Even this supporter of Teilhard de Chardin finds Massimo Faggioli's and James Martin's effort to rehabilitate him "weird"

Read especially the last parts of Mark Lambert's "I may surprise you with a defence of Teilhard de Chardin" (November 23, 2017).

... his reputation as a bit of a rebel means that an approval of a proposal asking for Pope Francis to remove the monitum has almost inevitably, drawn support from Pope Francis merry band of theological nitwits & cheering boys. The fact that such people as Fr. James Martin and Massimo Faggioli are cheering for the petition to remove the monitum (warning) against the writings of Teilhard... well... it speaks volumes, doesn't it?

Ii could easily be argued that the central error of our times is evolutionism taken as a paradigm for the whole of reality, including God, revelation, tradition, and morality. As Father Z puts it, if Teilhard's writings were ambiguous and seriously erroneous when the monitum was imposed, then surely they still are? ...

... I can't help but be disappointed by this constant desire to forego the practice and common sense of the past and re-write everything in the ink of modern secularism. Isn't this glib jostling for attention intellectually drab and dishonest?

Yes I defend Teilhard de Chardin's extravagant and audacious writings. I love them! As a scientist he wanted a free-ranging, peer review of his work. His ideas should be challenged, but not demonised. But I don't mistake them for the teaching of my Church, and I don't regret or seek to revoke the very valid monitum placed on them in 1962. Fr Teilhard de Chardin accepted the Holy See's censure, & he would have accepted the monitum as a just act by the teaching authority of the Church, just as he accepted the censure of his superior in 1925. The fact that Faggioli and Martin are seeking to rehabilitate him somehow is weird (given he is pretty much old hat these days), and strikes me as just another anti-orthodoxy bandwagon for them to jump on.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Freaking out Darwin

Tom Wolfe, "Freaking out Darwin" (World, September 9, 2017):

In The Kingdom of Speech—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Science, Math, and Worldviews category—Tom Wolfe has fun with Darwinism and then linguistic theory. Wolfe sees Charles Darwin as an ambitious but fearful upper-class Brit beaten to the punch on natural selection by the lowly Alfred Russel Wallace, and evolution as a fable for atheists, about as reliable as the Apache belief that the universe began with a ball of dirt from which a scorpion pulled strands that became earth, sun, moon, and stars. (Wolfe calls that “the original version of the current solemnly accepted—i.e., ‘scientific’—big bang theory, which with a straight face tells us how something, i.e., the whole world, was created out of nothing.”) In the excerpt below, courtesy of Little, Brown and Company, Wolfe recounts how Wallace undermined his and Darwin’s “child.” —Marvin Olasky

Read more >>

The comment by Guy Noir - Private Eye: "Tom Wolfe, eviscerated by reviewers but caring less! If I have to pray for the souls of vocal and opinionated non-believers, I'll choose his, even while celebrated Jesuits may cringe!" Amen, brother!

Huzzah! Shattered glass!

One brick through the pane glass window of established scientific wisdom ...

Dwight Garner, "Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky" (New York Times, August 30, 2016)

... and another brick though the stained glass window of much of the ruling class of the Catholic Church ...

Edited by Daniel M. Clough, Genesis According to the Saints (Loretto Publications, 2016).

Brilliant!

[Hat tip to JM]

Fr. Z's calculation of the world's creation off by approx. 123 million years

In a recent post, entitled "Happy Birthday Universe!" (Fr. Z's Blog, April 27, 2016), Fr. Z writes:

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe [was] created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler ....

He goes on to relate a great many fascinating details about the life and times of Kepler, including the fact that he is sometimes considered the founder of modern science. In his concluding sentence, however, Fr. Z writes:

As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.

Now please forgive me, but I take a fiendish delight in responding to such statistics by pointing out glaring errors when I find them. In his case, as any astro-physicist worth his salt knows, the figure cited above is off by a little over 100 million years. The exact figure can be inferred from the epiriometrics of the brilliant research scientist, A.D. Sokal, in his landmark essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (1995), from which we can conclusively show that Fr. Z's figure is off by 123,857,487 years. The critical calculation is:


In light of which we are compelled to conclude that the Big Bang (and, omnia sint paribus, the creation of the world) occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago, not 13.7 billion -- or, to be exact, 13,823,857,487 years ago at precisely 3:26 in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time (anachronistically assuming Greenwich Mean Time existed then). I believe it was raining that afternoon.

In the interests of fair disclosure, my 'fiendish delight' in pointing out such errors stems from my studied skepticism regarding the philosophical conclusions inferred by scientists from their empiriometric and empirioschematic calculations, which are often presumptively taken for reality itself, as amply demonstrated by the physicist Anthony Rizzi in his book, The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century, and by the Gifford Lecturer and Templeton Prize winning physicist, Stanley Jaki, in Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. My skepticism also extends to the metaphysical claims either stated or implied in "The Grand Evolutionary Story" reiterated ad nauseam by contemporary textbooks of biology, parts of which Alvin Plantinga famously called "pure arrogant bluster."

So thank you, Fr. Z, for allowing me at your expense to skewer a bit of contemporary 'scientific bluster' with a bit of playful bluster of my own. I suppose you could claim that you covered yourself by the insertion of the cautionary term 'about' since 13.8 billion is 'about' 13.7 billion; and that might be true. Then again, would we really have any conclusive way of knowing whether we weren't off by 6-11 billion years, give or take a few hundred million? Or we could just take Stephen Hawking's word for it that it all happened "about 15 billion years ago."

Adam, Even, and Genesis - the implications of revisionism

It's always an interesting exercise to review the implications of revising the traditional account. We all know of Catholics we've met or heard about who dismiss the historicity of Adam and Eve, and who consign the first eleven chapters of Genesis to the murky primordial world of "myth."

The importance of thinking more deeply about the implications of such moves on the Biblical-theological chessboard, however, is not always readily seen. For example, an alternative to the traditional Catholic view that Adam and Eve were historically real, first parents of humanity (as Jesus Christ is the "New Adam" and new root of regenerated and redeemed humanity), is the view that they are only "symbols," whatever that is taken to mean. On that view, the Fall (Original Sin) is not to be taken as anything so naively parochial as a "historical event," but rather to be understood as a "fatal flaw" in our nature, empirically confirmed by the pervasive selfishness of human beings we see all about us and in ourselves. Problem with that: it makes God the author of sin, of our sinful nature, because it means there was never a human being with a pre-lapsarian (non-fallen) nature and so God made us selfish and sinfully-disposed. In this case, as Baudilaire famously quipped: if God exists, he's the Devil! (Something like that)

Well here we have an example of someone toying with revisionist interpretation of Genesis, only he's not nearly so radical as the aforementioned views, because he still believes that Adam was a "historical" person. Yet the implications of even his views are far more revolutionary that he suggests. Have a look: "The Lost World of Adam and Eve" (Christianity Today, March 19, 2015): "Old Testament scholar John Walton affirms a historical Adam -- but says there are far more important dimension to Genesis." Yeah. Right. Interviewed by Kevein P. Emmert, John Walton is Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, the flagship academic institution of Billy Grahm Evangelicalism in the United States.

Here is what one of our readers writes about this piece:

Let's be frank and let's be honest. If you are going to say "I believe Adam was a real person, but literarily he represents more than just who he was," shouldn't we ask, "How can someone literally be more than who he was?" Are we so determined to try to reconcile the Bible and 'science' that we will swallow such sophistry? And that [sophistry] is without question just what this is, well-intentioned or not. If Walton's take is accepted, it will not only be the world of Adam and Eve or Genesis that will be lost -- all the eager and impassioned endorsements to the contrary. I am increasingly convinced that Original Sin as classically understood is the acid test of orthodox Christianity. [Amen to that!]

From Christianity Today, of all places. Reported as if it is nothing unusual at all [emphasis added]. With no com box option! The ghost of Carl Henry would be spinning in its grave if it hadn't been here diced and quartered under a cone of silence. [Not to mention what Billy Graham would think of this, if he could attend to its import at age 97.]

For further reading:

• Dennis Bonnette, "Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?" (Crisis Magazine, November 24, 2014)
• "Adam," Catholic Encyclopedia [makes use of a great deal of historical criticism, but fairly cautious]
• Dave Armstrong, "Fr. Robert Barron's Denial that the Adam and Eve of Genesis Were Historical Figures and the Primal Human Pair" (Biblical Evidence for Catholicism, November 28, 2013). [And HERE is Fr. Barron offering boiler plate accommodations to prevailing prejudice]
• C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care(Crossway, 2011)
• Ardel B. Caneday, et al., eds., Four Views on the Historical Adam (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology)(Zondervan, 2013)
• J. P. Veersteeg, Adam in the New Testament: Mere Teaching Model or First Historical Man,translated by Richard Gaffin (P & R Publishing, 2012) [Excellent]
• "The Fall," Catechism of the Catholic Church (285-421)
• John Murray, The Imputation of Adam's Sin(P & R Publishing, 1992) [Theological implications]
• Francis A. Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time: The Flow of Biblical History (Bible commentary for layman) (InterVarsity Press, 1972) [Basic. Good. Clear.]
• Fr. Chad Rippinger, The Metaphysics of Evolution(Books on Demand, 2012)
• Alvin Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible" [PDF] Christian Scholar's Review, XXI:1 (September 1991), 8-33 [Excellent]
• Brian W. Harrison, "Early Vatican Responses to Evolutionist Theology" (Roman Theological Forum, May 2001)
• George Sim Johnson, Did Darwin Get It Right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution(OSV, 2006)
• Benjamin Wiker, The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Regnery Publishing, 2009)
• John Wynne, A Catholic Assessment of Evolution Theory: Weighing the Scientific Evidence in Light of Thomistic Principles and Church Teachings on Origins(RTM, 2011)
• Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
• "Center for Science and Culture" (Discovery Institute)
• Msgr. Charles Pope, "The Problem of Polygenism in Accepting the Theory of Evolution" (Archdiocese of Wathington, October 24, 2010)

[Hat tip to JM]

Principles of Catholic Theology and Careful Readers

Just a brief aerogram today from Guy Noir in Rome, where he was apparently luncheoning with some friends among the papal paparazzi last Saturday. Always the Socratic gadfly, seizing upon every possible means of prodding me and provoking me to THINK, he scrawls out (in a remarkably florid John Handcock-esque hand) the URL to the mighty War Against Being blog of James Larson, and, with the words: "I believe this is depressingly right," refers to the following title and excerpted quote: "The Synod on the Family, Joseph Ratzinger, And the Destruction of the Catholic Mind" (WAB, January 22, 2015):

If that bishop possesses a mind which has fallen prey to the denial of substantiality inherent in Modern Physics, and if he is also an evolutionist: then, despite the fact that the good instincts he has inherited from the past may indeed have led him to vote correctly, he is not at all established in those foundational principles which are necessary for truly “thinking with the Church”. His orthodoxy, his conservativism, in other words, is built on sand, and is eventually bound to crumble – if not in himself personally before his death, then in his spiritual children. He may believe in the indissolubility of marriage, but he has no substantial basis for so believing. He may believe in the concepts of mortal sin and sanctifying grace, but these beliefs fly directly in the face of his being in bed with Science and Evolutionary Theory. He has feet of sand.

To which Noir adds a bit of text in Saxon Runes in mockery of my ignorance of them ...

... which he then "generously" condescends to translate for me as follows:

"... Which explains the ongoing tragedy that we witness unfolding in the well-meaning but impossibly-conflicted papacies of the last six popes. Meanwhile we witness the incredible spectacle of Ignatius Press adding more bricks to its literary memorial to Vatican II.(And I do mean bricks: peruse Fr. De Lubac's Paradoxes or More Paradoxes for confirmation; also note his biggest fan of late is John Milbank)."

Well enough. I never found Milbank rewarding enough to read anyway. I liked de Lubac's The Drama of Atheist Humanism,which shed some interesting new light on Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach, but I remain in two minds about some of his other work. My head hurts.

[Disclaimer: Rules 7-9]

Good discussion: On Atheists & Evolution: From Stephen Fry to Bono

British actor Stephen Fry blasphemes God and arrogantly proclaims his faith in dogmatic atheism. Michael Matt uses Adam, Eve, Genesis and Bono to answer Fry and challenge de facto false "religions" such as atheism and evolution. A couple of bracing moments.

"History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud"

In case you missed it: Luke Harding's article pointing out that a flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries (in The Guardian, February 18, 2005):

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.... Read more >>

Darwinism and Darwin: "A Dull Plodder"

Terry Scambray, in "A Genius for Destructive Change" New Oxford Review (May, 2014), reviewed Paul Johnson's Darwin: Portrait of a Genius. Interesting review.

In response to Scambray, Laszlo Bencze writes the following letter to the editor, "A Dull Plodder," in the current issue (July-August 2014):

As Terry Scambray makes clear in his review of Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (May), Charles Darwin was hardly the scientific giant of present-day adulation. In fact, flattery of Darwin has reached its apogee now that he is often called the greatest scientist of all time, the man who had the “best idea” in the history of mankind.

Yet the truth, as Scambray points out, is that Darwin was very much a man of his time — and a dull plodder at that. He spent eight years writing a four-volume study of barnacles. Yet, oddly enough, barnacles are never mentioned in The Origin of Species. Why? Was it impossible to discern evolutionary evidence in these complex and obscure creatures he knew so well? Instead, he devoted almost every bit of his magnum opus to tedious examples of artificial selection in domestic animals. He brushed away the glaring advantage of artificial over natural selection with rhetoric along the lines of “I see no reason why” natural selection might not have fashioned the eye or any other organ or living thing. For such schoolboy ineptitude he was roundly criticized by his contemporaries, all of whom are now consigned to history’s dustbin, regardless of their skills and biological competency.

As for Darwin having honestly formulated his theory based on slowly accumulating evidence, his own private notebooks reveal that as early as 1844 he proclaimed that he would “transform the ‘whole [of] metaphysics.’” We will not find such words in the works of Newton, Pasteur, or Einstein. Perhaps they were not genius enough.

Scambray wisely warns against laying “yet another coat of bronze to the iconic figure of Darwin.” It’s too bad Paul Johnson felt he had to take on the role of literary foundry man.

Needless to say, defenders of the reigning orthodoxy, like Arthur M. Shapiro (in the same issue), were not happy.

"Another evolutionary biologist rejects the bogus theory of Evolution"

Dean Kenyon, Emeritus Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University recounts the steps that led to his growing doubts and rejection of Evolutionary theory.


Interesting, isn't it.

[Hat tip to Alex Naszados]

The Church's objections -- yes, objections -- to Evolution

Boniface, "Evolutionary Theology and More" (Unam Sanctam, May 13, 2014):

Have you heard the refrain from conservative Catholic apologists that the Church has "never had a problem" with evolution? Or perhaps that theological objections to evolutionary theory are based solely in rigidly literalistic interpretations of Genesis 1 or are primarily Protestant concerns? This new exhaustive article on evolutionary theology on Unam Sanctam Catholicam's website will demonstrate that the opposite is in fact true; the Catholic Church was one of the first Christian bodies to object to evolution, doing so in 1860, only one year after Origin of Species. And the fundamental objection was not centered on literalism in Genesis 1 - although that was a concern - but on the question of substance and how creatures could be said to have substances expressed in 'natures' if everything was in a constant state of change. How could we speak of "being" when evolution teaches that there is only "becoming"?

Click here to read "Solemn Enthronement of Evolution" on Unam Sanctam Catholicam.

Read more >> [Spoiler alert: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., and the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger take hits in this critique, as well as Cardinals Agostino Casoroli, Avery Dulles, and Chrostoph Schönborn.]

[Hat tip to L.S.]

Does 'Evolution' disprove Adam & Eve?

"The Parent Flap: Darwinists Argue That Adam & Eve Have Been Disproven. Molecular Geneticist Ann Gauger Does Not Agree" (Salvo, Fall, 2013).

[Hat tip to JM]

Evolution: the debate that will not die

Albert Mohler, "Bill Nye's Reasonable Man -- The Central Worldview Clash of the Ham-Nye Debate" (February 5, 2014):

Last night’s debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham attracted a huge international audience and no shortage of controversy—even before it began. Bill Nye, whose main media presence is as “The Science Guy,” and Ken Ham, co-founder of Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum, squared off in a true debate over one of the most important questions that the human mind can contemplate. That is no small achievement....

The initial controversy about the debate centered in criticism of Bill Nye for even accepting the invitation. Many evolutionary scientists, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, refuse to debate the issue, believing that any public debate offers legitimacy to those who deny evolution. Nye was criticized by many leading evolutionists, who argued publicly that nothing good could come of the debate....

... A protege of the late Carl Sagan and the current CEO of the Planetary Society, Nye was in full form last night, wearing his customary bow-tie, and immaculately dressed in a very expensive suit....

Ken Ham is a veteran debater on the issue of origins, and he was clearly prepared for the debate. Ham’s arguments were tight and focused, and his demeanor was uniformly calm and professional....

... The clash of ultimate worldview questions was vividly displayed for all to see. Read more >>

Then there are the following comments from Frank Sheed's Genesis Regained from more than four decades ago, which seemed so tame back then but now ly in the face of the far more urgent rumblings of the Zeitgeist:

Those scientists who work on human origins, most of them at least, find it difficult to see the human race as all descended from one couple. Men trained in palaeontology, anthropology, genetics, are practically unanimous in feeling that the frontier between animal and man could not have been crossed by one single individual or pair from whom all the existent races of men have descended.... For those not trained in any of these fields such unanimity must carry great weight.

But can we simply accept it? We lend them our ears, we cannot give them our minds – if for no other reason than they cannot give us theirs. They cannot give us the years of experience.... which have strengthened and enriched their minds, the habits grown instinctive, the reactions grown spontaneous. We can but weigh as much as they can convey to us… We can no more simply swallow scientists than we can swallow historians or theologians.

What we are hearing is the scientific orthodoxy of today, but scientific orthodoxies, like religious, have been known to change....

About the cradle of every religion, said Thomas Huxley, lie extinguished theologians like “the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.” Surely extinguished scientists are as frequent....

[They tell us] to allow the descent of all men from one pair would go against all [proper scientific] mental habits. But belief in God, in immortality, in God-made-man are not among those habits; we cannot be certain of the judgments, even the unanimous judgments, of minds which omit such habits ....

A geneticist tells us that the emergence of a single pair is “infinitely improbable”; if we have followed his arguments we may agree, but with a proviso “unless God intervenes.” Is God’s intervention improbable? Our geneticist may ... well be irritated, even if he happens to be a Christian: God is not part of his scientific habit. To his scientific formation, so much has been contributed by the insights of men who regard God as irrelevant.... (p. viii).

[Hat tip to JM]

Catholic descendant of Charles Darwin

From Ed West (Catholic Herald, UK, June 13, 2013) via Laura Keynes , "I’m a Direct Descendant of Darwin ... and a Catholic" (Strange Notions):

"Are you related to the economist?” people sometimes ask when they see my surname. I explain that, yes, John Maynard Keynes is my great-great-uncle—his brother Geoffrey married Margaret Darwin, my great-grandmother. “So you’re related to Darwin too?” Yes, he’s my great-great-great grandfather. Eyes might fall on the cross around my neck: “And you’re a Christian?” Yes, a Catholic. “How does a Darwin end up Catholic?”

The question genuinely seems to puzzle people. After all, Darwin ushered in a new era of doubt with his theory of evolution, and the Bloomsbury Group, of which Keynes was a part, influenced modern attitudes to feminism and sexuality. How can I be a product of this culture, and yet Catholic? The implication is that simple exposure to my ancestors’ life work should have shaken me out of my backwards error.

I’m a product of what Noel Annan called “the intellectual aristocracy”, the web of kinship uniting British intellectuals over the 18th to 20th centuries....

[Hat tip to Dr. E. Echeverria]

"Evolution"

... in quotes, because the word is notoriously ambiguous. It is best broken down into component theses, as Alvin Plantinga once did in an essay (e.g. ancient earth thesis, common ancestry thesis, naturalistic origins thesis, etc., some of which there is evidence for, and others for which there is none whatsoever). But here this is beside the point, since nearly everyone seems to think of "it" as some sort of settled simplicity that any credible intellectual worth his salt must simply assume as a matter of course to be taken seriously (witness Ben Stein's well-known documentary).

As such, "it" has become a matter that just won't go away. A recent article by Carol Glatz, "Human evolution: Science, faith explore the mysterious emergence of man" (Catholic News Service, April 25, 2013), reports that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences recently brought together world-renown scientific experts, evolutionary biologists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, neuroscientists, theologians and philosophers to discuss the major physical and cultural changes that occurred during mankind's evolution. The article states:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Evolutionary science is still grappling with understanding how the human species, with its unique capacities for language, culture, abstract reasoning and spirituality, may have emerged from a pre-ape ancestor.

Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, declared that theology and philosophy "must not engage in a losing battle to establish the facts of nature that constitute the very scope of science"; rather, they "should ask themselves how they can find a meeting point with and become enriched by the naturalist viewpoint of science, starting from the assumption that the human being is already a speaking, questioning being," he added.

The CNS article continues:

How that speaking, questioning being emerged from a 5 million-year-long lineage of other primates is still a matter of much debate.

"It is?" responds Rorate Caeli, in "The inerrant word of God does not 'evolve'" (April, 28, 2013), adding: "Sadly, even modern Churchmen have succumbed to the false religion -- and poor science -- of evolution. I say modern Churchmen, as the Church doctors never sat around wondering if their ancestors -- Adam and Eve -- lived in trees and ate bananas."

Rorate interestingly offers two links, adding: "Que this traditional, learned priest -- who is also a trained scientist. Give them a listen, and discuss:

• Evolution: a False Religious World View Masqueraded as Science; and this:
  
• Big Bang Fizzles, Moses Sizzles

Richard Dawkins v. Cardinal Pell: debate

Richard Dawkins and Australian Catholic Cardinal George Pell discuss religion, morals and evolution on Q&A. (April 10, 2012 ABC TV):


There are a number of things I like about Cardinal Pell, including some things he has written and said about the Catholic Church and her traditions in the past. This debate, however, is not one of them.

Some may think he scores a number of clever points against Dawkins, but even then he spends more time lurching lamely into defensive postures than should ever be necessary with the likes of Dawkins, whose arguments could be shredded into confetti with a few quick strokes by any reasonably well-educated Catholic philosopher, which shouldn't be hard to find.

What would be hard to find these days, however, is a Catholic reasonably well-educated as the the relation of science to the Bible, and particularly to the early parts of the Book of Genesis. Cardinal Pell embodies this pathetic state of affairs himself, by lurching into indefensible speculations about the descent of human beings from pre-human progenitors, perhaps in South Africa, and trying to reconcile such speculations with the early chapters of Genesis by unnecessarily conceding that most of the accounts related in these texts are mere myths.

Dawkins' arguments are so lame that he barely constitutes a threat to the theist. But Cardinal Pell does the Church no service here by practically painting the Catholic into a corner of near irrelevance in the discussion. Lame. Lame. Lame.

Shucks, I suppose the Cardinal deserves some credit for being willing to go on TV and at least attempting to defend the Catholic faith.

An example of much better arguments and counter-arguments, with few exceptions, is provided by this discussion between Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Alvin Plantinga.

Rampant Evolutionist fideism

"Missing Link Found, 'Eighth Wonder of the World'" (Sky News, May 20, 2009) and "Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution" (SkyNews, May 20, 2009).

If this were a Pentecostal revival tent meeting, it would be one thing; but it's not. It's an Evolutionist revival tent meeting, with true believers waiving their arms in the air, babbling in tongues, rolling in the aisles, and falling in dead faints in front of the klieg lights and cameras.

These supposedly sober men of science have just unveiled a fossilized skeleton of a monkey that was actually found over 20 years ago. Why precisely now, during the bicentenary of Darwin's birth? Well, there's money to be made in all this hype, of course; and, given waxing interest in such "horrors" as Intelligent Design theory, it's high time for a new springtime in the New Evolutionist Evangelization, to shore up the flagging faith of the true believers. It's not likely they're really interested, however, in discussing these facts.

Oh, no, they breathlessly tell us, they've been secretly preparing to unveil the "eighth wonder of the world"!!! "[P]roof of this transitional species [they KNOW this, of course!] finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution"!!! Darwin "would have been thrilled" to have seen this fossil"!!!!

Unconfirmed reports continue to circulate that, according to reliable eyewitnesses, Richard Dawkins became so excited upon hearing this report that he soiled his trousers.

Dubbed "Ida," the fossil "tells us [FINALLY!] who we are and where we came from"!!! Right. And the fossil is precisely "47 million years old!" The scientific researchers, of course, KNOW that the figure could not have been, say, 42.3 million years, or 24.5 million years. This is HARD SCIENCE, after all ...

If you find that you have some difficulty mustering the kind of stratospheric leaps of faith called for by these true-believer Evolutionist pulpiteers, when they invite you, with every head bowed and every eye closed, to get up out of your seat and walk that sawdust trail up to the altar of self-congratulatory "scientific" enlightenment, you may want to try something a bit less emotional, more rational and level-headed.

I recommend Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

Every bit as timely now as when it was first written, this is a remarkably well-researched book ... No, that is far too modest: the research is of breathtaking breadth, such as only a polymath intellectual like Adler could muster.

Adler phrases his title advisedly, precisely in the way he poses the problem. By focusing on the "difference" of man from non-man, he shows that the question at issue is of the sort that cannot be answered by any single discipline. Traditionally philosophy and theology have monopolized the subject of human nature; but neither philosophy or theology cannot presume to answer the question alone, as they cannot claim exclusive jurisdiction over the broad-ranging aspects of the question. Many facets of the question must be addressed by various special sciences, he shows, including biology, paleontology, neurology, psychology, and even computer science and research in artificial intelligence. But then, none of these special sciences is competent to reflect with epistemological self-consciousness upon their own first principles. That requires a philosophical mind, if not one versed also in matters of theology.

It is the single, most level-headed and most thoroughly researched discussion of the question I have seen. Highly recommended.

[Oh, then again, Adler is so gauche as to use the word "MAN" in his title. So what could he possibly know?]

Of related interest

• Mortimer J. Adler, Intellect: Mind over Matter (1st Collier Books Ed edition, 1993), a version of The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes rewritten by Adler in more accessible terms, as kindly called to our attention by Dr. Max Weismann.

Thomas Nagel defends intelligent design

• Prominent Atheist Professor Thomas Nagel Calls Intelligent Design Scientific and Constitutional (Free Republic, September 15, 2008)
  
• Thomas Nagel Critiques Dawkins: The Design-Cannot-Possibly-Be-True Argument (IDTF, October 23, 2006)

[Hat tip to E.E.]

Perniciously misleading spin

"Vatican Accepts Darwin's Theory Of Evolution Compatible With Christianity" (AHN, February 12, 2009).

This may not be inaccurate reporting, if indeed it is true, as the article states, that "Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said Darwin's theory which the Church was against in the past, is compatible with Christianity." Nevertheless, it remains egregiously confusing and misleading publicity. "Darwin's theory" is far from being a tidy, uncomplicated package of ideas. There are inconsistencies within it, and there is much that is rejected by Darwin's own contemporary stepchildren and proponents; and there are elements in it that are clearly inimical to the Catholic Faith. "Sound bites," of course, are not the stuff of subtle analysis; but misleading statements can be highly problematic and fatally confusing the the faithful. It is broadly supposed now that the Vatican dropped the ball in the publicity department in the instance of the Holocaust-denying bishop. Yet the Vatican's publicity on the question of the theory of Evolution has been consistently confused and confusing ever since Pope John Paul II's 1996 "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution," which was widely interpreted by both elated liberals and alarmed reactionaries, in the absence of forthcoming caveats and clarification, as an unqualified pontifical embrace of Evolution as a "fact," simpliciter.

It would have been helpful if the Vatican publicity personnel could have acknowledged at least the complexity of the issue. Notre Dame University's Reformed philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, at least had the presence of mind in addressing the issue some years ago to ferret out no less than five distinct claims resident within the "Grand Evolutionary Story":

The first thing to see is that a number of different large-scale claims fall under this general rubric of evolution. First, there is the claim that the earth is very old, perhaps some 4.5 billion years old: The Ancient Earth Thesis, as we may call it. Second, there is the claim that life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms of life. In the beginning there was relatively simple unicellular life, perhaps of the sort represented by bacteria and blue green algae, or perhaps still simpler unknown forms of life. (Although bacteria are simple compared to some other living beings, they are in fact enormously complex creatures.) Then more complex unicellular life, then relatively simple multicellular life such as seagoing worms, coral, and jelly fish, then fish, then amphibia, then reptiles, birds, mammals, and finally, as the culmination of the whole process, human beings: the Progress Thesis, as we humans may like to call it (jelly fish might have a different view as to where to whole process culminates). Third, there is the Common Ancestry Thesis: that life originated at only one place on earth, all subsequent life being related by descent to those original living creatures-the claim that, as Stephen Could puts it, there is a "tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy."12 According to the Common Ancestry Thesis, we are literally cousins of all living things-horses, oak trees and even poison ivy-distant cousins, no doubt, but still cousins. (This is much easier to imagine for some of us than for others.) Fourth, there is the claim that there is a (naturalistic) explanation of this development of fife from simple to complex forms; call this thesis Darwinism, because according to the most popular and well-known suggestions, the evolutionary mechanism would be natural selection operating on random genetic mutation (due to copy error or ultra violet radiation or other causes); and this is similar to Darwin's proposals. Finally, there is the claim that life itself developed from non-living matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry: call this the Naturalistic Origins Thesis. These five theses are of course importantly different from each other. They are also logically independent in pairs, except for the third and fourth theses: the fourth entails the third, in that you can't sensibly propose a mechanism or an explanation for evolution without agreeing that evolution has indeed occurred. The combination of all five of these theses is what I have been calling 'The Grand Evolutionary Story'; the Common Ancestry Thesis together with Darwinism (remember, Darwinism isn't the view that the mechanism driving evolution is just what Darwin says it is) is what one most naturally thinks of as the Theory of Evolution.

This would be a start, at least; and the kind of care in presuppositional analysis that Plantinga's little piece goes on to display is a welcome antidote to the flat-footed statements emanating from the Vatican.

No intelligence allowed

I just saw "Expelled" for the first time. It's always been a fascinating question to me why so much controversy is generated by anyone who simply questions the sacred cow of reigning scientific orthodoxy, the Sacred Tradition of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory. Stein's movie does so with occasional Monty-Python-esque humor, as in the clip "Expelled: How Life Began" (scan down to the lower of the two videos linked here), which is based on a movie I remember seeing at the Smithsonian as a child. The hue and cry from the Holy Office of the Inquisition is unimaginably and boringly predictable. Which also has me wondering why a sense of humor seems to be confined to the side of traditional Jews (like Ben Stein) and Christians (like Alvin Plantinga), and why professed atheists are so lugubriously humorless on this issue. Go figure.