Intelligent Design

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 30, 2005

Earlier this week in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a federal district judge began hearing arguments in a highly watched case pitting a legion of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union against the Dover, Pennsylvania school district.

The Dover school board requires ninth grade biology teachers to read the following statement as they study the section on evolution: "Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. Gaps in theory exist for which there is no evidence…. Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin…. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind."

The ACLU is suing on behalf of eleven parents, alleging that by requiring teachers to read that rather balanced and general statement, the district is violating the principle of the separation of church and state. In their press conferences, ACLU attorneys are claiming the case is analogous to the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, when a Tennessee teacher was convicted of violating a state law against the teaching of evolution that had been promoted by fundamentalist Christians, who believed that evolution was contrary to the Creation accounts in Genesis.

But the theory of intelligent design is not the same thing as a literalistic understanding of the Biblical creation accounts. Intelligent design is not even opposed to evolution. It is opposed, however, to a philosophical atheism that some have misused the theory of evolution to advance.

The theory of evolution, first advanced by Charles Darwin in the 19th century, states that species evolve from each other via random genetic mutations when those changes make them more capable for survival. Some have taken the notion of "random" mutations — which, scientifically, basically means that you cannot predict in which direction a change will occur — to claim that evolution happens completely by chance. But this is a philosophical presumption rather than a scientific conclusion. To say that the mutations appear random to us does not mean necessarily that they are in fact random or unguided.

This is the unscientific conclusion that those who advance the theory of intelligent design challenge. Scientists who promote it generally agree with their colleagues that the world is billions of years old and that the human race began about 150,000 years ago. But they say that when you examine the data given by extinct and extant biological life, there is an intelligible order to it.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading scientific backers of intelligent design, do not say that God is behind that order, but it is an easy inference to draw on the basis of the data. The classic example is that of a watch and watchmaker. A Swiss watch, even with millions of years, would never randomly be able to put itself together and function. Since the world and the human race are infinitely more complex than such a watch, it would be even more unthinkable to look at the order in the world and in biological life and not intuit a "watchmaker."

Some say that the induction of a watchmaker is an unscientific observation, and strictly speaking, they're right. But to induce the absence of a watchmaker from the same data is at least as unscientific. Scientific theories, it should be added, are made precisely by deductions and inductions based on observable data, and the evidence in favor of an inference of design is simply much stronger and more plausible than one denying it.

A 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, chaired by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, crisply stated: "In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist" (Communion and Stewardship, 69).

The Church is not opposed to the theory of evolution, but does object to the unscientific materialistic inference that random mutation in evolutionary mechanisms somehow "proves" that the process of evolution is unguided — and therefore that there is no "guide."

Catholics listening to the press accounts of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District should remember to check their watches.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.