{"id":882,"date":"2011-04-05T11:29:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T15:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/returntorome\/?p=882"},"modified":"2015-03-13T13:29:23","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T17:29:23","slug":"st-thomas-aquinas-and-the-inadequacy-of-intelligent-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/returntorome\/2011\/04\/st-thomas-aquinas-and-the-inadequacy-of-intelligent-design\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Thomas Aquinas and the Inadequacy of Intelligent Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My friends Edward Feser<\/a> and Jay Wesley Richards<\/a>, both fellow Catholics, are engaged in an online dispute about whether contemporary Intelligent Design theory (ID)\"\"<\/a> runs counter to classical Thomistic understandings of nature and final causality. On this matter, I am with Ed. For I believe that ID, as defended by Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, is a view that in the long run serves to undermine rather than advance the cause of Christian theism. Of course, I see why some of my fellow Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, are so attracted to ID. For it promises to beat the apologists of atheism at their own game with the only tools they believe are epistemically appropriate, the methods of the empirical sciences. But this posture, it seems to me, uncritically accepts this first premise, which is inherently hostile to the sort of metaphysical thinking on which large swaths of the Christian worldview depend. \u00a0To get an idea of what I mean, what follows is an excerpt from my recent article published in Synthese<\/a><\/em>, \u201cOr We Can Be Philosophers: A Response to Barbara Forrest\u201d<\/a> (citations omitted):<\/p>\n

Take, for example, Mark Ryland, a former vice president\u00a0of the Discovery Institute, and now the director of the Institute for the Study\u00a0of \u00a0Nature. He writes in the New Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em>: \u201cIn some respects, standard\u00a0reductionistic neo-Darwinism and IDT [intelligent design theory] are mirror images\u00a0of each other, and suffer from some of the same defects\u201d\u2026. What does Ryland mean by this?<\/p>\n

According to Dembski, we discover design in nature after we have eliminated\u00a0chance and law. And we do so by a conceptual device he calls the explanatory filter.\u00a0If something in nature exhibits a high level of specified complexity for which\u00a0chance and law cannot account, Dembski concludes that it is highly probable that\u00a0the gap is the result of an intelligent agent. Design, therefore, is not immanent\u00a0in nature. It is something that is imposed on nature by someone or something\u00a0outside it.<\/p>\n

This means that for Dembski as well as other ID advocates, nature\u2019s order, including\u00a0its laws and principles, need not require a mind behind it except for in the few\u00a0instances where the explanatory filter allows one to detect design. But whatever design\u00a0we detect, it can always be overturned by future discoveries, and thus conceding yet\u00a0another slice of nature to naturalism.<\/p>\n

So, ironically, as Ryland notes, ID advocates, like Dembksi and Behe, and defenders\u00a0of naturalism, like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, wind up agreeing that without\u00a0\u201cgaps\u201d in nature one is not justified in believing that there is design in nature. The IDer\u00a0thinks he can fill the gaps with intelligent agents; the atheist sees no reason to abandon\u00a0fruitful theories because of a few anomalies for which he thinks he can someday\u00a0account. Ironically, Dembski accepts this narrative, but is confident that the naturalists\u00a0will not be able to \u201cexplain\u201d everything:<\/p>\n

The \u201cgaps\u201d in the god-of-the-gaps objection are meant to denote gaps of ignorance\u00a0about underlying physical mechanisms. But there is no reason to think\u00a0that all gaps give way to ordinary physical explanations once we know enough\u00a0about the underlying physical mechanisms. The mechanisms simply do not exist.\u00a0Some gaps might constitute ontic discontinuities in the chain of physical causes\u00a0and thus remain forever beyond the capacity of physical mechanisms\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, however, is not the only option for Christian theists. Followers of St. Thomas\u00a0Aquinas (Thomists) and many other Christian thinkers do not accept this philosophy\u00a0of nature\u2026. For the Thomist,\u00a0design is immanent in the universe, and thus even an evolutionary account\u00a0of the development of life requires a universe teeming with final causes. What is\u00a0a final cause? It is a thing\u2019s purpose or end. So, for example, even if one can provide\u00a0an evolutionary account of the development of the human lungs without any\u00a0recourse to an intervening intelligence, there remains the fact that the lungs develop\u00a0for a particular purpose, the exchange of oxygen for the sake of the organism\u2019s survival.\u00a0This fact, of course, does not contravene the discoveries of modern biology.\u00a0And neither does it mean that final causes should be inserted into scientific theories.\u00a0All it means is that the deliverances of the sciences\u2014even if they need no\u00a0intelligent intervention to be complete\u2014can never be nature\u2019s whole story. For the\u00a0Thomist, and for many other Christians, law and chance do not eliminate design.\u00a0\u201cDesign\u201d does not replace efficient and material causes in nature when the latter\u00a0two appear impotent as explanations (i.e., Dembski\u2019s \u201cgaps\u201d). Rather, efficient and\u00a0material causes require <\/em>final causes. For example, my belief that the lungs\u2019 purpose\u00a0is to exchange oxygen is not falsified simply because I can provide an exhaustive\u00a0scientific account of the natural processes of the evolution and development\u00a0of the lungs. This is because final causality is not a substitute for a scientific account\u00a0of nature. For the natural processes\u2014even if they are complete and exhaustive\u2013seem to work for an end, and that end is its final cause. This is why, in his\u00a0famous Five Ways (or arguments) to show God\u2019s existence, St. Thomas includes as\u00a0a fifth way an argument from the universe\u2019s design as a whole<\/em>, appealing to those\u00a0scientific laws that make motion possible\u2026. For this\u00a0reason, I write in a recent article [in the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy<\/a><\/em>]: \u201c[Although] I have maintained and continue to\u00a0maintain that ID may be taught in public schools without violating the Establishment\u00a0Clause\u2026 [,] I sincerely hope that no public school teaches it. For I think that\u00a0ID advances an inadequate philosophy of nature that suggests a philosophical theology\u00a0that is inconsistent with classical Christian theism\u201d\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friends Edward Feser and Jay Wesley Richards, both fellow Catholics, are engaged in an online dispute about whether contemporary Intelligent Design theory (ID) runs counter to classical Thomistic understandings of nature and final causality. On this matter, I am with Ed. For I believe that ID, as defended by Michael Behe and William A. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,27,30,32,71,105,106,140],"tags":[158,22217,22240,22265],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apologetics","category-catholic","category-catholicism","category-christianity","category-intelligent-design","category-philosophy","category-philosophy-of-religion","category-st-thomas-aquinas","tag-barbara-forrest","tag-intelligent-design","tag-philosophy","tag-st-thomas-aquinas"],"yoast_head":"\nSt. Thomas Aquinas and the Inadequacy of Intelligent Design<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My friends Edward Feser and Jay Wesley Richards, both fellow Catholics, are engaged in an online dispute about whether contemporary Intelligent Design\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/returntorome\/2011\/04\/st-thomas-aquinas-and-the-inadequacy-of-intelligent-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"St. Thomas Aquinas and the Inadequacy of Intelligent Design\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My friends Edward Feser and Jay Wesley Richards, both fellow Catholics, are engaged in an online dispute about whether contemporary Intelligent Design\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/returntorome\/2011\/04\/st-thomas-aquinas-and-the-inadequacy-of-intelligent-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Return to Rome\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-04-05T15:29:33+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-03-13T17:29:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/community\/returntorome\/files\/2011\/04\/1851686908.01.LZZZZZZZ-195x300.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Francis J. 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