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To Criticize Darwinism is to Preserve the Faith says Toronto Priest and Seminary Prof.

By Hilary White
 
TORONTO, June 14, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pure materialistic Darwinism is a theory that “denies…important Christian teaching about man and his origins,” says Toronto priest, Fr. Martin Hilbert in the most recent edition of Touchstone magazine.
 
The problem in the debate over the origins of life, says Hilbert, is that barring a few who contend that their theory “does not banish God from the picture,” most adherents of the Darwinian theory are, “whether they know it or not, crass materialists.” Those who adhere religiously to the theory start out with an established prejudice against the possibility that anything other than pure random chance could have created life or its many complexities.
 
The debate has become hot again last year in the US with proponents of the theory called Intelligent Design and the atheistic Darwinian scientific establishment fighting over the use of their respective theories in public schools. Then a prominent Vatican theologian, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, added fuel when he wrote in the New York Times correcting the media-generated myth that the late Pope John Paul II had judged the Darwinian theory as acceptable for Catholics.
 
Hilbert quotes Pope Benedict XVI at his inaugural Mass unambiguously refuting the Darwinian claims of randomness. Benedict said that man is “not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed… each of us is necessary.”
 
A priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Toronto, Martin Hilbert holds a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Toronto and teaches a course in the philosophy of science at St. Philip’s Seminary. He points out what he says is an important philosophical danger of accepting Darwinism: “its degradation of human reason by ruling out of bounds the intellect’s ability to see design” in creation.
 
Hilbert cites the “unbelievable” complexity of the simplest forms of life “that makes clear that there is very little substantial evidence for the grand claims of Darwinism.”
 
“If such evidence were there, [to show that random mutations had created the variations and structures of all life forms] proponents of the argument for God’s existence from design in nature would not be able to cite the human eye or the bacterial flagellum as being beyond the ability of natural processes to create without God’s intervention…”
 
“To criticize Darwinism,” Hilbert writes, “…is not meddling in a neutral science. It is preserving intact the deposit of faith, which says some very definite things about the origin and fall of man, by rejecting claims made in the name of science that science itself cannot maintain.”
 
Touchstone magazine bills itself as a “journal of mere Christianity” and covers social and scientific and cultural issues from a ‘conservative’ Christian point of view “from each of the three great divisions of Christendom – Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox.”
 
Read the full article:
Darwin's Divisions by Fr. Martin Hilbert:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=19-05-028-f
 
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Darwinian Evolution Incompatible with Catholic Faith says Cardinal and Author of Catholic Catechism
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jul/05071104.html

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