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Non-overlapping magisteria - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation? - religion and science have their own respective domains of teaching authority

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

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In the context of this "standard" position, I was enormously puzzled by a statement issued by Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the same body that had sponsored my earlier trip to the Vatican. In this document, titled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," the Pope defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Newspapers throughout the world responded with front-page headlines, as in The New York Times for October 25: "Pope Bolsters Church's Support for Scientific View of Evolution."

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Now I know about "slow news days," and I do allow that nothing else was strongly competing for headlines at that particular moment. Still, I couldn't help feeling immensely puzzled by all the attention paid to the Pope's statement (while being wryly pleased, of course, for we need all the good press we can get, especially from respected outside sources). The Catholic Church does not oppose evolution, and has no reason to do so. Why had the Pope issued such a statement at all? And why had the press responded with an orgy of worldwide front-page coverage?

I could only conclude at first, and wrongly as I soon learned, that journalists throughout the world must deeply misunderstand the relationship between science and religion, and must therefore be elevating a minor papal comment to unwarranted notice. Perhaps most people really do think that a war exists between science and religion, and that evolution cannot be squared with a belief in God. In such a context, a papal admission of evolution's legitimate status might be regarded as major news indeed - a sort of modern equivalent for a story that never happened, but would have made the biggest journalistic splash of 1640: Pope Urban VIII releases his most famous prisoner from house arrest and humbly apologizes: "Sorry, Signor Galileo . . . the sun, er, is central."

But I then discovered that such prominent coverage of papal satisfaction with evolution had not been an error of non-Catholic anglophone journalists. The Vatican itself had issued the statement as a major news release. And Italian newspapers had featured, if anything, even bigger headlines and longer stories. The conservative Il Giornale, for example, shouted from its masthead: "Pope Says We May Descend from Monkeys."

Clearly, I was out to lunch; something novel or surprising must lurk within the papal statement, but what could be causing all the fuss? - especially given the accuracy of my primary impression (as I later verified) that the Catholic Church values scientific study, views science as no threat to religion in general or Catholic doctrine in particular, and has long accepted both the legitimacy of evolution as a field of study and the potential harmony of evolutionary conclusions with Catholic faith.

As a former constituent of Tip O'Neill, I certainly know that "all politics is local" - and that the Vatican undoubtedly has its own internal reasons, quite opaque to me, for announcing papal support of evolution in a major statement. Still, I reasoned that I must be missing some important key, and I felt quite frustrated. I then remembered the primary rule of intellectual life: When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents - a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.

Non-overlapping magisteria - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation? - religion and science have their own respective domains of teaching authority

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

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