On radio over the past week, I have found that one topic in particular has been favored: Intelligent Design. It is an alternative to Darwinism, or evolution by random mutation and natural selection.
The talk show hosts bring it up because there is a lot of interest out there. They can see when the phone-banks light up and when they do not. I have been writing articles critical of evolution for many years, and invariably there is a strong response — on both sides of the issue.
What should Catholics think? A few days ago, Pope Benedict quoted St. Basil the Great on the subject. Some people, Basil said, “fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance.” That, precisely, is the evolutionist’s worldview.
To be sure, there has been a lack of total unanimity in the Church hierarchy. John Paul II said that evolution was “more than a theory,” and the idea that evolution occurred under divine guidance has long been a staple of Catholic higher education. Still, once we introduce the ideas of design and intelligence, then randomness and chance — the essential ingredients of Darwinism — are dispensed with. If we accept a God who designed the world, then we don’t need any help from the Darwinians who said it arose by accident.
Pope Benedict said recently that the universe is an “intelligent project,” and last July Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna wrote an article for the New York Times in which he said: “Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and necessity’ are not scientific at all.” As John Paul II put it, they are “an abdication of human intelligence.”
To Catholics wrestling with these issues, especially teachers who may have been warned that religion is impermissible in the science class, I would say this: emphasize the weakness of the evidence for evolution. It is very weak indeed, some say non-existent.
If someone says, “Evolution is a fact,” (and some do) ask them what they mean by evolution. It will probably turn out to be something like this: If an antibiotic is added to a laboratory dish of bacteria, some bacteria will die and some will live. Those that survive will increase, consuming the available nutrients. Therefore, in that bacterial population, the “gene ratios” have changed. Evolution is sometimes defined as such a change within a population.
Looked at that way, evolution obviously is a “fact.” But of course the word is normally understood to mean something much more than that. It is today’s approved answer to the important question: How did we get here in the first place? How did life appear?
By the slow, successive modification of pre-existing forms, Darwin said. Go back far enough, to one of those warm little ponds they imagine must have existed, and you would find that life started of its own accord from nothing in particular. Over the eons, atoms and molecules whirled themselves into ever more complicated structures. Some were fitter than others. The fittest survived and the rest fell by the wayside. That’s all there is to it. No designer, or intelligence, or God, is needed.
We need to understand just how implausible this story is. We know nothing at all about the origin of life, or the evolution of the cell. No progress has been made toward the laboratory assembly of even the simplest of organisms, such as the bacterium e coli. Scientists have tried, but as the New York Times recently reported, they found they didn’t have enough computing power (see Carl Zimmer, New York Times “Science,” August 16, 2005).
In Darwin’s time, the cell was thought to be a “simple little lump of protoplasm.” Today we know it to be as complex as a factory. There are 300 trillion cells in the human body, and they all know where to go and what role to play in the growing body. Embryologists do not have any idea how this happens, for all the cells contain the same DNA molecule in the cell nucleus.
This, incidentally, is the problem that stem-cell researchers are trying to solve: how to “coax” stem cells into becoming others, such as the pancreatic cells that diabetics need. The latest word is that it may take them “decades” to learn how to do this — to design the cells they want.
For Darwinians, fossils have proved to be a disappointment. Darwin himself believed that much more would be unearthed than has been. All the museum bones supposedly linking humans and apes can fit into a single box. One of the world’s experts on bat fossils once told me that they don’t know how bats arose, and in the fossil record “there are no half bats.” The oldest known fossils already have their sonar built in. We still have no idea how that happened, 150 years after Darwin.
I once asked the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer if he believed in evolution. He worked on the San Francisco docks for many years, and wrote The True Believer, published in 1951. He was an agnostic. He contemplated the question, and the difficulty of deriving design and order from randomness and chance.
“It’s easier to believe in God,” he said. And that is the truth.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Tom Bethell is a senior editor at the American Spectator. He has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times magazine, and New Oxford Review. He is a graduate of Oxford University, where he studied both science and the philosophy of science. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science was published by Regnery on November 14, 2005.
