New book: God and Evolution confronts the fan club of Darwin's unemployed God

Fan club's motto: God loves you, but the world shows no evidence of his existence. And clued-in clergy will tell you it is wrong to ask for evidence.

Hmmm. If I had a husband like that, either he'd be on the sidewalk or I'd be on a fast train. And I'd definitely be attending a different church.

A recent Biola University seminar introduced an overdue new book, God and Evolution: Protestants, Catholics and Jews explore Darwin's challenge to faith (Discovery Institute Press, 2010). Why this? Why now?

"Too few people have carefully teased out the various scientific, philosophical, and theological claims at stake," says Jay Richards, director of research for discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, and editor of God and Evolution. "As a result, the whole subject of God and evolution has been an enigma wrapped in a shroud of fuzz and surrounded by a blanket of fog."

Well, putting it this way, in the passive voice, is putting it charitably.

I have not seen the other contributors' chapters yet because the book sold out at the seminar. But if what I heard there is anything to go by, this one is a real eye-opener. Two items stand out:

- David Klinghoffer's careful explanation of why traditional Judaism could not possibly endorse the no-design universe

- the exposition - in serious theistic Darwinists'* own words - of the theology that underlies theistic Darwinism.

In fairness, many Jews have lost contact with their faith, and most people who call themselves theistic evolutionists simply do not, in my experience, know what Darwinism says and implies.

The fog created by neo-Darwinists and theistic Darwinists is so great that, quite honestly, unless you have rubbed your face in the Evolutionary personal advice columnist's traipse with the gorillas, Darwinian brand marketing, or the human zoo, you wouldn't know.

Many people think that Darwinism just means that Earth and all life forms thereon were not created in 144 hours. Also, they foresee conflict and don't want it ("divides the brethren").

But conflict is coming to them. As God and Evolution's press release puts it:

The book is a response to growing efforts by some Darwinists to enlist the support of the faith community by downplaying Darwinism's core principles. Chapters of the book detail the failures of theistic evolution, address the problem of evil, and explain how intelligent design is consonant with orthodox belief.

I gave a talk on my own chapter's subject: The older Catholic popular writers and Darwinism. G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and St. George Mivart, each in his own way, recognized the atheist materialism that underlies Darwinism and emphatically rejected it. Here is a brief excerpt.

Indeed, the Church still does. If you look carefully at what the present Pope has said (dealt with in the book), he is well aware of what is at stake. Too well aware. An entrenched, tax-funded Darwin lobby, supported by compliant and cheerfully ignorant legacy Western media can roar up quite the furore in a situation where few are currently getting murdered. And the Pope has plenty of problems with situations where lots of people are getting murdered.

Here is that brief excerpt from my chapter.

(Note: I use the term "theistic Darwinists" rather than "theistic evolutionists" because, among the serious ones, Darwinism is the only theory of evolution that seems important, despite growing support for other causes of change in life forms.)

Excerpt from "Early twentieth century Catholic writers and evolution"

Eighty years ago, Chesterton also noted the contradictory stances of what is now called “evolutionary psychology”:

In spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilization in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club.

Yet nothing much has changed in this area since Chesterton wrote Everlasting Man, over eighty-five years ago, except the huge growth in the “evolutionary psychology” literature and its ever-more-expansive attempts to explain everything away. The interesting point is not the relative antiquity of the objections to Darwinism but rather the confidence Chesterton, like other older Catholic writers, had that Darwinism would die out in his own lifetime. Indeed, he wrote,

Darwin’s theory . . . has largely been abandoned by the latest scientific men; and indeed is only still accepted as a piece of Victorian respectability by old-fashioned people like Bishop Barnes. But in any case, it never went very far towards touching the primary problems; and Darwin himself hardly pretended that it did.

But things did not work out at all as Chesterton hoped. Every download of science media releases offers more and yet more “evolutionary psychology” folly based on Darwinism, to say nothing about further paltry claims in biology. One sees endless variations on: “Yeast sample undergoes evolution, to spur immunity to virus; dramatic demonstration of Darwin’s thesis, researchers say.” All it really shows is how yeast continues to be yeast by dumping a binding site used by the virus—a loss, not a gain, in information. Clearly, ideology rather than startling new evidence undergirds these narratives.

The popular Darwinism that the older Catholic authors opposed flies in the face of the increasing incredibility of Darwinism’s central thesis—that natural selection and random variation is a source of massive gains in information and, in the case of humans, vast cultural changes. Yet the thesis lands in print again and again, regardless. Chesterton’s French-born friend Hilaire Belloc tried, likewise, to stem the growing tide of popular nonsense. Let’s look at how Belloc fared.

You can buy the book here.

Mailbox: A reader writes from an island in Mediterranean to ask,

Don't you think Evolution excludes God from being the Creator? How can you support it them being a Catholic?

After I got over raging at that guy for living in a place that is actually warm and sunny (how dare he?), I replied:

Friend, thank you for writing, and apologies for any delay in getting back to you.

Essentially, I think God can create however he wants.

He can use direct creation and various types of evolution, including Darwin’s natural selection. Or other methods beyond my ability to imagine.

He’s God. and I’m not. So I don’t worry about whether God can do something, but rather whether evidence suggests that he has.

Indeed, for certain purposes – weeding out losers, for example – natural selection is doubtless an important mechanism.

I use it myself sometimes when I garden. I often just scatter flower seed broadcast - knowing that the losers will die, and the survivors will not need interventions that I can’t afford and don’t have time for.

Where I differ with the exponents of “Evolution” is:

1. I am not an atheist or a “liberal” Christian.

2. Therefore I do not need to prove that there is no design in the universe or life forms.

3. Therefore, I can acknowledge that design is evident in the universe and in life forms.

4. Therefore, I do not need to pretend that my method for weeding out loser plants in my garden actually creates any new information. All it does is distinguish between good and bad examples of the information that already existed.

5. I think that once we get things like that straight, we will be on the verge of another science revolution. But as along as we are stuck with no-design nonsense, we will be stuck with stupid projects about stuff we know that ain’t so.

I do hope this is a help.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Could Darwin take communion at a Catholic Church?

I've been slow blogging these last couple of days, as I am editing a manuscript on a rush basis.

Just a note to say that, among the many trolls and morons who landed in and were quickly bounced out of my Inbox in the last couple of days, were several Useful Catholic Idiots who want me to know that the Catholic Church approves of evolution.

Now, by evolution, they mean Darwinism - if they understand clearly enough what they are talking about to mean anything in particular. That, admittedly, was usually unclear.

It was about Darwinism, of course, that I was talking, in the post that set off the troll explosion. This present message is not intended for them because they need to believe something that is not only untrue but could not possibly be true. But for any others who may be interested:

Darwinism exists to account for the history of life without design or purpose. So, as a matter of fact, Darwinism is precisely the sort of evolution of which the Church does not approve, and both Cardinal Schoenborn and Benedict XVI have recently made that clear. Here's a summary. If anything, the Church would be more likely to dust off Teilhard de Chardin, ridiculed by Darwinists.

The fact that so many lapsed Catholics approve of Darwinism strengthens my point.

All the authors of the recent spate of atheist books sense the deep importance o f Darwinism to their cause. So the matter is simple, in a way: The very reason the Church can't support it is the reason they must.

By the way, the answer to the hedder question: No, because he wasn't a Catholic. And he wouldn't have wanted to even if he were. Despite the rot sometimes preached in schoolbooks, his faith gradually unravelled through his life. He said different things to different people at different times but that is, without question, the general direction.

Catholic Church and evolution: Exquisite pleasure in skinning a cat?

A friend wants me to post this excerpt from G. K. Chesterton on why Christians cannot "affirm evolution". Essentially they cannot do so because - in the context, it usually means affirming atheism and denying the real existence of the soul.

And here is the passage to which he draws my attention:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

- G. K. Chesterton, "The Maniac" in Orthodoxy.

Of course, Chesterton, who died in 1936, did not live through the vast, modern attempts to deny the cat.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Catholic Church and evolution: Do we belittle God by calling him an intelligent designer?

Recently, I did a TV show (more later) on the Catholic Church and the intelligent design controversy.

My interviewer asked me about Fr. George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer who has said that intelligent design reduces and belittles God’s power and might. Specifically, the interviewer asked me what I understood Fr. Coyne to mean.

Well, I have no idea, actually. This 2006 pronouncement is the usual squid ink sprayed by people with a vested interest in preventing others from understanding what is at stake in the intelligent design controversy.

Neither Scripture nor tradition offers us a reason to think that God feels belittled by being called a designer. No surprise there - designer is one of the roles of a creator.

Meanwhile, a friend writes to say that (Not for chance) almost all orthodox traditions enclose the symbolism of the Great Designer (or equivalent), applied to God.

For example, in Hinduism they call Him "Vishwakarma", the Great Carpenter.

In Masonry they call Him the "The Great Architect Of The Universe".

In Judaism "Binah", the third of the Sephirots (Kabbalah principles), is the designing Supreme Intelligence.

In Islam, among the 99 names of Allah, there are at least four or five names related to the symbolism of the designer.

In Buddhism the "Enlightenment" or "Awakening” is a spiritual state where one sees himself and all things as designs of the Supreme Bodhi (all-pervading Intelligence).

Last but not least, in Christianity (isn’t the tradition of Fr. George Coyne?) Jesus was - both symbolically and effectively - the "Son of the Carpenter".

Well yes, but could the "tradition of Fr. George Coyne" be getting a makeover? Relevant Christian doctrines are kicked into the attic of unsubstantiated "faith," while all searches for evidence remain in the secure realm of materialist atheism?

Then we suddenly discover that no reasonable person can credit key Catholic doctrines ...

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Can the Catholic Church believe in God and Darwin?

I am shortly going to be writing several posts about the Catholic Church, Darwinism, and intelligent design.

But first, a note about the stories you may hear in the Catholic press: Caution is well advised.

Few Catholic reporters know much about the actual arguments and evidence in the intelligent design controversy. Most get stuck on fatuities like "There's no conflict between faith and science" and ambiguities like "The Catholic Church supports evolution." So they seldom have any idea what the critical issues really are.

Two of the most critical issues are, "What does it mean to believe in God" and "What does it mean to believe in the soul, as our immaterial and immortal nature?" Thus, you will hear truly staggering statements along the lines of "The Church can believe in God - and Darwin too!"

Anyone who says that - or anything like it - simply doesn't understand the issue, and you can safely forecast that anything else you hear from them will be a timewaster.

Can the Church believe in God and Darwin too?

Darwinism is an attempt to explain of how the human being, including the human mind (and religion, of course), can come into existence without any purpose at all, let alone input from God. That is the nub of Darwin's theory, a point that is emphasized repeatedly in the evolutionary biology literature.

Now, suppose the Church decides that Darwin and his modern day fans are right. Can Catholics go on believing in God? Yes, but what belief in God means becomes radically different in that case. As Logan Gage says, the explanation for religious beliefs is that

They must have had survival value at some point in the past; or, alternatively, ... religion does not have direct survival value but is a by-product of something else that does have survival value. (Note: - from a review of Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue, Journal of Lutheran Ethics, October 2008.)

So religion evolved either because it has survival value or because it is associated with other types of behaviour that have survival value. That is the explanation for it.

Of course, you may hear a pundit crow happily that "our wonderful God worked through evolution! He gave religion survival value! Thus we evolved to know that religion is true!"

Talk about missing the point ...

The Darwinian explanation does not explain religious belief, it explains it away . It removes any reason for supposing that the reason that we believe in God is that God actually exists and has revealed himself to us. From Gage again:

... once one learns that particular religious belief X came about because we used to run from lions on the savannah, X loses its justification. I did not come to believe X by any sort of rational or designed process; rather, I believe X because my evolutionary history gave me a tendency to believe X.

Darwin himself grasped this problem:

... the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Can you still believe in God or revelation? Yes, but your belief becomes the intellectual equivalent of smoking pot. You evolved in such a way that belief turns you on. That, in sum, is the reason for the strong appeal of Darwin's theory to atheists.

And what abut the immortal soul then?

The evidence for the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human mind or of religion is very poor, as Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain. Nonetheless, some Christians in science would very much like the Church to embrace it. I don't think that likely because the Catholic Church is not well suited to the radical materialism that would result. Here, for example, is a must-read New York Times article spelling that out exactly:

That is the nub of the issue, according to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul. Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, she writes in her book “Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?” (Cambridge, 2006). Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their “strategic location” in creation.

Another theologian who has written widely on the issue, John F. Haught of Georgetown University, said in an interview that “for many Americans the only way to preserve the discontinuity that’s implied in the notion of a soul, a distinct soul, is to deny evolution,” which he said was “unfortunate.”

The solution, in some folks' view, is to affirm "evolution" and deny the soul. Making clear to Catholics that there is no such thing as a soul could be bad PR, however. But there is another way: To define the soul in such a way that there is no reason to believe that it really exists. That is Ken Miller's strategy here:

For scientists who are people of faith, like Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, asking about the science of the soul is pointless, in a way, because it is not a subject science can address.

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

That will go over better with Catholics who do not like to think much.

As a matter of fact, materialist Christians will need to fudge a lot over the next few years to make their case because the younger generation of John Paul II Catholics are not even modernists, let alone materialists. So don't be surprised if you seldom hear the conflict set out clearly in the Catholic media.

Catholic Darwinists to congregate in Rome?

Recently, I wrote about Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn’s flirtation with the views of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin - whose teachings were condemned - here. At the time, I was wondering why Schoenborn would even think of something like that, when a friend wrote to explain something like this,

... Schoenborn's difficulty is political. He cannot support Darwinism but he also cannot use terms or concepts like design. Not only would that enrage Top People but it would also imply that Protestant evangelicals are influencing him. But, while understanding his difficulties, many people have expressed dismay to me at his recent choice to present Teilhard as a Catholic thinker widely honored in the Church - which he wasn't.

Well, meanwhile, another friend has written to point out that Schoenborn’s biggest problem is more likely the Pontifical Academy for the Sciences, which is preparing big Darwinfests this fall and another one in the spring .

Schoenborn and B-16 can’t endorse the mud to mind nonsense without intellectual disgrace because they actually know that magic doesn’t happen. But they also can’t afford to appear to act without advice from their Catholic science boffins (even though they might be wise to).

I’m sure glad I don’t have Schoenborn’s job.

While we’re here, Nullasalus writes,

I think it's important to realize that Teilhard is not being offered by the Cardinal as an unimpeachable authority on how to view evolution and life. Instead it looks like Teilhard is being referenced to provide a model for how to approach and consider the subjects of evolution, biology, life, etc.

The cardinal seems to believe (and I'd have to agree) that there's nothing wrong with the pure science and mechanisms of what we normally call evolution. It's the philosophies and assumptions grafted onto the science that he thinks Catholics must reject.

Well, this weekend I hope to get a chance to actually read Schoenborn’s book (which has arrived), and I will review it and get a chance to estimate for myself the esteem in which he holds Teilhard.

However, I disagree with Nullasalus’s second paragraph. Darwinism is NOT and never has been purely a theory about how one species might transmute into another over time. From Darwin on, its promoters have ALWAYS - and quite rightly - assumed that its metaphysical significance was exactly what Stephen Jay Gould explained:

"Darwin's theory uses the same invisible hand, but formed into a fist as a battering ram to eliminate Paley's God from nature. The very features that Paley used to infer not only God's existence, but also his goodness, are, for Darwin, but spin-offs of the only real action in nature-the endless struggle among organisms for reproductive success, and the endless hecatombs of failure." (Gould S.J., "Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand," in "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History," Jonathan Cape: London, 1993, pp.149-150)

And, I must say, I am getting tired of all the well-meaning people who write to me to pretend that things are otherwise.

There are people out there who insist to me that Darwin was not a racist (of COURSE he was a racist, and his Descent of Man is one long ode to racism!). Or that Darwinism doesn’t “really” support materialism (then why is it materialism’s creation story?). Or that Darwinism somehow advances Christianity - then why are the Evolution Sunday churches are mostly heretical dhimmis for Darwin, as a fellow journalist writes?

Most of the people who take the trouble to express their anxiety that I should learn to like materialist rule before something bad happens to me mean well.

They want to be nice. They want me to be nice. They would like everything to be nice.

Well, how nice, exactly, are things for anyone who disagrees, based on evidence?

Notice, I said, "based on evidence." Because that is the key.

(See, the materialist doesn't care if you want to go holler stupidities for Jesus in some tabernacle north of the city somewhere. He likes that. He can jeer and make fun of you.

But if you go into the sciences and discover that most of what he is saying about life and the universe is nonsense supporting his doctrines - and start publishing facts that don't back up his doctrines - THEN he has a big problem with you indeed.)

See the Expelled movie, coming out in April, if you want to know what happens to scientists who do that.

No, the Pope is not a Darwinist, but what sort of evolution does he support?

I've been meaning to catch up with the Catholic side of the controversy over Darwinian evolution, and now at last I have a moment: Recently, Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk in which he said explicitly:

"Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions," he told a meeting of academics of different disciplines sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

This sort of language explains why Catholic Darwinist Ken Miller got so upset with Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn, a close B16 associate, over his famous 2005 op-ed in the New York Times.

Miller was upset because he knows as well as anyone that this and other instances of Cardinalspeak and Popespeak are a polite way of saying that the Catholic Church does not support materialist theories of evolution like Darwinism, a point made in 1996 by John Paul II, but widely misrepresented ever since. Clearly, Schoenborn did not believe Miller's claim that Darwinism is not inherently atheistic. Indeed, he should not, when 87% of evolutionary biologists are atheists or agnostics (with 78% being pure naturalists).

But that's well-trodden ground and I am not going there now.

The key question is what WILL the Church support, if not Darwinism - and a surprising answer has come up. A friend tells me that Cardinal Schoenborn's own recent book, Chance or Purpose?, which I have ordered but not yet received or read, summarizes Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in a favourable way, quoting,

He [Teilhard] incorporated the way that Christian faith viewed the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as an inspiring vision into his research and his thought as a natural scientist.Conversely, he was constantly opening up his activity as a scientific researcher toward the great horizon which had been unlocked for him by his Christian faith.

”

Frank Wilson, books editor for the Philly Inquirer, reviewed Schoenborn and picks up on his sympathy for Teilhard too:

What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which Schönborn is sympathetic to the views of the controversial Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose 1960 book The Phenomenon of Man (boasting a foreword by no less an evolutionist than Julian Huxley) gave a Christological spin to evolutionary theory (Christ "becomes the visible center of evolution as well as its goal, the 'omega-point' ).

Linking evolution to Christ may sound bizarre, but it is central to the point of Schönborn's book, evident in its title. Need evolution be thought of as a matter of pure chance? Or might it be purposeful?

Hmmmm. Truth in advertising, Teilhard's ideas were denounced by the Church in 1962 and 1981, as full of “serious errors” that “offend Catholic doctrine.” Here's a summary of his basic ideas, and yeah, they do bounce from wall to wall.

Christian apologist C. S. Lewis quipped to a friend that Teilhard's book, Phenomenon of Man (which some sources say should have been translated from the French as "The Human Phenomenon") was “evolution run mad":

He saves 'continuity' by saying that before there was life there was in matter what he calls 'pre-life'. Can you see any possible use in such language? Before you switched on the lights in the cellar there was (if you like to call it so) 'pre-light'; but the English for that is 'darkness'. Then he goes on to the future, and seems to me to be repeating Bergson without the eloquence) and Shaw (without the wit). It ends up of course in something uncomfortably like Pantheism; His own Jesuits were quite right in forbidding him to publish any more books on the subject. This prohibition probably explains the 'succes fou' he is having among our scientists . . .

Presumably, among "our scientists" Lewis would include atheist Julian Huxley who wrote an Introduction to Teilhard's book, and apparently wanted to found a religion of evolution. In Evolution Sunday, he finally got his wish.

Lewis wasn't alone in dismissing Teilhard. Nobelist (immunology) Peter Medawar wrote a devastating review of Phenomenon, lamenting

the gullibility which makes it possible for people to be taken in by such a bag of tricks as this. If it were an innocent, passive gullibility it would be excusable; but all too clearly, alas, it is an active willingness to be deceived.

A savvy friend figures that Schoenborn's difficulty is political. He cannot support Darwinism but he also cannot use terms or concepts like design. Not only would that enrage Top People but it would also imply that Protestant evangelicals are influencing him. But, while understanding his difficulties, many people have expressed dismay to me at his recent choice to present Teilhard as a Catholic thinker widely honored in the Church - which he wasn't.

Yes, there are Teilhardians out there, but look at who they are and judge for yourself how they relate to Catholicism.

(For a summary of Catholic teachings, go here)

Catholics: I get mail - and so does B16!

Recently, a person who claimed to be a Catholic informed me that I was a liar if I didn't tell readers that the Catholic Church has fully embraced Darwinian evolution.

Ironically, I'd be a liar if I told readers that the Catholic Church HAS fully embraced Darwinian evolution, because it hasn't and I know that it hasn't. (I wouldn't be a liar if, like my correspondent, I were simply confused or mistaken.)

My correspondent is probably honestly confused, because many people have been, by inept reporting.

In October 1996, John Paul II told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,

... some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.* In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

Many sources ran with this, trumpeting that the Pope supports evolution. They did NOT bother to read, consider, or report JPII's further remarks:

"There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories."

[Guess which kind the Church likes? Hint: Not the one Darwin liked.]

"The magisterium of the Church takes a direct interest in the question of evolution, because it touches on the conception of man, whom Revelation tells us is created in the image and likeness of God. The conciliar constitution Gaudium et Spes has given us a magnificent exposition of this doctrine, which is one of the essential elements of Christian thought."

[= Man is a fallen god not a risen animal.]

"Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God."

[= The immortal soul really exists and is unique to humans.]

Richard Dawkins, probably the best-known Darwinist worldwide, attacked the Pope for his statement, because he realized - if others didn't - that JPII was cutting the heart out of the enterprise. No meaningful interpretation of Darwinism can survive JPII's qualifications. The whole point of Darwinism is to situate humans firmly within the animal kingdom and the whole point of JPII's statement is to jerk them out of it.

Also, "more than an hypothesis" does not mean what many have interpreted it to mean. The online document at EWTN inserts an asterisk and provides the following note:

EWTN Note on translation:
The English edition at first translated the French original as: "Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of more than one hypothesis within the theory of evolution." The L'Osservatore Romano English Edition subsequently amended the text to that given in the body of the message above, citing the translation of the other language editions as its reason. It should be noted that an hypothesis is the preliminary stage of the scientific method and the Pope's statement suggests nothing more than that science has progressed beyond that stage. This is certainly true with respect to cosmological evolution (the physical universe), whose science both Pius XII and John Paul II have praised, but not true in biology, about which the popes have generally issued cautions (as above and Humani Generis). [CBD]

There it is in black and white, folks. The popes have issued "cautions" about evolution in biology, which is Popespeak for "Darwin? Forget Darwin." (In Italian, that's Dimenticare Darwin, the Italian title of an anti-Darwin book, now in translation.)

Following that up, the current pope Benedict XVI (B16) has gone out of his way to make his dissent from Darwinism clear. I mean the only way he could be more clear would be to issue prayer cards assuring Catholics that they are not some "casual and meaningless product of evolution." Oops, he's done that, actually.

And the message seems to be getting across to people who just weren't listening before. So B16 gets mail too.

PS: PS: Apparently, the howler monkeys (a fellow journalist's term) of materialist science have forced B16 to cancel a presentation at a university.

Here is an excellent overview of Catholic teachings by Fr. Martin Hilbert of the Toronto Oratory.

Catholic Church continues to reject Darwinism

Avery, Cardinal Dulles weighs in on evolution in First Things. Citing Christoph, Cardinal Schonborn's assault on Darwinism in the New York Times in July 2005, he notes,

Cardinal Schönborn’s article was interpreted by many readers as a rejection of evolution. Some letters to the editor accused him of favoring a retrograde form of creationism and of contradicting John Paul II. They seemed unable to grasp the fact that he was speaking the language of classical philosophy and was not opting for any particular scientific position. His critique was directed against those neo-Darwinists who pronounced on philosophical and theological questions by the methods of natural science.
Several authorities on these questions, such as Kenneth R. Miller and Stephen M. Barr, in their replies to Schönborn, insisted that one could be a neo-Darwinist in science and an orthodox Christian believer. Distinguishing different levels of knowledge, they contended that what is random from a scientific point of view is included in God’s eternal plan. God, so to speak, rolls the dice but is able by his comprehensive knowledge to foresee the result from all eternity.

Critically, he notes,

This combination of Darwinism in science and theism in theology may be sustainable, but it is not the position Schönborn intended to attack. As he made clear in a subsequent article in FIRST THINGS (January 2006), he was taking exception only to those neo-Darwinists—and they are many—who maintain that no valid investigation of nature could be conducted except in the reductive mode of mechanism, which seeks to explain everything in terms of quantity, matter, and motion, excluding specific differences and purpose in nature. He quoted one such neo-Darwinist as stating: “Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces rationally detectable.”

And it goes on from there. Basically, serious Catholics cannot be serious Darwinists. And versa vice.

Catholic Church: Pope Benedict on design of the universe vs. chance

A friend attracts my attention to one of the current Pope’s old sermons on design in the universe, a direct rebuttal to Jacques Monod's "chance only" philosophy:

...The more we know of the universe the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment. In pursuing them we can see anew that creating Intelligence to whom we owe our own reason. Albert Einstein once said that in the laws of nature "there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection." In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful reason that holds the universe together. And we are penetrating ever deeper into what is smallest, into the cell and into the primordial units of life; here, too, we discover a reason that astounds us, such that we must say with Saint Bonaventure: "Whoever does not see here is blind. Whoever does not hear here is deaf. And whoever does not begin to adore here and to praise the creating Intelligence is dumb."

Jacques Monod, who rejects as unscientific every kind of faith in God and who thinks that the world originated out of an interplay of chance and necessity, tells in the very work in which he attempts summarily to portray and justify his view of the world that, after attending the lectures which afterward appeared in book form, François Mauriac is supposed to have said: "What this professor wants to afflict on us is far more unbelievable than what we poor Christians were ever expected to believe."

Monod does not dispute this. His thesis is that the entire ensemble of nature has arisen out of errors and dissonances. He cannot help but say himself that such a conception is in fact absurd. But, according to him, the scientific method demands that a question not be permitted to which the answer would have to be God. One can only say that a method of this sort is pathetic. God himself shines through the reasonableness of his creation. Physics and biology, and the natural sciences in general, have given us a new and unheard-of creation account with vast new images, which let us recognize the face of the Creator and which make us realize once again that at the very beginning and foundation of all being there is a creating Intelligence..."

My friend comments, "This was written by Joseph Ratzinger [now Benedict XVI], and given as one of a four part series of homilies in Munich in 1981 (!). Parts of other homilies also address Monod's philosophy. It was first published in 1986 by Erich Wewel Verlag, as a response to certain non-orthodox views circulating among Catholic theologians, then translated to English by Boniface Ramsey, O.P. and published in 1990 by Our Sunday Visitor. This quote was taken from a new edition with additional material that has been republished as 'In the Beginning...': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall by Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995, pp. 23-25. My take is that Fr. Coyne's theology would also fall short in this critique, even with fertility added."

Yes, I doubt Fr. Coyne's theology on fertility (as opposed to actual intelligence or design) would meet this test. I don't think the Ratzinger sermon is online, alas. Here, by the way, is an easy-to-read introduction to actual Catholic teaching and activity on intelligent design, creation, et cetera, as opposed to a variety of claims made in the legacy media.

If you want to understand why the intelligent design controversy cannot go away, read By Design or by Chance?.

The Catholic Church: And two and one half understandings of ID

I will blog on the Catholic Church’s position on intelligent design in more detail later, when I get a chance to get all my links together, but for now:

There are currently two and one half understandings of ID:

1. The specific ideas of biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician Bill Dembski (irreducible complexity and specified complexity) may provide evidence of a level of information in life forms that cannot be explained by the chance interactions of physical laws.

Behe’s or Dembski’s thesis may be correct. Or may not. Even if both are incorrect, correct theses may arise from another quarter.

Surely, the Catholic Church was never going to throw its institutional weight behind either of these theses, as I have pointed out in at least one earlier post. Why should it? Such theses stand or fall in their own arenas in their own good time. The Church has learned at least that much in the age of science.

2. The universe and life forms show evidence of intelligent design in principle? That is not something the Catholic Church can oppose. The entire Bible depends on that idea. Jews and Muslims agree with it, and so did key Greek philosophers, as indeed have most philosophers throughout history. (They disagreed about what, who, how, where, when, and why, but few disagreed about the fact of design until fairly recently.)

For a while, Darwinism looked like it might provide a creation story for post-Enlightenment atheism, ... but maybe not.

½. Oh yes, the half idea. The Western media, desperately co-dependent with materialism, have in mind some monster that is a hybrid between the two ideas above. Thus, if the Catholic Church says that Darwin’s theory of evolution does not account for the key elements of the human story, that means that the Catholic Church thinks that Behe or Dembski are, specifically, right - or that evolution doesn’t happen. Or that the earth was created in 144 hours. Or that Jerry Falwell and Jim Dobson should rule. Or something.

Hey, the sky ain’t falling, folks. All that is happening is that the Catholic Church is reasserting the traditional Christian position that the universe and life forms show detectible evidence of intelligent design, as in “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord”. Why would anyone expect it to do anything else?

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

What I would tell the Catholic Church: re intelligent design and evolution

Apparently, there is a big confab right now at the Vatican to decide what to say about intelligent design vs. evolution. A friend insisted, for some reason, that I offer an opinion. Heck, everyone is doing that, it seems.

Ever since Pope Benedict XVI said, in his inaugural mass, that we are not "some casual and meaningless product of evolution," the Catholic Church has found itself in the spotlight, asserting, against the adminbots and pundits of a materialist society, the we are purposeful and meaningful.

I can't think what to suggest, but try this: Recover your heritage.

Recover the traditional Catholic idea of evolution, which is not a Darwinian struggle for survival.

There is a whole Catholic way of understanding evolution that was buried by vulgar Darwinism, which was well suited to the expansion of a military and commercial empire - the materialism of expressways and shopping malls. Darwinism told people what they already knew (that the big guns win) through the entire history of life. That was false but in an age of imperial expansion and falling trees, it sounded true.

There were non-Darwinian Catholic contributors to evolution theory - St. George Mivart and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. What about Giuseppe Sermonti or Jerome Lejeune?

Mivart summarized the problems with Darwinism as follows, a hundred and thirty-five years ago:

What is to be brought forward (against Darwinism) may be summed up as follows:
That “Natural Selection” is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures. That it does not harmonize with the co-existence of closely similar structures of diverse origin. That there are grounds for thinking that specific differences may be developed suddenly instead of gradually. That the opinion that species have definite though very different limits to their variability is still tenable. That certain fossil transitional forms are absent, which might have been expected to be present. That there are many remarkable phenomena in organic forms upon which “Natural Selection” throws no light whatever. (From By Design or by Chance?, p. 70-71.)

These are still problems. Nothing has changed except that the Darwinists are louder, ruder, and more bullying than ever.

Maybe it's time to just tell the Darwinists to siddown, shuddup, and let others talk for a while.

Gosh, if the Catholic conclave did that, it would be making a real contribution. The Catholics who have weighed in on the subject may be right or wrong, but it's time the Church recovered its own history and gave them a listen. Even if a person is largely wrong, the points on which he is right might show a way forward.

It's almost not worth deciding what to do about Darwinism, because it is on the way out anyway. But we must find some comprehensive way of addressing the history of life. Listening to the muffled or silenced voices - especially from one's own tradition - would be a good beginning.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

The Vatican and the Astronomer: Why George Coyne had to go

From what I can determine from recent pronouncements, the Vatican is not backing off the process of evicting Darwinism ("evolutionism") from its list of approved belief systems. Here's Cardinal Schoenborn proposing an evolution debate:

Cardinal Schönborn, who sparked a worldwide debate in 2005 with an article in the New York Times on the subject, called for clarification of the difference between the "theory of evolution" and "evolutionism," the latter understood as an ideology, based on scientific theory.

By way of example, the cardinal mentioned Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who saw in the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," "the scientific foundation for their Marxist materialist theory. This is evolutionism, not theory of evolution."

The archbishop of Vienna warned against the application of this evolutionist ideology in fields such as economic neo-liberalism, or bioethical issues, where there is the risk of creating new eugenic theories.

[ ... ]

Cardinal Schönborn explained that the phrase meant that "the theory, as scientific theory, has been expanded with new scientific data, but of course that phrase cannot be interpreted as an 'Amen' of the Catholic Church to ideological evolutionism."

It should be obvious to any reasonable person that Schoenborn knows exactly what the issues around Darwinism ("evolutionism") are and he is not backing down.

Early last week ,the news broke that, as of August 19, Fr. George Coyne, 73, director of the Vatican Astronomical Observatory, had been replaced by Argentinian Jesuit Fr. José Gabriel Funes as the new director of the Vatican Astronomical Observatory.

Coyne, who had been director since 1978, had become well known to the news media in recent months because of his opposition to Cardinal Schoenborn who, with the apparent blessing of the Pope, has been attempting to put some distance between the Catholic church and Darwinism since July 2005.

Maybe too well known.

The background to the issue is that John Paul II had said that evolution was "more than a hypothesis" but immediately went on to disclaim any materialist interpretation of it, which certainly includes Darwinism. However, the pop sci media jumped on the first part of his statement like dogs on a rabbit, resulting in any number of essentially mistaken or misleading claims that the Catholic church "supports evolution." These claims are, of course, used by those who would foist Darwinism on an unbelieving public.

In the sense in which the Catholic Church supports evolution, Michael Behe, the much reviled ID biochemist, also supports evolution. (Behe is a practicing Catholic, by the way.) That is, Behe and Schoenborn accept that evolution happens. But so? That doesn't prove that Darwin was right about the power of natural selection or that the neo-Darwinists are right about anything at all. And those who revile Behe's views would be unwise to hope for much better from the Vatican.

Apparently, Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education (called by some here the "National Center for Selling Evolution") has attempted to spin Fr. Coyne's departure as a normal retirement. He told Dick Fischer at the ASA discussion group that a media account that suggested otherwise was tendentious:

... after all, Coyne is 73 years old, and his retirement could have been predicted in any case. And there's no reason to think that Coyne's successor's view differs from Coyne's ... "

Nice try, Glenn. But ... obviously, retiring Fr. Coyne just as the Vatican is seriously deliberating Darwinism and its effects is a message about acceptable avenues of dissent.

From what I can tell, B-16 is good at avoiding visible cow plops. So, however Coyne's successor may agree with his views, he will probably see that the Vatican observatory refrains from further direct conflict with Rome in a matter that does not even involve astronomy.

My own assessment (which appeared in part as a comment to an earlier story posted at Uncommon Descent):

The Catholic Church is many things, but one of them is - a large organization. Coyne was doing something that you just can’t do in a large organization - creating a public uproar around top management’s decisions.

Whether it’s GM or the RC church, you can’t run around implying to the press that the CEO is a yo-yo or the Pope is a dope. (I don’t, of course, mean that Coyne used those words, but … I think that if his opposition had been confined to lobbying scientists trusted by the Vatican, he would still have his accustomed telescope.

The Church is not North Korea. There are acceptable avenues of dissent. But the American media are not one of them.

Coyne's private theology is certainly a problem, but after all, he was not in the parish ministry. At his age, if he wasn't making a big deal of it, chances are others wouldn't either.

The problem is, he was making a big deal of it. At at time when the Vatican wants to and should want to blow clear of Darwinism, his actions implied that accommodation was possible. And he was b eng treated by science organizations as an authority.

Even that wouldn't have mattered much except that he started getting more media attention than the Pope and was treated as an authority by science orgnaizations.

Also, he was putting his institution on the public mental map in the worst way possible, short of a sex scandal. Most people did not know that the Vatican even had an observatory in Arizona.

Some might wonder why: "With all the suffering and social injustice in the world, how dare they take the donations of the faithful and use them for .... "

(Now, for my own part, I feel the same about the Vatican observatory as I do about its fabulous art collections: They are part of a culture and they serve a broader purpose. We always have the poor with us, and can help them whenever the opportunity arises. But I'd be naive to think that everyone sees the matter in this light ... )

So an institution like the Vatican observatory is best off to be respected by the editors of astronomy journals, and avoid involvement in an array of public controversies. Fr. Coyne seemed unwilling or perhaps unable to do that. It will be interesting to see how his successor fares.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Spin Cycle: Why the Washington Post worries about the Catholic Church checking out of Darwinism

In "Darwin's Compost", George Neumayr says it way better than me:

Schonborn’s clarification of the Church’s rejection of any theory that considers chance an adequate cause for complexity in nature frightens the elite, as they know that the Catholic Church is the most formidable foe to the Enlightenment’s search for God-less, purely material explanations for the functioning of the universe (which is, contrary to the opportunistic denials of atheism by evolutionists, what random variation and natural selection amount to).

Dissenters inside the Church and opportunists outside it have been working hard to neutralize the Church on the crucial question of evolution. But they will not get away with this, and Schonborn’s dissent marks the beginning of a serious backlash to the Enlightenment liberalism that has been smuggled into Catholicism as “reform.”

He also points out that Darwinism is not even a purely modern idea: It was rejected by the first great philosopher of science, Aristotle, 2500 years ago. He asks, would American students be allowed to read the passage he quotes from Aristotle?


(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the sidebar. )

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Notre Dame academics trash/laud Cardinal Schonborn’s stand against Darwinism

In the continuing spin of Cardinal Schonborn’s denunciation of Darwinism, Gary Belovsky, an evolutionary biologist “who is Catholic” says

There will always be a place for God in peoples’ lives, because there are ultimate questions that science cannot answer, e.g., how did the “big-bang” creation of the universe get its start? However, to search for all answers to our existence using faith alone is an abdication of human intelligence. Prior to Cardinal Schönborn’s statement, the only religious caveat placed on Catholics in regard to evolution was that at some point God nfused our ancestors with an immortal soul, a metaphysical entity that science cannot measure and therefore, must be accepted on faith.

Does he mean that a Catholic can be a complete and thorough-going naturalist as long as he maintains, by faith alone, that one, single completely unobserved and unobservable notion about the human is true (an immortal soul)? Hmmmm. I can certainly see why Cardinal Schonborn is concerned ....

Meanwhile, Protestant scholar Alvin Plantinga argues that Schonborn is right.

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 ironically reverses the legacy media’s obsession with the dangers of questioning naturalism in the public schools, by observing 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.

No, but it is. If Darwinism is taught without any critical thinking permitted, then that metaphysic is necessarily taught. Darwinism is the creation story of the public school system. That’s what the controversy is about.

(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the sidebar. )

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Catholic theologian trashes both Darwinism and ID

Fr. Edwin Oakes, a widely read theology professor at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, in Mundelein, Illinois, weighed in last week, in Zenit, (an international Catholic news agency) against both Darwinism and ID.

On Darwinism , he says,

If evolution simply means "descent with modification," then I would agree that evolution must be regarded as confirmed by scientific "fact" -- meaning by that tendentious word a reality that no one can afford to deny, except at the price of obscurantism.

[ ... ]

The problem comes from the conflation of Darwinism with evolution strictly defined. Now Darwinism asserts not just the fact of "descent with modification"; it also claims to know the "how" of evolution: Evolution occurred, it claims, by means of something it calls "natural selection."

Again, if that term is strictly defined, it simply means that only those organisms that reach reproductive age get to transmit their genes; and if those genes were somehow "responsible" for helping that organism reach reproductive age, then that "helpfulness" will likely contribute to later success as well.

As with the doctrine that all life began as a single-celled organism, I hardly see how such an obvious insight can be regarded as controversial. But then again, we have to ask: How much does the concept of natural selection actually explain the "how" of evolution? Certainly, this question is a very controversial point among philosophers of biology.

But leaving aside whether natural selection actually does any explanatory work, the importation of that concept into human relations has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster for the 20th century: Karl Marx, John D. Rockefeller and Adolf Hitler were all enthusiastic Darwinians.

For that reason, I would say that any application of Darwinian principles outside the restricted sphere of organic evolution is not only not "accepted as scientific fact" but that it has also been massively disconfirmed by history.

Fr. Oakes’s comments imply, without directly saying it, that human history is not simply the history of an accidentally naked ape. After all, if it were, Darwinism would not have been such a social disaster as he emphasizes.

About intelligent design, he says

Q: What are your objections to the Intelligent Design movement?

Father Oakes: Primarily that ID advocates seem regularly to confuse finality with design. Now because people only design things for a purpose, the two concepts are too often conflated. But they are different.

[ ... ]

I also object to the way the ID Movement conflates the Thomistic distinction between primary and secondary causality. The advocates of this movement claim that if it can be proved scientifically that God must intervene on occasion to get various species up and running, then this will throw the atheist Darwinians into a panicked rout.

I disagree. My view is that, according to St. Thomas, secondary causality can be allowed full rein without threatening God's providential oversight of the world.

Q: But aren't you making God recede from the world, just as the deists did with their concept of the clockmaker God?

Father Oakes: Actually, no. Remember that for Aquinas God's primary causality does not refer to an initial moment of creation, after which secondary causality kicks in and runs things from then on out.

No, God must sustain the world in each moment of its existence. God keeps the world in being because God is "He Who Is." God is Being itself; and because of God's self-sufficient Being, the universe "is," albeit derivatively.

[ ... ]

You have to read the whole thing to get a good sense of his argument; it’s too long to reproduce here.
(Note: You will also have to hunt and peck at bit in the archives for July 27 and 28 for these files, called “Evolution in the Eyes of the Church,” parts 1 and 2, because they don’t display as individual files. Zenit needs to update its documentation system.)

Meanwhile, ID advocate Angus Menuge, who teaches Philosophy and Computer Science at Concordia University, sent me the following comment (not linked anywhere, so I am reproducing all of it):

What a shame Fr. Oakes remarks are full of the same condescension and misrepresentation of ID as his earlier articles, e.g in First Things , where he has been unable to show his interlocutors the minimal respect required by any civilized academic discourse.

ID allows for intervention, but does *not* require it every time a design inference is drawn. I may infer that an "irreducibly complex" structure is designed without supposing that its assembly instructions are the result of a special miracle.

I respect Thomistic theology, but not the way Oakes marries it to an unbiblical Barthian denial of natural theology beyond the pathetic appreciation of "Oooh isn't that a nice sunset!!"( i.e. common-sense, intuitvive, but ultimately indefensible intuitions of design (plenty of atheists like sunsets too) that are not worthy of being called "knowledge" according to any credible epistemology).

ID is not committed to conflating "the Thomistic distinction between primary and secondary causality." It maintains, as does Scripture, that teleology is detectable. To say that teleology is going on but is not detectable is neither Scriptural nor (necessarily) warranted by the evidence (there is none) and promotes a Barthian modernist fideism, where one has to hold in faith even those non-salvific facts that the Scriptures themselves says are available (though suppressed) by all men.

Particularly disturbing to me are Oakes' uses of rhetorical phrases, assuring us that God can still be working providentially, but which are lacking in any concrete meaning.

If this is really the best the church has to offer, atheism never seemed more intellectually respectable.

Hey, chill out, prof! That may be the best Fr. Oakes has to offer, but Fr. Oakes is not, in isolation, the Catholic Church.

My own view is that many twentieth century Christian thinkers so inured themselves to a world in which Darwinism and naturalism are really true - and religion serves only a psychological purpose for those who believe it - that they have no clear sense that Darwinism and naturalism might actually be false.

I mean, they do not write as if they believe that these concepts are false, even when they maintain that they are.

Fr. Oakes appears to want to keep Darwinism in a sort of cage in the zoo of natural history. But the trouble is, Darwinism claims to define what human life is, so it won’t stay in that cage.

These twentieth century Christian thinkers (theistic evolutionists) seem always to want to reassure us that, after all, we should not expect to find concrete evidence of God’s work in the world. But what if we can/do find it? Then the status quo, prior to Darwinism and naturalism, is restored.

Religion will still be a hard sell because so much is wrong with the world that many people understandably doubt traditional Western doctrines of God. But many always did doubt, didn’t they?

What’s different about the ID crisis is this: If nature is not all there is, and if life did not come about purely by chance events acted on by natural law, then some belief that includes meaning and purpose for the universe must be true. I think that is the real reason so many thinkers left over from the twentieth century are in a spazz about the intelligent design hypothesis, and filling the media with their fears, worries and complaints. All the concessions they have made turn out to be for nothing.

Of course, Fr. Oakes’s religion – also mine, as it happens – could, in theory, be false. Any statement positive enough to be true can also be false. But if ID is true, what would make Roman Catholicism false would not be the triumph of Darwinism or naturalism, but of another religion or philosophy (other than nihilism, of course, which is ruled out if naturalism is not true). I don’t expect that to happen, but I do expect a lot of tantrums from public intellectuals as the problems of Darwinism and naturalism mount, and the old order slowly decreases in relevance.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Darwinists vs. the Catholic Church: Stuff to know before climbing into the ring

Here is nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s assessment of the oldest major institution on Earth:

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy* so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared to the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. ( - On Ranke's History of the Popes. 1840)

So, getting the Catholic Church to accept any clearly naturalistic, modernist view of life (like Darwinism) is not on the same order of difficulty as getting the local school board or the Supreme Court to accept it. The school board and the Supreme Court accept it already; they may not know that they do until someone points it out to them. That is, most of them have never considered the possibility that naturalism, Darwinism and related philosophies might literally not be true.

But the Catholic Church has never thought that these ideas were true, ever. And naturalism (of which Darwinism is the creation story) is not even a new idea. For practical purposes, Epicurus beat the Darwinists to it by nearly 2500 years. So the Church has had plenty of time to develop an opinion.

(Note: The Catholic Church would not agree with Macaulay that it is "a work of human policy.": It believes that it is the true heir of Jesus’s promise to Peter, who is regarded as the first Pope, "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it." (Matthew 16:18))

The looming conflict will certainly be lively.

Incidentally, some people wonder why we can't just decide that Darwinism is only a scientific theory and not a philosophical one. I doubt that that will really work for any length of time. I will have more to say on that subject later, but this for now: The major Darwinists have never intended Darwinism to be any less than a way of looking at all of life. It is only fair to evaluate the theory as they do. Also, stripped of its philosophical claims, Darwinism becomes only an assertion about how species change over time - an assertion for which there is actually very little good evidence. Please note, I am not saying that Darwinism, seen in this limited way, is not a correct explanation. I honestly don't think there is enough evidence to tell whether it is a correct explanation or not. The reason Darwinist explanations for all kinds of things are so widely accepted is simply that the theory is assumed to be true on a philosophical basis.

Here is the problem in a nutshell (and I did not invent it):

A peculiarity of Darwinism, both in biology and in other fields, is that it explains too much. It is very hard to imagine a condition of things which could not be explained in terms of natural selection. If the state of various elements at a given moment is such and such then these elements have displayed their survival value under the existing circumstances, and that is that. Natural selection explains why things are as they are: It does not enable us, in general, to say how they will change and vary. It is in a sense rather a historical than a predictive principle and, as is well known, it is rather a necessary than a sufficient principle for modern biology. In consequence its results when applied to social affairs were often rather odd. (MacRae, Donald G. [Reader in Sociology, University of London], "Darwinism and the Social Sciences," in Barnett S.A., ed., "A Century of Darwin," [1958], Mercury Books: London, 1962, p.304).

Darwinism is "necessary" if you want to get rid of the idea of design or purpose in biology. But that is a philosophical project. And if, increasingly, Darwinism is not "sufficient", well, ... maybe that's because you can't get rid of design or purpose in biology.

(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the sidebar.)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Blog service note: Did you come here looking for any of the following stories?

- The op-ed by Catholic Cardinal Schonborn in the New York Times? Note also the Times's story on the subject, some interesting quotes from major Darwinists to compare with the Catholic Church's view, as expressed by the Cardinal, and an example of the kind of problem with Darwinian philosophy that the Cardinal is talking about.

- the Privileged Planet film shown at the Smithsonian, go here for an extended review. Please do not raise cain about an "anti-evolution" film without seeing it. If your doctor forbids you to see the film, in case you get too excited, at least read my detailed log of the actual subjects of the film. If you were one of the people who raised cain, ask yourself why you should continue to believe the people who so misled you about the film's actual content ...

- the showing of Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian, go here and here to start, and then this one and this one will bring you up to date.

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