Category Archives: Science

Are We Alone in the Universe?

Angels, End Times, Redemption, Science, , , ,

There was a time, not too long ago, when mentioning Area 51 or aliens, invited ridicule as a conspiracy theorist.  But the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is currently measuring about four years so that many Americans (2/3 according to a 2021 Pew Research study) now believe that extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) exists.  Interestingly enough, American Catholics believe at a slightly higher rate than Americans as a whole.  One can only speculate why that might be, but the Church has not spoken definitively on the subject leaving Catholics somewhat free to follow the evidence.  It is the qualifier “somewhat” that I would like to use as the launching pad for a discussion of ETI given that Divine Revelation gives us some guardrails for investigation as to both the possibility and the likelihood.

It is worth mentioning at least at the outset that we already have proof that we are not alone in the universe.  Angels and their fallen counterparts are constantly acting within material creation, even in visible ways.  It is certainly possible that the UFO sightings and even the discovery of “non-human biologics” are simply diabolical manifestations.  But it is contemptuous to insist upon this as the only possible explanation.

Setting Up the Guardrails

The temptation when dealing with the question is to leave it to “science” to determine the possibility and likelihood of intelligent life.  This approach neglects the fact that theology is also a science.  Because its first principles come from God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, it is the highest of the sciences. 

By looking to theology, we are able to eliminate some possibilities.  The ETI must be of a completely different race from mankind in that they have a different line of descent.  The Church has condemned polygenism and so there must be more than mere accidental differences between human and the other race of ETIs.  They must be a different substance altogether.  In other words, they would have to be biologically distinct humanoids with a rational soul.  Scripture and the Magisterium both describe the “human race” as descended from Adam so that it at least seems possible (an argument from silence) that there could be another race or races in the universe.

Once we allow at least for the possibility, then we must examine the ETIs relationship to Christ.  For everything that exists, exists in relationship to Christ Who “is the center of the universe and of history” (Pope St. John Paul II,Redemptoris Hominis, 1 ).  St Paul tells the Colossians that “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16-20).  This point is vital not only in considering ETI, but in understanding reality as a whole.  Everything that exists, does so for His sake (not only for His sake but primarily).  Fig trees were created for Him to curse, trees for crosses and water for baptism.  Most importantly, human nature exists for His sake so that He might take on human flesh.

The fact that Christ took on human flesh gives to the human race a special dignity such that “all material creatures[exist] for the good of the human race” (CCC 353).  This would include ETI who, even if rational beings existing for their own sake, would exist in a similar manner to the angels, acting in service to the race of Adam.  This might be an argument against the existence of ETI in that we appear not to have received any benefit from them.  This is likely an argument St Thomas would have made in light of his contention that to speak of a universe in any meaningful way is to assume that the elements must form an ordered an interactive whole.  If there were no communication among the citizens, then the civil good could not be perfected (c.f ST I q.47, a.3).  Communication could still come later, but it is hard to imagine why it would be so delayed.

Building on the principle that the ETI must be related to Christ, then we can examine the relation of the race itself.  First, we would posit that they were, like the angels and mankind, created in a probationary state of grace.  As St. Thomas says, “It pertains to divine freedom to infuse grace into all who are capable of grace, unless something resisting is found in them, much more than he gives natural form to any disposed matter” (Commentary Sentences, 4, q.1 art.3).  The question would then be what the outcome of their testing was.

Fallen or Unfallen?

One thing that becomes immediately clear in reading the New Testament is that in the act of redemption, God willed a correspondence between the fallen and the Redeemer “since the children share the same blood and flesh, he too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could…set free those who had been held in slavery all their lives by fear of death” (Heb. 2:14).  This means that if the ETI were fallen, they would need a separate incarnation.  A second incarnation however would be incompatible with the Faith according to an infallible teaching found in Dominus Iesus: “Therefore, the theory which would attribute, after the incarnation as well, a salvific activity to the Logos as such in his divinity, exercised ‘in addition to’‌ or ‘beyond’‌ the humanity of Christ, is not compatible with the Catholic faith” (DI, 10).  The Son’s sole redemptive act is through His human nature.  Therefore, there can be no other fallen race in existence.

This leaves open only one possibility; that there is a heretofore unknown, unfallen race of intelligent creatures in the universe.  Like the Angels, Christ would be their Lord and Head, but not their Redeemer.  In His human nature Christ is “the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:12-13).

St Thomas says that if Adam had not fallen then he would immediately attain “that happy state of seeing God in His Essence, he would have become spiritual in soul and body; and his animal life would have ceased, wherein alone there is generation” (ST I q.100, a.2).  Likewise, because they would have passed their probationary period, the ETI would have spiritual bodies (which might help to explain the manner in which UFOs seem to move) and would not reproduce.  Of course one could also ask why, if they have passed their probationary period, they don’t immediately receive their reward in the beatific vision. 

According to Paul Thigpen in his book Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith, St Padre Pio once told a reporter that “The Lord certainly did not limit his glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did.”  Despite this saintly endorsement, I think another saint provides the logic for why they do not exist.  When speaking of how Providence guides even our sins, St Thomas says that because the angels contain a higher perfection than men, a far fewer number of them fell as compared to mankind (Sentences I D.39 q.2 A.2).  It would seem that if there were a race of men that did not fall, this test of proportionality would fail and the ladder of perfection of the universe upended.  It is for this reason that I ultimately find the existence of ETI very unlikely. 

Before closing, I want to mention another resource that I found very helpful in addressing the existence of ETI; Marie George’s Christianity and Extraterrestrials.  Part of the challenge in thinking theologically about this issue is being able to formulate the questions correctly and frame it from the perspective of Divine Providence.  She does both.  I might weigh her conclusions differently than she did, but her framing of the issue is invaluable for anyone who wants to approach the issue from a Catholic perspective.

The Muddled Creationist

Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, Scripture, , ,

There is perhaps no movement in the Church that has been more destructive to confidence in Sacred Scripture than Theistic Evolution.  Proponents usually defend their position by saying “truth cannot contradict truth” so that the lens of science can be applied to the biblical account of origins confidently.  But the amount of exegetical gymnastics that it requires ultimately destroys faith in the truth and historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  Once faith is shaken in the beginnings of the Bible, it is not long before other books fall victim to the same fate. 

At first glance it seems to be a reasonable position especially with our modern disdain of fundamentalism, no matter what position they actually take.  As Christians, the full evolutionary explanation, one marked by a completely material explanation of the origins of life, is unacceptable.  But rather than rejecting it outright as false, they attempt to tweak it so as to avoid being lumped in the fundamentalist creationist camp.  They insert God into the gaps in evolution by saying that either He guided it or stepped in at certain points.  The evolutionary fence-sitting seems like a compromise but all it ends up doing is compromising the Faith itself.

Avoiding the Evolutionary Creep Deep into Genesis

I mentioned the first eleven chapters of Genesis as being in the crosshairs.  We should not be surprised about this because St. Peter warned us that scoffers in the end times would deny the truth of the Flood.  He even tells us how they will deny it—by saying ‘all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.’ (2 Peter 3:3-7).  This describes what has become known as uniformitarianism.  This “theory” posits that all geological features can be interpreted in terms of slow-and-gradual processes.  Layers of sediment and the natural processes all proceed at exactly the same pace throughout the history of the world enabling us to somewhat accurately measure time based on the fossil record.  If those processes are not uniform then really nothing can be said as far as timing.  If there was, say a world-wide flood, burying the surface of the Earth for 100 days, the receding of the waters would not only profoundly change the face of the earth but also lay down layer upon layer of sediment almost all at once.  This would mess up the “biological clock” and leave evolution without enough time to work itself out.  Combine this with other similar catastrophes that were not as large and any dating of the Earth would certainly be overestimated.

Darwin himself recognized that the Flood must go— “Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species).

Even if we ignore the fact that fossils only form when something is buried quickly, uniformitarianism has been called into question as a scientific theory.  Many geologists, especially those who don’t have an atheistic axe to grind, agree that  it should retired.  We have many recent examples of catastrophes that have resulted in an “aged” landscape.  A good example that refutes uniformitarianism is near Spirit Lake in Mt. St Helens in Washington state that was created in a mere few hours and has the “appearance of being millions of years old.  Nevertheless, it is nowhere near being as sure a theory as it is often portrayed. 

What is sad is that many theistic evolutionists feel obligated to adjust their interpretation of Noah’s Flood by making it either a mythical event or just a small local flood because it does not fit with evolution.  This is non-sensical unless you are also willing to explain away all the animals on board (why is this necessary?) and God’s promise never to do it again (there are local floods all the time).  Darwin had at least this right—if the Flood really did occur then it is practically impossible that evolution is true. 

Not a Science Textbook

There are those who willingly accept the historical truth of the Flood yet still claim that we should accept evolution because Genesis is not a science book.  This is a bit of a non-sequitur because no one claims that it is.  Science could not explain creation for the simple fact that it is a supernatural event.  The Six Days of Creation describe supernatural actions performed directly by God (Wisdom 9:1).  It definitely explains how  it was done, even if it doesn’t do so using scientific language.  It is a dogma of the Faith that each thing was created out of nothing by God’s Word (“through Him all things were made”) and not through any secondary causes (more on this in a second).  Science could no more explain how God did it than it could explain how Christ turned water into wine or rose from the dead.  Science can only explain natural phenomena.  The fact that it is a supernatural event explains the rather oblique language, but it does not clear the way for an evolutionary interpretation.  The language is meant to add clarity not obscurity.  To say that the “dust of the earth” really means “ a monkey’s body” or that the birds being formed on the fifth day before the reptiles on the sixth day isn’t really meaningful since evolutionary theory has birds evolving from reptiles or the fact that the whales and other sea-going mammals were formed on the fifth day before the land animals on the sixth day from which they supposedly evolved also doesn’t matter is putting the evolutionary cart before the scriptural horse.  It may not be a science textbook, but there is no reason to use oblique language when there is a perfectly understandable explanation.  Truth cannot contradict truth indeed.  Why would we assume that the Scriptural text should be adjusted when it is clear that there is little more than a scientific hypothesis that reptiles evolved into birds?  It is almost as if God anticipated the Theory of Evolution and directly refuted it through the order in which things were created.

As promised, we will return to the dogmatic declaration that all things were created directly by God and find a rather large stumbling block for theistic evolution.  The First Vatican Council declared

“If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema.” (Vatican I, Dei Fillius, Canon 5).

The bold text means that God did not use any secondary agents to create each new kind of living thing.  This Biblical kind is distinct from biological species (a nebulous term anyway), but it does leave the door open for microevolution even broadly speaking (say for a horse to become a zebra for example).  But it closes the door on is macroevolution because it does not permit any belief that one kind (say reptile) became another kind (say bird).  Evolution, even guided, also necessitates on God’s part an adherence during creation to natural laws.  This too draws the Church’s anathema upon the theistic evolutionist.

Ultimately then the theistic evolutionist can only subscribe to a microevolutionary theory of variation with biblical kinds and requires God to regularly intervene in creation whenever a new kind is made.  What they don’t realize is that this ultimately makes them muddled Creationists.  They concede that God created each new thing, but then mix in microevolution to explain all the variation.  I say muddled because they are confusing what St. Thomas describes as the Creation/Providence paradigm.  During the days of Creation God created each thing according to its kind.  On the Seventh Day and beyond, no new kinds of creatures come into being (God rests from creating on the 7th day), but through reproduction and multiplication we might see distinct scientific species arise (think of my horse and zebra hypothetical).  But this really isn’t evolution at all, at least not as Darwinists define it.  Certainly, you could read Genesis literally and there would be no conflict with microevolution at all (this is why I have written about the need to not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch).

It turns out then that Theistic Evolution is nothing more than a Faustian Bargain.  In order to be intellectually honest to the Evolutionary explanation, Faith in Genesis must be replaced with faith in Darwin.  There is no compromise to be made between the two worldviews that does not leave the compromiser compromised.

The Tyranny of Sophistry

Abortion, Culture, Marxism, Science, , , , , ,

In his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper comments that the battle against sophistry is a perennial problem.  Satan’s primordial sophistry escaped the gates of Eden and has plagued mankind ever since.  Progress, especially when it is not matched by moral progress, only causes sophistry to grow.  Sophistication, Pieper says, usually entails greater degrees of sophistry.  What the sophist seeks to do is to shut down all pursuit of the truth by playing with words, usually by inventing catch-phrases that slide off a forked tongue and convey some half-truth that is cleverly dressed up as the whole truth.  It is most certainly an abuse of language; for the proper use of language is to convey ideas and tell the truth.  But sophistry uses language in order to manipulate people.

The Sophistry of Today

The problem of sophistry in our own age is particularly acute.  You might say that we are living under the tyranny of sophistry in which any objection to a sophist shibboleth is met by stupefied hostility.  “Pro-choice”: how could you not be in favor of a woman’s right to choose?  “Black lives matter”: so, you think Black lives don’t matter?  The objection is not with the half-truth, but with the half-falsehood that is dressed up by the slogan.  In other words, the objection is with the sophistry that manipulates language to hide what is really going on. 

In general, we should all be pro-choice, but in particular it totally depends on what the object of choice is.  If you are choosing to kill an innocent baby, then no, in fact we should not “Pro-choice”.  Of course, Black lives matter.  But what the honest person objects to is dressing up the Marxist aims of the further destruction of Black lives and society as a whole in this truth.  It is sophistry plain and simple.  And anyone who insists otherwise is a language tyrant.

Following the Science

There is a new slogan that is being peddled by the tyrant—“follow the science”.  Science is a great weapon in the hand of the sophisticated tyrant because it can be made to say anything you want it to say.  It is presented as somehow being about objective truth gathered by running controlled experiments in an unbiased setting.  The  method may be reliable, but the scientist himself is a fallen human being.  He is prone to biases, lapses in attention, ignorance, faulty design and even outright lying.  It does not help that his so-called peers who review his work also suffer from the same inherent problems.  It is also not immune to the “Cancel Culture” with many scientists handcuffed by a cultural confirmation bias.  All of this leads to what scientist Stuart Ritchie in his book Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth calls a “replication crisis” in modern science.  Experiments are run all the time.  But the true test is when an experiment is replicated.  Almost none of the so-called “science” has been replicated and very often is exposed as flawed when honest scientists attempt to do so.  Like Ritchie we should not be anti-science but instead to use it in a manner that discovers the truth without succumbing to the sophist’s tactic of inventing it.

As I said, science is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the sophisticated tyrant because it can be used to say whatever they want it to say.  Herein lies the half-falsehood found within “following the science”.  Science itself can never lead to certainty.  To assert otherwise is to turn science into a religion that must be governed by faith.  “Follow the science” is a credal statement.

Why is it that science can never lead to certainty?  In short, science, because it deals in material being, always deals with contingencies and therefore only leads to contingent truth.  The truth of what is being asserted always depends on certain conditions also being true.  The point is that when “Science” is presented as certain, without any discussion upon the conditions in which the thing also depends, it is a manipulation. 

Take, for example, the contention that “masks work”.  This is most certainly not an absolute.  What are the conditions under which they work?  To mandate mask wearing without any reference to the conditions under which they work, is not about safety but control.  If you want to keep people safe, then you will school them in the art of wearing the mask.  If you want to control them then any mask will do.  Likewise, the push for vaccination.  What are the conditions under which the vaccines “work”?  What are the conditions under which they don’t, or might even be harmful?  Are we to believe that a vaccine was developed at warp speed that covers every contingency?  To say they are “safe and effective” without observing a multitude of contingencies is not science but scientism.  To even mention those contingencies is sacrosanct and will likely get you censored. 

Science can say whatever I want it to say simply by playing with those contingencies.  I simply design my experiment so that it leads to a positive result.  Then I get peers to agree with the way it was run—never mind that these peers also have a vested interest in toeing the party line.  If it leads to a negative result anyway, I simply put it in the file cabinet.  Whenever you hear some scientific “fact” presented in some absolute manner, always seek the contingencies.  Who or what does this apply to?  When doesn’t it apply?  When someone tells you that it applies across the board, they are presenting something that has some degree of uncertainty as certain.  We may be willing to accept that degree of uncertainty and treat the proposition as true, but it is not anti-science to demand further uncertainty be removed.  But either way, certainty will never be achieved.

In classical Greece, the sophists threatened to take over society until the likes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle stepped in.  They were unafraid to call sophistry what it was.  But that was not enough for them.  They also rescued the victims of sophistry by teaching them how to reason.  Perhaps in our own sophisticated age, we could do the same.

The Battle Over the Origin of Species

Anthropology, Creation, Creed, Evolution, Science, Scripture, , , , , , ,

Writing in his journal in 1873, Charles Darwin said “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.”  Using his slow and silent theory of Evolution as his side attack, Darwin decided that he would reimagine the Book of Genesis.  The original Origin of Species speaks of the supernatural beginnings of all of creation and it was to be replaced by a completely naturalistic explanation for the origin of all that is.  Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started a revolution, first by consigning the first three chapters of Genesis to “myth” and then systematically deconstructing each of the tenets of the Creed.  The Church was certainly caught flat-footed when the attack began and the Faithful made compromises with Darwinists that can be labeled as “theistic evolution.”  But this compromise does not just remake the beginnings but removes the supernatural from nearly every element of the Faith.  It is high time then that we reconstruct a theology of Creation which starts with a proper understanding of the opening chapters of Genesis.

Before diving into the specifics, we must first admit that the use of figurative language has as its goal to make the truth clearer.  Those who attempt to reconcile the two Origin of Species accounts often speak as if Genesis is using figurative language to convey the truth that God created all things, but that it is not intended to explain how He did so.  Nevertheless, the account does in fact reveal how He made things.  Genesis speaks very clearly that the animals are made from the clay(Gn 1:24), Adam from the slime of the Earth (Gn 2:7) and Eve from the rib of Adam (Gn 2:23). 

The Figurative Catch-22

It is often contended that the author of Genesis is merely using figurative language thus opening the door to an evolutionary explanation.  The problem with this interpretation is that there is no need to use figurative language; ordinary language will do.  Darwin did it and didn’t need the Holy Spirit’s help.  If Theistic Evolution is true, then the figurative language makes this less clear, not more, and violates the sole purpose of using figurative language to begin with.  No one would read “Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds” (Gn 1:23), and think this is simply a metaphor for one living species becoming another.  It is quite clear, even if we admit that it is figurative language, that the author is saying that the living animals all came directly from inanimate matter.  Likewise with man who God “breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” If man’s body came from animate being, then “breathing the breath of life” into the man so that he “became a living soul” may be figurative language, but the figure does not actually point to reality.

This also invites the more fundamental question as to why God needs to use figurative language to begin with.  Certainly, there are truths that are beyond human understanding and thus only a metaphor or the like will do.  But when speaking of God’s actions in Creation, the Omnipotent God, can do things in such a way as to make them explainable.  In other words, why would God need a metaphor to describe how He created—couldn’t He just create in a way that enables Him to also describe it in relatively simple terms? Why do we default to thinking that “the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth” isn’t actually how God actually did it?  The only reason why we wouldn’t read that literally is because we a priori remove any supernatural action on God’s part and assume that it is a metaphor for some natural explanation.  Again, why would God then use a metaphor when there is a natural explanation that could be explained using clear language?  The ancient peoples knew of different theories of evolution, so it would have been intelligible to even them.  “Slime” or “dust” (depending on your translation) is not a metaphor for ape, even for the most inarticulate person you could imagine.

That it should be read with a supernatural interpretation is clear from the fact that things are created by God’s Word—“through Him all things were made.”  How can we reconcile God’s “let there be” and evolutionary construction of the universe by natural processes?  The only way is through a Deistic conception of God by which He speaks not directly into creation (i.e. supernatural creation and miracles) but through some Divine blueprint by which the universe reaches its completion without any direct intervention on His part.

The Mind of the Church

It was mentioned above that the Church was caught somewhat flat-footed in its response to Evolution.  That was not the case initially.  A local synod was held in Cologne, Germany in 1860 to specifically address Evolution. They sought to respond to the release of Origin of Species in Germany and nip any attempt to say humans were subject to evolution in the bud.  Although it was a document of a local Church it did receive the unreserved acceptance of Rome because it contained the ordinary Catholic teaching.  Likewise, Vatican I declared that all things were created directly “according to their whole substance” by God.  Pope St. Pius X also commissioned the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), giving them Magisterial Power to declare the truths about Genesis.  In his 1907 Motu Proprio, Praestantia Scripturae, he declared that “all are bound by duty of conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Pontifical Commission, both those which have thus far been published and those which will hereafter be proclaimed.”

Related to the specific question at hand, the PBC issued the document “Concerning the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis” in 1909.  The question that was posed was “[N]otwithstanding the historical character and form of Genesis, the special connection of the first three chapters with one another and with the following chapters, the manifold testimonies of the Scriptures both of the Old and of the New Testaments, the almost unanimous opinion of the holy Fathers and the traditional view which the people of Israel also has handed on and the Church has always held, may it be taught that: the aforesaid three chapters of Genesis contain not accounts of actual events, accounts, that is, which correspond to objective reality and historical truth, but, either fables derived from the mythologies and cosmogonies of ancient peoples and accommodated by the sacred writer to monotheistic doctrine after the expurgation of any polytheistic error; or allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths; or finally legends in part historical and in part fictitious freely composed with a view to instruction and edification?” to which they answered, “In the negative to both parts.”

Genesis, according to the mind of the Church then, contains actual events “which correspond to objective reality and historical truth” and is not “allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths.”  Genesis is true history from “the beginning”.    

If the modern Church that has been steamrolled by the slow and steady onslaught of Darwinian Evolution it is because these teachings have been mostly forgotten.  If we are to reverse the tide, then we must reassert our confidence in the truth and meaning of God’s Word.  We have abandoned it for dubious science and the fallout has been great.  Only by reasserting the Traditional understanding of the Church can we restore a belief in the supernatural action of God.

An Act of Charity?

Abortion, Bioethics, Science, , , , , ,

In the last post, it was discussed that an evolutionary paradigm, motivated by a spirit of transhumanism that was at the heart of the development of the new delivery methods for so-called vaccines.  It was also mentioned in passing how much of the debate so far as centered upon the question of the use of aborted fetal tissues in both the testing (Moderna and Pfizer) and delivery (AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson).  Despite this connection to abortion, there are many in the Church that have reasoned that it is morally licit and perhaps even laudatory to receive the vaccine.  In this post, we will discuss why it is neither and we should avoid these and all abortion tainted vaccines.

As usual, the devil is in the details—except this time, the Devil really is in the details.  The four current vaccines all make use of fetal cell lines originating in an aborted child.  Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca all used cells derived from the HEK293 cell line while the Johnson and Johnson used cells from the PER-C6 line.  These came from different children; the former came from the kidney (HEK=Human Embryonic Kidney, one can imagine that it was not the only sample since it has the number 293,even if it is the most “fruitful” of the collection) of a child in 1973 and the latter from the retina of a child in 1985.  The degree to which each of these vaccines is tainted by the evil of abortion is certainly different.  Although whether this is morally relevant or not is open to discussion.  Before getting to that however, it is good to ponder just what we mean when we say it is tainted by abortion.

The Devil Is in the Details

Most of us would have difficulty imagining how these cell lines are gathered.  Perhaps we might think that a bunch of abortions are performed and they have a bunch of tissue left over that they then sell to harvesters and researchers.  Or maybe we think that the harvester went door to door at abortion mills and ask if they had any extra tissue around.  In truth however the harvester must have arranged a priori, presumably through informed consent of the mother, to gather the cells from the child at the time of the abortion.  Like regular organ donation, fetal organ donation must be fresh in the sense that the live tissue would be preserved right as the abortion is happening.  It might also be that the child is removed along with the womb and kept alive until the harvesting could occur at some secondary site.  The point is that the developer wasn’t just some opportunist, but absolutely complicit in the abortion.  He arranges with both the abortionist and the mother beforehand and does nothing to stop it at the time. Presumably, there is compensation both to the abortionist and the mother, meaning that he has actually encouraged it.

But it isn’t just the abortion that is the problem now.  The developer of the line commits a further evil when he keeps the child alive and harvests his or her organs.  Let that settle in—a child is removed from (or with) his mother’s womb, possibility refrigerated and then, while still living, has his organs removed.  This is the stuff of Mengele’s dreams.  The evils now begin to multiply.  The researcher, because he demands the cell lines for testing, may or may not be cooperating with the abortion, is most certainly cooperating and complicit in organ harvesting.  So while we might be able to say there is a moral difference between simply using the cell line for testing versus using it for delivery, it is not a difference in degree but in number.  Any researcher that uses the cell line formally cooperates in the organ harvesting.      

In order to avoid the reductio ad Hitlerum accusation, it is important to discuss the reference to Josef Mengele.  Regardless of the usefulness of the results and the data, everyone agrees that to use data from any of his experiments is unethical.  This is because the way in which these experiments were conducted was so evil that conscience forbids the use of the results.  Certainly a Catholic conscience should shudder at having anything to do with abortion and organ harvesting tainted vaccines, regardless to what degree a given Pharmaceutical Company used them.  Some actions such as harvesting organs from innocent, living pre-born children is so evil that there is no good that would justify using them.  As the former abortionist Bernard Nathanson said, “it is impossible to separate the issue of abortion from the use of the tissue obtained therefrom.”

Appropriation vs Cooperation

This is why framing the use of these vaccines only in terms of cooperation is incomplete at best.  Cooperation with some act in the past is almost always remote.  Appropriation, that is, whether we can reap the fruits of someone else’s past evil act in the present is another question.  We might not cooperate to the evil of abortion and organ harvesting, but that does not automatically mean we are free to benefit from it.  For example, suppose I buy a bike that I later find out was stolen.  I am obligated to return that bike to its rightful owner, regardless of whether I actually cooperated with its theft and regardless of how desperately I need the bike. 

The theft of the bike is illustrative because in a very real way the organs have been stolen from these children.  Once we become aware of that fact, we must make restitution by returning them to their rightful owner, God by providing them with a proper burial.  This is why it is always an act of charity to bury a person.  When these aborted children were murdered, in justice they must be buried and as long as they remain unburied, the evil is ongoing.  While we may not have the means to gather up all the remains from this child, we most certainly have no right to benefit from their murder and dismemberment.

This is why the two vaccines, Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, that deliver the vaccine through cultures grown in the cell line (that will contain a part of the child’s body, namely their DNA) must be avoided.  There is no question as to whether if there is a grave enough cause or not. It is a clear violation of justice.  The other two vaccines currently on the market, might be justified for an extremely grave reason.  I say might because it is hard to imagine that given the evil that has been done to the unborn persons anyone would in good conscience be willing to do so.

What is clear is that receiving any of these vaccines can not be reduced to an act of charity nor as an obligation to the common good.  Charity is a love of God and love of neighbor for His sake.  It cannot be an act of charity to compromise with evil or reap the fruits of a gravely evil action.  Furthermore, the common good must work for the good of every member of a society.  For the vaccines to truly be instruments of the Common Good, then the goods attached to them must flow back over even the unborn members of society. Clearly, these vaccines are prejudiced against some of the unborn.

In closing it is worth mentioning that the Church’s teaching that focuses on the principle of cooperation has truly backfired.  There are many cases in which a child (or an adult with the COVID vaccines) receives a “a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin” when there is no serious “danger to health.”  Not surprisingly the “the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available” (c.f. Donum Vitae, 8) has fallen upon deaf ears.  We are currently 0 for 4 on the COVID vaccines and there is no reason to think that will change.  Perhaps if, and this would need to happen from the top, Catholics en masse refused the Covid vaccines, then we wouldn’t be in this moral quandary. 

Plot Holes in Reality

Culture, Evolution, Moralilty, Natural Law, Science, , ,

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, St. Thomas makes the observation that when Aristotle reckons that  “art imitates nature,” he means that man, because he is an intellectual creature, can make things that help him fulfill his nature.  For example, a beaver builds a dam by instinct, while man uses his reason to fashion a house.  But it doesn’t just pertain to servile arts like building a house, but fine arts like making a movie or writing a book.  But because man is also fallen, he can also use those same arts to distort and do harm to his nature.  In this way we might say that, in addition to imitating nature, “art forms nature.”

Examples abound on how this uniquely human capacity is abused, but there is one way that has a profound effect in our age.  The aforementioned storytelling arts use the inherent power of storytelling to activate wonder and convey important truths about what it means to be human.  One way in which this art abuses our nature has been covered previously regarding “Drag Queen Story Hour.”  While this is still somewhat rare, thee is a more common abuse of story that may not even be on our radar at first—it wasn’t on mine until a friend of mine pointed it out.

Tolerating Plot Holes

We have all seen movies in which there are both subtle and gigantic plot holes.  Sometimes they are too much and we turn off the movie, but most of the time we simply tolerate them for the sake of moving the plot along.  We might think that the producers of the movies are simply lazy in not tying up loose ends, but in truth we should expect them when the story presents a falsehood about human life.  The problem is that if we watch enough movies, then we eventually learn to overlook them.  We become, in a very real sense, conditioned to overlook them—not just in the movies but in the rest of life as well.  Point of evidence is the current Covid crisis which is riddled with plot holes that the majority of people of good will simply accept. 

More on this particular example in a moment, but there is something further here that needs to be pointed out.  We accept the plot holes for the sake of the plot and to move the story along.  But if we look at it from the perspective of the producer, he has a plot in mind and includes the plot holes in order to make his story fit together.  In a certain sense then we can say that the plot holes actually reveal the plot and the intention of the producer.

This principle is important because it is applies to the incongruous in real life as well.  We will usually have one of two tendencies; to overlook the plot hole completely or to point out that it makes no sense and then, like the fist tendency, simply move on.  The point though is that it makes perfect sense because it moves the story along.  In other words, if we pay close attention to the incongruities rather than dismissing or mocking them, the plot that the artist is advancing will come into relief. 

Focusing on the plot holes themselves then will enable us to see through the agenda of those who insert them into reality.  These holes may look different in the various arenas of public life, but the principle is always the same.  If we consider three examples from the fields of morality, science and politics then we can learn how to see the plot holes for what they really are.

Plot Holes in the Moral Realm

Any number of examples could have been chosen to demonstrate moral plot holes, but a recent one from Pope Francis is particularly helpful here.  In a documentary that aired in October, the Holy Father was quoted as saying that “we have to create a civil union law.”  While not a tacit acceptance of gay marriage (few things, unfortunately, are tacit with Pope Francis), the comment caused an uproar because he was suggesting that the civil realm should create space for gay couples.

Let us assume that the Holy Father’s “plot” is promotion of the Gospel and true human thriving in this world so as to be residents of the next.  From within that context we would say marriage is a fundamental human good that helps to fulfill human nature.  But not any “union” between two people will do, but only one that is in accord with nature.  In short, as Catholics, we know that only monogamous marriage between a man and a woman leads to authentic happiness.  Any other domestic arrangement leads away from this.  The laws and the practices of the Church herself are reflective of this awareness.  The Church teaches what she does about marriage because she knows that it is a good thing for those involved to act according to nature.

To suggest that this is just a “Church law” or only binding on Catholics with no effect in the civil realm creates a giant plot hole.  No law should be made to protect or promote something that we know will ultimately lead to unhappiness.  By suggesting that there should be some civil law, the Holy Father is really expressing that he doesn’t believe that marriage is a true human good. 

Pope Francis in choosing the name Francis has seen his role as one who would reform the Church.  He has been open about this from the beginning of his pontificate.  Applying our principle of looking along the plot hole (at this and many of his other ones), we can discern what that reform consists in.  The Holy Father is attempting to reform the Church, not according the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of the age. The plot holes reveal the plot.

Plot Holes in the Scientific Realm

Plot holes in the scientific realm are usually more difficult to discern for the layman, but usually become apparent once you check assumptions.  When a scientific theory is full of unsubstantiated claims that are labeled as “assumptions” the plot of the Scientists are unmistakable.

A good example of this is what we is commonly referred to as the Big Bang Theory.  This theory claims that the universe began as a dense ball of primordial matter that exploded and over billions of years organized into the universe that we observe today.  This cosmology is accepted as scientific fact, but once we pull back the curtain we find that it rests on many untested and untestable assumptions.  There is a growing gap between observation and theory and in order to advance the plot, several plot holes needed to be introduced.  According to Big Bang Cosmologists, ~95% of the universe is composed of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  The problem is that these hypothetical entities have never been observed and they can’t be measured.  Instead they are theoretical constructs that hold the Big Bang Universe and its accompanying theory together.  You can read more about these two things elsewhere, but the point is that in order to use the theory to explain what we observe in the universe, physicists had to make up an unobservable “force”.  As one physicist observed,

Big bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities – things that we have never observed. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent. Without them, there would be fatal contradictions between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory…the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors.

 Eric Lerner, “Bucking the Big Bang”, New Scientist

The point is that we hold as scientific fact a theory that only explains 5% of what we observe in the universe.

Viewed as plot holes, these assumptions reveal that Big Bang Cosmology is not about the science but about scientism and the ability to explain natural phenomena using only natural causes.  It is an attempt to discredit the Genesis account of creation and theology and create an atheology that is completely devoid of God.  It is essentially the theory of Evolution on a cosmic scale.  The plot holes reveal the plot.

Plot Holes in the Political Realm

 

As is becoming increasingly obvious, the political realm is not devoid of plot holes either.  In fact one could say that the plot holes in this arena of life will be the way in which 2020 is best remembered.  Covid-19 itself is not a plot hole, but the way in which it has been managed has revealed the plot holes in reality.  If we examine them carefully then we can come to see the plot more clearly. 

We will discuss the vaccine some time in the near future, but the manner in which masks, social distancing and closures have been implemented have represented serious plot holes because of their lack of consistency and scientific justification.  I already discussed this with relation to masks, but it also applies to social distancing.  This has never been tried before and it is based on a simulation.  Yes, you read that right, not an experiment, but a simulation.  Drs. Jay Richards and William Briggs cover this in their book Price of Panic in detail, but in short the CDC went with recommendations from this paper in which found that social distancing would “yield local defenses against a highly virulent strain” in the absence of effective treatment. The “science” behind it was simple; you create a model to simulate an environment in which closing schools and implementing social distance measures lower the rate of infection and then you test to see if the rate is in fact lower. Besides proving that you are a good programmer, this also, surprisingly proved that social distancing worked. The fact that it is a simulated environment and not a real one should have no bearing on our decisions, right? This is, after all, Science.  No matter anyway because we now have effective treatment and thus no more need for social distancing, right?

Once we view these inconsistencies as plot holes related to the plot, we can see that there are powers that be that have chosen not to waste a good crisis and to implement their grand plot—The Great Reset—which we will discuss in the coming weeks. The plot holes reveal the plot.

In conclusion, we might be willing to tolerate plot holes in our movies, but we should never overlook them in real life.  If we do, we may find that we are caught up in someone else’s story for how the world should be. The plot holes reveal the plot.

Darwin and Intellectual Racism

Anthropology, Atheism, Creation, Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, , , ,

When you are in the habit of setting days and months aside to celebrate everything and everyone, you are bound to have some rather odd coincidences.  Today, February 12th, might be one of them.  In the midst of Black History Month, we take a day to “celebrate” Darwin Day.  Chosen to coincide with the birthday of Charles Darwin, the day is set aside to highlight Darwin’s unique contributions to science and to promote science more generally.  A strange coincidence because Charles Darwin single-handedly gave the world a theory that, at its very core, gives intellectual justification for racism.

To be fair, Charles Darwin himself was vehemently opposed to slavery.  He came from a long line of abolitionists.  The problem is that he also came from a long line of atheists so that his hatred of God was greater than his love of slaves.  His justification of slavery and many other genocidal practices was not merely an unintended consequence of his theory but a result of a willed obstinance.  His co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace warned him that it was insufficient for explaining man and his friends, including Samuel Wilberforce, the son of the great British abolitionist, warned of the brutality his theory justified.  Darwin, in a moment of brutal honesty once wrote, “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.”  In short, he was willing to accept any collateral damage in his “slow and silent attack on Christianity.”

Even Evolutionary Ideas Have Consequences

If we look closely at the theory of evolution itself, we will see why racism necessarily follows.  The Theory of Evolution is based on the relatively straightforward principle of Natural Selection—“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”  Colloquially known as “Survival of the Fittest”, Darwin’s model is rather intuitive until he posits that it explains everything.  The principle is without limitation and any species, given enough time and interaction with the environment, might evolve into any other species.  It is endless evolution with no room for distinctions between micro- and macro-evolution even though Darwin never uncovered evidence for the latter. 

Had he simply put forward the theory of Natural Selection to explain the origin of non-human species like he did in his first book On the Origin of Species, then it is very likely that the microevolutionary aspects would have been accepted and the macroevolutionary rejected, or at least severely modified.  But Darwin had intrinsically connected his scientific theory to a materialist worldview.  To consummate the wedding, he slipped humans into the theory in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

After Evolving into a rock, Charles Darwin hangs out with the author at the Museum of Natural History in DC

Despite making numerous connections between the rudimentary forms of morality and intelligence in animals and human beings, Darwin was plagued by what appears to be an uncrossable chasm—the difference between the highest animal and the highest human.  But if he was to apply Natural Selection to the “descent of man” then he could allow for a slow and steady evolution which posits that there is not just a difference between animals and men, but between gradations of men as well.  As he puts it in The Descent of Man “Some of these, for instance the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species.”

For Darwin evolution is an ongoing process.  This means that it continues down to our own day and that various species are continually fighting for survival; humans included.  Governed by the first evolutionary principle of Survival of the Fittest, Natural Selection has favored certain races over others.  Race is pitted against race and tribe against tribe so that the only way we know which is the most fit of them is by their continued survival and destruction of other races and tribes.  So then evolution not only scientifically justifies slavery and racism, but also genocide.  As Darwin himself put it in Decent of Man:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [like the gorilla, orangutan, or chimpanzee] . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

An Inherent Contradiction

Modern men are unique in their ability to hold contradictions together in their head, but it is impossible to hold them together in practice.  Either racism, slavery, and genocide are wrong and Evolution is a false explanation for the origin of man or Evolution is true and racism, slavery and genocide are justified.  There can be no intellectual racism without actual racism emerging.  No amount of “sympathy” (to use Darwin’s term) or “woke” condemnation can overcome “scientific fact.”  When science is all you got for truth, then you have to accept the consequences of that.   

We have spoken on any number of occasions previously on why Evolution is both bad philosophy and bad science.  Nevertheless it is accepted as fact because it is the only explanation that eliminates God.  Darwin knew that and his intellectual progeny know it as well.  The problem is that any worldview that eliminates God ultimately ends up justifying the elimination of men.  If Man really came from below, then we might treat him as we see fit.  Might makes right.  But if man came from above then every man is intrinsically valuable regardless of whether he is a savage or civilized.  In fact, as history has borne out, it is Christianity and not some blind process of evolution that raises man from savage to gentleman.  

Aquinas’ Fifth Way and Science

Atheism, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, Science, , , , ,

While St. Thomas thought his First Way for proving the existence of God was “the most manifest” in his own day, it is the Fifth Way that is the most accessible to modern man.  Among the Five Ways, the Argument from Finality speaks most clearly modern man’s anti-metaphysical language.  In fact, one modern philosopher, Immanuel Kant, thought the Fifth Way oldest, clearest and the most accordant with the common reason of mankind.”  This is a powerful endorsement coming from the man who killed metaphysics and thought that there could be no objective proofs for God’s existence.  Given its accessibility therefore, it is instructive for us to examine it more closely.

The Argument from Finality is often mistakenly confused with its doppelganger, the Argument from Design.  St. Thomas’ proof is deductive and demonstrative while all the variations of the Intelligent Design Arguments are inductive and probabilistic.  The latter always leaves open the possibility, even if it is remote, that there is in fact no Intelligent Designer.  The Argument from Finality, while it too comes to the same conclusion, it proceeds in a logically sound manner leaving no doubt as to the existence of a Supreme Intelligence Who created and sustains all things in existence.

The two types of proofs are different in another important way.  Like the other Four Ways, St. Thomas’ proof is not really concerned with creation, but preservation.  It is concerned primarily with why things are the way they are right now.  In other words, it eliminates the possibility of deism that plagues all of the Intelligent Design-type arguments. 

The Argument

With that said, let us turn to St. Thomas’ rather brief argument directly.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end.  Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.                   

  ST I, q.2 a.3

Proceeding from direct sense experience of the world, St. Thomas posits that since non-intelligent beings always (or at least when not impeded) act for an end, that is, act intelligently, there must be an intelligence “underwriting” their intelligent activity.

On the one hand this is common sense.  In fact, this is such a “given” that empirical science treats it as a first principle.  In order for science to proceed, it has to assume that the object of its study is intelligible.  Intelligibility requires intelligence.  Prediction requires predictability which requires a governing intelligence. 

But common sense, especially if it conflicts with a scientistic worldview, is not so common.  This makes philosophical inquiry necessary.  Framing the discussion within philosophical terms such as final causality makes the argument clearer.  Recall that a being can be explained with regard to its four causes.  The first two causes, the material cause, or what it is made out of, and the formal cause, or what makes the thing what it is, are intrinsic.  The other two, efficient and final causes, are extrinsic.  The efficient cause is the external cause that brings about the existence of a thing or a new way of existence.  This need not point to a First Cause (at least directly), but can refer to secondary causes.  The efficient cause of new oak tree is an acorn.  Looked at from the perspective of the acorn, we can say that the final cause of the acorn is to become an oak tree.  Given all the right conditions, it will develop into an oak tree and not anything else like a rosebush or a donkey.  This is always the case, so much so that we can say that the acorn acts towards this end and not another.

This connection between a thing acting as an efficient cause and fulfilling its own final cause is very important for modern science.  For modern science seeks to study efficient causality.  In developing predictive models for inert matter, it seeks to explain what causes changes in matter.  It does not concern itself so much with final causes, but they are always lurking in the background because of this inherent connection between the two extrinsic causes.  Even if it does not so much care about final causes, the modern scientist cannot act as if they don’t exist without simultaneously denying efficient causes.  It is like sawing off the branch you are sitting upon. 

Why There Must be a Final Cause

Because the acorn lacks intelligence, this inner directedness of the acorn to develop into an oak tree must have an extrinsic intelligent cause.  This becomes evident when we realize that Aquinas is talking, not about creation but preservation.  Why does the acorn, here and now, have as its end or telos, the oak tree?  And why must there be Intelligence for this to be the case?  In order for a final cause to be a true cause, then the effect must be in the cause.  To see how this works, we will draw an analogy with a human artifact, say a house.  The builder is the efficient cause of the house, but he is also what is called the exemplary cause.  It is his idea of what the house will look like that is the final cause.  That cause does not exist in the house, but in the mind of the builder.  So if we return to our acorn, we can ask where the final cause exists.  When we do, we realize that it exists as a divine idea.  Now we see why the final cause cannot exist without an intelligence.  It must first exist as an exemplar in order to be a true final cause.  It must exist not just at creation, but also in the here and now.   

Once this link between final causes and intelligence is made, we see why St. Thomas’ argument is true.  The fact that we observe anything that acts as an efficient cause is also acting upon its own final causality.  Because these things act towards ends, and not just any ends, but very specific ends, there must be an intelligence behind it.  “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”

Understanding what St. Thomas is really arguing for then becomes important because it differentiates it from other Intelligent Design arguments.  This demonstrative proof is protected from the “God in gaps” arguments that usually plague these types of arguments.  Sharing the same assumptions as modern science, it also makes it especially potent against those who reject God based on scientism.

The Philosophy of Evolution

Science, , , ,

Tomorrow will mark the 160th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.  Considered to be a formational tome in the field of evolutionary biology, it has in the last century plus become a foundation of the model world.  We find evolution, not just among plants, but races of men.  Survival of the fittest becomes political eugenicism.  We find it in not just animals, but among societies of men who reject the ideas of the past as extinct that needed to evolve to suit the changes in enlightened mankind.  The modern world is, in truth, all in on evolution.  And this might help to explain why it has devolved.  The theory of evolution is bad science and even worse philosophy.

Evolution as Bad Science?

Science, in Aristotelian tradition is thought of in more general terms than we do today. The most general meaning of the term is an organized body of knowledge, resting on first principles, purposed to investigate causes.  This broad definition includes all fields of knowledge from metaphysics to the empirical sciences such as evolutionary biology.  This spectrum of sciences has a natural hierarchy in the sense that it studies not just individual beings (empirical science), but being itself (metaphysics).  Each science must accept certain first principles, givens if you will, upon which the investigation of the causes of things can proceed.  With no foundational truths to build upon, the scientific house is destined to crumble.  The hierarchy allows the lower sciences to draw from the higher to procure their first principles.  For example, physics, one of the lower sciences, depends on mathematics, a higher one, for its first principles.  A physicist in acting to quantify some aspect of reality, could not proceed if he doubted the laws of mathematics.  If he were question the laws of math rather than his own hypothetical law, then he would most certainly be wrong.  He is ignoring the first principles so that the truth can adapt to his theory.

Portrait of Aristoteles. Copy of the Imperial era (1st or 2nd century) of a lost bronze sculpture made by Lysippos

A science then can be bad not just in its method, but in its observance of first principles.  In this way evolution is bad science.  Evolutionary biology depends on the philosophy of nature for its first principles.  The philosophy of nature is concerned with principles of unity in the face of change.  Evolutionary biology, too, is concerned with change, but specific changes in individual species.  Any theory that explains the change in individual species must respect the higher science in order to maintain its connection to truth.  If the evolutionary biologist ignores these principles then he is no different than the physicist who ignores the laws of mathematics.

 The First Principles

What are the first principles that evolutionary biology borrows from the Philosophy of Nature?  There are a number of them, but three will suffice to show why evolution is bad science. 

All that exists is either substance or accident.  A substance is an individual existing thing, while an accident depends upon a substance to exist.  A tree is a substance, the green of the leaves is an accident.  Trees exist on their own, greenness does not exist except in the trees (and other green substances).  You could take away the green from the leaves and the tree would remain a tree.

Since evolution deals with change, we must also look at some of the first principles related to change.  Change consists in reducing potency to act; some specific potential that is dictated by a thing’s nature is brought into existence through some agent cause.  This agent cause must already have the power to cause the change.  That is, it must be in act.  Suppose a room is cold which means it is potentially warm.  Only something that is actually warm like a burning log can heat up the room.  A log that is only potentially hot could never heat up the room.  This is the principle of sufficient reason.  This principle, in all its variations, deals with cause and effect.  An effect must in some form be in the cause.  In layman’s terms, you cannot give what you do not have.  For an effect to come about, the cause must have the power to cause the effect. 

Third, there is the principle of hylemorphism.  This principle says that all material beings are composed of form and matter.  Form, which is ontologically prior to matter, determines what a thing is.  Matter is the individuating principle, it is what makes the thing “this thing” rather than “this other thing”.

There is also another principle related to the upward movement of evolution.  Material creation proceeds from simple to complex, from the lowest to the highest.  In philosophical terms, there is a hierarchy of being in which the higher beings exhibit perfections not found in the lower.  Stones are not alive the way that plants are.  Plants cannot move and sense the way animals can, even if they have the same vegetative powers.  Animals cannot abstract and communicate the way that man can, even if they can gain sense knowledge of individual things.  As one of the philosophical dictionaries puts it, “in material and living bodies we find an ascending order of perfection in which the higher beings have their own perfections as well as those of the lower level of being. In the unity of the higher being, the multiplicity of the lower beings is virtually present.”  What this means is that although the lower is contained within the higher, the higher is not contained in the lower. 

The First Principles Applied to Evolution

If we frame evolution first as a philosophical problem, then it becomes clear how the first principles apply.  Specifically, it deals with changes not in individual substances, but in the generation of offspring.  The law of generation allows for accidental differences between parent and offspring.  These accidental differences can be based upon both the mixing of genes of the parents and on mutations in the genetic information.  These differences result in an offspring with the same essential form, but accidental differences.  Some of these differences may be biologically advantageous such that the incidence in the population increases.  Still we are dealing with like substances.  Evolutionary biology has a term for such changes and it calls it microevolution.  Microevolution is on solid philosophical groundwork such that if the biological data supports it then we can conclude that it is at least highly probable.

Macroevolution, on the other hand, posits a different sort of change.  Based on random a series of random mutations the matter is changed to the point that a new form is brought about.  This hypothesis comes in conflict with our first principles stated above.  First, the direction of evolution is always upward towards greater perfections.  But this would violate the principle of sufficient reason.  An effect cannot exceed its cause.  If the cause does not include the effect, then it must be brought about by some other way.  A blind animal can give birth to an offspring with sight because she has sight in potency, but no amount of lightning and “primordial soup” can effect sight in the offspring of a being who does not have eyes.  You cannot give what you don’t have. 

This principle is also violated quite frequently when the fossil record is combed for the elusive “common ancestor” and “missing link” that the lower somehow caused the higher.  There is little actual biological evidence for this causal link such that it is much more plausible that are closely situated on the ladder of being.  If nature is a continuous hierarchy then we would expect to see beings that are closely related to each other.   

Secondly, and more fatal for the philosophical backing of macroevolution, is that it posits that matter is the cause of a new form.  It is saying that given enough changes in the matter, a new kind of form can come into existence.  But form always precedes matter.  Matter cannot exist without a form, even if a form can exist without matter.  Once the new form exists, the matter which is in potency to the form, can be reduced to act.  If the new form cannot come into existence without some immaterial Cause, then the only way that macroevolution could possibly be true is if this Cause intervenes at each evolutionary stage to create new forms.  This Cause, because He was capable of creating all forms, would have to be omnipotent and omniscient.  Most would call such a Cause God. 

We can readily see why microevolution often is used in an ideological sleight of hand to cover up what is going on with macroevolution.  If matter cannot bring about a new form, then in order for macroevolution to proceed, God must create new forms.  In other words, Macroevolution, if it is true, then offers proof for the existence of God.  Because it does not conform to the ideological agenda that most who support evolution have, this fact is kept quiet and only material explanations are allowed. 

Good science always requires good philosophy.  Darwin may not have realized the implications of his new theory, but once we apply the Philosophy of Nature to his theory, we quickly find that macroevolution needs not only Aristotle, but God.

A Not-So Hard Case

Abortion, Human Dignity, Moralilty, Science,

As the laws supporting abortion continue to be challenged, a common objection is raised that abortion ought to be legal when the life of the mother is at risk.  So common is this objection that the President, who has been arguably the most pro-life executive ever, says that it is a necessary exception.  Like all the other “reasons” for abortion this one too depends upon propaganda and ignorance.  Therefore, we need to have a reasoned response ready to refute this seeming “no-brainer.”

Notice first that I said it depends upon propaganda.  This is because it is an attempt to circumvent the “exception proves the rule” principle.  If this really is an exception, then you must be willing to concede the rule that abortion is otherwise always wrong.  The problem is that even if we were willing to make a concession in this situation, abortion supporters really want abortion on demand.  It is an attempt to play on compassion while creating a smokescreen that makes abortion legal and right in all cases.

That being said, it is also not an exception to the rule, a point that otherwise preys upon general ignorance.  Abortion, that is the direct killing of a pre-born infant, as either a means or an end, is always wrong and admits of no exceptions.  This does not mean that in true cases where a mother’s life is in jeopardy that she must simply suck it up and put her affairs in order.  Instead, in every case in which a mother’s life might be in jeopardy, there are moral solutions that do not involve an abortion. 

This brings up a point that merits further examination before we dive into the specifics.  It is certainly common sense but unfortunately is often overlooked, especially in the name of medical expedience.  There is always a moral solution to a problem of health.  This is not to say that it won’t involve additional suffering, but that these “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situations always have solutions that are good for the whole person.  I say this not to be callous but as a reminder that we should never think we have to do something wrong.  It is also meant to be direct challenge to the medical community that they only offer and investigate what would ultimately be moral solutions.  If doctors and medical researchers really care about the health of the person then they will care not just about the body, but the soul as well.  The first question for medicine should never be “can we” but “should we”?

Early Pregnancy

Looking then more closely at the specific situations in which a mother’s life is truly in jeopardy will underscore all that has been said so far.  These threats come most often at the beginning of pregnancy with what are commonly called ectopic pregnancies.  As the etymology of the term suggests, ectopic pregnancies occur when the developing person is “out of place” and implants somewhere other than the uterus.  This can occur in the abdomen or cervix, but the overwhelming majority of cases occur within the fallopian tube.  These pregnancies pose a serious risk to the mother’s life because of hemorrhaging.  As an aside, these types of pregnancies are occurring at much greater rates than in the past thanks to scarring from an increase in the incidence of sexual transmitted diseases (most especially PID), IUDs, tubal sterilization and contraceptive pills.

We should mention both that the child will never achieve viability.  There have been a few, though very few, cases of successful transfer of the child to the uterus but this is still an important area of research we should be devoting energies (and prayers) towards. Also of note is the fact that up to 2/3 of ectopic pregnancies resolve themselves, requiring no medical intervention.  In the remaining cases there are three treatment options.

The first is a chemical solution that uses methotrexate (MTX).  MTX directly attacks the outer layer of cells produced by the developing baby that serves as connective tissue to the mother.  The child detaches and then is washed out of the tube.  Note this has appeal because of it is the least invasive, but also has the most serious side effects.  It also does not treat the underlying cause of the ectopic pregnancy, increasing the likelihood that it will happen again.

Although the Church has not spoken definitively upon this issue, most moralists would categorize this as an abortion because it involves the direct killing of the child as a means to saving the mother’s life.  An unborn child may die as a result of treatment, but the treatment itself cannot be the killing of the child.  The death must be an unintended, although it could be foreseen, side effect of the treatment.  That is why one of the surgical options called a salpingostomy is not a moral option either.  The doctor makes a small incision in the fallopian tube and removes the child in the hopes of preserving the mother’s fertility.  This also amounts to an abortion because it is the direct removal of the child that “saves” the mother.

A third treatment is called salpingectomy.  This has been the preferred method of dealing with ectopic pregnancies by faithful Catholic for years.  It involves removing the portion of the tube that is at risk of rupturing.  Unfortunately, it is the same section that also contains the embryonic human being.  Although the baby dies, it is a double effect and not something directly willed.  This moral solution probably represents the best physical health option as well because it removes the damaged portion of the fallopian tube.  Depending on the amount that is removed (if it is ruptured then a total salpingectomy might be necessary), it does put the mother’s fertility at risk.  Therefore, it is not always preferred even though, by removing the problematic portion of the tube, it makes it far less likely that the problem would ever occur again.

This can seem like a very legalistic approach to things considering that the end result—the termination of the pregnancy—is the same in all three of the approaches.  But, like all moral decisions, the means we use to achieve the end matter just as much as the end itself.  The means we use to do anything must also be good.  The mother, even though she has not seen her baby, is still his mother.  Knowing that, despite the difficult circumstances, she did right by her child can bring her great solace.  But either way, the demand for abortion because of ectopic pregnancy is a red herring.

Later Pregnancy

What about later in the pregnancy?  A moment’s reflection also shows that abortion is not needed.  If the child is viable, then the mother can be induced or an emergency c-section can be performed.  There is absolutely no medical reason why a later-term abortion is necessary.  Even when the child is not viable, inducing labor for the sake of saving the mother’s life can be justified even though the child might not survive.  Obviously, this requires clinical judgment, but the situations where it happens that the woman’s life is in danger because she is pregnant, and the child is not near viability, are very rare (and some say non-existent).  Nevertheless, there is still no need for abortion in these cases either.

Upon closer scrutiny then this so called “hard case” really is not so hard.  I say that not because it is an emotionally and psychologically challenging time, but because it offers a clear moral path.  The need for abortion when the mother’s life is in jeopardy is not a real need and we need to present the facts as such.

Evolutionary Bait and Switch

Science

A recent Gallup poll found that 38% of Americans hold to the Creationist view of human origins.”  The remaining 62% believe that evolution (either guided or unguided) played a part.  In the court of public opinion, evolutionists appear to have won the day.  The problem however is that the debate suffers from a lack of precision in terms.  “Evolution” means different things to different people.  In general we know that it refers to some transformation of a species of living beings but most discussion occurs without making that definition more specific.  This is why the first (and most important step) in any discussion is to define your terms. Evolution falls into two main categories, microevolution and macroevolution.  As the name suggests, microevolution explains the changes that lead to variation within a given species.  Macroevolution refers to the large-scale changes that lead to increasingly more complex species.  The failure to make a distinction between these two categories is the source of most of the confusion in the current debate between so-called creationists and evolutionists.

Microevoltion and Macroevolution

As the “experts” in the scientific fields, the evolutionary philosophers, that is, those who treat evolution as a philosophy such that it explains all of reality rather than as a scientific theory that explains part of reality, are only too happy to have these two lumped together.  Microevolution seems to be self-evident and it doesn’t take an expert to see this.  Anyone who has had to take multiple antibiotics for an infection knows that bacteria can evolve such that they are resistant to certain antibiotics.  With the self-evident quality of microevolution, the evolutionists can perform a bait and switch of sorts lumping macroevolution in and selling it as “evolution.”  Opposing something that seems so obvious makes one look like an unreasonable religious nut.  We must insist then that swallowing the microevolutionary slice doesn’t mean we must eat the whole evolutionary pie.

Many insist that there ought to be no distinction between micro- and macro-evolution because macroevolution is simply an extrapolation over time of the same processes that drive microevolution.  This viewpoint is scientifically problematic for at least three reasons.

First, there is the problem of the Missing Link in the fossil record.  “The problem is”, as GK Chesterton pointed out nearly a century ago, “that the missing link is still missing.”  The use of the term “missing link” is considered archaic, but the idea I think is still valid even as we find more and more examples of intermediate species  within the fossil record.  These intermediate species are often labeled as “transitional” but the problem is that this implies that the jump from one to the other is very short.  If macroevolution based on microevolution is true, then there ought to be something like a linear or gradual progression between species.    Instead there are still jumps, and even if the jumps are getting smaller, they are still pretty large.

Too often the “missing link” became an argument from silence, but I think it is still valid because the gap of say 400,000 years between two related species is non-trivial.  The fossil record really appears to show something like fits and starts.  A species is stable and then abruptly a new species appears.

If science truly is allowed to go where the data takes it, then it is far from definitive that macroevolution has occurred based on the fossil record.  In fact in a controversial paper in 1972 as Stephen Jay Gould points out the exact opposite,

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

(1)Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

(2) Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.'”

Second there is the problem of time.  Extrapolation from micro to macro-evolution we are told, happened slowly over time.  If a chasm is so wide that it cannot be crossed without a bridge, no amount of time is going to make it crossable.  The macroevolutionist might say that there were small stepping stones that arose that made the crossingpossible, but that those stepping stones disappeared.  Again one would have to ask where the data is that suggests that such stones actually appeared, especially when there is a simpler and much more reasonable assumption that they were carried across.  That is unreasonable, if you have not already presupposed that no such carrier existed.

The third problem is related to the mechanism by which evolution is said to occur, namely natural selection.  This ought to be obvious from the name, but Natural Selection is selective and not productive.  It does not bring new creatures into being, but instead is a mechanism by which certain individuals are favored because of their adaptations to some environmental condition.  It cannot create those individuals but draws from those who already exist in the population.  Many treat Natural Selection as a creative force; as if it somehow causes the favorable mutation rather than just selecting based on it.

An Edge to Evolution?

As we continue to study the genetic basis of mutation, Natural Selection seems not to be a mechanism by which this jump from microevolution to macroevolution could have occurred.  In his book, The Edge of Evolution, biologist Michael Behe documents a study in which about 30,000 generations, or 1 million years of E. coli have been manufactured and what they have found is “ Mostly devolution.”  It will advance to a certain stage and then throw away chunks of genetic patrimony because it costs too much energy to maintain.  What Behe claims is that this is one example among many of the edge to evolution.  There is a barrier beyond which selective breeding will not pass because either sterility occurs or genetic variability is exhausted.  Although Behe is not popular among some of his colleagues, it is mostly on ideological and not scientific grounds.  Even scientific giants like Richard Dawkins could only resort to ad hominem  arguments to refute Behe.

None of this, of course, proves that macroevolution does not offer a true explanation of the variety of species.  But it does show the need for intellectual honesty that starts by using terms properly.  We should not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch that many neo-Darwinist philosophers try to sell us.  Evolution, especially macroevolution is an open question and ought to be treated as such.

Where’s the Conflict?

Faith and Reason, Science

In the first of the thirty-two correspondences between a junior tempter and his devilish uncle Screwtape “discovered” by CS Lewis, the latter cautions his nephew Wormwood not to “use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.”  Yet, to most people science is a great enemy of Christianity.  It seems that Satan has taken the exact opposite approach to Lewis’ discovery by using what is seen to debunk what is unseen.  But he always operates under illusions and half-truths, especially when it comes any supposed conflict between science and religion.  The two can never conflict even if, at first sight, there are apparent contradictions…[because] we know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth” (St. John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996).

In addressing why any conflict is not real and only apparent, we must begin by recognizing the dependence that science has on faith.  All of science rests upon two fundamental assumptions.  Like most first principles they cannot be proven, but instead require faith on the part of the person.  The scientist is no different in this regard because he believes first of all that the world itself is intelligible.  It is the assumption that there is a law behind what is being studied that drives us to discover the law.  No reasonable person would set out to discover something that he believed was truly random in the statistical (as opposed to the scientific) sense.  This leads to the second point, namely that the scientist assumes that the human mind has the power to accurately grasp that which he is seeking to discover.  Intelligibility requires intelligence to measure it.  Every scientist bases assumes his instruments can provide accurate measurements and depends on this.  The mind, as the instrument of the scientist, too must have the capacity to grasp reality.  Both are necessary for science and both must be taken on faith.  As Chesterton says, the “Materialist cannot explain why anything should go right, even observation and deduction.  Why good logic should not be as misleading as bad logic, if they are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.”

What does the faith of the scientist have to do with religion?  The intelligibility of the universe is a religious assumption because it necessitates an Intelligence behind it.  In other words, it requires a God, and not just any kind of God, but the Judeo-Christian God.  Only He is a God of reason or Logos.  Historically speaking it was no accident that modern science arose when it did—in the midst of a Christian culture. In fact, it is certain Christian fundamental ideas that allowed the emergence of scientific thought to begin with.  The study of science arose because of a belief in a transcendent Creator who endowed His creation with orderly physical laws.  Scholasticism was responsible for the rejection of the pantheistic approach to nature.  Christian belief debunked the idea that created things have a mind of their own and but instead followed fixed physical laws.   In fact, the pioneers of modern science, such as Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton thought that by pointing out the wonders of creation they would lead people to the praise of the Creator of those wonders.

Gregor Mendel

Why is it then that scientists are often the ones leading the way of the New Atheist movement?  Chesterton hinted at the answer in his quote regarding the Materialist, but it is because they use science as a smokescreen for their philosophy.  While Science and Christianity cannot conflict, Christianity and Scientific Materialism are natural enemies.  The Materialist believes all reality is only matter (or at least ultimately derived from matter).  It is easy to prove that this philosophy is true when you assume it to be true.  Not surprisingly, when you use instruments that are designed to measure matter to measure the immaterial, you will never find them.  It is like walking around with a calculator looking for a cell-phone signal and denying its existence to the people talking on their phones.

In many ways modern scientific materialism is no different than ancient paganism.  The pagans saw the supernatural everywhere.  Things were gods or the playthings of the gods moving at the whim of the gods.  The Judeo-Christian religion demolished all such superstition.  The two Creation accounts in Genesis are mainly written to debunk the superstition of the Babylonians by showing that their gods were actually made by the True God and in fact were not gods at all.  So it is ironic that the materialist now comes along and accuses the Christians of superstition by debunking the Creation accounts.  The materialist sees his mission as one of freeing mankind from superstition.

But superstition by definition is an irrational or unfounded belief.  The reason why Christianity was able to free the pagans from superstition was because it is a religion that is reasonable and with a belief in the natural world.  Christians may believe in the miraculous, but they view it as a supernatural act.  In other words, the miracles of the Christian faith rest upon the natural world.  You cannot have the supernatural without the natural.  It is precisely the understanding that men naturally die that allows us to see the Resurrection for what it is.  The very foundation of Christianity is rooted in an unwavering belief in intelligibility and predictability of the natural world.

This is why the First Vatican Council in its first canon said ““If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.”  In other words it is an article of faith that you don’t need faith to believe in God.  To believe in God is the most reasonable thing one can conclude based on the intelligibility of the universe.

It is not without irony then that the Materialist accuses Christians of superstitions when in fact it is they who are superstitious.  For their claim is most certainly not a scientific but a religious one.     What they actually believe is irrational.  They are just as superstitious as the most superstitious of the ancient pagans.  As Stephen Barr has pointed out, the ancient pagan thought that his actions were controlled by the orbits of the planets while the materialist says they are controlled by the orbits of electrons in his brain.  Rather than speaking of fate like the pagan, he speaks of determinism.

In the nearly three centuries since the rise of modern science, mankind has learned more about the workings of the universe than in all the previous centuries combined.  We know more about how things work with each day.  This ought to lead us to deeper wonder and awe and we learn more about the Designer Who made all things to reveal Himself to us.  This is why Screwtape was so vehement with Wormwood about staying away from true science.  But once philosophy is masquerading as science, we run the risk of it drawing people from God in a way that Lewis’ characters would have reveled in .

Happy Darwin’s Day

History, Science,

To mark his 209th birthday, the American Humanist Association has honored Charles Darwin by declaring today to be International Darwin Day.  The group praises Darwin and his theory of evolution for “unclasping scientific progress from theological limitations and paving the way for a fuller understanding of our place in the universe.”   While they mention “theological limitations,” one gets the sense that it is really any “limitations” to natural science, including those that are inherently part of its essence that humanists will not accept.  Natural science is limited in that it is designed to look for material causes as explanation for certain effects.  It can neither find nor detect non-material agents.  It is a valuable and reliable field of knowledge for sure, but knowledge is not wisdom.  As the name suggests, Homo sapiens (literally “wise person) as a species seek wisdom and therefore are necessarily philosophical.  Humanists forget that physics is always at the service of metaphysics.  What ends up happening is that physics becomes metaphysics and bad science follows.  Only when natural science respects it limitations can it truly pave the way for “a fuller understanding of our place in the universe.”

If one reads Darwin’s Descent of Man then it becomes readily apparent that Darwin starts with the assumption that the mind was entirely material and that humans had an ape-like ancestor.  In other words, he took the theory of evolution as he describes it in the Origin of Species and applied it to man without any scientific justification.  In other words, he first made a metaphysical assumption and then simply asserted what that would look like scientifically.  Of course, his metaphysics was not solid as I showed in a previous post.

But science also needs religion.  In fact, it is certain Christian fundamental ideas that allowed the emergence of scientific thought to begin with.  The study of science arose because of a belief in a transcendent Creator who endowed His creation with orderly physical laws.  Any good scientist knows that what you study is not only observable, but that it follows some known order.   No reasonable scientist would study what he truly believed to be random coin flips.  Furthermore, man must be capable of recognizing this order so as to study it.  In order to discover the order of the universe of which man is a part, he must also somehow transcend it.  In other words, Humanists must recognize that to reject either of these truths, undermines any attempts that they make to gather knowledge about the world.  In fact, the pioneers of modern science, such as Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton thought science was at the service of wonder so that it would give content to the praise of the Creator.

Historically speaking, religious faith and science thrived side by side until the start of the eighteenth century.  For various reasons, some of which were valid such as wars within Christianity itself, many Enlightenment intellectuals became disillusioned with Christianity.  In response to this, they proposed a “religion of reason” that would replace the dogmas of faith.  This co-option of science by the Enlightenment was characterized by its claims that science must be “value free”.

Creation of Man Sistine

It should be noted as well that Darwin was not the first to posit a theory of evolution.  One of the questions that theology has long been trying to answer was where Adam’s body came from.  Some posited that it came about instantly while other said it came through some stages of development.  For example, St. Augustine in his commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad Literam) thought that Adam came into the world in full maturity.  But he left it open to the idea that his body could have come about through long process similar to embryonic development (or evolution of some sort).

So what does Divine Revelation have to say about the “Origin of Species?”  First that God created the world ex nihilio.  This does not preclude Him using something like the Big Bang as the mechanism, although this particular theory has some serious flaws scientifically that need to be worked out.  When you are using a theoretical construct that cannot be measured like Dark Matter to explain 5/6 of the matter in the Universe, it is far from a complete explanation.  Regardless of whether it is true or not, one still has to explain how the point of infinite density and temperature at time zero ever got there.  In other words, scientists may be able to answer the question as to how things come about, but they will never be able to answer the question as to why there is something instead of nothing.  That is a question for metaphysics and religion.  To pretend natural science could answer that question or to pretend that is not the more important question is to delude yourself.  Metaphysical questions are always the most important questions because we crave purpose and meaning and not mere explanation.

Regarding the “Descent of Man”, Pius XII in his Encyclical Humani Generis, offered three specific truths from Revelation that must be safeguarded.  The first is that man, because of his spiritual soul, could not be a direct product of evolution.  There is nothing contrary to Revelation to say that man’s body came through evolution, but the soul must be believed to have been directly infused into that body by God.

Second, we must hold that the first woman came directly from the first man.  At first this seems unnecessary or even superfluous, but Pius XII was reaffirming that which had been taught as part of the Ordinary Magisterium going all the way back to Pope Pelagius I in 561 (“together with Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of the man”).  The reason why this truth is of particular importance is because it affirms the essential equality (in dignity) of man and woman.  An unchecked theory of evolution always leads to justifying inequality between people because one group is always somehow inferior to the more evolved one.  It was Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s who applied Darwin’s arguments for Natural Selection to improved breeding of human beings.  He is the first to coin the term eugenics, to which the likes of Marx, Hitler and Margaret Sanger all devoted their time.

Finally, Pius XII said that Adam and Eve were two real people from which the entire human race has come (this is called monogenism).  The Pontiff said that “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37).

This is why a wholesale adoption of evolution is problematic.  Evolution without Revelation would require that in the transition from animal to man, there would necessarily be a multitude of men and not just two.  What is at stake in this is Jesus and His Mission.  If there is no Adam and no Original Sin as separation from God then there is no need for the Incarnation and Redemption.  While we may not be immediately aware of the implications of this belief, humanists certainly are.  In an article entitled, “The Meaning of Evolution,” the author says that, “[E]volution destroys utterly and finally the very reason for Jesus’ earthly life, which was supposedly made necessary, for if you destroy Adam and Eve and original sin, then you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God. Take away the meaning of his death, and if Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, then Christianity is nothing.”

Ultimately, the battle between science and revelation has a direct bearing upon science itself.  As Pius XII said, “truth cannot contradict truth” so that   those places where modern science contradict revelation will ultimately lead to dead ends.  No amount of faith in scientific fudge factors like dark matter, dark, energy, inflation, and missing links will ultimately lead to truth.  It certainly is not at the service of reason to continue to create hypothetical constructs to fill in the gaps when Revelation has a perfectly reasonable answer—I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

 

 

Evolution and the Church

Faith and Reason, Science

In a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Pope St. John Paul II said “the Church takes a direct interest in the question of evolution, because it touches on the conception of man, whom Revelation tells us is created in the image and likeness of God.”  Rather than dismissing evolution as somehow anti-Christian, the Pontiff embraced it as “more than an hypothesis.”  To be clear, the Holy Father never actually endorsed a specific theory of evolution, but instead says it is “more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution” because many of the so-called theories of evolution are wrong because they rest on a flawed metaphysical system.  This shows how the two areas, philosophical and scientific, must remain in dialogue with each other if we are to find the truth about man’s origins.  If the scientific community will turn its evolutionary glance towards the most highly evolved Ox, St. Thomas Aquinas, then he can point them only in the direction of those theories that rest on a firm metaphysical foundation.

Mostly as a matter of polemics, there is a false dichotomy that is often set up between creation and evolution.  But the two need not be mutually exclusive.  All too often a belief in creation is often lumped together with what is commonly referred to in Christian fundamentalist circles as “creationism.”  Creationism starts with the view that the six days of creation are meant to be taken literally and then posits that the earth is about six thousand years old.  Of course when science examines the question of the age of the earth, it comes up with a much larger number.  Since “truth cannot contradict truth” it is the scientific that wins out because it seems to be more in line with human reason.  What starts out as a defense of the Christian faith ends up making it look absurd.  St. Thomas warns about attempting to invoke arguments like these for “the Christian faith that are ridiculous because they are in obvious contradiction to reason” and only serve to provoke the irrisio infedelium, the mockery of unbelievers.

Along the same lines, a second dichotomy is set up in that creation means that the Creator had to make the world perfect.  If it is not perfect, then it must be one based solely on chance.  St. Thomas would reject both viewpoints.  In response to the latter, St. Thomas himself addressed the question as to whether chance could govern the world. St. Thomas countered the neo-Darwinists’ of his time called the “atomists” who saw the variety in the world as the result of a random interplay of matter by arguing that variety is precisely the intention of the Creator.  God “brought forth many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided” (ST, I, q.47 a.1).  In fact, if the purpose of creation is to show forth the Creator, then this diversity would be exactly as one would expect.  Just as no work of art can express or exhaust everything an artist has to say because it is always limited by its material framework, likewise no creature can entirely express the Creator.

In response to those who say the existence of a Creator necessitates that the world be perfect, St. Thomas would say that the world, because it is not an end in itself, is actually is a state of becoming, rather than already perfected.  In fact while St. Thomas affirms the goodness of everything that exists (this is called ontological goodness), this does not imply that everything is the best that it can possibly be.  In fact he even says that God could have created a better world (ST I, q.25, a.6, ad.1).  While the world may be journeying towards its ultimate purpose, it is not yet there.

Meet your relatives

It is the philosophical underpinnings of the response to this false dichotomy that gives us a Thomistic launching pad for philosophically valid theories of evolution.  The idea that each goodness is “manifold and divided” and each creature is limited is expressed by St. Thomas in his distinction between essence and existence.  What Aquinas teaches is that everything that exists (while allowing for a possible exception) is constituted by an inner structure of two metaphysical principles.  The first is the act of existence by which the thing is present is the universe of real things.  The second is the manner in which its existence is limited and that is its essence or type of thing.  Think of existence having two dimensions.  The vertical dimension is like a ladder in that the variety of things each have an increasing “amount of existence” that is determined by how much being its particular nature can hold.  There is also a horizontal dimension in which things can share the same nature or essential form and be multiplied because of matter.  Just as essence limits existence, so too matter limits the number of individuals.  So while two rose plants are identical in nature (and therefore being), they do not have the same level of being as say a bear.

Philosophically, St. Thomas would say that there is a dynamic principle that governs the change by relying on the Aristotelian notion of act and potency.  As things change, there must be a principle of continuity that acts as a means for the thing to receive a new mode of being.  This aptitude is its potency or potentiality.  Potency can be either passive which is the capacity to receive some actual perfection from without or active which is the capacity to act from within.  Creatures in essence shape themselves.  They have an active potency or inner force that is governed by their nature that shapes what they become.

It is also necessary to include as foundational the Principle of Sufficient Reason.  The principle of causality, as it is commonly referred to, states that every being that lacks the sufficient reason for its own existence in itself must have an adequate efficient cause. It seems then that the central metaphysical problem related to evolution is how to explain it without violating the Principle of Sufficient Reason, specifically the causal axiom that “no effect can be greater than its cause.”  Drawing upon what was said above about active potencies as the ability to act by some inner power, we can say that two beings already in existing in nature may have the active potentiality to combine with each other under certain conditions to form a new being.  For example, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, both of which are flammable, combine to form a water molecule which has the opposite property of putting fires out.  This viewpoint may explain evolution in the pre-biological dimension of our world in which all change may be a change in degree.  However this theory cannot explain those changes that require a step up the ladder of being without violating the principle of sufficient reason.

One final principle that needs to be articulated is the distinction between differences in degree and differences in kind.  A difference in kind refers to the fact that there could not possibly an intermediary between the two (called the law of the excluded middle) while a difference in degree admits this possibility.  Two things differ in kind if one possesses a characteristic totally lacked by the other or if one can do something that the other cannot while a difference in degree is a characteristic that one has more of it and the other less.

Any solution to the question of evolution would need to conform to the principle of sufficient reason.  This means that it must present creation as containing some points of discontinuities and cannot be a wholly continuous process that has been set in motion.  Non-living creation shares in existence to a lesser extent than creation that has life.  There is a further division within the realm of living beings.  All living beings have a soul, but they are different in kind and not just degree. These kinds of souls, delineated as vegetative, sensitive and rational, serve as animating principles for living beings.  All living things have vegetative powers in their souls, but only plants have a vegetative soul.  Likewise both man and the animals have sensitive powers in their soul, but only animals have a sensitive soul.  Only man, with reason and will, has a rational soul.  It seems natural to posit that the points of discontinuity would be reflective of these distinctions.  A Thomistic theory of evolution then could be developed by dividing the problem into four distinct areas.

The first would be evolution in the non-living universe from the beginning to the formation of the earth.  In order to satisfy the principle of sufficient reason all that seems to be needed is the infusion of a range of active potentialities (even if they are somehow dormant) in the universe.  This integration would require an Organizing Intelligence but would not require any further special intervention of the Creator (although there is room for such an intervention in theory).

Secondly we could speak of the evolution of plant life.  The principle of sufficient reason requires that an outside source of causality would be needed to move up the ladder of being from non-living to living.  The matter in the plants may have the passive potentiality to receive life, but that life would need to be supplied from an outside source.

Next we could speak of evolution of subhuman animals.  The presence of the sensitive powers must indicate a difference in kind because between the presence of these powers and the lack there are no intermediaries possible.  Therefore this suggests that there is a new level of being here as well.

It should be mentioned that the idea of microevolution within species presents no special philosophical problem because they could be the result of accidental changes with the same nature that produces beings that have only a difference in degree.  Many scientists such as Francis Collins have said that these accidental changes could be brought about by an active potentiality that consists in gene jumping in response to a given environment.  This may in fact become so cumulative that the later entities are no longer able to breed with the earlier and thus a new species is judged.  This however does not imply a qualitatively new level of being.

Finally, we come to the final step and that is the “evolution” of man.  Once again we find that man represents a jump up the ladder of being through the spirituality of the human soul.  The ability to form abstractions is attributed to man along with propositional speech, tool making for future use, and cumulative culture all mark a transcendence of the immediate environment.  These non-material powers cannot be explained by the combination of material causes and in fact would need the intervention of some outside non-material cause.

Notice that throughout the discussion we did not rely on Divine Revelation at all.  This is not because Divine Revelation has nothing useful to say or that we should ignore it.  It was simply beyond the scope of what was being proposed.  Science, philosophy and Divine Revelation are all reliable sources of knowledge and in an ideal world all three should be working in unison to come up with a unified vision of man’s origin.  This essay simply took a bottom up approach that would require no faith on the part of the scientist.  Followed properly, any reasonable person would begin to ask what (or Who) this non-material source might be.  In a future essay we will add the guidelines imposed by Divine Revelation to complete the full picture.