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Divorce of Love and Life
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Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
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What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Recently PBS has produced a series entitled "Evolution." There are many things wrong with the series, but I want to concentrate on what I regard as its fatal flaw: the dogmatic portrayal of the Darwinian explanation of evolution as an established scientific fact. For the record I personally believe in evolution. It is the best explanation extant to account for the fact that living beings that used to inhabit our planet are no longer here and beings that we see in our day were not always here. Although I believe in evolution I do not agree that Darwin gave a good account of how evolution works.

Darwin believes that new species are formed through natural selection. Through the operation of chemical laws inorganic molecules became organic ones. Once that occurred the organic molecules began to produce many offspring, too many for available resources or perhaps not able to make adjustments to changes in the environment. This set up a competition in which only the fittest survived and reproduced.

Among the survivors there were some organisms that either through gradual or gross mutations (evolutionists still argue this point) developed organs that gave them an advantage in the competition for survival. The emergence of such organs as the eye which, because of its complexity, seemed in past ages to require design by an intelligence of a high order, in actuality came about by chance mutations. Over a long period of times these accumulated mutations produced an organ of vision by trial and error methods with no guidance from a designer. According to Darwin evolution operates in a blind, impersonal, mechanical fashion much like a machine that makes products about which it knows nothing. Natural selection produces other machines, which are so many responses to the problems of life and survival, and it does this in a completely mindless way. No longer do we need to posit the existence of some intelligent designer to account for development of complex organs as thinkers had done in the past. Life and new species came about by mere chance.

Knowing how a machine works does not eliminate the need for a designer. If the universe evolved that explains only how it came to be, not why. A statue can be carved by hand or by machine. The method employed does not answer the question, who designed the statue? If the machinery used in the origin of new species is evolution it required an intelligent designer just as the robots that produce other machines, e.g., automobile engines, require intelligent design. They do not come into existence through blind impersonal chance.

It is impossible that life should have originated by chance alone. Chance is not the cause of anything but only an occasion for a real cause to operate. If a man is killed in an automobile accident while on his way to work, it would be incorrect to say that his occupation was the cause of death. It was the automobile that struck him. Chance does not eliminate ordering by causes; it presupposes them. Throwing dice is called a game of chance. But chance could not operate if someone had not designed a cube that gives one in six odds. Thus design determines the range within which chance can operate. It is wrong to give chance an independent existence. It cannot exist at all except in relation to causes, that is, to things ordered. Chance is a byproduct of ordered causes.

Darwinists would have us believe that proteins were made in a chance operation like shaking amino acids together in a box. One commentator computed that producing one simplified protein molecule by chance alone has the probability of 1 chance in 2.02 followed by 321 zeros. The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability would be a sphere with a radius so great that light would take the years represented by the number 1 followed by 82 zeros to cover the distance. This would be more than sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe. To form a single molecule in a volume equal to the earth supposing 500 trillion shakings per second results in a number represented by 1 followed by 243 zeros billions of years. One protein molecule would not be enough. There would have to be millions of them. In this scenario there is no plausibility that life originated by chance. If the origin of life is to be compared to a roll of dice, we may be forgiven for suspecting that someone loaded the dice.

Evolution employs both chance and design in a certain mix. There would be no opportunity for chance to operate in evolution if there were not physical and chemical laws that make random events possible. Random events do not eliminate finality, choice, and design from the universe. And since design can be only the product of a mind, the need for a designing mind in evolution remains in full force even if portions of evolution operate by chance. The origin of species is not a question of either blind chance or design. It is not even a question of placing design alongside mechanical evolution. It is a question of intelligence designing the mechanics of evolution and working through it as the tool for bringing about its goals.

Another thing that is wrong with Darwin’s natural selection theory is that it may account for the survival of species (they adapt to new circumstances), but not for the arrival of new species. Natural selection is essentially negative and passive. Competition over a limited food supply adds nothing to what the species already had. Natural selection has no mechanism to supply the new adaptive form. If there were changes brought about by such random things as gamma rays it is not certain that the new mutations would be beneficial. Indeed they might be crippling as when a laboratory fruit fly is made to grow legs out of its eyes. The mutated fly is clearly worse off than its parents in the struggle for survival.

Darwinism is popular with many because it appears to eliminate a strong argument for the existence of God based on the great order and design in the universe. If an intelligent designer is responsible for the universe, then we are dealing with a person, one to whom we are accountable because we are his creation.

It is far easier for persons who believe in God to assent to his existence as designer of the universe than it is for atheistic Darwinists to believe that the world came about by chance. It requires much more faith on their part. There is an old story about some hospital nuns whose car ran out of gasoline. They had no container with them except for a bedpan. One nun walked to a service station and returned with gasoline in the bedpan. As she poured it into the fuel tank a passerby watched and exclaimed, "Sister, I wish I had your faith." As I think of the absurd things Darwinists have to believe about chance as a cause of everything, I say, "As a believer I wish I had your faith."