Scott Carson has a thoughtful (and funny) assessment of Cardinal’s Schönborn’s latest puzzling attempt to further confuse Catholics about the Church’s attitude to science.
The editors of First Things are not idiots, either, and yet they seem to fall victim to a kind of ideology of their own at times, especially when it comes to this issue of the connection between global materialism and the defense of evolution. Schönborn’s essay is neither convincing nor philosophically sophisticated, and yet it has managed to find more than one eager audience of yes-men. Reading it is like watching a theocon version of The View, with Schönborn filling in for Rosie O’Donnell with his vapid pseudo-aristotelian inanities carelessly cribbed from Copleston’s History of Philosophy and Fr. Neuhaus doing time as Barbara Walters, silently egging on the Schönborns in the While We’re At It section while pretending that the Stephen Barrs don’t exist. I suspect that the reason has less to do with anyone’s commitment to scientific methodology and more to do with thumbing one’s nose at the advocates of scientism.