Science and Culture Today | Page 1223 | Discovering Design in Nature

Stephen Meyer is in Brazil this week at the “Intelligent Design: Science and Religion” conference at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo, one of Brazil’s oldest and most prestigious universities. He speaks today at 3:00PM PST (7:00PM in Sao Paolo) about Signature in The Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.The Symposium lectures are being transmitted live on the university website and you can watch Dr. Meyer’s lecture this afternoon there. Once on that page click on the Symposium logo to stream the speeches in real time. Also in attendance at the conference is University of Idaho biologist Scott Minnich, who spoke this morning about “Irreducible Complexity and the Bacterial Flagellar Motor: Assessment of Recent Controversies”. On Wednesday at Read More ›

In my prior post, I critiqued ACLU-affiliated law professor Gary Williams for claiming that David Coppedge’s case “probably won’t have a shot in court.” If Coppedge has no case, then Mr. Williams must be saying that an employee discussing a matter relevant to the workplace and that is not prohibited by any employer policy–in a non-disruptive fashion–can be targeted when other employees expressing different views about the same topic are not penalized. But this is exactly what happened at JPL, a taxpayer funded entity: JPL has no policy against talking about intelligent design (ID), and permits employees to express viewpoints that are hostile towards ID, but when an employee expresses pro-ID speech, he’s suddenly harassed, investigated, demoted, and told to Read More ›

In my previous installment, I discussed St. Thomas’s views of creation and his understanding of how God interacts with the world. The subject could easily fill a long book, of course, but I hope to have provided enough to serve adequately as background for evaluating the criticisms of ID from a few Thomists.

One such Thomist is Gonzaga University philosopher Michael Tkacz, who wrote an article criticizing ID in This Rock magazine, published by Catholic Answers, back in 2008. I read both This Rock and the Catholic Answers website frequently. Both are generally very reliable, orthodox sources of information. So the piece would never have seen the light of day if it had been called: “Why God Is Only Allowed to Act in One Way.” Instead, it’s called “Aquinas Vs. Intelligent Design.”
What I’d like to focus on here, primarily, is his presentation of the views of St. Thomas. First, a couple of caveats: I am only focusing on this single article by Tkacz, on what Tkacz says, and on what I think are its implications. I do not intend to imply anything about Tkacz’s personal views, which his short article may not represent accurately. Moreover, while Tkacz’s criticisms are similar to the critiques of ID from some other Thomists, I do not mean to imply that these others agree with Tkacz’s specific argument. (In fact, I suspect there would be disagreement on the details.)

Tkacz presents his argument as if it were a straightforward, uncontroversial rendering of “Thomism” and the “Catholic intellectual tradition.” He argues that God’s creative activity never involves a change from one thing to another. So he objects to ID arguments that he thinks (incorrectly) imply that God “intervenes” in nature:

This is the view that nature, as God originally created it, contains gaps or omissions that require God to later fill or repair. Given the Thomistic understanding of divine agency, such a “god of the gaps” view is clearly inconsistent with a proper conception of the nature of creation and, therefore, is cosmogonically fallacious.¹

This is a familiar caricature of ID, which ID proponents have corrected many, many times. In truth, ID per se is neutral with respect to how and when intelligent design is implemented (though God can do what he wants to do). Logically, detecting design within a framework in some particular locus within nature (the subject of ID arguments) is a different issue from determining how that design came about.
Tkacz attributes this “god of the gaps” view to Michael Behe (who is a conservative Catholic):

Now, a Thomist might agree with Behe’s knowledge claim that no current or foreseeable future attempt at explanation for certain biological complexities is satisfactory. Yet, a Thomist will reject Behe’s ontological claim that no such explanation can ever be given in terms of the operations of nature.

But Behe has never made any such claim and Tkacz provides no reference to substantiate his characterization of Behe’s argument. On the contrary, in The Edge of Evolution, Behe suggests just the opposite–that everything might trace back to the fine-tuning of physical constants and cosmic initial conditions.²This creates a problem for Tkacz’s conclusion: “Insofar as ID theory represents a ‘god of the gaps’ view, then it is inconsistent with the Catholic intellectual tradition.” Since the “insofar” clause isn’t satisfied, I think, the central thesis for the article dissolves.

Rather than belabor his inaccurate portrayal of intelligent design, however, let’s focus instead on Tkacz’s representation of St. Thomas and the Catholic tradition. I think (perhaps because of the limitations that a short article imposes), that that attempt falls short of the mark.

In a recent post I explained why David Coppedge is alleging religious discrimination in his lawsuit against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for shutting down his pro-intelligent design speech, even though intelligent design (ID) is science, not religion. In the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Professor Gary Williams of Loyola Law School (and former head of the Southern California ACLU) argued that even if ID is religion (or, as in Coppedge’s case, ID is labeled religion by JPL), that Coppedge’s lawsuit is weak: Certain kinds of religious activity are protected if they are not intrusive – such as wearing certain religious garb – but speech during work hours is not included, he said. So even if intelligent design is viewed as Read More ›

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s the memorable opening line in Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” and, in following the Darwin debate, I often think of it. Making sense of disparate personal experiences and bits of information gleaned from the news or other sources, we are powerfully moved to weave a narrative that makes sense of it all. Darwinians and creationists alike have complained precisely that intelligent design refuses to offer a tidy historical narrative of how a designer might have exercised “his” creative influence. This refusal annoys and confuses people beyond belief.

Of course, some stories are true. Others are fabrications, maintained only by steadfastly turning your face away from contrary evidence. Either way, human beings are incorrigible storytellers, and information that doesn’t fit our story tends to get ignored. This may explain why news venues have so far mostly declined to report on what happened to David Coppedge.

He is a top-level computer specialist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Cassini mission to Saturn whose supervisors demoted and humiliated him for raising scientific issues about intelligent design. Last week he sued in the Superior Court of the State of California, complaining of religious discrimination, harassment, and wrongful demotion. Sounds like a news story, doesn’t it?

The Influence of St. Thomas

St. Thomas Aquinas holds a special place of honor in Roman Catholicism. To be sure, one can be an orthodox Catholic without following Thomas’ philosophy–indeed, his influence is minimal in Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. And in the Western Church, not everyone follows Thomas. Franciscans, for instance, generally prefer Bonaventure. Moreover, even those who consider themselves Thomists have all manner of disagreements with each other and even with Thomas himself.

Still, Thomas’ influence in the Western Church is hard to overestimate. Catholics refer to him as the Angelic Doctor. In many ways, Thomas is the high water mark of what has come to be called “scholasticism” and “classical theism.” In fact, if you survey the writings on the doctrine of God even by Protestant scholastic theologians after the Reformation, you’ll find that many depend almost entirely on the method Thomas laid out over three centuries earlier.

His influence has continued into the present, following the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which called for a renewal of scholastic and Thomistic thought, at a time when its influence had begun to wane. Today, many traditional Catholics, tired of the unfaithful innovations that resulted in the wake of (though not necessarily as a result of) Vatican II, look to Thomas to provide a way forward. Several Thomists have recently criticized ID for having a faulty (if implicit) theology and philosophy of nature, and they have claimed their critique depends on St. Thomas’ philosophy of nature. So it might help the discussion to consider his views briefly.

A law professor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (who was previously elected head of the Southern California ACLU) was quoted in an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune commenting on the David Coppedge’s lawsuit against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL): “a case like his probably won’t have a shot in court, because courts have viewed intelligent design as a religious belief, rather than a scientific theory, according to Gary Williams, a professor at Loyola Law School.” This raises the question… Does it Matter to the Case Whether Intelligent Design is Religion? First, whether courts have or have not “viewed intelligent design as a religious belief” is irrelevant to Coppedge’s lawsuit. What matters is that, as the Coppedge v. Read More ›

The current travails of David Coppedge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory hit close to home. He’s being unjustly, perversely punished simply for lending copies of two ID documentaries, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet, the latter based on the book by Guillermo Gonzalez and yours truly. Guillermo, of course, suffered similar bigotry at Iowa State a few years ago, and endured (among other things) a barely disguised campaign to deny him tenure led by, among other people, an atheist professor of religion at Iowa State. It’s hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn’t Read More ›