Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, the Catholic archbishop of Vienna, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that while the Church has no objection to "evolution," that does not mean it accepts everything that travels under that name.

Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, the Catholic archbishop of Vienna, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that while the Church has no objection to "evolution," that does not mean it accepts everything that travels under that name. The Times then ran follow-up stories on whether the Church was turning away from modern science. But the discussion is mired in confusion. The cardinal used some needlessly provocative, and some needlessly obscure, phrasing: "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. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." It should be obvious that "evolution" is not the only word in this passage with a contested meaning. The merits of the cardinal's argument turn also on the meaning of "random" and "design" (to say nothing of "ideology" and "science"). What he is saying, as we read him, is that various natural phenomena suggest, even if they do not prove, the existence of a Creator, and that the Church cannot accept any theory of evolution that precludes the role of Providence in the development of human life. Schonborn's views, as expressed, are compatible with the possibility that God set a process of natural selection in motion for the purpose of creating mankind. The argument from design, theologically ancient, did not presuppose any biological facts that have been disproven. The Church will neither repudiate it nor put God in exile. It is somewhat astonishing that anyone expects otherwise.