The subject matter for discussion on Thursday the 13th is a paper by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, entitled “The Designs of Science.”
Cardinal Schönborn writes concerning “intelligent design” and the human mind’s capacity for discerning it:
In theology, although the mind’s ability to grasp the order and design in nature is adopted by, taken up into, and elevated to new heights by the faith of Christianity, that ability precedes faith, as Romans 1:19-20 makes clear. In science, the discipline and methods are such that design—more precisely, formal and final causes in natural beings—is purposefully excluded from its reductionist conception of nature.
And, further:
… my argument (is) based on the natural ability of the human intellect to grasp the intelligible realities that populate the natural world, including most clearly and evidently the world of living substances, living beings. Nothing is intelligible—nothing can be grasped in its essence by our intellects—without first being ordered by a creative intellect. The possibility of modern science is fundamentally grounded on the reality of an underlying creative intellect that makes the natural world what it is. The natural world is nothing less than a mediation between minds: the unlimited mind of the Creator and our limited human minds. Res ergo naturalis inter duos intellectus constituta — “The natural thing is constituted between two intellects…
Click here for the full text of Schonborn's "The Designs of Science" (First Things January 2006).
