The Lord Shall Have Them In Derision
by Mark Anthony Signorelli (January 2011)
[i] Still, Darwinism began as, and at its core remains, a theory about how species of organisms change over enormous expanses of time, and as I said, it is a most remarkable thing that such a theory could become a serious rival to any theology, Christian or otherwise. Were one to travel backwards in time to visit Anselm or Duns Scotus, and inform them that in a far distant century, their Christian religion would descend into considerable quiescence in their native country, I suspect that they would have remained unsurprised and undisturbed; such men were not naïve about either the forces of history or the nature of man. But if one were to tell them further that their religion would be superceded in the minds of thousands and millions by a theory about how organisms change over enormous expanses of time, I am quite certain that they would have been incredulous. No doubt, they would attest that their convictions concerning God, the universe, and man’s relationship to both, were such that they were entirely consistent with all possible theories about how species of organisms change over enormous expanses of time, and therefore could not possibly be contradicted by any of them. And they would have been correct. The vaunted, and by now perfectly tiresome, conflict between religion and science is indeed a consequence of ignorance, as the Darwinians constantly insist. However, it is not the recalcitrant ignorance of religious persons towards science that is at the root of the controversy, as they would have us believe; rather, it is their own incorrigible theological and philosophical ignorance that has, from the beginning, generated the intensity of the debate. Let us “count the ways” of their folly.
[ii] Indeed, he excoriates the rash folly of those Christians who presume to contest scientific questions from the authority of scripture, and thus, by an untutored literalism, bring their creed into disrepute with the scientifically knowledgeable:
[iii]
[iv] Philip Kitcher spends an entire chapter refuting what he calls “Genesis creationism,” and insinuates that anything other than a literal reading of Genesis inexorably leads to disbelief: “devout people fear that, when thought through, traditions of nonliteral reading that have dominated much of the history of Christianity, and that are present in liberal Christianity today, will not leave much standing.”[v] Remarkably, Professor Kitcher declines to expand on the great consternation which the reflections of St. Augustine have occasioned in the minds of the Christian faithful, and what a deep threat to orthodoxy may be discovered in the Confessions and The City of God.
[vi] No matter how many times this is pointed out to Darwinians, they refuse to acknowledge the fact. Thus we find Dawkins, in introducing his alleged refutation of the design argument, claiming that Paley gave “the traditional religious answer to the riddle,”[vii] (and discovering Richard Dawkins peddling gross errors about the history of theology and philosophy is about as shocking as finding a bullfrog croaking). Traditionally, arguments attempting to deduce the existence and nature of God from the existence and nature of His creation trace their orthodox pedigree to a single passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1,20)[viii]: “for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” Since it is the invisible characteristics of God which are demonstrated by his works, this would seem to obviate the search for traces of divine engineering in the biological realm, or the quest to identify the gap in efficient causality into which we can shove our conception of God. Most significantly, in claiming that it is God’s invisible characteristics which are revealed by the nature of the universe, the Apostle is obviously appealing to features of the natural world which are not subject to experimental observation or to measurement, and therefore his argument is entirely immune to either scientific verification, or scientific negation. What are the “invisible things” of God which are evident in His works, and which we are “without excuse” if we ignore? Consider the following passage from St. Augustine’s City of God:
[ix]
[x]
[xi], a position which the Darwinians, with their rampantly materialist conception of mind, will not likely concede. But this is less a testament to the inadequacy of these arguments, than to the desiccated condition of the Darwinians’ own dogmas.
[xii] The thing about natural objects that reveals the work of God most fundamentally is simply that they are, that they exist, since God is, most fundamentally, total and authentic being, the eternal “I Am” of Exodus, and the fountain-spring of all contingent beings. This is the thesis that would be worked out with such profundity in Aquinas’ metaphysics.[xiii] Perhaps I am digressing here beyond the claims that are strictly included in an “argument from design,” but I mention this insinuation of the passages above in order to demonstrate the level at which these arguments are working. Paley’s argument rests on a distinction between a rock and a watch; we realize that their distinctive natures require different kinds of explanation. For the Darwinians, the watch is replaced by a biological organism – a leopard, say -and of course, viewed scientifically, the rock and the leopard require different kinds of explanation. But viewed from a certain ontological perspective, the rock and the leopard both require the same kind of explanation, an explanation that accounts (or attempts to account) for why they exist at all. After all, the existence of rocks is no less enigmatic than the existence of leopards. Why should either one of these things have emerged out of nothingness? Any attempt to answer this question must be formulated in terms that entirely transcend the scientific investigation of natural causes – the realm of “second causes,” in the Thomistic nomenclature – and therefore cannot be threatened or affirmed by scientific discoveries. It is at this transcendent level – the level of ontological inquiry – that Augustine’s and Bonaventure’s arguments operate. So too do all traditional “arguments from design.”[xiv]
[xv] The argument runs as follows in the Summa Theologia:
[xvi]
[xvii]
[xviii]
[xix] Darwinians try to encounter this problem by recruiting a couple of quotation marks, and – profound thinkers that they are – referring not to the purpose or final causes latent in nature, but to the “purpose” or “final causes.”[xx] I hope it is obvious to everyone that this is nothing but a cheap gimmick. Beginning with the real teleology of nature, then, we can, according to Aquinas, infer a Supreme Intelligence which bestows upon nature that purposefulness, since “whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence.” Consider the example Aquinas uses to illustrate his point, the archer and the arrow. Suppose we were capable of observing the arrow mid-flight, without simultaneously observing the archer. We would not deny that the arrow was moving towards the target; that is to say, we would grant that it was moving in some teleological fashion. But we would infer from the arrow’s directedness some intention, in the person of the archer, that accounts for that directedness. Of course, this is because we know, from experience, that when arrows move towards targets, it is generally because they are projected that way by archers. But Aquinas holds that we can argue in the same way about the objects of the world, that their end-directedness is evidence of a directing intelligence, which we call God. Perhaps we might characterize the argument as follows: if there is no directing intelligence behind nature, the teleology which we discover there is illusory, but since it is impossible that it is illusory (since, for instance, we find it impossible to speak about nature without drawing upon teleological language), then there must be an intelligence behind nature. Christopher F.J. Martin states the most suggestive feature of this argument: “but it is a plausible claim that unless the whole has a point, no part of it has a point, all appearances of final structure notwithstanding. Thus St Thomas thinks that if the world as a whole does not have a point, then the things in the world that seem to have a point don’t have a point either.”[xxi]
[xxii]
[xxiii] That is, according to Dennett, Christian belief has no more metaphysical support for its positions than belief in Superman. And this sort of assertion is akin to that incredulous question of Richard Dawkins, which drivels out of his mouth in nearly every one of his public appearances, as to why anybody would believe in the divinity of Christ anymore than in the divinity of Thor. In the libraries of the universities where these two men collect their salaries, there is amassed over two thousand years of intellectual endeavor, laying forth, with all conceivable philosophical sophistication and breadth, the case for belief in Christian doctrine, yet when these mountebanks drop the pretense of arguing from evolutionary premises, and engage the “primordial convictions” of their adversaries, they believe those convictions, with their two millennia of rational defense, can be summarily dismissed with some idiotic twaddle about Superman and Thor. Why exactly should any authentic seeker of the truth feel compelled to take these people seriously? And when we observe them rehearsing this asinine travesty of argumentation with the last degree of condescension and disdain towards their opponents – well, it would take a quite superlative Christian to refrain from returning those sentiments in kind. The whole pretense of the last two centuries, from Huxley on down to Dawkins, that there is a uniquely Darwinian rejoinder to the classical arguments of the Christian theologians – a rejoinder deduced from the facts of evolutionary history – is simply a consequence of the massive ignorance and presumption of modern Western persons regarding the contents of their forfeited philosophical traditions.
[xxiv]
[xxv] Once we grasp this fundamental truth, we recognize that the theory of divine authorship is not so much refuted, as “dissolved,” demonstrated once and for all to be Laplace’s superfluous and unnecessary hypothesis: “one of Darwin’s most fundamental contributions is showing us a new way to make sense of ‘why questions…a clear cogent, astonishingly versatile way of dissolving these old conundrums.”[xxvi] Then we can securely conclude that any account of divine origins is a mere relic of pre-Darwinian superstition, “as obsolete as the quill pen…a fascinating museum piece, a curiosity that can do no real work in the intellectual world today.”[xxvii]
[xxviii]
[xxix]
[xxx] Finality presupposes mechanical operations, such that it remains illicit to conclude the absence of finality merely from a complete account of mechanical causes. As Martin writes:
[xxxi]
[xxxii] For on their premises, any example of mechanical operations is evidence of the absence of purpose, supernatural or otherwise. A Darwinian might as well say, “look, those leaves were blown off the tree by the wholly mechanical force of the wind; therefore there is no God,” or “you can see how the first billiard ball transferred its force to the second one, in order to propel the latter towards the cup; therefore there is no God.” These are not exaggerations or reductio ad absurdum’s, but assertions which are perfectly akin to the central Darwinian claim. Consider the following statement (quoted endlessly by adoring Darwinians) by the twentieth-century evolutionary theorist and Communist agitator, J.B.S. Haldane: “My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course…I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.” What does this amount to, other than a paraphrase of the following: “cells multiply in my petri dish according to invariably mechanical laws; therefore, there is no God.” Such arguments amount to nothing more than a modernist revision of the opening of Psalm 19: “the heavens (and everything beneath) declare the glory of nothingness.” They represent, not conclusions derived from the observable facts of the world, but dogmatic convictions read into the facts of the world.[xxxiii]
[xxxiv] In his other work, he has defended his notoriously awful position on the “intentional stance,” the upshot of which is simply to deny that human beings possess any distinctively mental life. And of course, he is joined by whole masses of modern academic materialists, who write books called The Illusion of Conscious Will[xxxv] and concur with statements such as “in principle you could explain all behavior without reference to subjective states,”[xxxvi] and in a thousand different ways, implicit and overt, deny the reality of human mental life. All of this is sheer lunacy, to be sure, but it is lunacy that follows directly from their grotesquely inadequate metaphysics.
[xxxvii]
[xxxviii] but as it constitutes just one more version of the “problem of evil” with which Christian theologians have been wrestling for centuries, it quite obviously does not provide the clinching argument which Kitcher desires. He then concedes that Darwinism comprises only a part of what he terms the “enlightenment case against supernaturalism.”[xxxix] As Kitcher presents it, that enlightenment case includes – as anybody familiar with this sort of thing could guess – a reminder of the diversity and irreconcilability of the world’s religious traditions, a brief survey of the textual problems revealed by Biblical scholarship, and an appeal to sociological theories of religion’s origins. Along the way, the reader is treated to pure speculation:
[xl]
Screaming non-sequitors:
[xli]
And outright defamation:
[xlii]
[xliii] Throughout this chapter, it becomes evident that Kitcher’s Darwinism is a consequence, rather than an antecedent, of his atheism, that he will put forward any anti-theological objections he can get his hands on, and that he would have turned out a committed atheist if he never so much as heard of Darwin in his entire life. It is the so-called “enlightenment case” that serves as the basis of his disbelief. And this, in the end, is all that Darwinian anti-theology amounts to: a novel packaging of the unscientific assumptions of late decadent liberalism. Evolutionary theory does nothing more than provide the grammar for their expression. Darwinism, then, simply embodies the unexamined prejudices of a generation of self-designated mandarins, a generation which, incidentally, has proven that it does not possess a single one of the intellectual virtues necessary to counsel or edify a civil society.
[xliv] What could more perfectly testify to the incurable presumption, narrowness, and frivolity of our modern academic class?
[xlv] and exult when they listen to Richard Dawkins claim that he doesn’t need to engage the arguments of theologians because, after all, theology is not a real subject.[xlvi] They are barbarians, in the truest sense of the word, and their ascendancy in contemporary academia remains perhaps the best evidence – though certainly not the only evidence – of what a barbarous age we inhabit.
[i] Ruse, Michael. Defining Darwin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 122.
[ii] St. Augustine, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” in On Genesis (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002), 185, 190.
[iii] St. Augustine, 186-187.
[iv] Ruse, 137.
[v] Kitcher, Philip Living with Darwin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 42.
[vi] As philosopher Edward Feser notes “The Fifth Way (Aquinas’ formulation of the “argument from design”) has nothing to do with Paley’s ‘watchmaker’ argument; actually, even the most traditional followers of Aquinas often reject Paley with as much scorn as evolutionists do.” In The Last Superstition (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), 76.
[vii] Dawkins, Richard The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 4.
[viii] See Gilson, Etienne The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (South Bend, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1936), 72. “Everyone knows that the whole speculative effort of the Fathers of the Church and the thinkers of the Middle Ages concerning the possibility of proving God from His works, hangs directly from the famous words of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (I, 20).” Everyone, that is, except the Darwinians.
[ix] St. Augustine, City of God (New York: Penguin, 2003), 432.
[x] St. Bonaventure, “The Soul’s Journey Into God” in Bonaventure (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 71-72.
[xi] For a typical Darwinian account of aesthetic pleasure, turn to Chapter One of Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct and discover that the delight you may take in viewing a landscape painting is really the legacy of your Pleistocene ancestors’ hankering after a good steak.
[xii] Bonaventure, 74.
[xiii] Etienne Gilson writes of the Thomistic proofs as follows: “thus we come back to our first general characteristic of the proofs: we have to start from an existence. When we can assign the complete, sufficient reason of any single existence, empirically given, we can prove the existence of God.” In The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (South Bend, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1956), 77. Or as Chesterton succinctly puts it: “though the stick or the stone is an earthly vision, it is through them that St. Thomas finds his way to heaven.” In St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 148.
[xiv] As Feser notes, “Dawkin’s problem is that he doesn’t know the difference between probabilistic empirical theorizing and strict metaphysical demonstration, and thus misreads an attempt at the latter as if it were the former.” 101.
[xv] Gilson writes: “in its most obvious aspect, it argues to some supreme artisan or demiurge, more or less resembling the Author of Nature so dear to the 18th century Frenchman.” Gilson 1956, 75.
[xvi] St. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologia”Q. 2, Art. 3. in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 27.
[xvii] See Hewlett, Martinez and Ted Peters Theological and Scientific Commentary on Darwin’s Origin of Species (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 107. “Thomas begins with the statement that we can, in principle, have no knowledge of God from intellect alone. Instead, he says, we can make analogous statements about God, using as the source for these analogies observations in the natural world. He admits at the beginning that these are only analogies that express in some way what God must be like, but they are not proofs, in Paley’s sense.”
[xviii] Feser, 114-115.
[xix] Feser thinks that evolutionary theory might even provide some slight verification of Aquinas’ premise.
[xx] See for instance Ruse, Michael Darwin and Design (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 268.
[xxi] Professor Christopher F J Martin's Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, Edinburgh University Press, found here: http://ftp.colloquium.co.uk/viae5.htm
[xxii] Hart, David Bentley, “Daniel Dennett hunts the Snark” in In the Aftermath (Grand Rapid, MI: William Eerdmans Publishing, 2009), 199.
[xxiii] For an audio recording of this debate, see here:
[xxiv] Dennett, Daniel Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 75.
[xxv] Dennett, 59.
[xxvi] Dennett 25
[xxvii] Dennett, 83. He regards such explanations as “mind-first” explanations, and claims that pre-Darwinian thinkers could not conceive how mind could emerge out of purely material causes. But of course, since Dennett himself does not believe in mind at all (as we shall see), he subscribes to this position as much as anybody ever did.
[xxviii] Hart, David Bentley The Doors of the Sea (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans Publishing, 2005) 83, 85.
[xxix] In Chapter 5 of the Apologia Pro La Vita Sua.
[xxx] Aristotle, Metaphysics Book I, 3-4. See also Aquinas’ early work On the Principles of Nature, part 3, in which he writes, “besides matter and form there must be a principle which acts, and this is called the effecting or moving agent or that whence motion begins. Because, as Aristotle says in Metaphysics 2, whatever acts acts only by intending (ie, with a tendency towards) something, there must be a fourth thing, namely, that which is intended by the agent, and this is called the end. Every agent, both natural and voluntary, acts for the sake of an end, though it does not follow that every agent knows the end or deliberates about it.”
[xxxi ]Martin. See also Gilson, Etienne, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 43. “Finally, perhaps it would be fitting to note once more that, far from excluding mechanism, Linnaeus’ finalism requires it. If living beings have been willed into existence in order to arouse admiration in the mind of the spectator, and the adoration of their author, nothing could serve this end better than knowing their mechanism. Once more then the close alliance of finalism and mechanism is here confirmed.”
[xxxii] Dennett, 47. “When they are confronted with a prima facie powerful and undismissable objection to natural selection…they are driven to reason as follows: I cannot (yet) see how to refute this objection, or overcome this difficulty, but since I cannot imagine how anything other than natural selection could be the cause of the effects, I will have to assume that the objection is spurious; somehow natural selection must be sufficient to explain the effects.”
[xxxiii] “(Dawkins makes) the frequently reiterated assertion that what we find when we look at the evidence of biological evolution is precisely what we should expect to find if we assume that the entire process is governed by nothing but random chance…It is after all, one’s prior expectations that are always at issue. For what one sees when one looks at the evidence of evolution is also what one might expect to find if one assumes that the entire process is the consequence of a transcendent intelligence drawing all things from nothingness and endowing them with form according to an internally coherent sequence of causes and a collection of magnificently intricate mathematical laws.” In Hart 2009, 199.
[xxxiv] Dennett, 63. Elsewhere (pg 80), he remarks that Darwinism leaves us with “a nifty mechanistic, behavioristic, crane-style mind.,” though a mind that is merely mechanistic is obviously no mind at all.
[xxxv] By Daniel Wegner
[xxxvi] See minute 51 at http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=pinker&topic=complete
[xxxvii] Plato, Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 80.
[xxxviii] The most poignant expression of the excruciating perplexity occasioned by nature’s brutality remains Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
[xxxix] Kitcher, 131. “Darwinism is entangled with what I’ll call the ‘englightenment case against supernaturalism.’ Evolutionary ideas form a separable part of the case, as well as amplifying other themes within it. It is wrong to give Darwin complete credit as the ‘anatomist of disbelief.’ But it would also be wrong to pretend that his ideas are not important to the ‘delineation of doubt.’”
[xl] Kticher, 143.
[xli] Kitcher, 144.
[xlii] Kitcher, 148.
[xliii] Kitcher, 165.
[xliv] I am told from my cover of Kitcher’s book that it won something called the 2008 Lannan Notable Book Award.
[xlv] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/mar/01/the-god-delusion/
[xlvi]“ The fact is that theology is a non-subject.” www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/2023765.htm+dawkins+theology+%22real+subject%22&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
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