Thomas Aquinas

Last week we reported on a discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of JPL employee David Coppedge. Over the weekend the San Gabriel Valley Tribune ran a lengthy story reporting on the suit. After Coppedge discussed intelligent design with JPL scientists, his supervisors told him to stop discussing religion. Last April Coppedge’s bosses demoted him. Coppedge had been a leader on the system administrator team for the Cassini mission, according to the suit. The paper also reports that after being ordered by his superiors at JPL to stop talking about intelligent design, Coppedge did just that. Even more interesting is this: Earlier this month Coppedge claims he met with his supervisors, who told him that the written warning was inappropriate and Read More ›

Preliminary Matters

I’m currently editing a volume called God and Evolution that deals with the general subject of theistic evolution (to be released by Discovery Institute this fall), and I am contributing a couple of chapters to the volume on Catholicism and ID. I’m also working on a book-length treatment of the same subject. As a result, over the last six months, I’ve been studying the relationship between Catholic theology and contemporary arguments for intelligent design.

Various “Catholic” assessments of ID have been appearing on for years, and no doubt will continue to do so. (See this 2007 article from the New Oxford Review, for instance.) But recently, a certain “meme” has begun to emerge that ID is somehow un-Catholic, contrary to the Catholic intellectual tradition, or some such. This seems to me to be a serious mistake that needs to be challenged directly. So one (though only one) of the purposes of the publications I’ve been working on is to respond to a cluster of criticisms of ID by some recent Catholic critics, including those by Ed Feser, Frank Beckwith, Michael Tkacz, and Stephen Barr. Some of these criticisms have taken place online, others in printed publications.

Unfortunately, the issues at stake are subtle and complicated, and often involve translations into somewhat different “conceptual schemes”; so it’s hard to deal with them adequately in the drive-by fashion appropriate to the blogosphere. Moreover, I don’t think that these gentlemen are all making exactly the same arguments, though their criticisms are related.

So there’s a danger of over-generalizing.

Since print publications have such a long gestation period, however, and the debate seems to be creating far more heat than light, I’ve decided to weigh in more promptly. My first response, to Stephen Barr, appeared several weeks ago. I’ll offer a few more responses here at Evolution News & Views, one at a time, over the next couple of months. (See also Vincent Torley’s response to Ed Feser over at Uncommon Descent, including the discussion in the comments section. Torley has promised more along these lines in coming weeks.)

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here, and the second here.

The Origin of Beauty

Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s masterful book A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature gives the following illustration of how modern scientific reductionists treat nature and the arts:

Imagine hearing the following account of one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies: ‘We have been able to prove that this particular symphony is actually reducible to a series of notes that happen to be played both at the same time in chords and one after another, creating a string of disturbances in the air caused by different frequencies. We realize, of course, that these disturbances cause further disturbances in the audience, due in part to the presence of Earth’s particular atmosphere and in part to the effect such disturbances have on the apparatus of the ear as transmitted by neurons to the brain–so disturbing, in fact, that some break into voluntary tears, remarking that they seemed to be hearing the very harmonies of heaven. Happily, we now know that there is nothing more to Mozart’s work in particular and to music in general than mere notes, themselves reducible to waves disturbing air.’

When Christian intellectuals hear such things, their general response is to think that they can have their Darwinian cake and merely scrape off the reductionist icing. But Darwinism, if I may continue the strained metaphor, is, it turns out, a layered cake with icing all throughout.

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here.

Intelligent Design and the Deity

In the predominant narrative, Charles Darwin was a humble scientist who proposed a strictly scientific theory. Upon publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, religious folks like Bishop Wilberforce voiced theological objections to it; and thus began the most salient episode in the ‘war between science and religion.’ Many Christians adopt a similar narrative, but suggest this was all a misunderstanding; Darwin’s theory simply has nothing to do with religious or philosophical questions.

If I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that both narratives are wrong.