Catholic and Enjoying It!
Me: I’m highly skeptical that they’re gonna land any punches that overthrow the basic arguments for stuff like an old earth and some sort of evolutionary growth of life on earth over the past 3 billion years or so. But they are welcome to give it their best shot. I don’t have any religious faith invested in the theory of biological evolution, so I don’t think skeptics about it are heretics who need to be silenced and shouted down as monsters, fools or wicked people. If somebody is wrong or dubious about, say, quantum mechanics or special relativity (which likewise present us with claims about the universe that are a bit hard to comprehend or swallow), the answer to their dubiousness or confusion is not “SHUT UP!”
But that has been the approach of the scientific establishment to people who have doubts about evolution–for decades. It’s lousy pedagogy and it tends to create conformists and skeptics, but not inquirers. I favor inquiry.
For many people, evolution is the central prop, not of science, but of a particular religious/philosophical outlook which relies on one of the only two objections St. Thomas could ever find to the existence of God:
Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.
Meaning, in translation, “Things work fine without God, so there’s no God. Ancients thought lightening was the divine wrath, now we know it’s just electricity. Ancients thought disease caused by evil spirits, now we know it’s just germs. Ancients thought creatures were made by God, now we know it’s just evolution.”
Thomas’ answer, of course, is still sensible:
Reply to Objection 2. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article.
But people who are looking for an excuse to ignore God are not really interested in reason, however much they may bill themselves as “Brights”. They are looking for a very powerful aesthetic appeal to a pre-conceived and pre-rational choice to reject God. As I noted some time ago:
In God Is Not Great, Hitchens describes how, at the age of nine, he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong:
I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.
Hitchens’s brother, Peter, drily replies:
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he “simply knew” who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
What is marvelous is how nakedly Hitchens reveals his own atheist convictions to be entirely faith-based and — what is more — based on faith in a mystical epiphany to a nine-year-old boy. All the massive artillery of his adult wit and eloquence is, in the final analysis, ranked and ranged to protect that boy and his emotional epiphany. In contrast, all Christ asks of us is to have hearts like children, not minds like children. St. Thomas’s faith was childlike; his intellect was formidably adult. Hitchens, in contrast, demands we reject St. Thomas’s fifth demonstration of the existence of God — because a nine-year-old boy had a really strong feeling once half-a-century ago.
The odd paradox of Thomas’ second objection to the existence of God is how incurious it is. It’s like the child who explains that he has “figured out computers” because he now understands that all the superstition about “CPUs” and “chips” is just woo woo because we now know that pressing “C” is what makes the C appear on the screen. The atheist materialist says stuff like “Given the vast panoply of Being which somehow organizes according to intelligible physical laws governing time, space, matter and energy, our after-the-fact guesses about how this massive and elegant panoply of Being resulted in the giraffe mean that we never have to account for the fact of Being, much less why it is intelligible.” It’s a massive act of hand-waving (and, of course, shouting and denunciations of heretics who go on being a bit curious about questions like “Why is there anything?” and “Why is it so elegant?” and “Why can my three pound piece of meat behind my eyes understand it at all?” In the end, atheist materialism, particularly of the Darwin-worshiping varieity often seems to me to be a huge case of intellect worship rather than intellect use.
In a somewhat related vein is the ongoing battle being waged over the whole “Intelligent Design” argument. For us laymen, things seemed fairly obvious for a while. The ID guys appeared to be restating Thomas’ fifth demonstration of the existence of God, using some cool new info from the biological sciences. Thomas says:
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
Seems like a rather straightforward point, clouded only by the kinds of ingenious avoidance of the obvious in which modernity specializes. Arrow find their mark, not because of their keen and innate cleverness, but because the archer makes the arrow to find its mark. There may be all sorts of secondary causes at work as the archer does his business: the sort of feathers he chooses for it, the kind of bow, the sort of target, the way in which he exploits the breeze. But at the end of the day, it comes back to the archer, not the arrow.
The ID guys make rather similar points. When you see a complicated little gizmo that acts as a motor for a paramecium flagellum you naturally intuit “design”. (A friend of mine who works at Boeing once took an illustration like the one I link here, stripped it of its descriptive caption and sent it round to a bunch of engineers to ask for their commentary. Instant response: “Who designed this?” They took it for a piece of nanotechnology.) Indeed, so strong is the inference of design that guys like Francis Crick have to formulate credal utterances like, “”Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” to keep the Faithful from straying from the True Path. Because, as True Believers in Thomas’ objection 2 believe and profess, it’s gotta be either/or.
But the ID guys have run into some trouble. Not from atheist/materialists (that’s to be expected) but from Catholics and, in particular, Thomists. The problem with ID arguments, they maintain, is that they buy into the same either/or thinking as the atheist/materialists. In this critique, the problem is that ID argumentation tends to set living system in stark contrast to the rest of the created order, such that, say, the eye or the paramecium flagellum is designed but say, ordinary seawater, or soil, or a rock are just random “nature”. They problem with this, say the theological critics of ID, is that it doesn’t think deeply enough about what the Tradition means when it speaks of God as the Creator. Rocks and wind and weather and all the other events taking place in Creation are likewise part of the design of God. Calling out living systems alone as evidence of Intelligent Design tends to reinforce the notion that the rest of nature is not designed too. Rather strenuous denunciations can sometimes ensue as people get het up about all this. So the ID guys tend to get it from both sides in the debate.
Me: I’ve never quite grokked the hostility that ID people receive from the Catholic and Thomist sides of the argument (and I’m a big fan of Thomism). It’s always seemed to me that the arguments for ID can quite easily be read in pretty much the same way that the Catholic tradition has always read, for instance, the miracles of Jesus: as places where the veil between this world and the next is especially thin, not as places where, alone, design can be intuited. So yeah: I get that a rock is, in it’s own way, just as “designed” as an eye or a liver cell. I get that it is Being itself and the intelligibility thereof that are the real metaphysical realities that ultimately need to be addressed. But, well, I don’t see the big problem with saying, “When it walks and talks like a duck, odd’s are it’s a duck.” When something is massively and eloquently redolent of the astounding ingenuity of the Creator like, say, a living system (however it may have evolved), then why not chalk it up to a Creator? If an arrow in a target says “archer” and a bullet in a body says “murderer”, then why doesn’t that paramecium motor scream “Who designed me? I’ll give you three guesses.”
Part of the trouble, it seems to me, is that the theological critiques seem to want very much to avoid “Then a miracle occurs!” thinking. ID seems to many Christian critics to invoke God the Tinkerer, who endlessly pops into the natural order to say, “Presto! Now let’s have a species of tyrannosaur!” There appears to be, in part, an aesthetic resistance to the notion that nature is basically a sort of badly running engine from GM that requires constant interference from Outside to keep cranking out new species of critters. Everybody likes (and this is a favorite word in the scientific community) “elegance”: a self-contained system where you don’t have to constantly monkey with the rules to keep it going. It takes care of itself and runs smoothly. Scientists like this. Theologians do too. And there is a real reason for that. We know instinctively that reasonable explanations for events in nature are nearly always natural ones. The car crashed, not because fire demons demanded a sacrifice and took over the teenager’s brain, but because he got wasted at the dance and tried to drive home. Evil spirits didn’t eat your homework. The Scooby Gang really *did* see Old Mr. Higgins in a bedsheet and not a ghost. Lame appeals to the supernatural to avoid doing your math are lame appeals.
And yet… Christianity does in fact insist that God acts on the created order in ways which both incorporate and transcend the “laws of nature” and that the “laws of nature” are, in the end, simply descriptions, not prescriptions. Such laws are “what God has designed nature to do–most of the time” and not, in the slightest, “what God is bound to do by the Higher Power that is Nature.” Consequently, I remain entirely agnostic about what God is and is not allowed to do in the creation and development of life. He’s certainly free, if he likes, to create and develop life via the innate behavior of the time, space, matter, and energy that he himself invented. So I have no problem with the notion that life evolves for the same reason I have no problem with the notion that Michaelangelo used a chisel. God seems to be rather fond of making creation a participant in his work.
But God also does things like the miracle of the loaves and fishes where, quite some time after the Big Bang, he opted to call matter into being from nothing as he did at the Beginning. He also occasionally designs eyes or other organ systems from scratch has he did in the miracles of Jesus and in the miraculous healing of Peter Smith. So I’m not gonna sit here and tell him that it upsets my theories about elegance and my aesthetic notions of how Nature should go when, for all I know, he’s been tinkering since the start. Mind you, I don’t *think* this is a very adequate account of the origins and development of life. I’m as skeptical as the next guy toward “Then a miracle occurs!” attempts to get around doing the hard work of science. But I’m also a Christian who thinks the record is really quite plain: sometimes a miracle does occur and aesthetic objections by atheist/materialists are faced with a great divine exclamation of “Tough beans!” from the God who, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, does whatever he feels like doing.
In the end, I empathize with the rather conflicted atheist Francis Crick, who said, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Crick’s atheism prevented him from facing what I regard as the bleedin’ obvious: “almost” a miracle nothing! It was (and remains) a huge and ongoing miracle and a place where the veil is particularly thin between heaven and earth. Not for nothing do we hail the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life.” Of course there are some places where the veil is even thinner: the Incarnation of Christ, his miracles, the sacraments, and the Eucharist for instance. All of these things constitute remarkable instances where God has done things “not according to the normal course of things.” If he does that in the case of living systems too, I can’t see that he’s not allowed to. I merely see places where atheist/materialists with a particular aesthetic sense of “how nature is supposed to be” are worshipping that sense as an idol.
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