Bishop Robert Barron and others working hard to evangelize the “Nones”—young adults without religious conviction—tell us that a major obstacle to a None embracing Christianity is the cultural assumption that Science Explains Everything. And if science explains it all, who needs God, revelation, Christ, or the Church? To be even more specific: If Darwin and the Darwinian theory of evolution explain the origins of us (and everything else), why bother with Genesis 1–3 and Colossians 1:15–20 (much less Augustine’s “Thou hast made us for Thee and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee”)?
That’s why “Giving Up Darwin,” an essay by David Gelernter in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, is both a fascinating article and a potential tool in the New Evangelization.
No one can accuse Dr. Gelernter of being an anti-modern knucklehead. He’s a pioneering computer scientist, a full professor at Yale, and a remarkable human being: A package from the Unabomber blew off his right hand and permanently damaged his right eye but didn’t impede his remarkable intellectual, literary, and artistic productivity.
In his Claremont Review essay, Gelernter gives full credit to what he calls “Darwin’s brilliant and lovely theory” and readily concedes that “there’s no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape.” But Darwinian evolution can’t “explain the big picture — [which involves] not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones.” What Darwin cannot explain, in short, is “the origin of species”—the title of the British naturalist’s first, revolutionary book.
The argument is complex, so it’s important to read Gelernter’s entire article carefully, and more than once. But to be desperately brief:
First, Darwinian evolutionary theory can’t explain the so-called “Cambrian explosion,” in which, half a billion years ago, a “striking variety of new organisms—including the first-ever animals—pop up suddenly in the fossil record.” How did this “great outburst” of new life forms happen? The slow-motion processes of Darwinian evolution can’t answer that question. Gelernter concludes that “the ever-expanding fossil record” doesn’t “look good for Darwin, who made clear and concrete predictions that have (so far) been falsified.” (This gaping Cambrian hole in the Darwinian account goes unremarked in the otherwise magnificent new David H. Koch Hall of Fossils at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History….
– From Aug. 21 article by George Weigel in First Things. To read whole article, click here.
George Weigel is a has-been. This flimsy argument is nothing but a recast intelligent design or God the watchmaker argument, which is shunned by Thomists and knowledgeable philosophers because it makes God just another lowly cause among created causes rather than the Uncaused Cause whose causation transcends all created causes. Evolutionary biology is not stuck on Darwin’s model nor presuppositions.
Anonymous,
Weigel’s argument isn’t flimsy. I don’t know much about specific intelligent design thinkers, but the term is vague and can refer to any number of different theories involving God. In fact, Aquinas’s forth proof for the existence of God starts with the order of the Universe and ends with God as the intelligent designer. How does intelligent design reveal God as a lowly cause?
You mean the fifth proof. Anyway, Weigel’s implication is that God “poofed” the Cambrian explosion to happen in a scientifically inexplicable manner so that, viola… it was “intelligently” designed. Problem is twofold: a future scientific explanation may be had that has no need for divine intervention; also, God acting in such a way would violate the order of creation by making God a lowly cause within the universe. A Catholic approach would be to say that God caused the universe to unfold in a manner such that secondary causes that are scientifically explicable carried out God’s first-causality in bringing about the evolution of the physical human body through natural, not miraculous, means.
Anonymous,
Yes, it is the fifth proof. You also make good points, although I wouldn’t say that there’s a single Catholic approach to this.
What I like about the Weigel piece is that belief in God is getting killed by people drawing half-baked inferences from Darwin. Weigel is basically saying that this issue is a wedge by which to force people to re-consider their own thinking – that the contemporary perception that people have of Darwin is based more on secular dogmatic assumptions then on a scientific basis.
If it turns out to be true that the Cambrian explosion et al. had nothing to do with a nudge from God, it’s still good to use this to get people to reconsider their secular dogmatic assumptions which might, in turn, get them to reconsider their denial of God.
As a science teacher in Catholic education, I teach my students the distinction between facts and explanations. The geological and fossil records are facts. So are radio-decay and the resemblances among living and extinct organisms. However connected, these things are connected and an explanation for those connections is a theory (and hypothesis is just Greek for “junior-grade theory”). Darwin proposed a connection based on adaptation to prevailing conditions, based chiefly on his knowledge of living forms and selective breeding. Fossils and the geologic record were vaguely understood in his day and radio-decay and the exact time frame of the earth unknown. We know more facts than he did and so it is without surprise that our theories need to change. As Einstein respected Newton, but was unafraid to go beyond Newton’s work, so scientists have moved beyond Darwin. Catholics are correct to reject “God the watchmaker”, but should take care not to embrace “God the conjurer”, randomly altering the rules of the universe to leave a history of life with no natural patterns at all.
Science and evolution are not incompatible with Catholicism. St Pope John Paul II said as much in his book on Genesis. Catholics are not fundamentalists and are not required to accept the Sacred Scriptures as literally true. The Bible addresses values, not science or history.
The best explanation for the Cambrian explosion of body plans (emergence of new Phyla) is the Snowball Earth theory. 600,000 years ago the seas were covered completely (or just leaving a thin strip at the equator) by ice. This put great natural selection pressure on animals that survived in isolation around underwater volcanic vents.
Continued….Many body plans appeared mostly by adaptation through gene loss and duplication. When the world began to warm up again due to volcanic eruptions that released large amounts of CO2, these marine animals dispersed again but were in competition with each other. No new body plans evolved since the Cambrian explosion. Global cooling and warming has been going on for a long time.
I would suggest that one need not go back to the Darwinian “bible” for an explanation of life. The initiating of a new human life today is presented as simple and obvious, on the surface. But the separate, virtually uncountable, number of distinct actions that must take place every minute in proper sequence and balance for one human life to come about show an order and purpose that is hardly random. There is direction in the creation of life, and direction in itself requires cognizance.