[Richard Dawkins] Father Coyne, this program is directed
towards the 200th anniversary of
Darwin's birth and the 150th
of "The Origin of Species".
You've emerged as a sort of spokesman
for one side in the Catholic Church
on the evolution issue.
As you just told me,
it's also an anniversary of Galileo
is it? It's quite recently that the Vatican
has actually in some sense
forgiven Galileo.
It looked as though Pope John Paul
was sort of thoroughly onboard
with Darwin, but are things
backsliding a bit now?
[Father George Coyne] I don't think you can
characterize it that way. First of all,
anything that I've said publicly
or in my writings
is George Coyne speaking.
[Dawkins] Yes, of course. [Coyne] By the way, please call my George.
[Coyne] That's what my mother called me
when I behaved myself.
[Dawkins] (laughter) I'm Richard.
[Coyne] I grew up not knowing my name. (laughter)
But no, I think you would characterize
it wrongly by thinking that I am a
spokesman for the Catholic Church.
[Dawkins] I never said that.
I said you were a spokesman for one
strand of thought within the Catholic Church.
[Coyne] Not even that. I think I fit
into one strand. But I have no
official position. But mind you,
that's not terribly important.
It's what we think. And I think
that's terribly important to recognize
right at the beginning, that the
Catholic Church is often thought of
as being very monolithic in
its thinking. The point is there
are very great divergences acceptable
within the Catholic tradition.
There is no Catholic point of view on many things.
There are on many things.
But on evolution there is no,
what I would call, an official Catholic view.
The point I've taken in the recent
debate is that sometimes church men
present a view as if it were the official
Catholic position, where it is not..
And that view sometimes establishes
kind of a conflict between religious doctrine, Catholic
thinking, and modern scientific evolutionary theory.
So I felt an obligation in recent times
to speak out as a, I was Director of the
Vatican Observatory at the time
[Coyne] so I had an official position. [Dawkins] Are you're not now?
[Coyne] No I've retired as of a year ago.
[Dawkins] Could you then tell us what your
own position as George Coyne is
on evolution and intelligent design?
[Coyne] Okay. My position as George Coyne,
and I think it represents a significant
number of Catholic scientists, is the following:
That the best scientific explanation we have
of he origin of the universe and everything
in the universe, including all living systems
and ourselves, is by what I call
neo-Darwinian evolution.
And I think we all know what we mean by that.
That is that the whole theory of Darwin
modernized with genetic mutation,
natural selection, and all of that,
I think is the best scientific explanation
we have of these origins that I spoke of.
[Dawkins] Well I clearly agree with that.
And I believe that Pope John Paul II
would have agreed with that as well.
[Coyne] In that amount of detail I couldn't say.
I don't think he would have disagreed.
He certainly said very officially in a
very official document to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences that
evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.
That from many of the scientific disciplines
it's now what I call the best explanation we have.
By the way, I use the word,
and you tell me if you agree or not with
me on this point. The best scientific
explanation we have of the origins
of the universe and everything in it,
I avoid the word "theory".
[Dawkins] Yes, me too.
[Coyne] Because certainly in American English,
theory gets the idea of "it's only a theory."
It's someone's idea. Where it is the best
scientific explanation. And it does not
at all contrast with any Catholic teaching.
[Dawkins] Right. Ok. Would the present Pope
agree with that, do you think?
[Coyne] I can't speak for him. I can only think
about him. I would say he would agree with that.
That as the best scientific explanation,
it does not contrast with any
doctrinal statements or theology of the
Catholic Church. I think he would agree with that.
[Dawkins] But that wouldn't be the view
of the Archbishop of Vienna, with whom
you've crossed swords.
[Coyne] Well, it wouldn't have been as of about,
to my knowledge, as of about 2 days ago.
I just received a pre-publication book
that has come out by Cardinal Schönborn.
It's the report, well, it's an anthology of
a series of lectures he gave in Vienna
subsequent to a bit of controversy that
arose from his New York Times op-ed article.
And the book is excellent. I think, had he
said this and not said what he did in the
New York Times op-ed article, I would have no
[Coyne] problem with it. [Dawkins] Very interesting. So in what way
[Dawkins] does it differ from the NY Times article? [Coyne] Well he speaks of what I
think essentially, you know, it's very hard
to characterize the whole book in a few words,
but if I were, it would be he's very
carefully distinguishes what he calls
"evolutionism" from "evolution." he calls it a
theory so I'll use that word,
the scientific theory of evolution.
And what he means by that,
and I agree with him totally on this,
is to take the best scientific explanation
we have and extend it beyond the science
is what he calls evolutionism.
That is, to reduce, for instance, to reduce
the human being to a material object in
the universe and fail to recognize that
from other disciplines outside of science
there is a much richer, if I can use that word,
richer view of the human endeavor.
That is religion, culture in general, literature,
poetry. I mean the human being is not made
of just what scientists discover the human
being is made of. Scientists in the very strict
methodology of science, the human being is more
than what methodologically, science can discover.
[Dawkins] If we are talking about poetry,
which you just mentioned,
then there is a sense in which anybody
would have to accept that that's true.
However, there are many scientists
who would say that there is nothing
actually supernatural in the human
make up. Poetry is something which
emerges from brain stuff in way
that we certainly don't understand in any
detail. But I think they probably would want,
I certainly would want to make a distinction
between acknowledging that on the
one hand and trying to bring in something
supernatural on the other.
[Coyne] The idea of bringing in something
supernatural I think is a caricaturization
of what religion faith is all about.
A scientist, or any other human being,
can accept or deny the supernatural.
But what you cannot do is on scientific
strictly methodological scientific grounds,
deny the supernatural.
[Dawkins] No I think you can't actually deny it,
but isn't it then part of a very large
population of things that you can't deny
for which there is no positive evidence?
I mean you can't deny fairies at the bottom
of the garden, but neither of us take it seriously. So-
[Coyne] Positive evidence is a key word here.
[Dawkins] But is there any?
[Coyne] Oh there surely is positive
evidence for the supernatural.
But it goes outside the scientific endeavor
because the scientific endeavor by its
methodology, is limited to explaining
natural events by natural causes.
Or if you wish, I don't like to use the word
material but we can use it in this context,
material events that we observe by material causes.
And it's limited to that. But it is limited to that.
[Dawkins] But you've used the word evidence.
What sort of evidence are you speaking of?
[Coyne] Well I'm speaking of the whole
traditions from, oh at least 2,000 years before
Christ up until modern times, but the whole
of Judeo-Christian literature,