Alvin Plantinga, one of the best known epistemologists in contemporary philosophy, enters the lists on behalf of Cardinal Schonborn:
A renowned philosopher from the University of Notre Dame supports recent comments by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn that belief in evolution as accepted by some in science today may be incompatible with Christian beliefs.
"Cardinal Schonborn has it right," said Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and one of the world's leading scholars in the philosophy of religion. "Evolution means different things to different people. Some of these things are perfectly consistent with Christian belief, but others are not.
"Some think of evolution as the theory of common ancestry: Any two living things share ancestors, so that we and the poison ivy in our back yard, as well as other living creatures, are cousins. This is surprising, but compatible with Christian belief."
Problems arise, according to Plantinga, when "scientists and others take evolution to be a process that is wholly unguided and driven by chance, so that it is simply a matter of chance that rational creatures like us exist. This is not compatible with Christian belief, according to which God has intentionally created us human beings in His own image. He may have done so by using a process of evolution, but it isn't by chance that we exist."
Plantinga adds that the idea that "human beings and other living creatures have come about by chance, rather than by God's design, is also not a proper part of empirical science. How could science show that God has not intentionally designed and created human beings and other creatures? How could it show that they have arisen merely by chance. That's not empirical science. That's metaphysics, or maybe theology. It's a theological add-on, not part of science itself. And, since it is a theological add-on, it shouldn't, of course, be taught in public schools."
This last paragraph is especially pertinent. Darwinism is the view that natural processes are sufficient by themselves to have produced the entire biosphere. This assertion, however, is completely untestable. No observation could serve to confirm it or to refute it. It is, as professor Plantinga notes, pure metaphysics which is why it must not be allowed a position of privilege in public school science classes. It is no more scientific nor less theological than the Intelligent Design theorists' claim that natural processes by themselves are inadequate as explanatory mechanisms for the structures, pathways, and processes we find in the biosphere.
