Rethinking Christianity by Alister McGrath

 

 

In public debates with Dawkins, he dismissed the claims of the “New Atheists”

that Christianity was a fraud. Dawkins and his sort, McGrath now says,

“were aggressively asserting atheist beliefs, but posing as if they were

telling incontestable truths”.

  

Theologian Alister McGrath: Christianity is back because it answers the big questions

The Telegraph

 

Theologian Alister McGrath:

Christianity is back because it answers

the big questions

  

Story by Peter Stanford

03 Nov ….

 

Alister McGrath is releasing a new book, Rethinking Christianity:

A Thoughtful Guide to a Life-Changing Faith - Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

 

Last year, a survey for the Bible Society, carried out by YouGov, made headlines. The number of Gen Z Britons attending church services, it declared, had soared by 16 per cent between 2018 and 2024. The news led to discussions in Parliament, and Church conferences trumpeting this “quiet revival”.

 

What made the claims so believable was a parallel narrative, more anecdotal but also more widespread, about young people embracing religion. You heard it everywhere, in opinion pieces, features and online chatter. It was the subject of entire books, such as Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by the award-winning young writer Lamorna Ash.

 

Yet, even as interest in Christianity became more vocal, the statistics came into question. The Bible Society report was contested, and eventually withdrawn; the British Social Attitudes Survey then reported, over exactly the same period, a 9 per cent fall in 18 to 34-year-olds who described themselves as “religious”. Given the level of claim and counter-claim, this has become ground where angels fear to tread.

 

Alister McGrath is well aware. A former professor of divinity, now emeritus professor in science and religion at the University of Oxford … one of Britain’s best known and most respected Christian intellectuals.

 

This mild-mannered 73-year-old chooses his words with great care in his north Oxford flat as we try to sort out what is and isn’t happening.

 

McGrath is now emeritus professor in science and religion at the University of Oxford –

Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

The central thesis of his new book, Rethinking Christianity, is that what the likes of Ash heard is absolutely correct.

 

The sea of faith around these islands is rising. “I am seeing,” he tells me, “a growth in young people wanting to talk about Christianity. Others have seen it, but right now no one really wants to emphasise it. It is probably best just to let it happen.”

 

The burnt fingers at the Bible Society, coupled with a still extant British reluctance to talk about Christianity – “We don’t do God”, as Alastair Campbell once put it, on behalf of Tony Blair – appear to have warned many commentators off. Not McGrath, though. This academic and author, best known as the biographer and champion of CS Lewis – both men were born in Belfast, albeit McGrath’s accent gives no hint of it – likes to step up when others hold back. He was, 20 years ago, the first leading Christian to lock horns in public with Richard Dawkins, following the publication of the evolutionary biologist’s global bestseller, The God Delusion.

 

In public debates with Dawkins, he dismissed the claims of the “New Atheists” that Christianity was a fraud. Dawkins and his sort, McGrath now says, “were aggressively asserting atheist beliefs, but posing as if they were telling incontestable truths”.

 

Damien Mackey: But see e.g. my article:

 

Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology

 

(2) Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology

 

In response, McGrath and his wife, Joanna Collicutt, a clinical psychologist and Anglican vicar, published a strong defence of religion titled The Dawkins Delusion. “I probably unwisely allowed myself to have a reasonably high profile,” he reflects.

 

Dawkins has, in recent weeks, been celebrating the 20th anniversary of The God Delusion, making appearances and writing articles (including in this paper). But the scientist is the deluded one, McGrath suggests. “The New Atheism seems to have tanked. It’s on its way out, because people have seen that it was never really answering the big questions.”

 

McGrath connects the revival of interest in Christianity with those years. “After my book came out in 2007,” he says, “a lot of young people who have come to Oxford contacted me, wanting to talk and tell me what their experiences were.” He thinks of those youngsters as two distinct groups: those who sought him out in the immediate aftermath of The Dawkins Delusion, and those who’ve done the same in the past decade. (In between, McGrath removed himself from the fray for six years, from 2008 to 2014, teaching at King’s College, London.)

 

“In the first period,” he explains, “their questions were all very defensive. ‘How on earth do we defend Christianity in the face of this [New Atheist] onslaught?’

 

They were mainly Christians – but [there were] also those outside Christianity who were interested in it but thought it was now an intellectual no-go area thanks to Dawkins.”

 

In response to Richard Dawkins (photographed for The Telegraph in July), McGrath published

a strong defence of religion titled The Dawkins Delusion - Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

 

In 2014, after he had returned to Oxford and become professor of science and religion, the requests to meet him started coming in again. This time, however, the discussions were very different. “The tone and the subject of the questions had changed. In these conversations, there was a revival of interest – of people looking, and seeing Christianity as able to answer the questions they were posing.”

 

In McGrath’s experience, an increasingly uncertain world – politically, socially, economically and environmentally – has made many young people look again at religion. So, when they ask to talk to him, what guidance does he give them?

“That as human beings we are all looking for meaning, significance, purpose – and more than that. In my view, Christianity can engage all of these significantly and persuasively. This goes beyond beliefs, to where we’re dealing with the deepest longings and aspirations of humanity.”

 

….

 

McGrath has a clear advantage, to a new generation of seekers, in helping them hear those answers. He has walked the same path. He was a convinced atheist when he arrived at Oxford in 1971 as an 18-year-old undergraduate to study chemistry. “I grew up in the 1960s,” he recalls, “and got caught up in the atheist zeitgeist. I was convinced we were all on the brink of a new progressive, godless age.”

 

Among other things, in the sectarian atmosphere of 1960s Northern Ireland – torn between Protestantism and Catholicism – atheism felt like an escape. “As a 16-year-old, it was obvious. No religion, no religious tensions, no violence. End of problem.”

His parents weren’t “particularly religious”, he says, though enough for young Alister to keep his atheism to himself. As he arrived in Oxford, however, he was looking forward to meeting other atheists and deepening his attachment to it.

 

“But most atheists I met – and there were plenty, because it was so fashionable – just assumed that atheism was the obvious thing for an intelligent person to embrace. It did not require any further intellectual justification.” (Rather like Dawkins, as McGrath sees him.)

 

And then, among McGrath’s fellow chemists, this serious-minded atheist undergraduate found Christians who were only too willing to challenge him in conversation. “And they eventually overcame the seawalls of my defence, if I can put it like that.”

 

McGrath began going to church. It was CS Lewis “more than anyone”, though, who brought him back to God. “Reading his books was my introduction to an intellectually intelligent form of Christianity that was also highly accessible. Through him, I saw that Christianity was not just something at a spiritual level, but could be sustained intellectually.”

 

He continued his chemistry work to postgraduate level, but at the same time read for a theology degree.

 

CS Lewis’s books provided an ‘introduction to an intellectually intelligent form of Christianity’: McGrath (pictured at Oxford in 2005) - Corbis via Getty Images/Andrew Fox

 

It made him the perfect candidate in 2014 for Oxford’s professorship in science and religion. Those two spheres have, in the past four centuries, had a difficult relationship. Take the case of Galileo Galilei, declared a heretic in 1633 and put under house arrest for daring to contradict Rome and insist that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

 

Damien Mackey: But, for quite a different twist on Galileo, see my article:

 

Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel

 

(3) Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel

 

But McGrath suggests that he is witnessing a new rapprochement between the disciplines.

“It is much more convivial now. A lot more scientists are now feeling more confident in talking about their faith. Science is very good at helping us understand how our world functions, but when it comes to moral values or existential meaning – well, no.”

 

What of artificial intelligence? “I could use AI to tell me where to buy pizza, but it doesn’t know what a pizza is. It is a linguistic world which is derived from observing human beings.” Still, he doesn’t think it’s to be dismissed. “We need to have our eyes wide open at the deep questions it raises, and the risk of crossing a particularly dangerous frontier.”

 

If he’s sceptical of the claims being made about AI, what about the charge regularly directed at the Church of England – namely, that it’s in terminal decline?

 

“I am very sympathetic to Anglicanism, and attend my local Anglican church, but I was disappointed by Justin Welby, who wasn’t particularly inspirational or an original thinker. And Sarah Mullally is the same.”

 

….

 

The BBC isn’t helping, he believes, having cut its religious output hugely in recent decades. “It is losing its way in terms of coverage of religion. I do find myself wishing that they would just have serious theologians just talking…” He pauses for a moment, then adds, in a rare flash of humour: “But I appreciate that that would not attract very many listeners.”

 

On the positive side, though, he feels he is “seeing a quiet re-entry of religion into the political domain”. He points to the Prime Minister, who speaks of the influence of his Catholic upbringing, and the Leader of the Opposition, who has spoken openly about her relationship with faith. I add that there are noisier candidates: Reform, like other Right-wing groups across Europe, has been trying to draw Christianity into their arguments around national identity; one proposed policy, for instance, would ban disused Christian churches from being repurposed as mosques. What does McGrath think of such actors? “There is this new interest [in Christianity], and different people are taking that in different directions,” he says diplomatically. “Some are more appropriate than others.”

 

What he wants to see above all: a return of Christian virtues to public life. “We are living in a culture where what is good is ‘what I want’. What we need is for people to be challenged, with a concept of good that is bigger than any one of us.”

 

Rethinking Christianity: A Thoughtful Guide to a Life-Changing Faith (TN Nelson, £14.99) is out now

 

Douglas Farrow unmasks père Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

“Teilhard’s vision of salvation is undeniably escapist. His hope is not, as some pretend, in the renewal of all things, but in the forsaking of all things.

It is not hope in the restoration of a proper relationship between God and the world and between the soul and the body, but in the eventual repudiation of the body

and of the world, of all that is material, through union with God.

That is his idea of rectification, indeed of deification, and it is—not to put too fine

a point on it —a decidedly heretical idea”.

 Dr. Douglas Farrow

 

Sister Ilia Delio, who lives and breathes Teilhard de Chardin, considers pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, to be constrained by an out-dated metaphysics, and in need of a Teilhardian utrahumanism:

Teilhard de Chardin points to what Pope Leo missed in 'Magnifica Humanitas' | National Catholic Reporter

 

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment of genuine civilizational urgency. Its concern for human dignity, its alarm at the displacement of labor, its refusal to treat artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument — all of these are worthy moral interventions. The encyclical asks the right questions.

 

Yet a reading alongside Teilhard de Chardin's ultrahumanism, and the theological tradition running through Carl Jung and Paul Tillich, suggests that the encyclical's answers are constrained by a metaphysics no longer equal to the evolutionary world it seeks to address. 

 

This essay does not dismiss Leo's concerns; it argues that Teilhard provides a more adequate — and ultimately more hopeful — theological grammar for engaging AI, one that honors the church's deepest instincts about the divine-human relationship while refusing to set evolution and grace in opposition.

 

The most revealing word in Magnifica Humanitas is a verb: remain. "Our duty in the age of AI," Leo writes, "is to remain profoundly human." The governing images — for example, Babel set against Jerusalem — are images of protection, of guarding a grandeur already given. The encyclical understands the human person as a finished essence, dignified from outside, to be preserved against a technological force that threatens to dissolve it. 

 

Leo builds carefully on the tradition of imago Dei, on the relational anthropology of the Trinity, on integral ecology extended into the digital sphere. Against the transhumanist fantasy of escaping weakness, he makes finitude the very medium of love and openness to God. This is the wisdom of the cross, and it is right.

 

But the verb remain is also a symptom. To remain is to hold a position against a threatening advance.

It presupposes that what the human is has already been determined — that the image of God is a status to be defended rather than a process to be undergone. The relational anthropology Leo invokes actually points in the opposite direction. If the person is constitutively relational, then a new and vast web of machinic and noospheric relations is not the death of personhood but its next medium. Leo has laid the anthropological foundation for a bolder argument and he then builds upon it.

 

Teilhard de Chardin offers the theology of the other verb: become. Evolution is not background scenery for the human story; it is the story. The human person is not a fixed essence deposited into a changing world but the growing tip of an evolutionary process that has always moved through convergence toward greater complexity and consciousness. 

….

 

The Problem with Teilhard

 

Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2018): 377–385 377

 

Douglas Farrow McGill University Montreal, Canada

 

Nova et Vetera 16-2 Spring 2018.pdf

 

 

The Pontifical Council for Culture has voted to request that the monitum issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1962 against the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin be lifted on the grounds that, though “some of his writings might be open to constructive criticism, his prophetic vision has been and is inspiring theologians and scientists.” Whether there are scientists who, qua scientists rather than amateur philosophers, are inspired by Teilhard may be doubted. That there are still theologians of a certain sort who are thus inspired may not be. Which is why the monitum must remain in place. For it is not his association with frauds like the Piltdown man that matters, but his assault on basic Catholic orthodoxy in cosmology, Christology, and ecclesiology. A reminder of this seems timely. Hence I offer here an abridged version of what may be found in full elsewhere. ….

Let us begin with what attracted (and still attracts) people to Teilhard, in whom the conflicting hopes and fears of the twentieth century met and found expression. Positively, he wanted to reconcile, to unite in a grand synthesis, “faith in God and faith in the World,” or “the cult of progress and passion for the glory of God.” Negatively, he wanted to combat with resolute determination an angst he thought rooted in the trauma of the Copernican revolution. He recognized man’s loss of bearings in the vastness of the universe and his sense of futility in a world subject to the law of entropy. He knew the “malady of space-time” that manifests itself as a “fundamental anguish of being,” a “sickness of the dead end,” a feeling of confinement: “As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and more clearly, in myself and in those around me, that the great secret preoccupation of modern man is much less to battle for possession of the world than to find a means of escaping from it. The anguish of feeling that one is not merely spatially but ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the anxious search for an issue to, or more exactly a focal point for, the evolutionary process; these are the price we must pay for the growth of planetary consciousness; these are the dimly-recognized burdens which weigh down the souls of christian and gentile alike in the world of today.” ….

Teilhard made it his aim to address this anxiety, to restore confidence in progress, and so to make the Christian faith relevant once again. To that end, he undertook what he called a “re-cosmologization of our religion,” commandeering evolution as the vehicle not only of creation but also of redemption. Evolution, if we ourselves took charge of it, would lead us to what he called Omega, that final issue our hearts desire, a point of complete cosmic convergence that quells all fear of perpetual, meaningless becoming. With this combi nation of evolutionism and eschatology, he hoped to cure the spiritual crisis of the modern world. Humanity needed a common center, a new hope, a uniting faith and vision.

That is just what he hoped to achieve by breaking down the disastrous barrier dividing devotion to God above from commitment to worldly progress here below. These “rival mysticisms” must not be allowed to divide mankind any longer.

Advance toward God must be linked with social progress for the benefit of both. In an article entitled “The Heart of the Problem,” he offered the following diagram, in which OY represents, he says, Christian faith aspiring upward, while OX represents humanistic faith driving forward, and OR is a “rectified” Christian faith capable of reconciling the two:

[See original article]

 

Through this rectified and rectifying faith, mankind would “achieve a breakthrough straight ahead by forcing its way over the threshold of some higher level of consciousness.” All who, in their own fashion, shared this conviction would advance in step together, be they Chris tian or otherwise.

I call this “diagonalism.” Teilhard called it “noogenesis.”

By that, he meant the “ascent of the Universe towards consciousness,” the “drift of matter towards spirit,” a gradual liberation of consciousness from the primitive, material layers of the world—the triumph of the interior over the exterior, of mind over matter. Time itself is “the rise of the Universe into high latitudes where complexity, concentration, centration, and consciousness grow and increase, simultaneously and correlatively.” As diversification gives way to unification, creation’s spatio-temporal dimensions will be reduced to a vanishing point. The newly emergent consciousness, satiated on “the whole divinisable substance of matter,” will break away “to join up with the supreme and universal focus Omega”—that is, with its divine Origin and Destiny. Is it not conceivable, he asks, “that Mankind, at the end of its totalization, its folding-in upon itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega Point?” That may be “a phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death: but in reality a simple metamorphosis and arrival at the supreme synthesis.” It will be “an escape from the planet, not in space or outwardly, but spiritually and inwardly, such as the hyper-concentration of matter upon itself allows.” ….

Did I say attractive? It should not be necessary to point out that that all of this is far closer to the gnostic cosmology and eschatology than to the Judeo-Christian. Teilhard’s vision of salvation is undeniably escapist. His hope is not, as some pretend, in the renewal of all things, but in the forsaking of all things. It is not hope in the restoration of a proper relationship between God and the world and between the soul and the body, but in the eventual repudiation of the body and of the world, of all that is material, through union with God. That is his idea of rectification, indeed of deification, and it is—not to put too fine a point on it—a decidedly heretical idea.

It goes without saying that this heretical cosmology requires an heretical Christology to support it, and that Christology is found in Teilhard’s exposition of the “Cosmic Christ.” The expanding cosmos seemed to have rendered our planet and our race, and hence also Jesus of Nazareth, virtually irrelevant, leaving individualistic materialism as the only option. One recalls here, more recently, Paul Feyerabend’s challenge to Cardinal Ratzinger that the Church ought to have foreseen this problem long ago. Père Teilhard was certainly aware of it, and his answer was to shift the emphasis to something or someone more grand than a mere man. Jesus, he suggested, was only one expression among many of the Cosmic Christ, a local expression appropriate to the needs of our particular planet and race.

Already in 1916, the young Jesuit wrote in his journal of “surrender to the Cosmic Christ” as the option that would secure what is best both in classical spirituality and in a more world-affirming posture. Beyond the traditional two natures of Christ, he claimed, we must reckon today with his third nature: with his relation to the Universe, rather than to the Father and the Spirit. This he posited as our most pressing theological problem. We must get to grips not with “the Man-Jesus and the Word-God,” but with “a third face of the theandric complex,” with “the mysterious super-human person everywhere underlying the most fundamental institutions and the most solemn dogmatic affirmations of the Church.” We must get to grips with “the consummating and cosmic Christ of St. Paul,” who alone could hold everything together. ….

But Teilhard’s Cosmic Christ, who underwrites noogenesis, has in fact nothing to do with the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ to whom Paul bears witness. He is not Lord at all, really, but rather the product of the cosmic process. There is a sense in which he does not yet even fully exist. If evolution is noogenesis, noogenesis is Christogenesis. “Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy.” “Quite specifically,” says Teilhard, “it is Christ whom we make or whom we undergo in all things.”

So who was Jesus? In him, this future Cosmic Christ appeared proactively, or perhaps we should say retroactively, as a particular man. He did so in order to infuse into human nature a grace essential to evolution’s “hominization” phase. By his sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus provided the impetus to self-transcendence, without which unification—incorporation into one infinite Person—is ultimately impossible. In his resurrection, he anticipated our liberation from “the temporal zones of our visible world” into the oneness of the Pleroma. Having thus demonstrated a law common to all life, he began to draw the whole world after him as the enormous body of his ascension. The Cross now represents “the deepest aspirations of our age,” and “towards the peaks, shrouded in mists from our human eyes, whither the Cross beckons us, we rise by a path which is the way of universal progress.”

For Teilhard, the incarnation was a decisive but temporary affair, then.

The Christ “appeared for a moment in our midst” that we might see and touch him “before vanishing once again, more luminous and ineffable than ever, into the depths of the future.” His withdrawal—both a going up and a going ahead, an ascension and an advance—means a going beyond the humanity he once shared with us. He has become “an immense and living force” to be encountered already, and worshipped, in all creatures. His presence is “silently accruing in things” until, in the Parousia, as if at a kind of flashpoint, it will suddenly break forth in all its splendor. For, as the twin vectors of our rectified faith “veer and draw together” they point us to the consummated Christ, the divine soul of a divinized creation.

To meld two opposing worldviews requires a powerful bond. Since Jesus of Nazareth could not supply that bond, Teilhard turned to the Cosmic Christ. But is that Christ something more substantial than a diagram, an invented metaphysic, an empty guarantee that forward is upward? And if so, can we follow Teilhard in addressing him as “Jesus”? For this much is clear: the first task of the Cosmic Christ is to dispose of the scandal of particularity with which Christianity has hitherto been burdened. Jesus of Nazareth is retained only as a reference point on our evolutionary chart, stretched out on the cross that is constructed for him by the intersection of Teilhard’s twin axes or aspirations. To expect belief in him today, as a living man, as “this same Jesus,” would not unite, but divide. The resurrected Christ, whose strength bends these axes until they touch again at Omega point, is someone quite different. He is no longer the incarnate one, with his own human and bodily specificity, but the immanent one. “Why should we go searching the Judaea of two thousand years ago?” asks Teilhard. “You do truly appear to me as that vast and vital force which I sought everywhere that I might adore it.”

On the basis of his Christology alone, it is impossible to speak, with the Pontifical Council, merely of reservations or room for constructive criticism. We are talking about heresy, full stop. Were the monitum to be lifted, what Pius XII called a “cesspool of errors” would slop out all the more readily into the Church. ….

 

 

 

 

 

“Babel syndrome” – the pretense that a single language – even a digital one – can translate everything. Pope Leo XIV.

 

“Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology,

but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem;

between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence”.

Pope Leo XIV

 

ENCYCLICAL LETTER
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
OF HIS HOLINESS
POPE LEO XIV
ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON
IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 

2026

 

….

Two biblical images

 

7. In order to answer these questions and discern how to navigate responsibly the era of AI, I would like to bring to mind two scenes from the Bible: the construction of the Tower of Babel (cf. Gen 11:1-9) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem (cf. Neh 2–6). The story of Babel appears in the Book of Genesis, at the origins of humanity, immediately after the genealogies of Noah’s sons. After settling in a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens” (Gen 11:4). Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to “make a name” for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.

 

8. The Book of Nehemiah, in turn, opens at a time of great vulnerability in the history of ancient Israel. After the Babylonian exile, a portion of the people returned to Jerusalem, but the city was still in ruins, the walls collapsed and the gates burned (cf. Neh 1–2). Nehemiah, a Jew in the service of the Persian King Artaxerxes, received news of the disastrous state of his ancestral city. Before taking action, he fasted, prayed and interceded for the people. He then asked the king for permission to return to Jerusalem and, upon arriving, examined the destroyed areas in silence. He did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones. Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.

 

9. In light of these two images, the Holy Spirit challenges us today regarding our relationship with technology and the ongoing digital revolution. Scientific discoveries are talents entrusted to humanity so that they may bear fruit (cf. Mt 25:14-30). Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

 

10. We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise. Instead, let us choose the “way of Nehemiah,” which highlights the importance of working together to make the City of God a safe place for returning exiles. Rebuilding today means recognizing that, precisely from the plurality of voices and visions which, even though they sometimes remind us of the confusion caused by the diversity of spoken languages, a bright possibility emerges. Indeed, this is the possibility of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity. Within this shared task, Christians discover their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that, in his light, pluralism does not dissipate into disorder, but instead, through the practice of synodality, it becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end. In the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all humanity. And this vision of grace is an invitation for us Christians to work together in order to foster a peaceful, just and dignified life in community within today’s “cities.”

….

 

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

The fingerprints of an intelligent mind are all over the genomes of life

 

 

“There are different categories of pseudoscience, but the type relevant

to Darwinism occurs when a legitimate scientific theory makes predictions critical to that theory that are subsequently falsified, but the theory continues to be promoted as science, often with creative story-telling and the use of technical terms mixed with words and phrases such as “over time,” “is conceivable,” “probably”

and many others which can be described charitably as words and phrases one uses when confirming data is unavailable”.

 

Kirk Durston

 

 

Apparently certain Christians, as well as certain scientists, so determined to ‘prove’ their agenda-driven arguments, will actually resort to lying to ‘make good their case’, or to ‘save the appearances’.

 

In the case of Creationists, for instance, Geology professor Ian Plimer has exposed such desperate falsifying in his book, Telling lies for God: Reason vs creationism (Random House Australia, 1994).

 

I (Damien Mackey) wrote about this unhappy situation, for example, in my article:

 

Abandonment of common sense, telling lies for God, not necessary prerequisites for biblical interpretation

 

(11) Abandonment of common sense, telling lies for God, not necessary prerequisites for biblical interpretation

 

One review of professor Plimer’s book reads as follows:

Telling Lies For God by Ian Plimer - 9780091828523

 

A powerful and controversial analysis of creationism - the belief that the Biblical description of the earth, and all life on it, can be applied literally - and an attack on the arguments put forward in its support. Ian Plimer, Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne, examines in detail the arguments of the creationists, and draws on his own scientific background and the expertise of many of his academic peers to refute them point by point.

 

He details the implications of treating the Old Testament as a scientific text - and takes an equally searching look at the material used to back up the more unusual statements made by some creationists here and overseas.

 

This is an issue which arouses great argument and passion amongst many Australians. We are all entitled to our beliefs - but in a pluralist society we should also expect them to be subject to public scrutiny.

 

Kirk Durston (2025) will tell of how the same situation can occur with Darwinian scientists: Darwinism as Pseudoscience | Science and Culture Today

 

How Darwinism Became a Pseudoscience

 

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein has a reputation for some pretty wild ideas outside his area of expertise that I might not want to defend. But when it comes to some comments he made a few months ago, within his own field of expertise, he was spot on when he provided a disturbing reality check on the current state of Darwinism. As a scientist, I have my own reasons why this is so. He stated,

 

In my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood … I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I’m annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a Creationist worldview was always a threat … and so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation, as it was presented, than it ever was ….

 

As a biophysicist specializing in the information encoded in the DNA of protein-coding genes, and how that information prescribes the 3D structure of proteins, I have my own reasons for agreeing with Weinstein on this issue. Although he thinks he knows “more or less how to fix it,” my knowledge of the extreme difficulty (a colossal understatement) of locating sequences that will code for a functional protein with a stable 3D structure, tells me that neither he nor anyone else is going to fix it (although I would be fascinated to hear his proposed solution).

 

That said, there are some phrases in his statement that deserve to be pointed out: “telling a kind of lie,” “broken,” and “lying to themselves.” Note, also, the motive for promoting this broken theory.

 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Darwinists are conspiring to deliberately corrupt science and mislead people, although such corruption and misleading is certainly happening. Rather, scientists who should know better, but continue to promote Darwinism, are living in denial, motivated by their own a priori commitment to materialism and scientism driven by an antagonism against any possibility that there is an intelligent mind behind the software encoded in the genomes of life.

 

Three Predictions of Darwinian Evolution

 

About 35 years earlier, I sat in the office of a professor of evolutionary biology at a major Canadian university. I had noticed three predictions of Darwinian evolution that appeared to be consistently falsified by experimental evidence, so I asked him about it. To my shock, he admitted that all three were major problems for which we had not yet found satisfactory answers. Keep in mind that this was 35 years before Bret Weinstein’s interview.

 

The main difference between then and now is that advances in science have made the problems even more obvious.

 

Eugene Koonin, an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, published a paper in 2007 admitting that even RNA replication, a proposed stepping stone to life, was so impossibly improbable, that it was unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe. …. His solution was to propose an infinite multiverse, which would offer an infinite number of opportunities to solve this problem. It is especially interesting to read the reviewers’ comments. They expressed the fear that intelligent design might be seen as a better explanation for the origin of life. Consequently, the concluding sentence of Eugene Koonin’s paper absurdly states that his hypothesis of an infinite multiverse “leaves no room whatsoever for any form of intelligent design.” One might think that a mind, which we know exists given that we all have one, might be a better “Ockham’s Razor” option than proposing an infinite number of untestable universes … but rational deliberation is often sidestepped in pseudoscience.

 

If one wonders what the driving force behind Darwinism is, and what the motive might be for Darwinists to be “telling a kind of lie,” as Weinstein puts it, one might want to think about both Koonin’s denial of any kind of intelligent design behind life, and what Weinstein said about the so-called “threat” of the theory of intelligent design as an explanation for the origin and diversity of life. This “threat” and denial have resulted in Darwinists lying to themselves and the public. The result is that Darwinism has degenerated into pseudoscience.

 

Variation vs Darwinism

 

The average person tends to understand the word “evolution” as the theory that the full diversity of plant and animal life has descended from a very simple cell that somehow arose in the past and began to self-replicate. People are often confused to learn that evolution is often defined as variation in a population of plants or animals over time, via a combination of genetic drift, mutations … and natural selection. (Note: In this article, “mutation” includes insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations.) Since we observe variation throughout nature, a Darwinist can look you in the eye and confidently state that “evolution is a fact!” But defining evolution as simply genetic variation over time is misleading. To avoid using the term “evolution” in a misleading way, I will refer to variation within a population over time as, simply, variation. As for the neo-Darwinian theory of common descent, we will describe that belief as Darwinism.

 

How Can We Tell the Difference?

 

Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of rigor in evolutionary biology when it comes to distinguishing between variation and Darwinism. I often observe Darwinists insisting that the two are the same thing, but as science advances this belief has become obviously false. Rigor must be an essential component of good science and using the word “evolution” to refer to two very different concepts is no exception. There is, in fact, a central, objective quantification of genetic change that allows science to clearly distinguish between variation and Darwinism. Absolutely central to life and its survival, reproduction, and variation, is the functional information encoded in the DNA of organisms. 

 

Functional Information

 

The concept of functional information as required by biological life was first proposed by Jack Szostak in a short article in the science journal Nature in 2003. …. 

Four years later, he coauthored a more extensive technical article in PNAS with Robert Hazen et al. further defining functional information. …. That same year I published an article in TBMM laying out how we can estimate the amount of functional information from actual data for protein families. …. I used a more complete equation than Hazen et al. used, but for the general cases they discussed, the equation I used reduces to the identical one they proposed. To confirm this, I contacted both Robert Hazen and Jack Szostak directly, showing them the derivation of their equation from the more extensive one I used for protein families, and they each confirmed that I was correct and that we are all using the same general equation for measuring functional information. ….

 

The Difference Between Variation and Darwinism

 

When we quantify the observed change in functional information in genetic variation within a population over time, we observe that there is none. If there is any change, it is usually a loss of information if the deleterious mutations are not compensated for at the same rate as beneficial mutations. A statistically significant increase in functional information has never been documented. 

 

Darwinism requires novel protein families and gene regulation systems, all of which require enormous increases in the functional information encoded in the DNA of the new type of plant or animal. Some Darwinists will point to the gain of a new function as positive evidence for Darwinism; however, when the functional information required for these gains is calculated, it turns out that a gain of function can occur without any increase in functional information. Therefore, gain of function fails to correlate with whether or not there has been a corresponding gain of functional information. 

 

To summarize, functional information is the key distinguishing factor between variation and Darwinism — the latter requires significant levels of new, protein-coding information, while variation within a population over time does not.

 

Categories of Pseudoscience

 

There are different categories of pseudoscience, but the type relevant to Darwinism occurs when a legitimate scientific theory makes predictions critical to that theory that are subsequently falsified, but the theory continues to be promoted as science, often with creative story-telling and the use of technical terms mixed with words and phrases such as “over time,” “is conceivable,” “probably” and many others which can be described charitably as words and phrases one uses when confirming data is unavailable. Those scientists who promote this sort of pseudoscience are “telling a kind of lie” to themselves and to the public. Once you start to see this, you cannot unsee it. Much of the origin of life literature is rife with it.

 

Critical Predictions

 

For the scientific method, a theory should be testable by making predictions which can be potentially falsified. A critical prediction is one that, if that prediction is falsified, the entire theory collapses.

 

One can find data that can be interpreted as “evidence” for virtually any belief or theory. Evidence in favor of a theory, however, is trumped by falsification of a critical prediction. 

 

As in any theory, one can find evidence supporting Darwinism, which textbooks dealing with Darwinism cover extensively, while at the same time completely ignoring or glossing over the critical predictions and their falsification. In this way, scientists “are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.” Emphasizing the evidence that supports a belief, while glossing over or ignoring the evidence that falsifies it, is another characteristic of pseudoscience.

 

For example, some aspects of the fossil record, phylogenetic trees, and genetic similarities can be interpreted in a way that supports Darwinism. However, the same observations are also predicted by the theory that there is an intelligent mind behind the software of life. In science, falsification of critical predictions entails that the evidence was misapplied. Due to creative storytelling, the line between science and science fiction has been blurred in Darwinism to the point of being almost indistinguishable. What we need for a critical prediction is something that is both essential and unique to the theory such that if it is falsified, we are forced to declare that Darwinism is, in fact, broken, as Weinstein might put it. Falsification exposes the creative storytelling of Darwinism for what it is — “telling a kind of lie.”

….

 

Summary

 

For Darwinism to be true, nature must provide an arena where novel, functional, stable, 3D proteins are relatively easy to find, and the rate of production of novel functional information encoded in the genomes of life is greater than the rate of destruction.

The reality is that neither is true. The laws of physics determine that stable 3D protein structures are unimaginably rare and the natural process of mutation leads to a net deterioration of whatever functional information is already out there. This is why every selective breeding experiment hits a limit if we try to see how far we can go. Nature ensures that the two critical predictions of Darwinism will continue to be thoroughly and consistently falsified. 

 

Darwinism began as a fascinating theory, but the falsification of its critical predictions means that those who continue to promote it are promoting a pseudoscience. They are, as Weinstein put it “lying to themselves” and “telling a kind of lie” to the public.

 

Ending on a Positive Note 

 

As Weinstein stated, “modern Darwinism is broken.” I am often asked what I have to offer as an alternative. My response is that we should go where the science points. In this case, the science shows that protein-coding genes require an impressive level of functional information, which is already encoded in the genomes of life. The only thing science has ever observed that can produce functional information are minds; we do it every time we message someone, write an essay, or write computer code. The fingerprints of an intelligent mind are all over the genomes of life in the form of the functional information encoded in the DNA. Science has no other observable, repeatable option; to ignore this is bad science. The ability to produce statistically significant levels of functional information is unique to intelligent minds. The key word here is “unique”; no other such process has ever been observed by science. Even genetic algorithms require an intelligent mind to design the fitness function and are, thus, examples of intelligent design in action. I have written a short introductory article, “Why This Scientist Believes that Intelligent Design Was Required for Biological Life,” presenting a positive, scientific method to test the hypothesis that the functional information found in life requires an intelligent mind. The job of science is to reverse engineer²⁰ the cell with its information-processing and gene-regulatory systems to understand how it all works. ….

 

22^nd October, 2026

Feast-day of pope-saint John Paul II ‘the Great’