It wasn’t until Cardinal Schonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, published an article entitled “Finding Design in Nature” in The New York Times that a simmering controversy exploded into the public eye. In that article, Schonborn points out that “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection — is not.”
Schonborn thus objects to an ideological science that is committed to explaining life through chance and necessity alone, while ignoring or suppressing contrary evidence about life’s origins. There are those, however, who see evidence of design in nature and they belong to a movement called “intelligent design,” or ID.
Schonborn is not alone. Over 400 scientists have signed a statement of dissent from Darwin’s theory of evolution, and school boards in the US and Australia are pushing to have Darwinism challenged and supplemented by ID. As polls have shown, a significant portion of the public does not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and not just because of religious beliefs, but because people know a con when they see it. Up until just a few years ago, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) began its definition of evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process….”
Notice the adjectives “unsupervised” and “impersonal,” similar to “unguided” and “unplanned” that the cardinal was objecting to. A definition of evolution that uses these adjectives is not, in fact, a biological definition. It is more like a mission statement for atheism masquerading as biology. And so a double standard exists in public schools. Religion must not enter the domain of the science classroom, and yet the science classroom becomes a place to teach kids atheism in the guise of Darwinian evolution. Reluctantly, NABT dropped the offending words from their definition, but not the atheism-as-science attitude that spawned it.
Those who are suspicious of Darwinism are vindicated by the fact that the Darwinists themselves are not too subtle about their religious motives. A new research program at Harvard aims to study how life began. One of its researchers put it this way: “My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.” How can divine intervention be the subject of scientific research? Something is wrong when science becomes a project to keep atheists feeling intellectually satisfied. In actual fact, though, ID is not concerned with the Divine, but with intelligence and the characteristic features found in nature that indicate design. Divine intervention may be an inference from design, but that is the business of theologians and philosophers.
ID is not controversial when it is part of other sciences like cryptology, forensics, archeology, or SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). But when it is applied to biology, the Darwinists begin gnashing their teeth. It is the implications of ID that are so intolerable to the biological establishment. They complain that ID is creationism religion in disguise, but their eagerness to reject ID as science because of the implication of a design inference reveals their ideologically driven definition of science. They think good science should only implicate chance, and not will; descendants of apes, and not thoughts of God. But good science is not defined according to its implications. Science looks at the facts and lets them speak for themselves. When they aren’t allowed to speak you get pseudo-science. This is why people are crying foul regarding Darwinian dogma.
Darwinism is very much like a religion. Its historical narrative has become the creation myth of secular culture. But it can no longer hide behind the façade of science. Science itself has changed enough over the centuries that it is beginning to expel the parasite that lived within it for so long. Science is increasingly becoming inhospitable to the materialism that has attached itself to it in order to bask in the glow of its authority. And maybe someday it will be science that in its own way points to the spiritual nature of the person and the fact that he, and the world he lives in, has been willed.
Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at noumena1@hotmail.com.
