[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Brian Miller. Today I'll be interviewing Father Martin Hilbert about his recent book, A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Father Martin was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and as a child he migrated to Canada after the Soviet Union invaded his nation. He has a master's of applied science in electrical engineering and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Toronto. Father Martin studied for the priesthood at St. Philip's Seminary, where he now teaches a course in the philosophy of science. He is a priest of the Oratory of St Philip Nari in Toronto. Father Martin, thank you for joining me.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Delighted to be here, Brian.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Now, I think a great place for us to begin would be at the beginning of the book where you describe what motivated you for writing this book. Could you please share that story with us?
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Sure. It's actually really the third part of my motivation. I've been interested in this for the greater part of my life because I always took science seriously. And I realized that here Darwinism was an alternative creation account. And if it was true, I really could not see how the Christian worldview was true. And if Darwinism was true, I don't see how we could have arguments for natural law and all those very other important things for a ordered society. So that was always a question on my mind. Then I read Christopher Baglow's book about faith and science in the cutting edge, and I realized that there were serious flaws with the Darwinian account as he presents it. And I thought that it would be worth writing something to balance that. And then finally, what drove me to it, I was talking to a parishioner of ours who's been teaching catechism for a few years, and she said to me, you know, Father, don't worry. I'm teaching the kids about Adam and Eve and original sin and all that, but we can't believe that, can we? And so I thought, well, I think it's time to actually sit down and write the book.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Well, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was very readable. It was very broad, but very accessible. So thank you for your effort. And I wonder if you would mind, if you could just give us an overview of the topics you covered in the book and some of its layout.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Sure. So I thought that it was important to describe what evolution. What is meant by evolution. And there are, of course, different meanings. And then I thought that I would. I need to present some empirical evidence. And that's always what struck me. Is that there really is very little empirical evidence for the grand theory.
And so I have that as a quite a long chapter. Talk about the fossil evidence, the astronomical odds against hitting upon a protein of a given type by chance that would work. And also the origin of life studies. So that was a chapter.
Then I gave an introductory chapter on the philosophy of science, trying to trace its Christian origins and also how it ended up how science sees itself as just about the efficient and material causality and wanting to keep God out of the door, to keep the divine foot out of the door, to quote Richard Lewontin. And as an alternative, I made the case for intelligent design, which is really just the inference to the best explanation. We use intelligent design in other areas and it works. We have the ability and innate ability to detect what is design. And in that chapter I also really tried to stress that intelligent design is not a God of the gaps, but something that one is led to after considering all the various options. And also to remind people that the universe must be permeable to the spiritual, that God creates each human soul. And that's physics, somehow has to make room for these divine interventions, these divine creations.
Then I went on to discuss the problems with dismissing intelligent design. The Catholic faith teaches us that we must be able to come to at least the belief in the God of the philosophers, from creation, from human, with human reasons. And if you block id, you're not going to be left with very much, very much that anybody's going to believe, except for those trained in metaphysics, to mystic metaphysics. And ID is I think, also the traditional biblical way of arguing for the existence of God from his wonderful creation.
Then I had to deal with another chapter. I dealt with problem of evil. Like if God is this designer, why do we have things like drakes that rape, sea otters that rape, and praying mantises that do all sorts of really nasty things to their mates, like eat them.
And also discussing supposedly suboptimal designs. And yes, I keep on pointing out to people that we live in a fallen universe and that original sin doesn't affect just man, but the whole of creation.
Then I have a chapter looking at archaeological evidence for early man, the fossil evidence and the technological evidence that we have, just to give people some sort of timeline when art began and various different levels of tools, fire, that kind of thing. Then there's a chapter on human exceptionality, because that's again, I think a very important idea. If we are just animals and we're allowed to kill cows, to eat them, well, why can't we just kill human beings?
So I think it's really important to show that there is something in us. We usually talk about the imago dei, the image of God, the immaterial soul. And in this way, in this chapter, I talked about this. Epistemologically, how can we know if we're just chemical soup? Why should we think that our thoughts have any relationship to objective reality? I talked about the placebo effect, near death experiences, evidence from neurology, such as the experiments of Wilder Penfield, and also artificial intelligence. And then I moved into, well, the last major chapter before the recapitulation. And that chapter is, well, first of all, Darwin's motivation, which I think was pretty dark and materialistic in coming up with his theory in the first place. And then what happens when Catholics try to incorporate a theory that was designed to be propaganda for materialism and try to incorporate it into Catholic theology? So in the last chapters, the recapitulation, just in case people have got fed up with too many details and the chapters, the last chapter has the whole landscape, so to speak.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I really love the way that you interweave the conversation with science, theology, history, philosophy. It was really enjoyable to read. And one topic that I was, I always appreciate is the history of Christian theology because there's the impression for many people this idea of evolution being integrated with Christian theology is very natural. But what did you write about? What Christians historically believed about God's role in the creation and in particular about the formation of humans.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Right.
Well, certainly in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, you have the psalms that just sing God's praises for the heavens, declare the glory of God. And Psalm 103 just talks about all these great things that God has done. Sun and moon, frost and cold. We also have that in Daniel, the book of Daniel. And yes, you do have animals there, but it's the whole of creation. There's stars, sea, cold, hot, and often with human beings at the pinnacle. And they are, of course, the pinnacle of creation, the last to be created on the sixth day in the first book of the first chapter of Genesis.
So. And then in the example of our Lord, Jesus talks about the sparrows and the lilies of the field. So he's also talking to people about things that they can see, basically life around them and getting them to recognize that their heavenly Father cares about them, that he doesn't let a sparrow fall without him knowing it. So all the more so he cares about you. And then in thinking about the creation of man, there's a wonderful Chapter in the second book of Maccabees, which I know does not make it into the Protestant scriptures. I think they call it the Deuterocanonical books. But it's about the mother of the seven sons who are being asked to eat pork and refusing to do it. And she has a wonderful passage, trying to shore up the courage of her last son. The six are now dead. And she writes, I do not know how you came into my being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore, the creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of man and devised the origin of all things, will, in his mercy, give life and breath back to you. I beg you, my child, to look at the heavens and the earth and see everything in them and recognize that God did not make them out of nothing that existed. Thus, also man came into being, so created directly by God. Ex Nicolas. That's where we get the phrase ex nicolo from that particular book of the Bible. So, yes, I think. I hope that that answers what you were getting at.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really wonderful. And could you talk a little bit also about church history? Like, what have some of the leaders of the Church or the fathers and doctors of the Church believed about life demonstrating evidence of design? Is that a view they held?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Well, I think that the way that we're looking at it right now, probably the only thing I can think of would be Augustine and his rational reasons.
And he thought that God could have built into creation the ability to change over time. But there really wasn't an ongoing debate from the time of Augustine in the 4th and early 5th century until people got started out in the 19th century.
But the idea that God created the universe and that. And I think that that's where we get into the origin of science. I think that science was possible only in a culture that believed that the world was designed and that we were also given a mind that had the wherewithal to find this design. And on top of that, that it would give glory to God for us to try and figure out the order. And. And that, I think, was the essential ingredient that got science rolling in late medieval times.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You see this idea that the knowledge of how belief that God is the Creator and you see evidence of design in nature, we'd expect to understand it and do science. That is deeply profound. And I know you also talked about Thomas Aquinas. What did Thomas Aquinas believe about creation and about whether Life demonstrated a type.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Of design, but he would certainly say that it demonstrated a kind of design. And in fact one of his passages in the Summa Contra Gentiles, which was written to try to convert the non Christians the Gentiles speaks about, you notice the way that flowers are arranged, always in a specific way. And if you're going to get that, you're not going to get that by chance. That's the work of an intelligent person. I'm grateful to Father Michael Kverick for pointing that out to me, but I think that it's, it is absolutely true. Now there are fun things that I was able to clear up along the way. You might think spontaneous generation.
You do have big mistakes on the part of Thomas. Thomas thought that maggots would just come out of putrefaction by some astro astronomical force that would come in. We now know that's not the case. So I always, I remember being told as a teenager, well, as a Catholic, all you have to believe is that God created the first cell and that then you can believe in evolution. But I was like, where did that come from? The cell theory of life didn't come into play really until, you know, the 19th century.
So this is not an ancient teaching at all. But certainly Thomas saw intelligence in the created order. And Thomas also insists, which the reason popes have insisted as well is that the human soul is created immediately by God. Meaning that there's no that God doesn't use an instrumental cause, he just gets directly involved. It's not that he's using water to make it or he's using chemicals in a particular way that they come together and they make a human soul. No, the human soul is an immaterial reality and God has to make it. That's Thomas, 13th century. So I think question 91 in the pre opar. But I could be wrong about that.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Okay, great. And then so it sounds like this idea of design in nature, Thomas's fifth way, different things like that were very consistent with what we talk about, design in nature. But then that shifted with many Catholic philosophers.
Could you explain how the Catholic Church originally responded to Darwinian evolution and then also talk about how that perspective changed over time and why?
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Right. Well, the very first response to Darwinian evolution came in 1860.
The bishops of Germany had a meeting in Cologne and they condemned the whole thing. And then there was a man named St. George Myvert who took an English scientist who argued against Darwin more or less along the lines of St. Augustine's seminal reasons, saying that yes, animals could have changed. But it was by God's design, something that God built into them. And for his, he was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate by one of the Roman universities.
But then I think that the Church was very careful on how to deal with other enthusiasts for evolution because the Galileo case was enough to scare the ecclesiastics from making another blunder. And so Father Kabarik in his historical work shows that elicit litany of people who were basically silenced quietly. Raphael, Calverney, Dalmas, Leroy, John Z. Henri d'orledo. They were all priests who had argued for what is today called theistic evolution.
And this is one of the things that in Christopher Baglo's book, you have no sense of any of these behind the scenes maneuvers. And that might be forgiven, a scholar might be forgiven for that because they're not well known names. But then there's Tyra de Chardin, who was silenced about seven times and was forbidden from publishing his phenomenon with men. And anybody that's writing about the Catholic Church and evolution really ought to know that there were problems with it. Now, in 1950 we had Pope Pius XII writing an encyclical called Humani Generis and that only had a few paragraphs devoted to mankind and evolution. And there he gave. He insisted first of all that you have to go back to monogenesin, meaning one Adam and one Eve, because he said otherwise you cannot see how to account for original sin.
But he said, I give you permission, but only if you're going to be very careful and only if you're going to have people that are experts in both theology and in the sciences to discuss the possibility of the human body somehow being evolved through the ages. Well, as soon as that came out, everybody ignored the cautions and of course it happened. Evolution is a fact. And you have tire de Chardin sort of being the big, I guess, focus.
And he really is, I think, a very dangerous man. I've got quite a lot in my book about him, but I think one of the things that's that I was surprised to learn he knew Epienne Gilson, who was a great Catholic theologian and philosopher rather.
And Gilson met Teilhard in on two occasions. One was when Teilhard was doing a baptism and Gilson was the godfather. And Gel sand was really impressed with Teilhard's priestly demeanor. Next time he meets, and it's about a year later, and it's a year before Teilhard's death in 19. So that was in 1954. He met him, Teilhard came up to him and warmly clasped him. And he said, hey, can you tell me if anybody is ever going to give us a scoop on this meta Christianity that we've all been waiting to hear about?
And Gilson wrote to Dulue back, said, for three days, I'm still shaking. I mean, what is this man doing? And next time that he goes by Teilhard, it's about three hours later. And Teilhard's engrossed in his breviary, just go, like, what is going on here?
And tired.
Anyways, the next person, that sort of next step that was interesting in Catholic thinking about evolution was John Paul II's address to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1996.
There was a line that said that evolution is more than a hypothesis. The way that it got translated into English.
People are interested. They can read a footnote in my book about how that all happened. But it's clear that it was not an endorsement of Darwinism, because first of all, as soon as he says that evolution is more than a hypothesis, he says, and to be correct, one should speak of the theories in the plural, because there are many explanations on how these change over time could have taken place. Then. He specifically says that any theory that sees the human mind as just an epiphenomenon of matter, something arising out of matter, is incompatible with the truth about man.
And yes, good, I'm glad he said that. But that's not the way it got reported. The way it got reported was often Pope John Paul II endorses Darwinism.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Well, I really enjoyed just the intriguing stories you had in your book about these different players who helped to shape theology. And you alluded to some of this already. But what are some of the concerns you have about attempts to integrate evolution with Christian with the Christian faith? What dangers do you see in that?
[00:21:25] Speaker A: I think two. Well, I see that there's really two very big concerns. One is original sin. I mean, every human being, if. Well, ask himself at some point, I hope, if God is all good and God is all powerful, which is what we tend to think, why is there such?
Why is there so much evil in the world around us and in our souls? Why is the one reality, what we fear? Death? Why is there disease? Why do we kill each other? And the church to this day says original sin. It's because it's not that God made it that way. It's because Adam and Eve rebelled against him. And their rebellion was not just some, know, backwards altercation that didn't have ramification. It's it's big.
And it, I think it goes into the rest of creation. You see in the Genesis account that all of a sudden it was no longer possible for man to just pick ripe fruits and enjoy it. He had to work for his food with the sweat of his brow, and thorns and thistles would grow up in his field. And childbearing was going to be difficult. And you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. So it's a really big problem. And original sin. And Teilhard says, oh, original sin. I never thought that I should be talking about original sin in a treatise about scientific treatise about man. Well, I don't think the phenomenon is scientific treatise. And I'm not the only one who doesn't think so. It's just bad poetry, as some people have put it.
But the original sin is like a really big thing. And we see that also, you know, in today's, today's work of theistic evolutionists like Baglock. Christopher Baglow quotes Kenneth Miller, who talks about the brain being a human brain being composed of brains that supposedly came at different stages of evolution. And somehow I guess that they were held together by some preternatural band aids. And then when Adam and Eve messed up, these band aids fell off. And now we're the creatures that evolution is expected to produce. Those who are obsessed with sex, those who are avaricious, those who are nasty to one another. Because if you're not nasty, then somebody who is will get you out of the gene pool.
So I think that's a real problem.
Another problem with theistic evolution kind of approach is that you have people like Kenneth Miller saying that would God have been disappointed if some other creature had come to the, to self consciousness through the evolutionary process and says, I don't think so. So that's. To me that just says you've just basically contradicted divine omniscience for starters. And if a creature can come to self consciousness through an evolutionary process, just a material process, what is the soul doing? I mean, the self consciousness is something that we usually associate with the immaterial soul. So you have a problem like that and you also have problems with, I think you have problems with the theology of the body, which I think is also fundamentally important to the big Christian story. It's God going out to seek a bride. The people of Israel, they rebel time and time again. They're adulterous, he has to chastise them. Finally, Christ is the bridegroom.
The marital imagery is essential to the Christian story. And I think it goes Back to Adam being put into a sleep, somehow Eve being taken out of his side. And all of that is made nonsense of by various theories of theistic evolution. So I see some of the problems there.
And as I'm very disappointed by the various efforts to deal with this, there was in the 1990s Francisco Ayala, who's now deceased, but he claimed that the variation in our genetic makeup is such that what we are never came from a group of animals that was fewer than 10,000.
Well, Ann Gouger showed that that wasn't the case.
But you have still people in the field, Thomistic evolution field, such as Father Nicanor astriaco. And in 2016 in the book, saying, well, you know, the pontific, the International Commission, the Theological Commission, thought that perhaps that might be okay.
But then three years later, in 2019, the new edition says, oh, I've got it now. There was Noam Chomsky mentioned that perhaps there was a really, really lucky mutation that gave one of our ancestors 100,000 years ago the ability to speak. And so he learned how to speak. And then of course, there was nobody to mate with him who was also intelligent. So of course you have bestiality there. But eventually he gave rise to sons and daughters, and that's how we all are here today. That's a version of monogenesis, which Father Ostriaco has in his 2019 book. And again, a material change, one genetic mutation, something that. And something that has been around. This idea has been around for quite some time from Noam Chomsky. So it's disappointing to see somebody in 2019 picking it up and thinking it's cutting edge.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Oh, it's really fascinating. And also you've mentioned a lot of now, and in your book you mentioned all these challenges to the faith that this theory presents. And you also talk about the scientific challenges. Despite all of this evidence, why are so many Catholic academics still embracing evolution so staunchly?
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Well, I think it is a cultural kind of thing. It was the gatekeeper to the sciences. And we've seen in some of the other books that the Discovery Institute Press has published the consequences, academic consequences of people that speak against it. I come, as mentioned at the beginning from Communist Czechoslovakia. I have a lot of stories from my parents. And by the 60s or by even the 50s, most of intelligent people just knew that Marxism was just a big lie enforced by the culture at large. And, well, with the army and the police behind it.
And everybody just laughed at it in private, but you couldn't do anything in public. And there's sort of an analogy there.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: That's really, that's a beautiful analogy. Now, in terms of the science, what were some of your favorite scientific arguments that you talked about in the book?
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Well, I think that the biggest one, the most obvious is the lack of fossils. And when you just have these arrivals, these explosions of new life that don't have any leading up to them. I like playing around with the odds of assembling a protein.
I like mathematics. I used to be an engineer, as you mentioned. And so it's was very pleased to see that a man named Eden, an engineer, said, hey, you've got 20amino acids and you got a 200amino acid long protein. How many ways can you make that? That's like 20 to the power of 200. That's just not going to happen by chance. So I like that kind of thing. And then sort of as a, as a sort of fun thing that I came across, and one can come across this from time to time is in Giuseppe Sermonti's book, he points out that leaf and stick insects apparently arrived on the scene long before the objects that they were supposed to mimic so as to gain protection. So it was completely the other way around. And now my nephews and other friends who know that I've written this book like to send me various things. So just the other day I got the snake caterpillar. That's. I forget exactly where it lives, but if you go up to it, it faces you and it looks exactly like a snake. Like an artist could not have drawn a snake better.
That doesn't happen by chance. That's something else.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Those are really nice examples. And as my last question, what impact do you hope your book will make with Catholics and even people of other faith traditions?
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Well, I hope that it'll, that it'll teach them a little bit about science, that science likes to portray itself as coterminous with rationality. During the COVID nonsense, we had follow the science. Well, who science.
And so I'd like to point out that science has a lot of great things for it. I'm happy to promote it as one of the good fruits of Christianity. And yet when it gets out of hand, if it isn't kept in check, it says some pretty incredibly stupid things and causes a lot of damage.
So going back to Cardinal Newman, St. John Henry Newman, who was actually an oratorian priest who brought the oratory to the English speaking world, he talked about the dangers of keeping natural theology, sort of rational theology out of the curriculum. Because unless it's there to adjudicate where things stand.
Other subjects just take over and encroach and make a mess of things. So I'm hoping that this book will give people a sense that you can criticize science without being anti scientific. You're just being anti scientistic, which is a good thing to be. And I want to tell them that the Christian story is the right story.
Bishop Spong said several years ago that Darwin has made nonsense out of the Christian story. And I think that he's right about that much time from Bishop Swang in other ways. But I think he's right in putting his finger on that and saying, well, the thing is that the Darwinian story is the nonsense and the age old revealed truth about God creating the world, creating us in his image and going out to seek union with his people is the real story. And that we can just laugh at other attempts to derail it through a materialistic theory that was designed to be an anti theory to the Catholic view.
[00:32:59] Speaker B: Well, that was very well said and thank you for describing your book for our listeners. It was a fascinating conversation.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Now to learn more about the book and to order a copy yourself, you can go to Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press for Idea Future Future. I am Brian Miller. Thanks for listening.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
