Free To Believe Whatever They Please?

Free To Believe Whatever They Please?
4 February 2006

Well, maybe they are. Maybe. Yet only about _Natura_, of course.
When it comes to _Deus_, firm guidance is authoritatively provided.



"I think it is much more important for a Christian to be fully aware of
his intellectual freedom than to be correct on any particular
scientific matter."
--Michael.Behe.

"[H]ow can we ensure that children consciously realize from an early
age the extent of their freedom to interpret nature?"
--M.B.

"[M]y argument was superior to a 'scientific' argument since it was
based on more certain and enduring truths and principles."
--Christoph Schoenborn



Scientific Orthodoxies // Michael Behe

(Michael J. Behe is professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh
University and author of _Darwin's Black Box_.)

<< http://print.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0512/opinion/behe.html >>

Back in the 1970s, when my wife Celeste was in the seventh grade at Our
Lady of Mount Carmel in the Bronx, her teacher, a Holy Cross Brother,
tried to start one science class with a bang. Brandishing a textbook
picture of nearly identical-looking embryos of different kinds of
vertebrates-fish, amphibians, pigs, humans, and more-he announced
with a flourish, "Evolution is true. Get used to it."

He didn't get the reaction he wanted. Celeste tells me she and the
other kids in the class shrugged. What's the big deal? My own
experience was similar. I learned about the spectacular power of
Darwinian evolution at St. Margaret Mary Alacoque grade school and
Bishop McDevitt high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We were told
that God could make life in any way He saw fit, and if He wanted to use
secondary causes like natural selection rather than some special
action, well, who were we to tell Him otherwise? It arguably shows even
more power, the lesson went, for God to create relatively simple matter
and laws which in the fullness of time would give rise to living
creatures, including men and women who could respond with a free will
to His love. It sounded fine to me.

My wife's classmates, and mine, didn't know it, but our
indifference to evolution was shaped by our religious upbringing.
Catholics have always been rather blasé about evolution. In our living
room we have a copy of the 1907 edition of _The Catholic Encyclopedia_
(which Celeste rescued from the shredder at a local library's
discarded book sale)-complete with the imprimatur of John Cardinal
Farley of New York, and published "under the auspices of the Knights
of Columbus Catholic Truth Committee." The encyclopedia carries a
scholarly twenty-thousand-word article on evolution written by two
Jesuits, one of whom was a professor of biology.

"What is to be thought of the theory of evolution? Is it to be
rejected as unfounded and inimical to Christianity, or is it to be
accepted as an established theory altogether compatible with the
principles of a Christian conception of the universe?" the
encyclopedia article asks. And it answers, "We must carefully
distinguish between the different meanings of the words theory of
evolution in order to give a clear and correct answer to this
question." Distinctions abound, but the gist of the article is that
Christians should be thoughtful and follow the evidence where it leads,
confident that the truth of nature does not contradict the truth of
God. Reading the old Encyclopedia entry reminded me of G.K.
Chesterton's observations in _Orthodoxy_ that "The Christian is
quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled
order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist
is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck
of spiritualism or miracle." Unlike materialists, Christians can
serenely evaluate the physical evidence. If the universe unfolded
completely through the regularities of God's laws, fine. If it
unfolded mostly by law but also by irregularities or special actions of
some sort, that's fine too.

Unfortunately, there's a large obstacle in the path of Christians who
want to exercise their freedom to follow the evidence wherever it
leads. Christians may have more freedom than materialists in deciding
on the best explanation for nature, but overwhelmingly it is
materialists-or practical materialists-who tell Christians the
story of nature. So information about the way the universe works almost
invariably passes through a rigid materialistic filter before it
reaches the general public.

Although the good brother at Mount Carmel undoubtedly thought he was
giving his seventh-grade students the straight dope about the evidence
for evolution, the picture of vertebrate embryos he flaunted was
utterly bogus. As has been widely reported in the past few years, Ernst
Haeckel, the nineteenth-century embryologist and Darwin booster who
first drew the embryos, took extensive liberties with the
representations, apparently to make them meet evolutionary expectations
more closely. The drawings were widely featured in high-school biology
textbooks for most of the twentieth century.

The false drawings had the full weight of the scientific magisterium
behind them, explicitly endorsed by such luminaries as Nobel laureate
James Watson and Bruce Alberts, a recent president of the elite
National Academy of Sciences, 90 percent of whose self-selected members
are avowed materialists. Watson, Alberts, or others of that company
surely could have discovered the drawings' doubtful provenance if
they'd cared to. Yet there's no reason to think the scientific
elite was actively conspiring to mislead the public about evidence for
evolution. Rather, the embryos drawn by Haeckel were what materialists
expected Darwinian evolution to show.

Of course, the problem isn't usually fake evidence being passed off
as fact. But when the evidence vouched for by experts is skewed or
pre-filtered through an alien philosophy, in what sense is a Christian
free to follow the evidence of nature? I was told in Catholic high
school that it looked strongly as though God must have used natural law
to begin life-because scientists were making substantial progress in
understanding how simple chemicals could combine to make the molecules
of life. What they had in mind was the work of the chemist Stanley
Miller, who back in the 1950s sparked a mixture of gases and saw that
some chemicals were made that also occur in life.

Looking back, I don't recall what evidence was presented in our
high-school textbook, other than a picture of Miller standing beside
his distillation apparatus. But I wrote the conclusion in my notebook
without a second thought. Today, when I'm in a much better position
to render a judgment, this claim based on Miller's evidence strikes
me as ludicrously inadequate. Now it looks to me-from the physical
evidence-that God did something rather unusual to bring about the
first life. Yet with the formation I received in science classes in
Catholic schools, it didn't surprise me at the secular universities I
later attended that the topic of how life started was not even a
subject for discussion. Of course it was by simple physical laws of
some sort-everybody knew that. The only question was by what route
material processes produced life.

As a postdoctoral associate at the National Institutes of Health in the
early 1980s, I shared a lab with a woman named Joanne, a fellow postdoc
and a serious Catholic. One slow afternoon she and I were gabbing about
the Big Questions, including the origin of life. "What would be
needed to get the first cell?" she asked. "You'd need a membrane
for sure," I said. "And metabolism." "Can't do without a
genetic code," she added, "and proteins." We stopped, stared at
each other, and both shouted, "Naaaaahh!" Then we laughed and got
back to work. Even though we quickly realized that there were brick
walls everywhere one looked, our only reaction was to chuckle. What we
didn't do was to question seriously whether the unfolding of physical
laws could adequately explain the very start of life. I guess we
vaguely thought that even if we didn't know, somebody else must. Or,
even if no one knew, somebody would figure it out soon. Or eventually.
There we were, two young, well-educated Catholic scientists, as free as
the wind to come to our own conclusions, and we punted.

I hate to imagine what Chesterton would say about such fine specimens
of free Christian thinking as Joanne and me. Yet a practical problem
arises from a Christian's freedom to find "a considerable amount of
settled order and inevitable development" in nature: In a scientific
culture dominated by materialism, social pressure will push Christians
to concede whatever is possible to concede as "inevitable." At
first, the concession might simply be irenic, to avoid conflict with
materialists in areas that are cloudy and are thought to be
unimportant. But as science progresses and claims more questions as
legitimate fields of inquiry, the habit of not making waves can become
dangerous, as the precedent of conceding the interpretation of material
reality to materialists becomes firmly established. In the end, the
ability of a Christian to see the hand of God in nature-not in some
gauzy, emotional sense, but as a deduction from the physical data-is
finally considered illegitimate. One day it was just the evolution of
species that was unapproachable. The next day, the origin of life and
the universe. Today even the origin of the mind falls under the
materialist program.

Worse, Christian schools that pass on the latest materialistic thinking
in science without clear warnings risk quashing the freedom of their
students. It was in Catholic schools that Joanne and I had both been
taught the scientifically correct attitude that the National Academy of
Sciences later described in its 1999 booklet _Science and Creationism_.
Although admitting the problem of the origin of life was "seemingly
intractable" (in other words, no one has a clue), the academy
chirpily kept the discussion firmly within a materialistic framework:
"For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no
longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes
involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become
which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first
cells." In other words, it doesn't matter what the evidence
is-the only conceivable conclusion is a materialistic one. Christians
who unconsciously acquiesce in this line of thought have lost a
significant chunk of their freedom.

As it happens, materialist scientists themselves are often as clueless
as I was about the narrowness of their vision of reality. In a recent
book titled _Lessons From the Living Cell_, a California biologist
named Stephen Rothman demonstrates, both intentionally and
unintentionally, the consequences of an impoverished metaphysics on
even brilliant minds. He claims that for decades scientists laboring in
Rothman's own abstruse field of cellular protein transport ignored
data that didn't square with a favored hypothesis called vesicle
theory. "Whether they thought the evidence convincing or weak, or
were ignorant of it, many biologists soon came to believe that the
vesicle model was not a model at all, but a description of an actual
mechanism," Rothman notes.

The scientific literature reflected this sense of understanding. Papers
commonly talked about the model, either in general or regarding
particular aspects of it, as known and secure events of nature.
Textbooks followed suit by communicating this comprehension to
students. Such descriptions did not highlight, or commonly even
mention, the immense lacunae of ignorance, the unanswered questions
about the model's fidelity to nature. Instead they gave the
impression that it was all known, or at least almost all known, a
certified product of laboratory research. . . . When evidence was
reported that did not seem to fit the theory, it, not the theory,
became suspect.

As with any other group, when a bevy of scientists gets a bee in its
collective bonnet, the buzz can be hard to silence. And, as Rothman
writes, the factors that decide which theories will be taken for
granted can be decidedly non-rational: "Prejudice about ideas and
people; personality; the power of authority and prior belief; raw
political power; who controlled journals, organizations, and funds; the
depth of commitment to an idea; and any and every other human and
social attribute and foible that one can imagine are also at play."

As a longtime skeptic of Darwinian evolution, I was buoyed by
Rothman's analysis. This guy gets it. He knows the difference between
a theory and evidence, knows that in science popularity doesn't
determine truth. Surely he'd also understand that if scientists can
be influenced by non-rational factors in a recondite area such as
cellular protein transport, they can be even more strongly influenced
on deeply controversial topics such as evolution.

But then, on page 78, I was brought up short. As an antidote for the
"strong microreductionism" that he disdains (defined as the view
that "we can come to understand all phenomena completely from
knowledge of their underlying structures, their constituent parts"),
Rothman prescribes not open-mindedness but orthodox Darwinism! In a
long, charming dialogue between two archetypal characters, Rothman's
alter ego Eudoxus lectures the reductionist Epistemon:

"What is missing, what you have ignored or forgotten, is nothing
less than the fundamental driving force of evolution-natural
selection. It was by means of natural selection that the molecules you
talk of became the material embodiment of the life forms that populate
this planet. It was natural selection that connected them to life; that
took their steel and cement and constructed life's edifice. And it is
here that strong microreductionism ultimately fails. It is in natural
selection that we see that the parts do not entail the whole."

"Took their steel and cement"? Why did we switch to the language of
heroic mythology? Here is a fellow who has spent scores of pages
scolding co-workers for reaching conclusions based on inadequate or
imagined evidence, and now he suddenly begins to lead the parade. For
his grand claim that natural selection explains all of evolution-and
therefore all of life-Rothman fails to present the rigorous evidence
he demands of the those simply trying to explain the workings of
protein transport. In fact, he presents no evidence. With a shrug of
their archetypal shoulders, Epistemon and Eudoxus simply agree to agree
that unknown material processes must have started life and that natural
selection must explain everything thereafter. Darwinism is not judged
the winner among competing explanations-it's the only conceivable
answer.

In my experience most scientists are not even as aware as Rothman of
how underlying philosophical assumptions shape their conclusions and
limit their choices: Materialism is the water they swim in, the tenet
whose falsity is literally unimaginable.

Yet there are some who are aware of the role materialism plays, and
they actively embrace it. Several years ago, marking the death of
astronomer Carl Sagan, the distinguished biologist Richard Lewontin
wrote in the _New York Review of Books_: "Our willingness to accept
scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an
understanding of the real struggle between science and the
supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent
absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . in spite of the tolerance of
the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because
we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism."

Meanwhile, in the introduction to his 1996 book Vital Dust, the Belgian
Nobelist Christian de Duve forthrightly declared, "A warning: All
through this book, I have tried to conform to the overriding rule that
life be treated as a natural process, its origin, evolution, and
manifestations, up to and including the human species, as governed by
the same laws as nonliving processes." And even while acknowledging
that Darwinian evolution has no answers, the biochemist Franklin Harold
in his 2001 _The Way of the Cell_ peremptorily bans the idea that
intelligence is necessary to explain some aspects of life: "We should
reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent
design for the dialogue of chance and necessity; but we must concede
that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the
evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful
speculations."

Even more chilling are passages such as this: "The greatest
scientific advance of the last 1,000 years was providing the evidence
to prove that human beings are independent agents whose lives on earth
are neither conferred nor controlled by celestial forces. Although it
may be more conventional to measure scientific progress in terms of
specific technological developments, nothing was more important than
providing the means to release men and women from the hegemony of the
supernatural." This isn't from a book or magazine article, or even
from an editorial in a science journal. It's the beginning of a
review article in the journal _Cell_, concerning the regulation of
molecules entering and exiting various compartments of the cell-a
technical review of a technical topic in a technical journal. The fact
that the "hegemony of the supernatural" is offhandedly denounced
reflects not only on the authors, but on the mindset of the scientific
community that would find it unremarkable.

Let me pull together a few threads to bring the dilemma into clear
focus. In the 1998 encyclical _Fides et Ratio_, John Paul II points
out: "It is not too much to claim that the development of a good part
of modern philosophy has seen it move further and further away from
Christian Revelation, to the point of setting itself quite explicitly
in opposition." A major tenet of the explicitly antagonistic
philosophy, he observes, is scientism, which "relegates religious,
theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere
fantasy." A big problem is that "the undeniable triumphs of
scientific research and contemporary technology have helped to
propagate a scientistic outlook, which now seems boundless, given its
inroads into different cultures and the radical changes it has
brought." And here is the rub: "There are in the life of a human
being many more truths which are simply believed than truths which are
acquired by way of personal verification. Who, for instance, could
assess critically the countless scientific findings upon which modern
life is based?"

Who indeed? Everyone, including scientists, relies on others for the
overwhelming majority of information they accept about the way nature
works. For just this reason, I had been surprised to find out
Haeckel's embryo drawings were false, surprised to discover what I
was taught in high school about the origin of life and evolution
didn't square with the scientific literature I later read. Yet if for
"truths which are simply believed" about the natural world
Christians must rely on those with a "scientistic outlook"-who
regard religious knowledge as "mere fantasy," who are "quite
explicitly in opposition" to Christian Revelation, who "have a
prior commitment, a commitment to materialism," who will vouch for
"patent absurdity," and who want "to release men and women from
the hegemony of the supernatural"-well, then, Christians are in a
lot of trouble.

In 1998 Larson and Witham published a survey in the journal _Nature_ of
members of the National Academy of Sciences; it showed that, overall,
90 percent of the members were materialists (and therefore atheists),
with the number rising to 95 percent for biologists. Although the
figures are lower (around 60 percent) for "ordinary" scientists,
and lower still for other scientifically knowledgeable groups such as
physicians and engineers, the tone is set at the top. Might the academy
members' materialistic views color the data? Might the academy
recommend that science be taught in ways that restrict a Christian
student's intellectual freedom?

Of course, people are allowed to be materialists if they choose.
Thoughtful persons such as, say, Richard Lewontin, who consciously
choose materialism over theism, are well within their rights. They are
also within their rights to argue strongly for the correctness of their
views. But the problem is not such explicit and deliberate materialism.
The problem is rather socially contagious materialism, spread more by
social pressure than by rational argument. The social pressure
doesn't have to be overt; it doesn't have to involve ridicule or
arm-twisting. It is often just an intellectual climate in which most
people do not recognize that their theoretical options have been
artificially limited.

Socially acquired materialism often manifests itself by an emotional
reaction when challenged. When I lecture in favor of the idea that
intelligence is explicitly needed to explain some aspects of biology,
the response is not typically, "Gee, that's interesting, but I
disagree." Instead, people become angry, denouncing the mildest of
challenges to materialism as unspeakable heresy. Once after a lecture
in Virginia a student declared she was going to dedicate her life to
demonstrating I was wrong. In Canada an academic ran after me with a
loaded rat trap, inviting me to stick my finger in it to see if it
worked (I use a mousetrap as an example of the sort of system that
can't be made by Darwinian processes). After a lecture to the
biochemistry department of a major west-coast university, a group of
students I spoke with sullenly agreed that the evidence for Darwinism
wasn't there. Nevertheless, they viewed the alternative with contempt
and passionately swore to seek a materialistic answer. At a debate
before the Royal Society of Medicine in London, I argued for the
incontestable position that science doesn't yet objectively know
whether Darwinian processes can explain the human mind, simply because
philosophers and neurobiologists don't yet even know what constitutes
the human mind. After all, I said, one can't contend that science
knows how an undefined entity could be produced by an unspecified
process. By a show of hands, about 95 percent of the assembled
scientists disagreed. Of course science already "knows" natural
selection can explain the human mind-because science already
"knows" Darwinian processes explain everything.

With such a uniformity of prejudice in the scientific community, how
can we ensure that children consciously realize from an early age the
extent of their freedom to interpret nature? Should Christian
scientists simply point out for Christian students and nonscientists
where the data end and materialistic presumptions begin?

Unfortunately, Christian scientists suffer from the same baleful
influences as everyone else, including the influence of materialistic
presuppositions. As a young man I was happy as a clam with my
theistic-Darwinian view of nature. As a Christian I was free to assume
a "considerable amount of settled order." In my mushy mind, this
meant accepting claims that were based on materialism and scorning the
benighted Christians who didn't accept them. Even now, I am sometimes
singled out by Darwinists as the most "reasonable" Intelligent
Design proponent, because I've written that I think common descent is
true. I'm embarrassed to admit that I derive some odd, involuntary
pleasure from being thought the "best" of the lot. My reaction is
especially irrational because some of my Intelligent Design colleagues
who disagree with me on common descent have greater familiarity with
the relevant science than I do.

We all desire to be admired as much, and scorned as little, as
possible. So unless we have a stronger reason to anchor us, we tend to
drift away from the contempt and toward the applause. In a profession
dominated by materialism, social pressure pushes one to accept as many
materialistic premises as one can. Since Christian intellectual freedom
is compatible with near-complete agreement, that's the boundary
toward which one floats, whether it is true or not. Other things being
equal, a Christian scientist is no more reliable than anyone else at
drawing lines between evidence and speculation.

I think it is much more important for a Christian to be fully aware of
his intellectual freedom than to be correct on any particular
scientific matter. But in order to preserve that freedom, Christian
students must be explicitly instructed in it. One way to make the topic
more realistic to students might be to have them read excerpts of works
by folks such as Richard Lewontin, Richard Dawkins, and other
scientists who have consciously chosen materialism over against theism.
Students should be told about polls showing that most top scientists
are materialists. Most effective, I think, would be to teach them past
examples, such as Haeckel's embryo drawings, where materialistic
presuppositions drove the acceptance of a false or questionable theory.

If more Christian students were so instructed, and if their mature
thoughts eventually leavened the scientific community, maybe some
future Holy Cross brother in the Bronx could hold up a drawing of a
human embryo and announce to his science class with a flourish,
"You're fearfully and wonderfully made. Get used to it."

== 33 ==

The professor is about as unpersuasive as usual when discussing
religionism naked, no bettera and no worse. I may be mistaken, but my
impression are that the Vatican hogen-mogens are not really quite as
laid back and easy-going as Prof. Behe evidently takes them to be.
They have certainly been known to issue fatwas specifically about
evolution and historical biology, anyway, whereas if RC's could really
believe just anything at all that takes their fancy about Nat. Sci.,
the authorities would presumably content themselves with announcing the
general libertarian principle.

As an amateur historian of culture, Prof. Behe doesn't notice that his
crew's traditional fellow-traveling with Darwin might, circa 1907, have
had something to do with distancing themsleves from the excesses of
certain overzealous Prods such as our own Secretary of State W. J.
Bryan. But of course we're all ecumenical now, are we not? Perhaps
the sheep are nowadays indeed free to espouse "intelligent design" if
they like without it mattering what the goats think one way or the
other.

As it happens, the following issue (January 2006) of _Neuhaus Things_
contains an essay by a genuine V.C. hogen-mogen, which why don't I
swipe too?



The Designs of Science // Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

(Christoph Cardinal Schönborn is archbishop of Vienna and general
editor of the _Catechism of the Catholic Church_.)

<< http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0601/articles/schonborn.html


In July 2005 the _New York Times_ published my short essay "Finding
Design in Nature." The reaction has been overwhelming, and not
overwhelmingly positive. In the October issue of _First Things_,
Stephen Barr honored me with a serious response, one fairly
representative of the reaction of many Catholics.

I fear, however, that Barr has misunderstood my argument and possibly
misconceived the issue of whether the human intellect can discern the
reality of design in the world of living things.

It appears from Barr's essay-and a number of other responses-that
my argument was substantially misunderstood. In "Finding Design in
Nature," I said:

· The Church "proclaims that by the light of reason the human
intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the
natural world, including the world of living things."

· "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the
overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not
science."

· Quoting our late Holy Father John Paul II: "The evolution of
living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to
discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses
admiration. This finality, which directs beings in a direction for
which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a
Mind which is its inventor, its creator."

· Again quoting John Paul II: "To all these indications of the
existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the
proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which
presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous
finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an
explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be
equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to
abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to
seek a solution for its problems."

· Quoting the _Catechism_: "Human intelligence is surely already
capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence
of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by
the light of human reason. . . . We believe that God created the world
according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity
whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."

· Referring to the Church's teaching on the importance and reach of
metaphysics: "But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the
odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the
nineteenth century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly
enthralled by the 'death of God' that by the use of reason alone
mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First
Mover, the God of the philosophers."

My argument was based neither on theology nor modern science nor
"intelligent design theory." In theology, although the mind's
ability to grasp the order and design in nature is adopted by, taken up
into, and elevated to new heights by the faith of Christianity, that
ability precedes faith, as Romans 1:19-20 makes clear. In science, the
discipline and methods are such that design-more precisely, formal
and final causes in natural beings-is purposefully excluded from its
reductionist conception of nature.

Instead, my argument was based on the natural ability of the human
intellect to grasp the intelligible realities that populate the natural
world, including most clearly and evidently the world of living
substances, living beings. Nothing is intelligible-nothing can be
grasped in its essence by our intellects-without first being ordered
by a creative intellect. The possibility of modern science is
fundamentally grounded on the reality of an underlying creative
intellect that makes the natural world what it is. The natural world is
nothing less than a mediation between minds: the unlimited mind of the
Creator and our limited human minds. _Res ergo naturalis inter duos
intellectus constituta_-"The natural thing is constituted between
two intellects," in the words of St. Thomas. In short, my argument
was based on careful examination of the evidence of everyday
experience; in other words, on philosophy.

Many readers will no doubt be disappointed. It seemed that, right or
wrong, my original essay was all about science, about real, tangible,
factual knowledge of the material world. But now I admit to be speaking
in the language of natural philosophy, that old-fashioned way of
understanding reality which quickly faded into the intellectual shadows
after the arrival of the new knowledge of Galileo and Newton.
Philosophy continues, it is said, only as a meta-narrative for modern
science and contains no positive knowledge of its own. In short, I seem
to have admitted that my essay was a meaningless or at best subjective
form of argument from a discarded and discredited discipline.

It is my sincere hope that for readers of _First Things_ I need not
respond to this modern caricature of philosophy. Philosophy is the
"science of common experience" which provides our most fundamental
and most certain grasp on reality. And, clearly, it is philosophical
knowledge of reality that is most in need of defense in our time.

Today, spirit-matter dualism dominates Christian thinking about
reality. By "spirit-matter dualism" I mean the habit of thought in
which physical reality is conceived of according to the reductive
claims of modern science (which is to say, positivism), combined in a
mysterious way with a belief in the immaterial realities of the human
and divine spirits as known only by faith (which is to say, fideism).

But human reason is much more than just positivistic "scientific"
knowledge. Indeed, true science is impossible unless we first grasp the
reality of natures and essences, the intelligible principles of the
natural world. We can with much profit study nature using the tools and
techniques of modern science. But let us never forget, as some modern
scientists have forgotten, that the study of reality via reductive
methods leads to incomplete knowledge. To grasp reality as it is, we
must return to our pre-scientific and post-scientific knowledge, the
tacit knowledge that pervades science, the knowledge that, when
critically examined and refined, we call philosophy.

Stephen Barr criticizes me for confusing two very different things: the
modest scientific theory of neo-Darwinism (which he defines as "the
idea that the mainspring of evolution is natural selection acting on
random genetic variation") and what he calls the "theological"
claim that evolution is an "unguided, unplanned" process.
"This," he asserts, "is the central misstep of Cardinal
Schönborn's article."

Let us assume for the moment that I indeed made a mistake. Is there any
excuse, any basis for my error? Barr, treating Darwinism with great
delicacy, says nothing. But there is much he could have said. He could
have listed quotations from Darwinian scientists going on dozens of
pages in which they make such "theological" assertions, in bold and
completely unqualified ways, assertions that evolution by means of
random variation and natural selection is an unguided, unplanned
process.

Many of those assertions are in textbooks and scientific journals, not
just in popular writings. I will leave it to others to compile a
complete account of such quotations. I made a small contribution of
three quotations in my recent catechesis on creation and evolution in
the cathedral church of St. Stephen's in Vienna. Here is one of those
three examples, a quotation from the American scientist Will Provine:
"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."

Barr argues that such "theological" claims are separable from a
more modest science of neo-Darwinism. I agree that there is a
difference between a modest science of Darwinism and the broader
metaphysical claims frequently made on its behalf. But which of those
two is more properly called "neo-Darwinism" in an unqualified way,
as I did in my essay?

For now, I happily concede that a metaphysically modest version of
neo-Darwinism could potentially be compatible with the philosophical
truth (and thus Catholic teaching) about nature. If the Darwinist,
taking up Descartes' and Bacon's project of understanding nature
according only to material and efficient causes, studies the history of
living things and says that he can see no organizing, active principles
of whole living substances (formal causes) and no real plan, purpose or
design in living things (final causes), then I accept his report
without surprise. It is obviously compatible with the full truth that
the world of living beings is replete with formality and finality. It
comes as no surprise that reductionist science cannot recognize those
very aspects of reality that it excludes-or at least, seeks to
exclude-by its choice of method.

But how successful is modern biology, seeking to be true to its
founding principles, at excluding the rational consideration of final
cause? One way to grasp this problem is to examine the question of
"randomness" and the role it plays in modern evolutionary biology.

The notion of "randomness" is obviously of great importance. The
technical error at the heart of my analysis of neo-Darwinism, says
Barr, is my misunderstanding of how the term "random" as used by
Darwinian biology. "If the word 'random' necessarily entails the
idea that some events are 'unguided' in the sense of falling
'outside the bounds of divine providence,' we should have to
condemn as incompatible with Christian faith a great deal of modern
physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy, as well as biology," he
wrote.

"This is absurd, of course. The word 'random' as used in science
does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means
uncorrelated. My children like to observe the license plates of the
cars that pass us on the highway, to see which states they are from.
The sequence of states exhibits a degree of randomness: a car from
Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Florida, and so on-because the cars
are uncorrelated: knowing where one car comes from tells us nothing
about where the next one comes from. And yet, each car comes to that
place at that time for a reason. Each trip is planned, each guided by
some map and some schedule."

I certainly agree with much of what Barr says, and I appreciate his
delightful example. I would like to suggest, however, that he may be
overlooking something when it comes to modern biology. First of all, we
must observe that the role of randomness in Darwinian biology is quite
different from its role in thermodynamics, quantum theory, and other
natural sciences. In those sciences randomness captures our inability
to predict or know the precise behavior of the parts of a system (or
perhaps, in the case of the quantum world, some intrinsic properties of
the system). But in all such cases the "random" behavior of parts
is embedded in and constrained by a deeply mathematical and precise
conceptual structure of the whole that makes the overall behavior of
the system orderly and intelligible.<!>

The randomness of neo-Darwinian biology is nothing like that. It is
simply random. The variation through genetic mutation is random. And
natural selection is also random: The properties of the ever-changing
environment that drive evolution through natural selection are also not
correlated to anything, according to the Darwinists. Yet out of all
that unconstrained, unintelligible mess emerges, deus ex machina, the
precisely ordered and extraordinarily intelligible world of living
organisms. And this is the heart of the neo-Darwinian science of
biology.

Be that as it may, let us return to and extend Barr's license plate
example and see what we might learn. Suppose the Barr family sets out
on a trip southward from their home in Delaware-and, while hearing a
brief introductory lecture on the proper meaning of randomness, the
children start writing down the state of each passing license plate.
After hours have passed, the children, pausing at their work, provide
the following report: While each individual car's license plate does
indeed seem uncorrelated to the previous and next, or to anything in
the immediate environment, there may nevertheless be a pattern in the
data. At first, almost all the license plates were from Delaware. A
little later the majority shifted to Maryland. A few hours after that
there was a big upswing of District of Columbia plates, mixing in
near-equal proportion to the Maryland plates. A short time later the
majority became Virginia plates. Now they see a dramatic shift to North
Carolina plates. Is there a pattern here? Is there a reason one can
think of for that pattern?

The Darwinian biologist looking at the history of life faces a
precisely analogous question. If he takes a very narrow view of the
supposedly random variation that meets his gaze, it may well be
impossible to correlate it to anything interesting, and thus variation
remains simply unintelligible. He then summarizes his ignorance of any
pattern in variation by means of the rather respectable term
"random." But if he steps back and looks at the sweep of life, he
sees an obvious, indeed an overwhelming pattern. The variation that
actually occurred in the history of life was exactly the sort needed to
bring about the complete set of plants and animals that exist today. In
particular, it was exactly the variation needed to give rise to an
upward sweep of evolution resulting in human beings. If that is not a
powerful and relevant correlation, then I don't know what could count
as evidence against actual randomness in the mind of an observer.

Some may object: This is a pure tautology, not scientific knowledge. I
have assumed the conclusion, "rigged the game," and so forth. But
that is not true. I have simply related two indisputable facts:
Evolution happened (or so we will presume, for purposes of this
analysis), and our present biosphere is the result. The two sets of
facts correlate perfectly. Facts are not tautologies simply because
they are indisputably true. If the modern biologist chooses to ignore
this indubitable correlation, I have no objection. He is free to define
his special science on terms as narrow as he finds useful for gaining a
certain kind of knowledge. But he may not then turn around and demand
that the rest of us, unrestricted by his methodological
self-limitation, ignore obvious truths about reality, such as the
clearly teleological nature of evolution.

Let us return to a telling word of Barr. He refers to my allegedly
over-broad understanding of neo-Darwinism as unwarranted extension of
the theory into the realm of "theology." Does his use of that term
mean that we can only know that teleology is real in the world of
living beings by reference to revealed truth? Does it mean that unaided
human reason cannot grasp the evident order, purpose, and intelligence
manifested so clearly in the world of living beings? Does it mean that
we worship an unjust God who, as Romans 1:19-20 teaches, punishes
people for their failure to abide by natural law, a law St. Paul says
they cannot fail to recognize through the manifest order in the nature
world?

Barr's essay addresses at some length the question of design in
biology, but does not clearly affirm that reason can grasp the reality
of design without the aid of faith. If my reading is correct (and I
hope I am wrong), in that respect Barr has followed the overwhelming
trend of Catholic commentators on the question of neo-Darwinian
evolution, who gladly discuss its compatibility with the truths of
faith but seldom bother to discuss whether and how it is compatible
with the truths of reason.

Perhaps now that the role of fideism is in view, I can profitably
return to the question of the essential meaning of the term
"neo-Darwinism." If, as many seem to think, neo-Darwinism serves as
a valid "design-defeating hypothesis" at the level of human reason
but is rescued from any ultimately improper conclusions only by the
intervention of theology, then it seems that my expansive definition is
fully vindicated. If reason is incapable of grasping real teleology in
living things and their history, then neo-Darwinism-which obviously
is incapable of taking into account theological truths-can truly be
said to be a theory that asserts, in the words of my original essay,
that evolution is "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation
and natural selection." What so many Catholics seem to be saying is
that, so far as we can determine with our unaided human intellects,
according to even the "metaphysically modest" version of
neo-Darwinism, there is no real plan, purpose, or design in living
things, and absolutely no directionality to evolution; yet we know
those things to be true by faith. In other words, a "metaphysically
modest" neo-Darwinism is not so modest after all. It means a
Darwinism that does not conflict with knowledge about reality known
through faith alone. In the debate about design in nature, sola fides
takes on an entirely new meaning.

Modern science alone may well be incapable of grasping the key truths
about nature that are woven into the fabric of Catholic theology and
morality. And theology proper does not supply these key truths either.
Prior to both science and theology is philosophy, the "science of
common experience." Its role in these crucial matters is
indispensable.

Let us return to the heart of the problem: positivism. Modern science
first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates
nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material
causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes
are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal
world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being
mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a
complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an
entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself-in other words,
that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as
understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic
fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic
understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all
the causes evident in nature-including the "vertical" causation
of formality and finality.

Some may object that my original small essay in the _New York Times_
was misleading because it was too easily misunderstood as an argument
about the details of science. As a matter of fact, I expected some
initial misunderstanding. Even had it been possible to state in a
thousand words a highly qualified and nuanced statement about the
relations among modern science, philosophy, and theology, the essay
would likely have been dismissed as "mere philosophy," with no
standing to challenge the hegemony of scientism. It was crucially
important to communicate a claim about design in nature that was in no
way inferior to a "scientific" (in the modern sense) argument.
Indeed, my argument was superior to a "scientific" argument since
it was based on more certain and enduring truths and principles.

The modern world needs badly to hear this message. What frequently
passes for modern science-with its heavy accretion of materialism and
positivism-is simply wrong about nature in fundamental ways. Modern
science is often, in the words of my essay, "ideology, not
science." The problems caused by positivism are especially acute in
the broad anti-teleological implications drawn from Darwin's theory
of evolution, which has become (in the phrase of Pope Benedict XVI,
writing some years ago) the new "first philosophy" of the modern
world, a total and foundational description of reality that goes far
beyond a proper grounding in the descriptive and reductive science on
which it is based. My essay was designed to awaken Catholics from their
dogmatic slumber about positivism in general and evolutionism in
particular. It appears to have worked.

== 33 ==

His Eminence seems in general a good deal more intelligent than
Professor Behe seems, but perhaps that is mostly because he is
expounding a system that has been well thought out over quite a number
of centuries and is not a neo-brainstorm of one individual dating from
last Friday afternoon. On the other hand, Herr Schönborn is clearly
no scientist, and not much of a philosopher of science, either. St.
Aristotle invented "final causes" by thinking about biology, for Pete's
sake, and possibly "formal" and "material" causes as well.

But never mind that, as against Citizen Behe, the question is only
whether His Eminence proposes to leave to the Romanist laity the sort
of unlimited liberty of private judgment that Behe was celebrating. It
seems clear that His Eminence proposes nothing of the kind:

"[A] metaphysically modest version of neo-Darwinism could potentially
be compatible with the philosophical truth (and thus Catholic teaching)
about nature."

The point here is not whatever Bowdlerized "neo-Darwinism" the V.C.
officials eventually come up with, or don't come up with, the point is
that His Eminence affirms that there exists a "philosophical truth ...
about nature" that his organization must undertake to inculcate into
its membership. The sheep, then, can't simply believe anything about
nature that whim may dictate. Or rather, the sheep can do so _de
facto_, and probably will, but they shouldn't do it _de jure_. Exactly
as with contraception and divorce and so on and so forth. The
_effective_ authority of the First Estate is not what it used to be in
the former Christojudaeandom, everybody recognizes that, but as against
the libertarian exuberances of Prof. Behe, what matters is that the
Roman sheep are _not_ free to think whatever they like about Nature and
think themselves obedient Catholics also.

As usual with libertarian schemes, Professor Behe's ideological
daydream has a sort of crazy charm to it: imagine if everybody you
passed on the street was independently engaged in freely interpreting
Nature! In the real world, ninety-nine-odd percent of them would
prefer watching television, no doubt. His Eminence of Vienna is
probably not a great TV fan, but his organization has always understood
the TV fans pretty well and not indulged any silly nonsense about
Everyman becoming his own Aristotle any millennium soon.

But God knows best. Happy days.
--JHM


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