intelligent design is whether biological systems exhibit some feature that cannot be ascribed to nature as such but in addition requires art or design to complete what, as Aristotle put it, ‘nature cannot bring to a finish,'” and he suggests that “specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of actual design, and that specified complexity is instantiated in actual biological systems.”
But I digress. Allow me to continue with my quotes on design from the Pope’s latest encyclical:
81. Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes a direct action of God and a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a “Thou” who addresses himself to another “thou”. The biblical accounts of creation invite us to see each human being as a subject who can never be reduced to the status of an object. (Para. 81)
“Even if we postulate a process of evolution”!!!! That’s a lukewarm endorsement if ever I heard one.
84. Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. (Para. 84)
85. God has written a precious book, “whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe”.[54] (Para. 85)
Lovely quote that one – enough to warm the cockles of any Intelligent Design theorist’s heart.
86. The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety “come from the intention of the first agent” who willed that “what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another”,[60] inasmuch as God’s goodness “could not be represented fittingly by any one creature”.[61] Hence we need to grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships.[62] We understand better the importance and meaning of each creature if we contemplate it within the entirety of God’s plan. As the Catechism teaches: “God wills the interdependence of creatures. The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other”.[63] (Para. 86)
When the human person is considered as simply one being among others, the product of chance or physical determinism, then “our overall sense of responsibility wanes”.[96] (Para. 118)
Any legitimate intervention will act on nature only in order “to favour its development in its own line, that of creation, as intended by God“.[112] (Para. 132)
Just as the different aspects of the planet – physical, chemical and biological – are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand. A good part of our genetic code is shared by many living beings. It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality. (Para. 138)
The Pope appears to believe that life is mysterious and inexhaustibly rich, and that we haven’t even scratched the surface of it yet.
To sum up: if I didn’t know better, I’d conclude that the Pope was an Intelligent Design sympathizer. He certainly doesn’t talk like any evolutionary scientist that I know of – certainly not like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne or for that matter, Larry Moran, and not even like theistic evolutionists such as Kenneth Miller and Simon Conway. For while Drs. Miller and Conway hold is that while God designed the process of evolution to ultimately produce intelligent creatures, He did not design each and every species. The Pope, on the other hand, emphatically affirms that God did design each and every species – especially humans. There are no accidents; everything is planned.
Or as St. Augustine put it 1600 years ago in his City of God (v.11), in a passage that was later approvingly quoted by St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica I, q. 103, art. 5):
Not only heaven and earth, not only man and angel, even the bowels of the lowest animal, even the wing of the bird, the flower of the plant, the leaf of the tree, hath God endowed with every fitting detail of their nature.”
Now we can understand why Pope Francis is so upset about species destruction: he thinks it’s an outrageous interference on our part with God’s plan for human beings and for the biosphere as a whole. God has explicitly willed the entire system of inter-dependencies which link us with other creatures. As such, species extinction constitutes a form of blasphemy on man’s part:
“Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things”.[43] (Para. 69)
84. Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. (Para. 84)
As the Catechism teaches: “God wills the interdependence of creatures. The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other”.[63] (Para. 86)
Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself; the same is true of the harmonious ensemble of organisms existing in a defined space and functioning as a system. Although we are often not aware of it, we depend on these larger systems for our own existence. (Para. 140)
uncommondescent
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