[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, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm reading an excerpt from a brand new book by Father Martin Hilbert called A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. The book demonstrates that intelligent design, rightly understood, harmonizes perfectly with the Catholic theological tradition. But before we get to that good stuff, let me tell you about an upcoming event you'll want to be a part of. From the smallest honeybee to the greatest whale, planet Earth is swarming with creatures of all shapes and sizes, each intelligently designed for their habitats. Where did they all come from and what are the implications for a faith in God? Join us at the 7th Annual Dallas Conference on Science and Faith on February 8, 2025 in Denton, Texas, or via livestream for a stimulating series of talks on the theme All Creatures Great and Small. Whether you join us in the Dallas area or online, you'll learn about the Miracle of Butterfly Metamorphosis with Paul Nelson, the Amazing Honeybee with Eric Hedin, the Scientific Evidence of the Human Soul with Michael Egnor, the Intelligent Design of Plants with Emily and Daniel Reeves, the Theory of ID as Fuel for Scientific Discovery with Casey Luskin and the Origin of Animal Body Plants with Stephen Meyer. In addition to these in person, attendees can choose from special breakout sessions presented by John West, Richard Sternberg, George Montanez, Ray Bolan, and Stephen Dilley. Other perks to joining in person include a live musical performance on the theme of the conference, a conference bookstore with a large selection of titles by Discovery Institute's scientists and scholars, a free book in honor of the late Jonathan Wells, opportunities for book signings with the speakers, and exhibitor tables from our partner organizations. You can learn more and register for the
[email protected] that's scienceandfaith.com okay, on to today's reading. An excerpt from A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design by Father Martin Hilbert. Let me introduce Father Hilbert to you, if you're not familiar with him.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Martin Hilbert migrated to Canada as a child after the Soviet invasion. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical engineering and a PhD in the history and Philosophy of science from the University of Toronto. Hilbert studied for the priesthood at St. Philip's Seminary, where he now teaches a course in the philosophy of science. He is a priest at the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Toronto. The story of how Father Hilbert came to write this book is interesting. A faithful catechist in his parish came to see him. Father Martin, she said. I've been teaching children about Adam and Eve, just as the catechism tells us. But we can't be expected to believe that, can we? What's the real story? Her question was the catalyst for a Catholic case for intelligent design. In taught, accessible prose, Father Hilbert draws upon his broad learning in science, philosophy, history, and theology to show that modern evolutionary theory, including theistic evolution, faces a rising wave of disconfirming evidence. Meanwhile, the evidence for both intelligent design and a first human couple, Adam and Eve, is stronger than ever. What about the problems of suffering, disease, and death in a world created by a wise and good creator? Father Hilbert tackles this issue as well and explains why the theory of intelligent design, rightly understood, harmonizes perfectly with the Catholic theological tradition. Dr. J. Richards is editor of God and Evolution and co author of the privileged planet. He's director of the Richard and Helen DeVos center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation. Dr. Richards says faithful Catholics should be delighted with the emerging new evidence for intelligent design in nature. The evidence confirms the settled Catholic teaching that nature is teleological and that we can know by reason from the creation that a creator exists.
But for obscure reasons, many Catholic academics object to intelligent design. Father Martin Hilbert is the perfect person to dispel these objections. His knowledge of theology, philosophy, engineering, and the philosophy of science allows him to navigate the troubled waters of the intelligent design debates deftly and accessibly. I'm especially fond of the way Father Hilbert integrates traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence with the more empirically focused and modest arguments for intelligent design. A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design is bound to become a classic contribution to the growing literature on intelligent design. The book was also endorsed by Father Michael Shabarik, Ph.D. a member of the Polish Dominican Province and author of Catholicism and Evolutionary and Aquinas in evolution. Father In 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that discussion regarding the hypothesis of the evolutionary origin of the human body is not forbidden. For Catholic theologians, however, the expected debate never happened. Theologians by and large interpreted the pope's permission as unequivocal support for an essentially naturalistic account of human origins. Now, over 70 years later, the theological community finally has a chance to take the turn indicated by the pope and ask fundamental questions about modern evolutionary theory, intelligent design, human origins, and the Christian understanding of creation. Father Hilbert's book is an important voice in this debate. He does not follow the easy and greatly wanting path of mixing Christianity with naturalism in the form of theistic evolution. Instead, he looks at evidence with an open mind and incorporates anything good and true. He finds in modern science and traditional theology. This book will be an eye opener for those who never thought that a Catholic can support intelligent design and be scientifically informed. I'm going to read now from the introduction to the book. It's titled Wrestling with Darwin. It begins with a quote from Charles Darwin's letter to his son George. Darwin says, I have lately read Morlaix's Life of Voltaire, and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity, even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire, produce little permanent effect. Real good seems only to follow from slow and silent side attacks.
Children are by nature theists with an inherent sense that things and events have causes, the world is a wonderful place, and that wonderful things call for wonderful causes. In this I was no different. I was 10 or 11 when I first encountered Darwin's alternative theory. My first thought was that the whole business was an attack on God. It was not that I was wedded to a naively literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Rather, I perceived that Darwinism was an attack on the power of reason to know reality and to arrive at the Creator. Animals give birth to their own kind. Surely everyone knows that. I thought. In my youthful eyes, Darwin's theory was something wicked people had devised to dispense with God and the Ten Commandments.
Having escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in 1968, I knew that evil was real, and it seemed to me that this theory was somehow entangled with it. My youthful perspective lacked all nuance, to be sure, and yet later I was to discover that both the founders of modern evolutionary theory and some of its leading contemporary proponents had explicitly confessed to motives bracingly akin to my cartoon like sense of their reasons for embracing the theory. Such discoveries, however, were far in the future. After my parents assured me that the theory was far from proven, I did not give it much thought. In high school and college I focused on math and physics and eventually graduated from university with a master's degree in electrical engineering. It was in graduate school that I began to take a greater interest in my Catholic faith. I had a lot of catching up to do because the last time I'd had any formal instruction in religion was a few sessions in grade eight in preparation for confirmation. So when I wasn't solving Maxwell's equations and the like, I was reading C.S. lewis, Fulton Sheen, Thomas Merton, G.K. chesterton, and various Catechisms. They felt like two separate worlds to me, but on one occasion the two passions came together. When reading J.D. jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, I encountered a graph of the Translucence of water as a function of frequency. The graph showed that in the extremely narrow range of optical frequencies, water becomes translucent, whereas at most frequencies below and above this window, it is nearly opaque. The difference is many orders of magnitude. Here was an instance of extreme fine tuning of chemistry to allow for vision. The fact jumped out of the page at me. If it were not for this window existing and being situated precisely where it is, no animal could see and photosynthesis could not take place. One possible explanation, and indeed the most obvious one, seemed to leap off the page. This exquisite fine tuning required an exquisitely skilled fine tuner, a designing intelligence at the very foundations of the molecular and atomic order of nature. The graph was too technical to explain to most people and the ones who understood it. My engineering classmates dismissed it, as Jackson had tried to do himself. In their minds, it just showed the power of natural selection to design the eye around this optical window. The graph did not convert any of my fellow grad students to belief in God. Immediately upon finishing my engineering degree, I joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, and five years later I was ordained a priest. I never lost my fascination with science, and I always retained a confidence that it could reveal important truths about the world. One day, at some point around 1990, I came upon an article by George Sim Johnston in the Oratory library in which he criticized Darwinism for its lack of empirical evidence. I had come across some of these arguments before, but what was new to me was the smoking gun evidence that Charles Darwin intentionally sought to rid the world of Christianity. Johnston quoted a letter written by Charles Darwin to his son George in 1873, part of which I quoted at the top of this chapter. But it bears repeating. I have lately read Morlaix's Life of Voltaire, Darwin begins, and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity, even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire, produce little permanent effect. Real good seems only to follow from slow and silent side attacks. Johnston also quoted T.H. huxley, Darwin's friend and bulldog. In addition to the truth of the doctrine of evolution, wrote Huxley, indeed, one of its greatest merits in my eyes is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral and social life of mankind, the Catholic Church. My encounter with these two quotations gave substance to my original surmise that Darwinism is to no small degree a program designed by its creator for excising God, and was championed by a bulldog of the same Mindset, mind you, Huxley did not even share Darwin's belief that natural selection could explain all life forms. The essential thing for him was that Darwinism removed God from the picture. As Richard Dawkins put it. A century later, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Several years after ordination, I was given the privilege of doing further graduate studies, this time in the history and philosophy of science. Although my primary interest was physics, there were breadth requirements in the program, so I enrolled in a seminar on the history of evolutionary biology. The seminar was lively and the professor was enamored of Darwin. It was just a few years after the publication of Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial, so I used to take a copy of it to class. Whenever a topic of discussion arose in the class that Johnson had addressed in the book, I would read a snippet of it for the benefit of the others around the table. The usual response from the professor was to admit that Johnson had a good point and then to change the subject. By the end of the term, three out of the eight students thought that there was about as much truth to Darwinism as there was in Rudyard Kipling's Just so stories about how the leopard got his spots, the camel his hump, the elephant his trunk, and so on. I have kept up an interest in the field of evolutionary biology ever since and went on to get a PhD in the history and philosophy of science. I am now more convinced than ever that Darwin's theory can at best account for a small part of the variations in plant and animal forms throughout the ages. Its primary purpose is to serve as a creation myth. The secular society in which we live. In this role, it contributes to an impoverished view of humanity and society and is a constant threat to the Christian understanding of the creation and fall of man. Moreover, the thought patterns it engenders are destructive of common sense and of a responsible use of reason. It is, I contend, an unmitigated intellectual disaster whose myriad shortcomings need to be dragged into broad daylight. In my exploration of Darwinism, there were times when I felt the power of its darkness. If the story of Adam and Eve was not true, then how could the Church be a divinely founded and guided institution? I was happy to allow that the story in Genesis might involve some poetic license in the details. But what if, in fact, humans were not created in moral perfection, nor freely chose to abandon the good to embrace sin? What if, instead, the true story of man's origin was that we arose from a single celled organism over eons of mindless evolution, with the inclination to violence and selfishness baked in through millions of generations of survival of the fittest, it seemed intuitively clear that natural selection should favor the lustful and violent. Darwin's theory was so much simpler. The effects of original sin part and parcel of evolutionary development. And yet the dogma of humankind's fall from sinlessness into original sin was too central. It seemed to me, to discard without changing the whole faith. But if my allegiance was to truth, then what I must seek the truth? Was I underestimating the potential of geological time scales to drastically transform life? Was it not the height of hubris to dismiss Darwinism when so many scientists and my peers had accepted it as true? Initially, I had little idea of molecular biology primarily. Perhaps there was something hidden there that could account for apparent design, apart from actual direct design. Could not God have created the various life forms using the Darwinian mechanism? To be sure, God's ways are higher than man's ways. And no human should presume to know from unaided reason how God might choose to accomplish some act of creation. At the same time, even if it were possible, employing only the Darwinian mechanism to create the great variety of life seemed so inelegant and wasteful. And it left God remote and uncaring, an absentee watchmaker. I resolved to give the theory a hearing. There were, after all, the obvious similarities between chimpanzees and humans. Perhaps there was no ontological leap between them and us, just a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. Moreover, many learned Catholics practically revered the theory. Through the 1960s and into the early 70s, Pierre Tellart Deschardin was the rage. Even Joseph Ratzinger was cautiously appreciative of Tellart and was looking for ways to accommodate Catholic theology to evolutionary thought. Was I holding on to an outmoded theology? The best way to find the answers to my questions, I decided, was to explore the scientific evidence related to Darwinism. That was one of my motivations in signing up for the seminar on the history of evolutionary biology. This led me to keep reading material in the field long after the course was finished some 30 years ago. I spent many years sorting through the evidence, aided by my graduate training in the history and philosophy of science, philosophy more generally, and logicall, of which I have found indispensable for navigating the various forms of evidence and arguments that impinge on the case for Darwinian evolution. Often I would encounter scientists deeply knowledgeable about the relevant biology, but who seemed wholly innocent of the rules and methods of reasoning logically and avoiding fallacies. Some, for instance, would advance a wholly circular argument for this or that point of evolution and do so with no apparent awareness that they were committing one of the most elementary fallacies. At the same time, I encountered individuals with a good grounding in philosophy and logic, but who had not taken the time to master the foundational details of evolutionary theory. I saw that given my background, I was well positioned to avoid both these shortcomings, provided I put in the spade work to learn more of the scientific debate, including more about the contemporary variations on Darwin's theory. And so weeks of study turned into months and years. The pages that follow are the fruit of that labor. I've been planning to write this book for a long time to help those who are searching for the truth about God and man in the face of Darwinian darkness. Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial was a great help to me, but it did not address some key questions of theology. Further, it is important to use up to date scientific evidence in the technical discussions, since much of relevance has been discovered in the intervening decades. I also thought it was important to argue for the perennial validity of intelligent design reasoning. To jettison this approach is to cut oneself off from biblical and patristic reasoning about God and creation. The hermeneutic of continuity so often stressed by Pope Benedict in his reading of the Second Vatican Council demands a defense of intelligent design. It is certainly legitimate to drop particular teachings of science, such as the model of an earth centered universe, when they are shown to be untenable. It is another matter to drop the notion that the order and complexity of the universe demand a designing intelligence. To be clear, Intelligent design, as its chief proponents define and employ it, does not get you all the way to theism, at least when the object of study is limited to biology. But its insights are most certainly theism friendly. And if intelligent design is rejected, one is left cut off from a path to rational belief in God that was championed in the patristic tradition. There are other questions that need to be addressed, because along with the order and complexity of life in the universe, we also encounter suffering and death. Indeed, there is evidence that Darwin was spurred to develop his theory of evolution by his considering the presence of suffering and death in the world. He regarded this as sufficient reason alone to reject belief in a benevolent creator. Having done so, he needed a substitute creator, and he found it in the stuff of random variation and natural selection. But in creating a new God. Had Darwin also created a radically new understanding of man, it would seem so, and it's a big part of what makes the whole Darwinian controversy so passionate. Is the human soul a reality that only God can create, or is it something that arises out of matter and the blind process of evolution? Is there something different and kind about us humans that distinguishes us from all other animals? Or are we, as Darwinian materialism holds, at bottom, nothing more than meat robots?
Recently, a faithful catechist in the parish who has been preparing children for their first communion for many years came to see me. Father Martin, she said. I have been teaching children about Adam and Eve, just as the catechism tells us. But we can't be expected to believe that, can we? What's the real story? Her question was the immediate catalyst for me to sit down and write what I have learned on the subject over the years. Most of what will appear in the following pages has been said elsewhere by others, but I hope that putting it all together at a level that educated non specialists can grasp will serve a useful purpose. It is time to dispel the darkness of Darwinian materialism. That was a reading from the new book A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design by Father Martin Hilbert. It's available now from Discovery Institute Press. To order your copy and perhaps one for a friend, visit Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press. For ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks so much for listening.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
