Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor praises Charles Darwin

Hmmm…don’t quite know what to make of this. Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster (i.e. London), recently wrote a piece in the London Times entitled: “In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry”.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

If there are ways of misusing Genesis and the Christian understanding of creation, there is also a danger of misusing Darwin. We should be worried when his theory is distorted into “the survival of the fittest” and becomes a way of legitimising policies that discriminate against the weak and vulnerable. I think the majority of us believe it is grossly wrong to use Darwin’s theory to justify social engineering or eugenics. There are also those who argue that, from an evolutionary perspective, moral attributes are merely the product of evolution and our moral sense is no more than a survival strategy. Yet the theory of evolution does not entail the denial of moral truth. It leaves the genuinely free agent confronted with moral choice and the question of how we ought to live.

The cardinal writes: “We should be worried when his theory is distorted into the survival of the fittest”. I didn’t think that this was a distortion. Isn’t Darwin’s doctrine “the survival of the fittest”?

Should the Church just remain silent about all this till we can get our ducks in a row?