Thoughts on Intelligent Design
I just spent a profitable time reading the latest issue of Crisis from cover to cover. For those
of you not acquainted with this worthy periodical, the July-August 2003 issue is
an excellent one. The cover story is on theories of the death of John Paul I,
favoring the more responsible account that attributes his death to an already
weak constitution overwhelmed by the stress of the papacy, not to poison
administered by Masons. If I may weigh in here with something that could not
really be called evidence, even less so because the gift of prophecy has not
been one of the charismatic gifts I have frequently exercised--I was not
particularly surprised when John Paul I died. When I heard of his election, my
first thought was something like, “They don't really mean it” with the sense
that it wasn't going to last. This was not influenced by any opinion one way or
the other about Cardinal Luciani, about whom I knew nothing at all. When he
died, I wondered if it had been a prophetic sense. A friend of mine suggested
at the time, referring to his identification in the prophecies of St. Malachy, “Maybe
calling him De mediatate luna meant he'd only last a moon.”
The issue also includes: A review of the life and work of George Enescu, which
makes me want to go and buy CDs of his compositions, and a number of book
reviews. One is a good review of what is apparently a very poor book on
Tolkien, which errs not by denying his Catholicism but by making his work too
Catholic. One of these days I will post some of my own thoughts on Tolkien,
whose work I have greatly admired and closely studied for the last 41 years.
There are also reviews of a book on the horrible censorship of school books by
the PC crowd, which makes me want to read it, and one
of a new book on Charles V by Bill Maltby, whom I happen to know through the
Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, which the reviewer does not consider very
interesting. I may try to read it anyway. I like having a magazine that reviews
books in such a way that I can really know if I want to read them or not.
Another article is on one of my favorite topics, the theory of evolution. This
is the second of a series of articles defending the theory of Intelligent
Design against Darwinism. This one discusses Christian defenders of Darwinism,
of whom I might be considered one (although of course the author doesn't know
anything about me; why should he?). The author (Benjamin D. Wiker of Franciscan
University of Steubenville) argues that Darwinism requires atheism and
therefore Christians (and some secularists, like Stephen Jay Gould) who contend
that Natural Selection does not contradict Christian faith are
deluding themselves. Dr. Wiker places Gould in the tradition of “double truth,”
which he identifies with any argument to the effect that science and theology
answer different questions, and therefore do not intrinsically interfere with
one another's conclusions. Against this he argues that the materialist methodology
required by Darwinism logically entails a materialist ontology, therefore
cannot be held consistently without atheism. He likewise dismisses the
arguments of Professor Howard Van Till to the effect that a purely material
development of the natural world through cause and effect demonstrates the
functional integrity of the creation and thereby the perfection of the Creator.
He seems to argue that this suggests Deism, a dangerous tendency that one of my
finest professors, the late James A. Vann, described as follows: “If you make
God just one of the players, it won't be long until He's sitting on the bench.
And then He'll be in the stands, and then you'll find Him standing in line with
everyone else to buy a ticket.”
In this argument, I don't know if I can identify with a party. I am not a
materialist; I am a Catholic Christian. I like Franciscan University of
Steubenville, except that they wouldn't hire me to teach history there, which I
very much wanted to do. I like Stephen Jay Gould. I think that Natural
Selection accurately describes the way that things happen among living beings.
I have never read The Origin of Species
or The Descent of Man,
although I feel increasingly that I ought to do so. I believe that God not only
created the world, but that He is immediately responsible for everything that
happens in Nature, that is, outside the free will of His rational creatures. I
do not believe that this last position is incompatible with a belief in Natural
Selection. This may make some people consider me delusional, but I believe that
it is in fact consistent, although it may take a long time and many essays such
as this one before I can clarify this.
C.S. Lewis used an analogy I like for creation, that of a work of literature. I
believe I am paraphasing him in this example. Why does Hamlet kill Polonius in
Act III of Hamlet? Is it
because Hamlet is on edge, looking for an opportunity to kill Claudius, fearing
attack and betrayal on every side, and because at the same time Polonius is too
naive to realize that Hamlet is actually dangerous and so undertakes to spy on
him? Or is it because Shakespeare wanted to begin the falling action of the
drama, and needed to put an overt act that would begin the tragic unravelling
of the Danish court? The answer is, both. Shakespeare is responsible for
everything that happens in Hamlet,
but it is a testimony to his greatness as a writer that the events appear to
develop with irresistable necessity. We watch the play and say, “It had to
happen that way” but of course it didn't. Claudius could have been hiding
behind the arras himself: in that case the play would have been over a lot
sooner, but also the character of Claudius would have to be different. The
Claudius we know would not take such a responsibility himself; he prefers to
leave it to someone else, using Polonius as he later tries to use Rosenkrantz
and Guildenstern, and still later Laertes. On the other hand, Hamlet might have
checked carefully to see who was there before he struck; but that would require
that he suddenly descend from the pitch of emotion to which he has wound
himself in confronting his mother with her sins. Shakespeare made his
characters and then saw to it that they behaved according to their natures, so
that the action would appear inevitable.
As far as natural history goes, God wrote the book. He wrote natural selection
into it. The hand of God is discernable everywhere to the eyes of faith and
nowhere to the unbeliever. But to the unbeliever I would ask, is not the belief
in the existence of chance as much of an act of faith as belief that variation
arose through the constant action of God at every point in the great drama of
creation? I have very little expectation that God's fingerprints will be found
by any material means, as the Intelligent Design or Creation Science parties
contend. But they are imprinted on the minds and hearts of the evolutionists
themselves, though they may try to deny it.