G Alston,
You fail to understand what the Pope believes:
Evolution says that man is the result of natural processes. If you accept that this is real then you also accept that morals, ethics etc are also natural and are the result of natural processes. If you assume morals come from god than you deny evolution. Can’t be both. Pick one and only one.
Yes, even the pope realizes the conundrum and that the church has been in a losing battle with science for years. So in recent years the pope has said evolution is real EXCEPT for man. It makes the church seem science friendly.
-you fail because you don’t see the third choice, the science of man, which is important to Benedict’s thinking: his contention that a proper, Christian, understanding of man requires a specifically *anthropological* form of science. Morals or ethics cannot be explained by the natural sciences because they are not rooted in the origin of physics, chemistry, or biology, but rather in the origin of language. Once one begins to take seriously questions into the nature of the origin of language, one may begin to appreciate that language, being an inherently public, shared phenomenon, could only have happened in some kind of memorable event, in other words in some kind of act of Creation. Now the pure scientist has no way of knowing whether this was an event in which man created God or God created man. That question can be left to faith, but the point is that a proper anthropological sciences evacuates most of the presumed differences between the two, making discourses like yours, obsessed with some phony evolution vs. creation debate, into a thoughtless ritual propagated by second-tier public intellectuals to entertain the masses for big bucks.
Furthermore, it is only when we understand better how culture or language is generated, anthropologically, that we can hope to find the mix of reason and faith that we will need to move beyond the present crisis. There is a discipline of Generative Anthropology, somewhat distinct from the Pope’s anthropological Christianity that is taking up this task. There is also the Christian anthropology of Rene Girard. Any reading in these areas will take you beyond your current either/or impasse.
