Last week, the History Channel hosted a documentary titled, Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, which described the discovery and the scientific characterization of a 47-million year old fossil of a female primate the scientists at the University of Oslo had named Ida. Unearthed in 1983 in the Messel Pit in Germany, the fossil skeleton, officially called the Darwinius masillae fossil, is 95% complete and is in such pristine condition that paleontologists could not only see the clear impressions of the animal’s skin and hair but could also identify the contents of its last meal of fruits, seeds, and leaves. Significantly, the skeleton revealed that this now extinct animal, with its grasping hands, opposable thumbs, and clawless digits with nails — physical features that it shares with us — is the oldest ancestor known of the primate lineage that would eventually give rise to apes, monkeys, and human beings. With much hype and excitement, Ida was proclaimed in the mainstream media as the “missing link” that confirms that human beings have evolved.
What is the significance of this discovery? Some bloggers have suggested that Ida is the definitive proof for evolution that undermines God’s role as Creator of the Universe. It is neither. First, Ida is not the definitive proof for evolution because evolutionary theory is an explanation for the origin and the 
diversity of life on Earth that is based not upon any one single piece of evidence but upon an interlocking network of evidence from molecular biology, physiology, and paleontology. As one commentator has noted, the term “missing link” has been used by the mainstream media to describe twenty-eight fossil discoveries in the past decade, each of which reveals an extinct animal that had physical traits seen in two different but related branches of evolutionary history. Ida is not the first “missing link” to be discovered by scientists, and it is unlikely that she will be the last.
More significantly, however, no fossil can ever prove that God is not the Creator of the Universe. Those who claim that this is even feasible are presupposing a false view that pits design against chance, and creation against evolution. Intriguingly, this is the binary perspective that is also endorsed not only by proponents of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory but also by advocates of Intelligent Design. According to these groups, one must choose between a creative act that emerges from God’s design or an evolutionary process that is grounded in chance. It is design or chance, creation or evolution.
However as St. Thomas Aquinas explained, design and chance are not opposed when it comes to Divine Providence. When human beings design things, we necessarily rule out chance causes: By definition, a loaded die designed by a cheat is not subject to the random forces that give rise to statistical chance. God, however, is different. He can design through chance. In fact, as St. Thomas pointed out, chance is chance only because God made it so: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).
In other words, when chance or contingent events occur in the world, they are random and contingent only because God made them that way. A random throw of a die is only random because God made it random! Therefore, if the evolutionary process is random, as much scientific evidence suggests that it is, it is only random because God designed it so that it would be random. Thus, a random process of evolutionary change can never rule out God’s providence in the creation of the world. With God, it is not design or chance, creation or evolution, but design through chance, design through evolution. In sum, Catholics can say with certitude that God created the world through a random process of evolution that He designed in His providence to give rise to the diversity of life on Earth. As the International Theological Commission of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican explained in its document, Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God:
In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process — one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence — simply cannot exist because ‘the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles….It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence’ (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2)” (no. 69).
No fossil, no missing link, can undermine the truth of this claim.
