The Honor Of God

Charles Darwin died in April 1882 at which time William Bateson and Walter Weldon were still Cambridge undergraduates and, indeed, still friends. In later years their bitter feud over the mechanisms of inheritance, evolution, and, in particular, the status of ‘Natural Selection’, was to colour Darwinian studies throughout the 1890s and well beyond. Gregor Mendel had completed and published his work by 1865, but neither Darwin nor anyone else read it. Its full impact did not begin to dawn until the early 1900s, and even then the initial effect was to encourage a belief in saltational evolution, as favoured by Bateson, rather than the Darwinian gradualism, advocated by Welden. By this time, Thomas Hunt Morgan was busy breeding fruit flies and mapping chromosomes at Columbia University. His work is now regarded as one of the foundation stones of our modern understanding of evolution, yet Morgan himself saw his results as anti-Darwinian! In London, meanwhile, the young Arthur Holmes was not only literally preparing his ‘time bomb’ which would transform the geological time scale but also provide enough time for Darwinian evolution to operate. In 1900, however, Bateson was famously to comment on the current state of knowledge of heredity and evolution that, ‘…not only is our ignorance complete, but no one has the remotest idea how to set to work on that part of the problem’. Negotiating Darwin is, firstly, a series of case studies on how six Catholic apologists were able to exploit the disputes and uncertainties of these ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ years (p. 20) in attempts to reconcile, or, rather, to ‘harmonize’ (p. 3), evolution with Catholic theology. Secondly, but more importantly, it is a detailed account of the reaction of Vatican bureaucracy to these reconciliatory attempts.

There has been, and still is, an extremely näive attitude towards the so-called conflict between Science and the Church, and this näivete has generated a series of myths which have been perpetuated as truths. The authors of Negotiating Darwin, however, subscribe to John Hedley Brooke’s ‘complexity thesis’ of history, and demonstrate just how intertwined and non-linear the debates really were; and in addition they also trace the origins of those myths.

They are able to produce this fine-grained study as a result of the opening up (on 22 January 1998) of the archives of the Congregations of the Holy Office and of the Index. For the first time, this allowed scholars free access to the documentation recording the actions taken by the Vatican with respect to the reconciliatory writings of these six authors. The period covered is from 1877 to 1902, with all but two of the six cases taking place in the 1890s during the pontificate of Leo XIII. Of these six, two are Italian, two English, one American, and one French. All are clerics, save the English anatomist St. George Mivart, but all, without exception, are Catholics. It is important to note that the subtitle of this work is ‘the Vatican confronts evolution’ and not ‘the Vatican confronts Darwin’ for, unlike that other paradigmatic case of ‘Church versus Science’, that of Galileo and Urban VIII, there was no clash of personalities here. The authors of Negotiating Darwin are, however, at pains to demonstrate how the ‘long shadow of Galileo’s condemnation’ had a moderating influence on the way the Vatican approached the perceived threat of evolutionary theory, and, indeed, the echoes of Galileo’s philosophy appear time and time again throughout the book. Of course, the two situations were very different but, taking an overview of these case studies, it is apparent that all six authors, while accepting, more or less, that evolution, sensu lato, had taken place, were unhappy about natural selection as being its sole driving force and about the fact that there was no obvious experimentum cruces to test it. At least the Copernican theory had been amenable to such a test, if only stellar parallax could have been measured with the requisite accuracy. This lack of evidence, and the fierce debates that it engendered within the scientific community itself, provided our apologists with the opportunity they needed to propose a series of non-materialistic alternatives to natural selection; alternatives which involved secondary, but law-abiding, causes and thereby retained Divine Providence which the Darwinian ‘Russian roulette’ was seen to threaten. Such strategies did less violence both to scriptural exegesis and the consensus fidelium of the Catholic Church. Conversely, this lack of proof also enabled the anti-evolutionists smugly to dismiss the whole idea as ‘unscientific’. What irony that Karl Popper, some ninety years later, controversially came to the same conclusion because, he said, the theory of evolution was not falsifiable!

While the writings of these six authors have always been readily available, published as they were in book form or in the press, the critiques, reports, and recommendations of the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index have never seen the light of day. It is these reports which have made Negotiating Darwin both possible and fascinating. The book goes a long way to closing an enormous gap, often erroneously filled from secondary sources, particularly the notoriously conservative Jesuit journal, La Civilta Cattolica, in our knowledge of the understanding of how Darwinism was received. It also highlights a number of issues which, with the resurgence of interest in ‘intelligent design’ (ID), are still relevant today.

It is impossible to summarize the subtly-nuanced dialectic which took place between the Darwinian ‘harmonizers’ and the consultors of the Congregations. While some telling points are made on both sides, much of it has the flavour of a disputation between twelfth-century schoolmen transposed into the nineteenth century. Did St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine really anticipate Darwin? In his attempt at harmonization, the American, John Zahm, in his Evolution and Dogma (Case no.3 p. 124 et seq.) argues that this is indeed the case. His reviewer, on the other hand, says that he finds it ‘difficult to tease evolution, as we currently understand it, out of the philosophers of antiquity or the doctors of the Church’ (p. 134). So the debates swung back and forth, often with the same ‘facts’ being used in the support of both sides; and one has to admire the intellectual gymnastics involved, if not the selectivity. Certainly the protagonists were selective and the omissions are as interesting as the inclusions. For example, only passing reference is made to the age of the Earth, poor Darwin’s ’sorest trouble’. This was a difficult problem which was not solved until Arthur Holmes used his radioactive dating techniques, the results of which were first published in 1911. Another of Darwin’s problems, which none of the authors mention, in the context under study is that of the ‘incipient stages of organs’. This formed a major element in Mivart’s initial critique of Darwin’s theory. It was, indeed, of such extreme importance that Darwin felt himself forced to address it by adding a completely new chapter to the sixth edition of The Origin (1872). We still lack a fully satisfactory answer to this critique but it is gradually beginning to yield to the new science of ‘Evo-Devo’.

It was, of course, the year before this sixth edition of The Origin was published that Darwin unleashed his second wild boar to rampage through, and scatter, the sacred text of Genesis. The Descent of Man was much harder to come to terms with than The Origin had been, and the consequences leap from the writings of both the apologists and the from consultor’s reports. In general, both sides, in their different ways, make Herculean efforts to cage this particular wild boar, and you must read the book to discover the theological contortions that they performed in order to ’save appearances’, as Galileo might have said. The real tussle was between the emphasis on God’s orderly immanence in the creation of all living creatures except man. Here, it was necessary to require that the Almighty be an interventionist ‘God-of-the-Gaps’. The tension is palpable. One of Darwin’s biographers, Ronald Clark, has likened these efforts of theologians in general to defend the ’special creation’ status of man to ‘Custer’s last stand’. Reading the reports of these six apologists, however, and the ways they invoked concepts such as ‘mitigated’, ‘limited’, and ‘theist’ evolution, brings to mind much more Neville Chamberlain’s futile note waving.

So why did two books by a middle-aged gentleman, from a country one of whose former queens had been excommunicated in 1570 and whose clergy were not recognized by the Catholic Church, ruffle so many feathers? The traditional answer is that Darwinian evolution destroyed the ‘watch on the heath’/’argument from design’ teleology, and intoned the last rites of William Paley’s ‘final causes’. This was certainly the belief of some of the apologists, John Zahm for example (p. 133). In fact ‘natural theology’ had been on the wane for some thirty years before The Origin appeared. Both the comparative anatomists and the geologists came to regard it as a sterile explanation of Nature’s underlying unity. Negotiating Darwin makes it clear that the real danger lay not so much with the pros and cons of any specific theory, but was rather to do with who had the ultimate authority to interpret the scriptures. Galileo, quoting Aquinas, had said that God had assigned Holy writ concerning scientific matters to scientists …’ and not to theologians, or ecclesiastical tribunals, or the Roman congregations’ (p. 244). This was, perhaps, something of an unlooked for backfire of Leo XIIIth’s encyclicals, Aeterni Patris (1879) and Providentissimus Deus (1893), in which he had encouraged new Thomist scholarship. It also opened the floodgates to an allegorical reading of the scriptures, thus undermining the authority of Holy Church. The book concludes that Leo XIII was undoubtedly more cautious in handling the ‘new learning’, especially science, than his predecessor, Pius IX. Pius was rather given to thunderous, sweeping condemnations of the innovations of an age of ‘reason’ and materialism, culminating in his infamous declaration, at the end of the Syllabus of Errors, that ‘The Roman Pontiff could not and would not reconcile himself with the progress, liberalism and modern civilization’. One wonders whether he would have condemned Darwin as well…

The final chapter, ‘The Church and Evolution’, puts the question, ‘Was there a policy?’. We will not spoil it for the reader by giving the authors’ answer, but, suffice it to say that, in the 1890s there were no inquisitorial witch hunts of yesteryear, no threats of torture, house arrest, or burnings at the stake. The word ‘heresy’ is hardly mentioned, in ‘Fact, nothing to laugh at at all’. Instead, lack-lustre admonitions such as ‘rash’, ‘unsafe’, or ‘erroneous in the Faith’ replaced the more muscular responses. However, it is clear that the Vatican still wished to restrain any loose cannon that might be directed at that sacred Leonine wall, the last physical bastion of the pope’s erstwhile secular domain. Evolution did, however, remain a problem for the Catholic Church for some time afterwards. For example La Civilta Cattolica devoted a series of articles by Jesuit Father Gaia to the question of ‘Evolution or the Stability of Species?’ in 1919 and 1920, which, after presenting scientific evidence both for and against, came out against evolution.

This is a fine study of the Church’s response to Darwin and evolutionism in the late-nineteenth century, even if there are some literary/linguistic lapses, with the result that it is difficult to understand quite what the authors are trying to say. One of the book’s great strengths, however, is that the authors resist the temptation to force conclusions on their readers. The treatment is even-handed with sufficient background being given to contextualize each case study yet allowing the apologists and the consultors to speak for themselves. The work will appeal to a wide readership.

Phillip Johnson is known as the father of intelligent design. The idea in its current form appeared in the 1980s, and Johnson adopted and developed it after Darwinian evolution came up short, in his view, in explaining how all organisms, including humans, came into being. Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s theory is lacking. In this interview, hear why he feels that such evidence is “somewhere between weak and nonexistent,” why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen.

The naturalism paradigm

Q: What is intelligent design?

Phillip Johnson: I would like to put a basic explanation of the intelligent-design concept as I understand it this way. There are two hypotheses to consider scientifically. One is you need a creative intelligence to do all the creating that has been done in the history of life; the other is you don’t, because we can show that unintelligent, purposeless, natural processes are capable of doing and actually did do the whole job. Now, that is what is taught as fact in our textbooks. And to me it’s a hypothesis, which needs to be tested by evidence and experiment. If it can’t be confirmed by experiment, then you’re left with the same two possibilities, and neither one should be said to be something like a scientific fact.

Q: Why do you think some people do not accept evolution?

Johnson: I think they see a problem. I don’t think it’s that they’re ignorant. I think that they see that what’s being given to them as evolution is less than science in that it hasn’t really been proved, and yet it’s presented as if it were proved. And on the other hand, it’s more than science, in that it contains the whole philosophy behind it, metaphysics as it were.

Q: As I understand it from reading your books and critiques, you see “materialism” as a very destructive thing in society. Can you tell me about this?

Johnson: Well, by materialism I don’t mean consumerism. I’m not talking about people who are greedy for material things. I’m talking about a philosophical system that explains what is real and what is not. A philosophical materialist believes that everything is, at the bottom, material composition. You start with the fundamental particles that compose matter and energy.

Another word for essentially the same thing is naturalism. It’s stated a little bit differently. Naturalism says nature is all there is, and nature is made of those particles. (Don’t let the distinction between matter and energy confuse you on this, because energy, like matter, is composed of particles according to the naturalistic viewpoint.)

Now, naturalism was most flamboyantly stated in the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan, which I remember watching many years ago. Sagan began that series with the pronouncement that the cosmos is all there ever was and all there ever will be. Nature is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be, with nature being these substances that make up the stars and the particles that make up the different kinds of radiation that come from them. But that’s all that there is.

A philosophy of naturalism or materialism is what generates the Darwinian theory. It’s what generates the certainty that only unintelligent natural forces were involved in evolution, which is to say in the creative process that brought our kind into existence as well as all the animals and all the plants. That is all a non-negotiable claim on their part. And why is it a non-negotiable claim? Because if the naturalistic starting point isn’t valid—if it isn’t completely correct—then something else must have happened. What is that something else? It’s something that they don’t like that might get a foothold in science itself.

“Maybe the creator is something more than an imaginary projection of people’s minds. Maybe a creator is a necessary part of reality.”

Q: Are there social consequences to this philosophy of naturalism or materialism that you describe?

Johnson: Yes, absolutely. Now, these consequences may be good or they may be bad. And they are attractive to some people and unattractive to others. For example, the naturalistic viewpoint is praised by those who like it for its tendency to liberate us from religious authority.

Q: But what’s the negative side? My understanding is you see not the positive side of materialism but the negative side.

Johnson: I’m happy to concede that there is a positive way of looking at something and a negative way of looking at something. The negative side is that the naturalistic viewpoint leaves the way open for a kind of freedom from divine authority, a kind of moral anarchy.

God or nature

Q: Is this a motivation for what you do?

Johnson: It is a motivation, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. I was an agnostic from the time I was a junior high school student up until my very late 30s. I had the kind of upbringing that is most likely to produce agnostics, a conventional kind of church-going requirement that never became real to me. I went to Sunday School because in those days mothers thought that was a good thing for their children on Sunday morning, and [on the way my mother] dropped my father off at the golf course. I grew up from that learning that when you got old enough so that your mother couldn’t tell you what to do anymore, what you did was you played golf on Sunday morning.

So I was an agnostic, and then when I went away to Harvard as a college student, that tendency was very much encouraged. I grew up thinking that to be intelligent or well-educated was to be agnostic and to be liberal in politics. I went through various things in life and found that the agnostic pattern in which I had become socialized was not adequate for me. I became a Christian, and I found a kind of structure for my life that seemed to be a very good thing and to this day has enabled me to get through crises like two strokes.

Q: And how did you come to view evolution?

Johnson: One thing that fascinated me about the study of evolution was that it seemed to me to give a window into a very fundamental question that was bothering me: Is God real or imaginary?

As I read all of the evolutionary literature written for the general public, I saw that some of the proponents of Darwinian evolution were hard-core atheists like Richard Dawkins, and others were not. Some of them took a view that religion or belief in God is alright if you want that sort of a thing, but they assumed that it was an imaginary thing. I could see that this is why there was so much insistence upon the Darwinian story.

Believing in Darwinian evolution doesn’t prove that there’s no God. What it proves is that there’s no need for God’s participation to get all the creating done. Now, is that true? I was fascinated with that question of what’s fundamentally true. If this Darwinian story is true, then nature does have all the creative power it needs to produce plants and animals and people. But if the story isn’t true, if it doesn’t fit the evidence, then maybe the creator is something more than an imaginary projection of people’s minds. Maybe a creator is a necessary part of reality.

That to me was a fascinating issue. It certainly motivated me to think that this was an important subject, not just for biologists or even scientists but for people at large. So it was legitimate for a law professor to address it and for the public to make up their own minds about it rather than to take the word of the experts. That’s what makes it important.

Evidence for evolution

Q: As we’ve gone about making this documentary, we’ve met professors in the natural sciences who’ll say, “Let me just show you this mountain of evidence,” and they show us fossil after fossil. Are these things not evidence of evolution?

Johnson: They all exist. The question is what are they evidence of? Are they evidence of a mindless and purposeless evolutionary process? It may that there was a slow development of one kind of thing into something else. But the important question to me is: Could this all occur solely by unintelligent, purposeless, material processes? Can we say that that has been confirmed? The theory of evolution may be true in a sense, but it may require the participation of an intelligent cause. That is the basic intelligent-design proposition—that unintelligent causes by themselves can’t do the whole job. That doesn’t say that everything was created all at once.

Q: So what does intelligent design say about how life was created and how we ended up with the diversity of life we see today?

Johnson: Well, the alternative is not well developed, so I would prefer to say that, as far as I’m concerned, the alternative is we don’t really know what happened. But if non-intelligence couldn’t do the whole job, then intelligence had to be involved in some way. Then it’s a big research job to figure out the consequences of that starting point.

Q: How would you go about testing for the existence of a designer? What is the research program?

Johnson: I’d like to start with the first question. It is sometimes said that the hypothesis that there is a designer is untestable. This is false. It is testable, and the test is Darwinian evolution. The claim of the evolutionary biologists is that unintelligent causes did the whole job. If they can prove it, then the counter-hypothesis that you need intelligence has been tested, and it has been shown to be false.

But what I concluded after reading the literature was that the claim that unintelligent processes have been shown to be capable of doing all the work of creation, from the simplest creatures to the more complex ones, is unsupported. The evidence for it lies somewhere between very weak and nonexistent. When you try to get proof, you get stories about microevolution.

“Instead of getting evidence of a creation story, what we’re getting is evidence of temporary variation in the size of finch beaks.”

Q: But they’re not talking about great transformations taking place all at once. They’re talking about something happening very gradually over a huge amount of time. Why couldn’t that be the case?

Johnson: Well, why couldn’t it? Often when one asks for a demonstration of the evolutionary changes that Darwinians claim, the answer that they always give is, “Well, it’s done very gradually” and “This takes an enormous amount of time, millions of years, whereas we only live to be 100 if we’re very long-lived, so it is quite impossible for the evolutionary change to occur in our time limits. That’s why we don’t see it.”

My logical reaction to that is that’s perfectly accurate if you assume that the evolutionary change of this enormous amount actually occurs. Then you can give a satisfactory explanation for why we don’t see it. But there is another possible explanation for why we don’t see it. The other possibility is that it doesn’t happen. I think maybe that’s what the truth is.

Q: If it doesn’t happen, then where do you go from there?

Johnson: Well, if it doesn’t happen, something else must have happened. The problem became clear to me as I read further and further that the one thing that evolutionary biologists are absolutely determined to support is their starting premise that all of the changes that brought about all of the different species and kinds of life on Earth happened by purely natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. So while there can be arguments over the details, there can be no argument or discussion over the fundamental principle that only natural—which is to say unintelligent—causes were involved.

The reason why that premise of natural causes has to be so inviolate and so ferociously defended is that what if something other than purely natural causes was involved? What would it be? Well, the most obvious answer to that question is it would be God. And they regard this possibility with horror, because it seems to unseat all of their science. It seems to take them back to the beginning or to the Dark Ages, as they would tend to say. You get God in there and that’s the end of science, they think, so that can’t be. But I wondered, maybe it could be.

I viewed myself as much more unprejudiced in that matter. I was willing to believe in a biological creation by Darwinian mechanism if it could actually be proved. But if it couldn’t be proved, I thought it was quite legitimate to think of something else.

Read the rest of the interview at Nova >>> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/defense-id.html

Interview conducted on April 6, 2007 by Joe McMaster, producer of “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” and edited by Lauren Aguirre and Peter Tyson, executive editor and editor in chief of NOVA online

A review of a new global reaction to the dictatorship of Darwinism, not to be confused with the legitimate Darwinian scientific theory of natural selection.  The Economist ON LINE… “In the Beginning”: A very interesting article, especially in it’s discussion of the growing concern of influential Islamic intellectuals for the hegemony of Darwinism and their advocacy of Intelligent Design as an opposing option.

THE “Atlas of Creation” runs to 770 pages and is lavishly illustrated with photographs of fossils and living animals, interlaced with quotations from the Koran. Its author claims to prove not only the falsehood of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, but the links between “Darwinism” and such diverse evils as communism, fascism and terrorism. In recent weeks the “Atlas de la Création” has been arriving unsolicited and free of charge at schools and universities across French-speaking Europe. It is the latest sign of a revolt against the theories of Darwin, on which virtually the whole of modern biology is based, that is gathering momentum in many parts of the world.

The mass distribution of a French version of the “Atlas” (already published in English and Turkish) typifies the style of an Istanbul publishing house whose sole business is the dissemination, in many languages, of scores of works by a single author, a charismatic but controversial Turkish preacher who writes as Harun Yahya but is really called Adnan Oktar. According to a Turkish scientist who now lives in America, the movement founded by Mr Oktar is “powerful, global and very well financed”. Translations of Mr Oktar’s work into tongues like Arabic, Urdu and Bahasa Indonesia have ensured a large following in Muslim countries.

In his native Turkey there are many people, including devout Muslims, who feel uncomfortable about the 51-year-old Mr Oktar’s strong appeal to young women and his political sympathies for the nationalist right. But across the Muslim world he seems to be riding high. Many of the most popular Islamic websites refer readers to his vast canon.

In the more prosperous parts of the historically Christian world, Mr Oktar’s flamboyant style would be unappealing, even to religious believers. Among mainstream Catholics and liberal Protestants, clerical pronouncements on creation and evolution are often couched in careful—and for many people, almost impenetrable—theological language. For example, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world’s 80m Anglicans, has dismissed literal readings of the Creation story in Genesis as a “category mistake”. But no such highbrow reticence holds back the more zealous Christian movements in the developing world, where the strongest religious medicine seems to go down best.

In Kenya, for example, there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.”

Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. “Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,” Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him.

Rows over religion and reason are also raging in Russia. In recent weeks the Russian Orthodox Church has backed a family in St Petersburg who (unsuccessfully) sued the education authorities for teaching only about evolution to explain the origins of life. Plunging into deep scientific waters, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, said Darwin’s theory of evolution was “based on pretty strained argumentation”—and that physical evidence cited in its support “can never prove that one biological species can evolve into another.”

A much more nuanced critique, not of Darwin himself but of secular world-views based on Darwin’s ideas, has been advanced by Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative Bavarian who assumed the most powerful office in the Christian world two years ago. The pope marked his 80th birthday this week by publishing a book on Jesus Christ. But for Vatican-watchers, an equally important event was the issue in German, a few days earlier, of a book in which the pontiff and several key advisers expound their views on the emergence of the universe and life. While avoiding the cruder arguments that have been used to challenge Darwin’s theories, the pope asserts that evolution cannot be conclusively proved; and that the manner in which life developed was indicative of a “divine reason” which could not be discerned by scientific methods alone.

Both in his previous role as the chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and since his enthronement, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has made clear his profound belief that man has a unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom; and that a divine creator has an ongoing role in sustaining the universe, something far more than just “lighting the blue touch paper” for the Big Bang, the event that scientists think set the universe in motion.

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9036706