What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
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
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
The Emperor’s Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
Eighty years ago in Dayton, Tennessee the famous “Scopes monkey trial” took place. The trial was about the legitimacy of teaching evolution in the public schools. Scopes, a teacher who had violated the town ban on teaching evolution was found guilty but the national publicity of the trial soon brought about elimination of such bans. Since the law was backed by fundamentalists, Christians and others who interpreted the first chapter of Genesis literally, fundamentalism fell out of favor. Once that battle was won by the evolutionists scarcely anyone suspected that the teaching of evolution would again be the topic of hot debate in our day.
It is fair to say that Darwinian evolution has been the form taught in public schools for eight decades. Darwin held that the emergence of new species in the world was the result of natural selection in which certain organisms that developed chance advantages such as sight were able to win the competition for limited resources and therefore were able to survive to pass on the newly acquired advantage to their offspring, whereas the disadvantaged lost in the battle for resources and did not survive to give rise to offspring. Lately another sort of evolutionist has arisen to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy. The new group maintains that life could not have begun by chance and that purposive organs such as eyes and wings are too complex to be accounted for by mere chance variations and their development required the intervention of intelligence; hence the movement is named Intelligent Design (ID).
Entrenched Darwinians do not take kindly to the new interloper in biology instruction. They say that ID is really discredited fundamentalism in a “cheap tuxedo.” In Dover, Pennsylvania school board members who supported instruction in ID were voted out of office. Recently U.S. Pennsylvania District Judge John E. Jones III handed down a decision that ID may not be mentioned in public school biology classes because it is really religion passing itself off as science. Former University of Kansas Professor Paul Mirecki stated as a goal in an e-mail he thought was private to teach ID under the category of mythology to “slap” the “big fat face” of “fundies,” his name for fundamentalists. Vatican astronomer Rev. George Coyne has consistently argued against considering ID as scientific. Professor Carolyn Tilghman at Oxford University defended Darwinism against the challenges of ID. Pope Benedict XVI waded indirectly into the debate by stating that the universe was made by an “intelligent project” and criticized those who say creation was without direction or order.
What should we think of ID? At the outset we must state that evolution is a fact. Present day species descended from others that existed in other ages but may now be extinct. This is clear from the fossil evidence. The only alternative to evolution is a special creation by God of new species in successive ages. So, while the fact of evolution is clear its methodology is not.
There are two points that we need to keep in mind on this subject. The Church has no problem with evolution as a scientific hypothesis any more than it has with any other scientific teaching such as the atomic structure of matter. What it may have trouble with is the external ideological baggage placed atop the scientific theory. The ideology is separable from the theory and can and sometimes must be rejected. The second point is that there are significant problems with evolution according to the Darwinian model of natural selection.
That matter is made up of atoms is a clearly established scientific fact. But scientists, who become stealth philosophers while pretending to do science, have laid three different ideologies on this fact. The first of these is materialism. If all things are made of atoms, then there is nothing but matter. It would be equally valid for a tadpole to say that there is nothing but water because that is that all he has experienced. The second ideological burden laid on the atomic structure of matter is atheism. Certain thinkers arbitrarily invested atoms with eternity and concluded that there was no need for a God to make them. Since all atoms are contingent beings, that do not contain within themselves the source of their existence, there was a need for someone or something to lend them existence. The third ideology placed on the atomic structure of matter is determinism. Since we are made of atoms which follow rigid mechanical laws, then our activity is also determined and do not really have freedom or responsibility with respect to our acts. This contradicts the common sense of humanity which often urges persons to make changes and always holds them accountable for their rational acts.
The fact of evolution is also made to bear certain ideological burdens, which strictly speaking, are not scientific. There are four scientifically unprovable notions underlying Darwinian evolution: (1) the universe had no beginning; (2) the only influences on life are blind, random, physical conditions, to which life forms react spontaneously and unpredictably; (3) life was not created by God but “happened” spontaneously when the right physical conditions came together by chance; and (4) every plant and animal life form now existing came from that single original accidental life form. One of the things that endeared Darwinism to secularists is that it served as an attempted explanation of apparent design without reference to a Designer whom some identified as God.
Other problems with Darwinian natural selection include difficulties with filiation, connecting a new group with an ancient one, and the process of change. Some say it was by an accumulation of small mutations (microevolution); others say there were large scale jumps (macroevolution). The mechanism of natural selection is essentially negative and passive. It cannot account for the existence of the new adaptive forms. Natural selection accounts for the survival of the fittest but the fittest are the same life form. Darwinists say that intermediate forms or missing links are not preserved in the fossil record because they were of short duration. It is amusing to hear hard-headed scientists, supposedly swayed only by evidence, argue for the existence of something on the grounds that the evidence for its existence is lacking. How can a brain that functions that way be the product of Intelligent Design? Darwinists who accuse proponents of ID of being fundamentalists in a “cheap tuxedo” should be aware that like Andersen’s fairy tale emperor they themselves have only an imaginary suit of clothes.
ID is no more or less religious or scientific than Darwinism. Neither theory is falsifiable, a criterion for recognizing a true science developed by Karl Popper in the 1920s. Both Darwinism and ID fall by this test. There is no conceivable experiment that could prove or disprove either one. Hypotheses resting upon non-physical or ideological assumptions are not science. The ACLU says that teaching ID is an establishment of religion. But teaching an unprovable hypothesis based on the ideology of atheism is also an establishment of religion.
The heart of the debate between Darwinism and ID is not whether they are true science. Neither of them is insofar as both rely on value judgments that are unverifiable by experimentation. The question is: why should one theory with its set of value judgments be presented in public school classrooms to the exclusion of all others equally circumstanced? The idea that orderly things demand the existence of a mind is not intuitively a position that is inferior to one that maintains that order is the result of chaos.
It is safe to predict that Judge Jones’ decision will not be the last word on this controversy. Stay tuned.
(Printed January, 2006)
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
