[00:00:00] Speaker A: And so over and over and over again, yeah, science has simply said Darwinism is a failed hypothesis. It works fairly well at a micro evolutionary level, adaptation at the level of species and genus, but in terms of building new kinds of living things, it's a failed hypothesis. It just does not work.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my two part conversation with Fr. Michael Haberic and Steve Green, authors of a new book called Creation or A Catholic Dilemma. Father Haberic is a Dominican friar of the Polish province with a doctorate in systematic theology from Cardinal Stefan Wozinski University in Warsaw. He directs the Steno Institute for Faith and Science. He has published three books he in English and many articles on the faith science dialogue. He seeks to renew the Catholic theology of creation through a new intelligent design and progressive creation paradigm.
Steve Green is director of Holy Family Institute of Catholic Faith and Life and host of the reasonably rational YouTube podcast. He has taught philosophy, theology and ethics for a variety of institutions and presents regularly on issues of faith, science and culture. Gentlemen, welcome back.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Andrew.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Thank you for inviting us.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it's great to have you. Well, last time we discussed why evolution became a dilemma for many Catholics, and today we're exploring a follow up question to what does modern science actually reveal? Does the evolutionary story satisfy the evidence? And if not, what is the more adequate explanation?
Now, Father Michael, for those who may not have enjoyed the first half of our conversation yet, why did you decide to write this book now and why, just briefly, is there a dilemma at all over creation and evolution in the Catholic Church?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: The dilemma is there because we have two completely different views of the origin of species, basically of different forms of life.
One is evolutionary, broadly speaking, which gives priority to the Darwinian theory of evolution in explaining these things. And the other is, we could say creationist, broadly speaking, which gives priority to the Bible and special revelation.
So we believe that the questions of origins should be answered by the Bible or the special revelation that humans received from God. And we believe in this special revelation, whereas the science of evolution is not strong enough to tinker with the traditional biblical interpretation. So this is where the dilemma comes from whether we should give priority to so called science. But in fact it's not, you know, real science. It's more like we could say philosophical idea wrapped up in some kind of scientific language, or we should give priority to the revelation of God, which speaks about the origins of the things in this universe.
So yeah, that's the dilemma.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: Okay. And you gave us some history in part one. You basically said that this dilemma has been around, at least in the modern sense, for the last about 100 years, would you say?
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So since Darwin proposed his theory, there were theologians who thought, okay, Darwin is a materialist, perhaps an atheist. He doesn't speak about God. He actually wants to remove God. We are Christians, but we will, so we will kind of make a blend. We will take evolution as what, as an explanation to, or Darwinian theory, as an explanation of the Origin of species. But we will say that God used this process as a secondary cause, so called. So God is in the beginning of this process. He accompanies this process, he assists this process, he supervises this process. He may even work as a kind of goal in this process, but he doesn't work directly in the creation of species anymore. And his workings are not detectable in any way by, by, by science. So he didn't leave any traces of his activity in the history of the universe.
And we think that modern science completely ruined the idea that God did not leave any traces in, in, in, in the history of the universe.
[00:04:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
Okay, well, that's a very interesting thesis to begin a book now, Steve. Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species on the Origin of species over 160 years ago. And in those 160 plus years, our scientific understanding of life and living things has grown exponentially. I mean, there's just so much that has been discovered and we now have the technology to get right into the cell and see what Darwin and his contemporaries just could not right down to the subcellular level. Has this explosion in scientific knowledge served to confirm Darwin's hypothesis that life and biodiversity arose from a single first living cell and can be explained by natural selection working on variations within species over long periods of time, or has it served to disconfirm it?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Most, most definitely the latter.
You know, it's interesting. So when Darwin wrote Origin of Species, he actually acknowledged a couple of fundamental challenges to his hypothesis that he was well aware of in the science and the literature and the data that was available in his day.
One of them was the fact that in the fossil record, when he was writing Origin of species in 1859, there were these explosive appearances of new forms, new essences, new natures, new kinds of living things.
That is true of animals, things like the Cambrian explosion, but it's also true even of plants. You know, so flowering plants just suddenly show up abruptly in the fossil record.
The, you know, in winged insects show up suddenly, birds show up Suddenly, and Darwin acknowledged, he said, listen, in order for my hypothesis to work, we have to be able to find fossils that demonstrate the slow, gradual, micro evolutionary steps that, that carry us from one species to the next. And in the absence of those transitional forms in the fossil record, that's, that's a, that's a defeater for my theory that they have to be there for my hypothesis to work. So in the ensuing 160 years, there have been many, many, many more fossil deposits discovered all over the world. And instead of turning up those missing links, as they're sometimes popularly called, those transitional forms that have to be there in the fossil record to confirm Darwinism, it has been exactly the opposite. The sudden and explosive appearance virtually out of nowhere in the fossil record of all the different kinds of plant and animal life has only gotten clearer. And so Darwin admitted that would basically spell doom for my theory. Well, that's what the science has showed. And yet his theory still persists. Another one that he acknowledges, he said, because everything has to develop by slow, gradual changes in tiny little steps.
Nature does not move by jumps.
He said, if, if it were to be demonstrated that there was an organ or a feature or a biological system which could not have developed by those slow, gradual, progressive steps over long periods of time in multiple generations, my, my theory would fall apart. Well, we've now discovered that living things are absolutely filthy with those kind of features. What Michael Behe of course refers to as irreducibly complex features, meaning features, organs, systems in living things which are composed of interconnected and mutually supportive functioning parts. And that part, that feature, only does its job. And if all of the parts are there working together, it's not that if you were to remove one of those parts, the system would work less efficiently or less effectively. It simply would not work at all. And many, many, many of these irreducibly complex features that we've discovered, even at the cellular level, are essential features. These aren't ancillary features that maybe determine whether or not a, a cat has long or short fur. These are features that enable it to metabolize nutrients and therefore survive or to reproduce and therefore propagate the species.
And there are, there are many, many others. Those are just two that speak specifically to the defeaters that Charles Darwin himself named. And on both counts, Darwinism completely loses. Science has crushed Darwinism.
But what's also interesting, just to make the point quickly, as science has progressed in the last 160 years, multiple other fields and scientific disciplines have weighed in on Darwinism. So mathematics for instance, has calculated the number of organisms and the number of mutations that would be required to even produce the simplest proteins that are necessary for all living things. And there's simply not enough time in the history of the universe, nor have there been anywhere close to enough organisms in the history of the universe to get it done. So mathematics says Darwinism doesn't work. Interestingly, recently, engineering has also entered the conversation to say when we look at living things, we don't see this slipshod, barely good enough evolutionary outcome. We see astonishingly sophisticated engineering and ingenuity that human engineers would love to be able to duplicate and are not even close to being able to do so. Which again indicates that there is an ultimate engineer behind the structure of living things and then chemistry as well. And this is particularly difficult for Darwinism on the whole origin of life question, because chemists have weighed in and said, listen, you're asking chemicals to somehow organize themselves and then come to life. It's not possible. There are thousands of chemical, of chemical properties that need to be satisfied that chemicals cannot do on their own.
And so over and over and over again, yeah, science has simply said Darwinism is a failed hypothesis. It works fairly well at a micro evolutionary level, adaptation at the level of species and genus, but in terms of building new kinds of living things, it's a failed hypothesis. It just does not work.
[00:11:14] Speaker C: Yeah, and of course you're unpacking a lot of these shortcomings of neo Darwinian evolution in the book. Now, Father Michael, what are we to make of the claim that the human body evolved from ape like pre human ancestors? That seems to be an accepted fact among many paleontologists. But you claim that there are some real problems with that idea.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah, obviously it's not a fact, because facts is something that you can observe. We do not see apes turning into humans, evolving into humans. We do not see any hominids. They're just humans and apes in both in the fossil record and in my opinion, and also living alive, what we see now. So yeah, obviously if you assume the evolutionary origin of man, then you have it when you look at the fossil record, because wherever you see something that does not match any of the species, you create a new kind of hominid or hominin and you in a way fill in the gaps. But if you look into the essential features of the ape like skeleton and human like skeleton, these are two completely different structures and they differ with almost every bone. I mean, every bone is totally structurally different.
So we do not see anything in between because humanity Comes with bipedalism and bipedalism require. Human bipedalism requires very specific skeleton. Every bone, every bone is different in humans due to the way how we move around our locomotion requires different skeleton. So my kind of philosophical slash biological argument is that because bipedalism was shown to be ineffective in running, we are 27% less effective than any quadrupeds or a mammal of similar size. Therefore bipedalism is an ineffective way of moving around. Therefore it has to come with reason. Because our reasoning allows us to produce tools and the tools make up for the deficiency of our bodies. So we do not run efficiently. But we can use other animals like horses, or we can produce carriages and now cars and airplanes and everything what you have.
So the, so bipedalism requires reason. And if you look from this, I would say correct from the point of view of correct anthropology, which assumes that reason is the human in the human soul, which is immaterial. And you need to adopt it from philosophy. It's not provable. Right. But you can see that once you have reason and you look at the human body from this standpoint, you see that there is a perfect compatibility between the body and the soul, rational soul. And you cannot have human or human like body without the rational soul. Which means that the entire story where they speak about transformation of an ape body to the human body, and then at the end of this process, some kind of infusion of the rational soul, this entire process is not possible because why would even evolution begin to go from the animal body, ape body, which is perfectly adapted to the environment and it doesn't miss anything, to a human body that without reason cannot even survive. Why would evolution make such a, such a, such a step?
The homing it. So the idea that there is a creature that has a human body but doesn't have rational soul, which means it doesn't think, it doesn't produce tools, it doesn't produce weaponry.
This, this is a dead end, evolutionary dead end.
In an unadapted body or universal body like human body, and no reason, so no capacity to use this body to produce tools. That's, that's a, that's a non starter. Or we could say it's dead in the water. Right. Which means that there is a huge gap between humans and apes. And that's why I don't think there is any evidence for the existence of creatures between humans and apes. But you can challenge the existence of such creatures just using philosophical and biological arguments.
[00:15:49] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, those are some great points. To apply to that discipline. It's a very creative discipline where they're taking bones or fragments of something and creatively applying it to an interpretation that already rules out certain things and by default includes others.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: May I add here that how they create those so called hominies, which is non rational creatures that are almost like humans in the look, they just combine ape features, especially chimpanzee features and human features. So these are hybrids, but they are clearly created, made up because they are not unique. Everything you see in those so called hominids, especially when they depict them in the images, this is just combination. Like they would take a human that is bent a little bit and then they, they would add a chimpanzee head to it, or a fur, you know, hair like a chimpanzee hair to human like features, human like body that is almost erect, but it's still a little bit, you know, crooked, whatever. So that's, that's, that's the way how they create those things under the assumption that they must have existed. But there is no real evidence that they have ever existed.
And I think there is some kind of catch 22 problem which means that in order to have the human like body, you need to to a human soul. In order to get the soul, you need the human body. Because the human soul can animate only the human body. Which means that the soul and the body have to come together. And evolutionary story always speaks about the body coming first. Alternatively, some would say that, some theologians obviously would say that God would infuse the soul into an animal like a chimpanzee. But then it is also non correct from the philosophical standpoint to say that the human soul animates non human body. So basically adopt this classic Christian anthropology which speaks about the immaterial soul and the body, then you can't even imagine a correct or any plausible scenario of evolution going from apes to humans.
[00:18:13] Speaker C: Yeah, very interesting. Now evolutionists maintain that chance and necessity, unforeseen events and the laws of nature are sufficient to explain the rise of life and the stunning biodiversity we see all around us. But of course in this book you're arguing that the theory of intelligent design makes a scientific case for including a third explanation. Explain why you think chance and necessity are not enough as you detail in the book.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: That I think is one of the things that science has demonstrated most clearly in the 160 plus years since Darwin and largely just by way of increased sophistication of observation. So you know, we have microscopes that are able to see down to the atomic and subcellular level, we have telescopes that are able to see out into the far reaches of the cosmos. So just the sheer. The sheer data that we have observationally and directly from science is it would have been almost inconceivable in Darwin's day.
And so, you know, for instance, looking at cells. So Darwin and scientists of Darwin's day were aware that living things were made up of cells. But because of the limitations of what they could observe, they had never seen the inside of a cell. So their conclusion was cells looked like these kind of little jelly donuts floating around in your bloodstream or in your tissues.
In fact, Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin's great proponent in Great Britain, he said that the cell is a simple undifferentiated globule of protoplasm. And that's what it looked like. And so, in a sense, I guess you can maybe see how Darwinism appeared plausible in 1859, because the idea was, if you just kind of reconfigure these little globules of undifferentiated protoplasm known as cells, that's how you get different kinds of living things. Well, we've been inside the cell now, and the inside of a cell is like New York City. It has transportation systems, it has machinery, it has factories, it has storage facilities, it's metabolizing, it's maintaining homeostasis. And so the sophistication of what's present simply gives the lie to the idea that chance and necessity alone could produce what we see. And the reason for that is you look at the multiple layers of functional systems and subsystems and organs and organelles all the way down to the cellular level and then up to the level of what you actually see. You know, the, the bones, the. The muscles, the tissues, the organs in any living organism.
And all of that functions together. And not only does it function together, but it's. It's run by information.
So in order for that organism to develop, there have to be genes that are sequenced properly. Certain genes are turned off at a certain point in the developmental sequence. Other genes are switched off.
Sets of genes are switched on together because they're performing almost like a symphonic structure, building function in that organism.
And when we see information, as the intelligent design theorists have done such a beautiful job of illustrating, when we see functional, specified information instructions that actually produce something, we're talking about the work of an intelligence. And so to ask matter by itself, nature by itself, to organize, systematize, guide, direct and Even correct. I mean, there are copying errors, but there's little machines that find the copying errors and fix the copying errors. To ask nature to do that simply by way of the laws of nature or the properties of matter, it's almost comically insufficient. And so what intelligent design theorists have proposed and what father Michael and I, as progressive creationists would simply agree with, is that you need a third cause. You cannot explain the complexity, the diversity, the information, the epigenetics, the sequencing, the ratioing, the irreducible complexity of what we have now observed for the last 160 years with purely chance and necessity.
There is almost endless evidence of a guiding and ordering intelligence which has put all of this in place and directed it.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. 150, 200 years ago, the idea worked, or could work, you know, that this could come about through chance processes and the laws of necessity. But, sorry, that has to be off the table now because of what we know.
It's not a God of the gaps, what we don't know. So God did it. It's because what we do know, this no longer functions as an adequate explanation.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: Darwinism.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: I would put it very simply. In early modernity, there was a conviction that the entire universe consists of matter and energy. In the 20th century, we discovered that there is matter, energy, and information.
So when you have just matter and energy, you can rely on just material causes. But when you have information, we know that information is produced by intelligence. Therefore, you need adopt intelligent design as a cause for producing information. And this discovery of information in nature brings us to the necessity of adopting intelligent design.
[00:23:45] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. As my friend and colleague Dr. Stephen Meyer is fond of saying, information runs the show in biology, you know, and it's about time we admit that and update our theories accordingly. Now, here's a question for you, Father Michael.
There's been an idea among many evolutionary biologists that because animals have certain features in common, this is evidence of Darwin's idea of universal common ancestry, or common descent, as it's known. You disagree, and in the book, you lay out an alternative explanation. Can you just briefly touch on that?
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, this argument, for me as a philosopher, it is at the verge of logic because it actually stems from the confusion of categories, where you just put a category of kinship and suddenly you replace it with homology, which is similarity. Or you take similarity and you kind of switch it to kinship. So kind of mix up these two categories, which is not permissible from the logical standpoint. We know that things that are. We know, you know, in nature, everything is similar to something else precisely because these are natural things, these are material things. So at least they have similar atoms, the structure of matter or whatever. So you will always find similarities in nature. It doesn't mean that there is a biological connection between those things that are similar.
So things may be similar and related, but they may be totally unrelated and similar.
They may be totally different and related, but they may be different and unrelated as well, or related.
There is no such a connection.
But the real problem here is that saying that similarity is explained by kinship or universal common ancestry doesn't really explain the origin of those organs or structures. You know, the icon of evolution is the bone structure of different limbs, like the whale limb and horse and horse leg and human hand and so on.
And they say, okay, this was present in some ancestor, and this is how it adapted the revolutionary process. But this theory does not answer the question where this original design comes from, where this idea comes from. So what we are saying, following intelligent design theorists, is that it's not a common origin or common ancestry. It's it's common design.
This structure is clearly designed to fulfill a function. In the case of the limb, it is efficient to have three joints and this bone structure one main bone close to the body, because you need strength here and maneuverability. So one joint only. But at the end you have many small bones because you need some kind of, you know, adaptation to the environment, like air, liquid water, or earth when you walk on earth, on the ground. So anyway, that's a common, common design and common design that is adapted by a designer. We see the same among human engineers who would have an idea. For example, we invented a wheel and different, different cars or planes or bicycles have different wheels. Right? But the idea is always the same, but it is adjusted to this required design.
The same with a window. I like to give an example of a window. So how would you introduce lights to a building? Well, you need a window. That's an idea. But then you adapt window to different types of buildings, like churches, offices, schools and homes and everything.
So you. So you see the same type of adaptation in the designs in nature, the basic requirements of nature.
There are objective requirements, why the design is such. And it has to be efficient, and it is in nature efficient, but then it is adapted differently to different applications.
So a common design rather than common ancestry.
[00:28:09] Speaker C: Yes, yes.
And honestly, unless you are trained as an engineer, it can be tempting to want to just combine them through that common ancestry, common descent. But the more you know about how things are created, how Things are built in terms of engineering, the less willing you're going to be about that. And I've had recent conversations with Dr. Stuart Burgess and he is a bioengineer who has really studied the mechanics of things that humans can make. I mean, he creates things himself, but then he turns around and studies the vertebrate limb and just all the structures that you find in biology. And he's saying that it's not just so. So design, it's not just really good design, it's actually optimal design. And he explains why.
Now, Steve, with this book, you're arguing that these scientific shortcomings force us to confront some logical and philosophical challenges to evolution.
So what are some of those that you've brought up in the book? The logical and philosophical problems that come with adherence to a Darwinian framework.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah, there, there are, there are so, so many. Just, Just like there are far, far more scientific challenges to Darwinism that we could possibly go into here. Yeah, that's, that's very true philosophically as well. But there are. Darwinism violates, it just blatantly violates some very fundamental philosophical principles that are generally quite non controversial outside of the context of Darwinism.
One is just the principle of sufficient reason, which is to say that anything which exists has to have a sufficient explanation for its existence. And there's a corollary to that which points out that you cannot have more perfection, more being, more complexity, more capacity in the effect or the thing caused than you had in the cause, the thing which produced it. Darwinism inverts that 100%. Darwinism says no. From simpler, less complex things with less power, less capacity, less sophistication.
Nature on its own, given enough time and using natural selection and random variation and genetic mutation, nature will produce more complex, more sophisticated things with greater capacity and totally new powers, including totally new body structures, totally new limbs, features, et cetera. On its own, that simply doesn't work. There's nothing in the single celled organism that has the capacity to give rise to a moose.
It's a complete inversion and a violation of that principle of sufficient reason.
Another interesting point is philosophically, Thomas Aquinas points out, and for Catholics, Aquinas, for everyone. Aquinas is one of the great thinkers of all time.
But he's a reference point because he systematizes not only Christian philosophy, but he also synthesizes it with ancient Greek philosophy as well. So he kind of creates this, this body of philosophical thinking which takes into account and employs the best of all philosophical thought up to his time. And Aquinas points out, he says, when you look at natural generation of living things, they don't even produce their own nature. So in other words, when a horse gives birth to a foal, you know, to a baby horse, the horse is reproducing a single instance in that foal of the nature horse, but the horse is not generating that nature.
The horse is not generating the universal nature of horse. It's a participant in it, and it's reproducing a single new instance of that nature.
But Darwinism says not only does do creatures produce their own nature, they produce entirely new natures that they're not participants in. So a reptile can give rise to a bird, although there's no bird nature in a reptile. Again, a complete violation of the simple logical point that even on the order of reproducing living things, biological entities, they don't even produce their own nature, let alone have the capacity to produce some entirely new nature of which they themselves are not participants.
And then, you know, theistic evolutionists will argue, they'll say, well, listen, it's actually more impressive for a being, a divine being, to create indirectly through intermediaries. But there's two confusions there. The first is there's a confusion on what we mean by creation to begin with.
And so creation has always meant creation out of nothing, the bringing into existence of a thing which did not exist before.
So when Genesis talks about God creating all the creatures and the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds according to their kinds, it's simply stating that fact. He's bringing a new type of being into existence which never existed before.
And so with that idea of creation in mind, then when they say, well, it shows more power to create indirectly, there's a confusion about what creation means. And in addition to that, it's very clear that to create in the proper sense, to bring a new thing into existence out of nothing which has never existed before, that's the ultimate expression of power. It takes far less to modify an already existing thing, far less power to modify an already existing thing to create a different kind of existing thing. So they're just. They're fundamental philosophical and theological confusions, I think, throughout the evolutionary Darwinist position and the theistic evolution position as well as.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned Aquinas. That was going to be my next question, because we'd be remiss if we did not include discussion of him. Now, Father Michael, let me just ask you as well. You know, Aquinas's teaching and his writing. Theistic evolutionists, you know, use it. Darwinists perhaps use it. Do you think his work is compatible with an evolutionary view?
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Obviously it's not.
And I'm really surprised that Thomas would claim the opposite. And this is just today's Thomas. So let's be clear that Thomas until 1950 would all dismiss Darwin's theory outright. Just saying that it's totally unacceptable. It's transformistic. And the Aquinas is an essentialist. So he speaks about permanent essences, especially among living beings. So it's totally inconsistent.
And you see how the paradigm may actually. The shift of paradigm may actually influence the thinking of those scholars. They are born in evolutionary paradigm, so they even try to adopt Aquinas. Well, there is a number of confusions. I will just point out two things. One is that when they say that God used evolution like he uses, for example, events in human life, or he uses angels to guide the universe, or he uses other humans to guide other humans, or you know, he uses some natural things to produce some natural effects in the universe. This is divine providence. And they confuse the providential work of God, where actually God uses natural things to bring about natural effects with the creative work of God, which was completely different because in the creative work of God God did not use any secondary causes. Steve just mentioned it that there are no secondary causes in creation because nothing can be a cause of bringing about something from nothing.
This is just not the thing.
No creative think can do such a thing. It just requires ultimate infinite power. So that's one issue where there is a confusion. I present a number of arguments in my book Aquinas and Evolution. But here I would just point out this very obvious thing that should be obvious for anyone who knows anything about classical metaphysics, classical philosophy, Aristotelian, Thomistic philosophy. So those. This classical approach divides being into the essence of a being and accidents. So everything you everything is something that it is and has some features. We call it accidents in philosophy. So a dog is a dog, but it may have different color, different size, maybe larger or smaller. It may be it has a longer tail, shorter tail, you know, these are all features. But in every dog you see the essence of dog. So the dog ness, we could say so the. So evolution may work on the features, on accidents because in accidental variation, mutation, whether these are random genetic mutations or whatever, you only change the accidents of the essences.
But you cannot by changing accidents. Even if you accumulate those changes over centuries, over generations, you will never produce a new essence because accidents and essence this is, accidents are attached, we could say to essence, but they do not influence the change of the essence. So, so basically any evolutionary scenario on Thomistic account is impossible. Even guided evolution is impossible, because even in the guided evolution you would still have the just changing of the accidents, not the essence. Okay, so this is how you, how we would dismiss evolution on the Thomistic grounds.
I do not see a real response to this argument. There was a couple of, a couple of counterarguments that I responded. I don't want to get into the details because this is quite complex, but the essence of the argument, you know, it and what, what Steve already mentioned the, the problem of the sufficient cause. So in, in I would put it this way.
Any living being is an idea how to realize the idea of life. So bird is the idea is a solution to how protection to how to produce a living being that will fly. And it has to meet so many engineering criteria. Okay, so it's an idea, it's a, it's actually. Every living being is an answer to dozens, hundreds of thousands of questions of an engineering nature. So how to make it efficient, how it should propagate, how to how, how it feed, how it would breathe, the respiratory system and circulatory system and everything.
These are the answers. And how to pack it into one organism. Okay, so this is an idea basically. And now in evolution, evolution is blind and everybody admits it. Even theistic evolution should say that the mechanism of evolution is blind. So how a blind process can produce a new idea, how a process that has no understanding would produce a solution to an engineering problem. You see, so the problem of sufficient cause is that the process of evolution is insufficient to answer the engineering questions. How to overcome the problem of mass and energy to fly. Okay, how to overcome the problem of balance, proper balance, and the wing profile and you know, millions of problems like that.
So there is no sufficient cause because there is no, there is no foresight and there is no intelligence in this process.
Now the answer that I encountered is that, okay, but evolution is just, it's not a single cause. There is a whole bunch of causes coming together. And they would list all kinds of things like population genetics and genetic drift and the environmental pressures, and you name it. So a dozen of causes. The problem is that none of these causes can produce the effect. So it's like saying, I use an analogy. Okay, let's imagine that we have a construction site and we bring the basic materials to these construction sites. So we have steel, bricks, concrete, whatever, and we have 50, let's say 50 workmen ready to start the work.
But there is no engineer. There is no but there is no plan. There is nobody to read the plan.
So we increase the number of physical workers. Now we have thousands of them. And we brought more bricks and more concrete and more steel beams, whatever.
Does it resolve the problem? No, because not the number of causes resolve the problem, but the kind of causes you have and evolution has not, does not, does not have the kind of cause you need.
So you can multiply the causes. But if none of them can actually read the plan, and there is no plan, there is no architect, an engineer who can read the plan, how to build the building.
It doesn't help if you, how many, you know how many workers you have or how many, how much, you know, how much materials you bring.
So that's the problem of the sufficient cost that Steve mentioned.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: Can I also just add to that real quick? Time also does not help. It does not solve the problem. So if you want a new software program written and you hire me, I have no idea how to write a software program. I'm not the kind of cause you need. You need a software engineer. And if you got a hundred of me, you still haven't even come any closer. If you got a thousand, and then if you gave a thousand Steves who are completely ignorant of computer programming a billion years, you would come back in a billion years and still not have your software program. The multiple causes and the, the great vast spans of time simply don't solve the problem at all.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:42:59] Speaker C: Yeah, because of the chasm between having materials. But then a sufficient cause, it's just too great. You cannot cross that with any amount of time because time is not what's needed.
There are other things needed that can't come about through a blind process.
Yeah, and thank you for sharing that analogy, Father Michael. That was very helpful too. And what both of you have explained in the last five to 10 minutes, I think is what is why some people summarize theistic evolution and why it fails as not even God can direct an unguided process.
And I think you've both explained why that is why God cannot direct an undirected process.
So I appreciate that level of detail. Well, as we wrap up today, Steve, let's just touch one more time on this perspective you discuss in the book called Progressive Creation.
Remind us what that is very briefly and why you think it's a better foundation for a working science faith synthesis.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Yeah, the progressive creation is essentially predicated on letting science answer the genuine science questions. And Then taking the best of traditional Christian philosophy and theology and wedding the two, it's a synthesis of the latest science with the best of the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. So in terms of the science, we would join hands with the intelligent design theorists and say, yes, chance, necessity and intelligence are all three part of the explanation for life and biodiversity that we see around us.
And all three have to be present in terms of the biblical interpretation we would hold with the ancient and consistent teaching of the Christian faith all the way up to the time of, of Darwin. And that is that the Genesis account is a literal and historic, not a literalist or fundamentalist account, but a literal and a historical account of how God created, that he created the different kinds of living things directly, intentionally and supernaturally, and then allows them some engineered adaptivity to evolve and adapt over time, over time in response to environmental pressures. In terms of the time scape of the universe in Genesis, those are science questions. So you know, science, multiple converging lines of evidence seem to indicate the universe is something on the order of 13, 14 billion years old. Great. Sounds good. That's a science question. The evidence is there. We'll go with that.
The days of creation. Again, we would, we would take a, an interpretive approach of the days of creation as definite periods of time, but not literally 24 hour periods. And we would also say again, in keeping with the tradition, that creation ends at the end of the six days of creation, that creation is a finished work. And then, as Father was alluding to earlier, from there, God's providence holds things in being and allows them to function as secondary causes, but creation itself belongs to only to God.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: And just the mere fact that you can put forth this idea and be confident about it, I think speaks to the fact that as Steve Meyer says, this is a new day in biology.
You are able to take the best of modern science, take the discoveries of intelligent design, take scripture and theology, and you're able to have to be confident in a working position.
And that's pretty special to be able to be at this point in history and in our study of science where we can do that again.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: Absolutely.
And can I just say just one other quick thing?
Thank you for making that point, Andrew.
I think one of the beautiful things about the progressive creation view, taking the latest and best of what science has to offer and synthesizing it with the best of the philosophical and theological tradition, and is that that position does not do violence to any of those three categories. They're beautifully compatible and the synthesis works without having to Twist or mangle the science or the philosophy or the theology.
[00:47:24] Speaker C: Yeah, great point, Father Michael.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Yes, I absolutely agree. And I think that intelligent design is vastly underestimated by Catholics. It's a huge apologetic tool, mind, that young people leave the Church.
That's the first reason, because they believe that science contradicts faith.
And intelligent design is precisely the way to do science to show the compatibility with faith. I call intelligent design the preamble to the preamblers of faith. Because in the Catholic tradition, we have the distinction between what we can learn about God from philosophy, and we call it preambula of faith, which means that by reason alone, we can know that God exists, that he's omnipotent, and so on and so forth. But then intelligent design tells you that you can, by strictly scientific methods, you can detect design in nature.
And once you have design in nature, we could say intelligent design as a scientific theory stops there because it says you can detect design. But then philosophy takes over and says, okay, if there is design in nature, you have to ask who is the designer, how he works? And you switch to preambula of faith and then to the tenets of faith, which is the biblical revelation. So I see this very perfect harmony, and I think that progressive creation as a new science, faith synthesis, the essential point is intelligent design. You cannot build this synthesis without intelligent design, because intelligent design perfectly connects hard science with classic philosophy. This is where you fill in the gap. And I'm really surprised that so many, you know, Catholic scholars, actually, they, they, they, they. They strive to. To connect philosophy. They are very often, they are good philosophers, and they want to find this connection with modern science, for example, to explain quantum mechanics in metaphysical terms.
And they look for this field, but somehow they miss the fact that intelligent design is precisely the place to look for.
Instead, they would say, oh, Darwinism is a scientific idea. It is established by science, so we have to adopt it.
And then, as Steve said, they have to actually twist Aquinas. They have to pretty much throw out of the window the classic biblical interpretation. So they have to violate classical theology, classical philosophy, in order to accept outdated science without really much support in facts and data.
So they confused, I would say they confuse materialistic philosophy with actual science. Actual science takes us to intelligent Design, and intelligent design opens science to deeper questions, like philosophical questions which people answered throughout the ages. So we are not creating anything from you in this sense.
Another misconception is that we need to create new theology, as if the church never said anything about the origin of man, the origin of the universe. We dump everything. We just begin with Darwin and build our theology from there. That's another misconception. I think that those deep questions and deep answers are pretty much true throughout centuries. We just understand them better and we add details.
And after science developed so much in the 20th century, we add the layer of intelligent design, and that's the huge accomplishment. And I truly believe that if the church started apologetics in this direction, it would be much more efficient and much more compelling and convincing rather than adopting materialism under the guise of science.
[00:51:40] Speaker C: Yeah, well, very well put.
And yeah, this is an exciting time to have these scientific discoveries that are bringing back the God hypothesis. But there's work to be done, right? To tell people about them and share that good news that science can affirm theistic belief.
It's great that we have it, but there's a lot of work to be done.
And I appreciate your efforts in putting this book together to reach not just Catholics, but other Christians and even seekers and nonbelievers who are still, you know, suffering from this dilemma that you've spelled out that can affect us all if we're not careful. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for taking time to unpack some of this.
It's been a fascinating discussion. Now, I understand that there are some videos that go with your book which can also be used to share with friends, family, associates. Steve, can you tell us about that?
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Yeah, if you go on YouTube, you can visit my YouTube channel, which is just reasonably rational.
And on that YouTube channel, Father Michael and I actually did a 10 part video series. So 10 videos based on the book. Think of the book as the entree and the videos as the appetizer. The book will give you a lot more depth in a lot more detail, but we made the videos to try to make it accessible. If there's someone who maybe isn't able to sit down and read the book, the videos will give them a nice introduction. And the videos are really an intro, an introduction and an invitation to do a deeper dive into these fundamental questions about the compatibility of Christianity and evolutionary theory.
[00:53:22] Speaker C: Okay, so that video series available at the reasonably rational YouTube channel.
And the book, of course, Creation Revolution, A Catholic Dilemma, available online, you know, places like Amazon.com or by going to the publisher's website, press.inkwell.net Inkwell is the publisher and you can get to it through press.inkwell.net well, again, gentlemen, thank you for your time. I need to have you back on idfuture. This is great discussion and we need to continue to talk about this. It's great stuff that you've amassed in this book.
[00:53:59] Speaker A: Thanks for having us on. Be happy to join you again.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: Thank you. Me too.
[00:54:04] Speaker C: Well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for joining us.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program
[00:54:15] Speaker B: is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
