Evolution and all that

A reader asks:

Do you think the case against evolution is sound? Im very interested in this debate but the science is a bit over my head. Would love to get your reaction.

I tend to think the work of the Catholic creationists is fairly crankish and represents an attempt to graft Evangelical obsessions on to the Church. The Church has no issues with evolution per se, only with attempts to turn it into a mask for atheistic materialism. Heck, the Pope even hosted a conference a couple of years ago on evolution. Although there is a lot of base stealing and crap science masquerading as evolutionary theory (see, for instance, the internecine squabbles among evolutionists about “just so” stories and so forth), there is also, as JPII pointed out, an awful lot of converging and convincing lines of evidence from all sorts of disciplines, while the arguments against the basic theory of descent from common ancestors and genetic modifications over time have always struck me as eerily similar to the sort of random heckling you get from anti-catholics against the faith.

What I mean is this: Opponents of evolution point to this weakness and that problem, just as anti-Catholics tend to point to proof texts and scandals, but they never put anything in place of the apparent weakness and many times the “weakness” turns out to have a rather reasonable explanation. So, for instance, you find dinosaurs turning up with feathers in the fossil record who look an awful lot like, you know, birds. The answer of creationists is to nitpick about the fact that these obviously transitional creatures were incapable of flight and so this can’t be evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Etc. It reminds me of arguments by anti-Catholics who nitpick about the fact that a couple of figures from the patristic era questioned the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, so therefore we must ignore the solid and obvious fact that these are obvious exceptions who prove the rule. There’s a sort of opposition to common sense driving it that I find so prima facie impossible to overcome.

So, on the whole, I think the effort to disprove evolution is doomed and often very wrong headed.

On the other hand, I think the instinct which recognizes an anti-God agenda is sound. I mean, come on. Read P.Z. Myers and his toadies. The trick is to argue smarter, not harder. One way to do that is to stop relying on God of the Gaps arguments like “I can’t explain how this paramecium got a flagellum, so God must have done it.” The problem with this is that, when somebody comes up with an explanation, people think the existence of God has been disproven. Instead of arguing for the existence of God from apparent exceptions to the rules of nature, Thomas took the much wiser course of arguing for the existence of God by asking “Why are there rules of nature?” or, more briefly, “Why is there anything?”

The main problem with evolutionary theory as mask for atheism is that it resolutely refuses to think deeply. It falls for Objection 2 in Thomas’ demonstration of 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.

Or, in non-Thomistic language, “Everything seems to work fine without God, so there’s no God.”

What this line of thinking always does is take for granted the existence of nature. So, for instance, as Mike Flynn was tearing his hair out about the other day:

Basically, Siegel’s argument is:

Arguments for God as cause of the universe rest on the assumption that something can’t come from nothing.  But given the laws of physics, it turns out that something can come from nothing.

This flunks Logic 101.  Read that again: "Given the laws of physics, something can come from nothing."  Given the laws of physics, which means you have to start with something, namely the laws of physics.    

He goes on to say:

[I]n many ways, getting something when you have nothing is unavoidable! …  For example, take a box and empty it, so that all you’ve got is some totally empty space, like [a picture of a black square] above. An ideal, perfect, empty vacuum. Now, what’s in that box?

It would seem simple to point out that you don’t have nothing; you have an empty box.  A black square (which he uses for illustration) is not nothing; it is a black square.  And even the vacuum that he imagines left in the box is not nothing; it is a vacuum.  

Conclusion: Dr. Siegel doesn’t know nothing.

In the same way, atheistic evolutionists constantly steal bases by saying things like “Given the laws of time, space, matter and energy, we can confidently assert that life accidently arose and developed without any need of a Creator.” Given by whom? Why is there anything? Why does it behave as it does? Often the explanation to such elementary questions is “Shut up” from atheistic materialists. Thomas, however, does not shut up and answers Objection 2:

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.

And that self-necessary first principle is what everybody calls “God”.