A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design

A CATHOLIC CASE

FOR

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

A CATHOLIC CASE

FOR

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

FR. MARTIN HILBERT, C.O.

SEATTLE     DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PRESS     2024

Description

A faithful catechist in Fr. Martin Hilbert’s parish came to see him. 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 is the real story?" Her question was the catalyst for A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. In taut, accessible prose, Fr. 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 problem of suffering, disease, and death in a world created by a wise and good Creator? Fr. Hilbert tackles that issue as well, and explains why the theory of intelligent design, rightly understood, harmonizes perfectly with the Catholic theological tradition.

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© 2024 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Library Cataloging Data

A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design by Fr. Martin Hilbert, C.O.

Cover design by Tri Widyatmaka.

346 pages, 6 x 9 inches

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024949219

ISBN: 978-1-63712-071-2 (paperback), 978-1-63712-073-6 (Kindle), 978-1-63712-072-9 (EPUB)

BISAC: REL106000 RELIGION / Religion & Science

BISAC: SCI027000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution

BISAC: REL010000 RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic

Publisher Information

Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98104

Internet: discovery.press

Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

First Edition, November 2024

ADVANCE PRAISE

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 seventy 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. Fr. 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.

—Fr. Michael Chaberek, PhD, member of the Polish Dominican Province; author of Catholicism and Evolution (2015) and Aquinas and Evolution (2017)

For too long advocates of Darwinism have taken advantage of the openness of the Catholic Church to true science in order to insinuate their barely disguised materialistic philosophy. In easy-to-follow writing, Fr. Martin Hilbert summarizes why modern scientific evidence stacks decidedly against Darwinism—and strongly in favor of the traditional Catholic understanding that life was purposely made by an intelligent designer.

—Michael J. Behe, PhD, professor of biological sciences, Lehigh University; author of Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves

What a delightful discovery this book has been, superb not only from a theological and philosophical point of view, but also by biological, biochemical, anthropological, and even engineering standards. In crystal clear prose, Hilbert shows that Darwinism is not so much the most successful contemporary theory of human origins as the most powerful contemporary myth of human origins, one which slants our views of who we are and how we are related to our Designer in unwarranted ways. Naturally his defense of the classical Christian view will deeply interest Catholics, but by rights his book should command the attention of all people interested in thinking clearly.

—J. Budziszewski, Professor of Government and Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, author of Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the One God (Cambridge University Press)

Fr. Hilbert has written a deeply insightful and broad defense of intelligent design for Catholics, based on scientific, philosophical, and theological arguments. He thoughtfully distinguishes claims that are clearly supported by the evidence from questions difficult to answer conclusively. The book is also highly engaging as he shares his own personal journey of seeking the truth and explores the intrigue of individuals and social forces that has led many Christians into materialist intellectual captivity. This work is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of the Church.

—Brian Miller, PhD, Research Coordinator and Senior Fellow for the Center for Science and Culture, an organizer of the Conference on Engineering in the Life Sciences (CELS), and contributor to multiple books and journals covering the debate over intelligent design, including The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy and Inference Review

Children by nature are theists. So begins A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design by Fr. Martin Hilbert, who as a child escaped Communism, but not before he knew that evil was real. Later he came to the view that Darwinism, whatever else it might be, was an attack on the power of reason to know reality and to arrive at the Creator. He holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science and teaches a course on the subject to seminarians. But he is by no means an ivory tower intellectual. He holds a master’s in electrical engineering and pastors a Catholic parish, dealing with the day-to-day concerns and suffering of his flock. Fr. Hilbert’s good sense shines through every page of this brave and refreshing work.

As a Catholic physician, I couldn’t agree more with what this highly educated, well-rounded, down-to-earth spiritual father thinks of Darwinism. Its primary purpose is to serve as a creation myth for the secular society in which we live, he writes. 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. Indeed! And that’s exactly what this book accomplishes. It’s a comprehensive, up-to-date exposure and take-down of Darwinism.

Fr. Hilbert also provides a nuanced look at the theory of intelligent design, clearing up common misconceptions about the research program and critically analyzing the explanations and key claims of its leading proponents, and doing so in the light of perennial philosophy and the teachings of the Catholic Church.

For Catholics who find their faith undermined by prominent spokespersons for contemporary science, Fr. Hilbert has a message of hope, one that draws an important distinction between actual scientific evidence on the one hand, and on the other hand, scientism and materialism masquerading as science. The good news for the Catholic is that the contemporary scientistic worldview is false, he writes. If the world at large has not heard of Darwinism’s demise, it is because the work of the ID community has been dismissed and ridiculed, and a collection of fawning Catholics and other Christians with prominent platforms have rushed to the defense of Darwinism and tried to change the Church’s teachings to accommodate it. Yet in the midst of this sad state of affairs, the faithful need not worry that the Church has been wrong on the origin of life, man, and sin.

One senses that Fr. Hilbert was driven to write this incisive and wide-ranging book. As a kindred spirit, who hails from his alma mater, I am sure that when the time comes, he will hear what all of us, deep in our hearts, hope to hear: Well done my good and faithful servant; come share your master’s joy (Matthew 25:21).

—Howard Glicksman, MD, co-author of Your Designed Body

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. Fr. 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 Fr. 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 ID. Bravo!

—Jay W. Richards, editor of (and contributor to) God and Evolution: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith, co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, and Director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation

To the Fathers and Brothers of the

Toronto Oratory of Saint Philip Neri

and in memory of Fr. Jonathan Robinson

and of my parents, Peter and Ludmila Hilbert

CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Wrestling with Darwin

2. Evolution: More than a Hypothesis

3. Intelligent Design in Nature

4. Intelligent Design: A Preamble to a Powerful Way to God

5. Creation Groans

6. Prehistoric Man

7. Man: The Image of God

8. Anti-Theist Darwin and His Useful Instruments

9. Converging and Convincing Arguments

Appendix A. Some Notes on Transformism

Appendix B. When Did Adam and Eve Live?

Appendix C. Faith of Our Fathers—A Hermeneutic of Continuity

Endnotes

Figure Credits

Index

1. INTRODUCTION: WRESTLING WITH DARWIN

I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire & he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force & vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow from slow & silent side attacks.

—CHARLES DARWIN, LETTER TO HIS SON GEORGE¹

CHILDREN ARE BY NATURE THEISTS, WITH AN INHERENT SENSE that things and events have causes, that the world is a wonderful place, and that wonderful things call for wonderful causes. In this I was no different.

I was ten or eleven 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 Saint 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,² 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 Morley’s Life of Voltaire, Darwin begins, & he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force & vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow from slow & silent side attacks."³ 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.⁴

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.⁵ 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.⁶

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 Phillip 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 for 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 timescales 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. 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 Teilhard de Chardin was the rage. Even Joseph Ratzinger was cautiously appreciative of Teilhard 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 in the history of evolutionary biology. This led me to keep reading material in the field long after the course was finished some thirty 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 logic, all 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 have 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. Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial (1991) 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 that 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 and 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 is 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 in 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 is 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.

When Hard Science Turns to Quicksand

Many years ago, when I was studying engineering, my friends and I would laugh at the artsies. We knew that we were dealing with real knowledge whereas the artsies were forever stuck in the realm of contentious opinions. Every professor of electrical engineering could tell you whether a particular circuit would work; and every aeronautical engineer would come up with a similar answer about the lift of a particular airfoil. But try asking philosophers, theologians or, say, literary theorists basic questions in their fields, and there would be little consensus.

My friends and I used to dream about saving the university cartloads of money by getting rid of all the humanities departments. In this we were unreflectively aiding and abetting an idea known as scientism, the view that the hard sciences offer the only genuine knowledge of reality. Over the years, at least some of us have come to appreciate that the humanities produce disagreements precisely because they deal with the more fundamental questions of human life, which, unlike scientific theories, do not lend themselves easily to empirical testing or mathematical analysis.

But it remains true that the hard sciences tend to produce results which, in many cases, all their practitioners can agree on, and this surely redounds to the credit of these sciences as modes of pursuing knowledge, if we avoid the excesses of scientism. We can go further and affirm that biology is one such hard science. The discovery of DNA, the deciphering of the genetic code, DNA splicing, and the now routine sequencing of genomes of many different organisms are the result of the concerted efforts of many brilliant and dedicated people. All scientists who work in the field agree on these basic technical facts, which must ground, or at least be consonant with, biological observation of actual life-forms. And there is also much that wet biology—work done in the field—has discovered: the life cycles of the sand dollar and sea urchin, the chemical warfare of the bombardier beetle, the migrations of birds, salmon, eels, and turtles, the role of chemical identification in colonies of insects, etc. All these complex findings, once research teams have spent years studying them, can be understood and form the basis for broad agreement, even while inspiring awe of the living world around us.

There is, then, no doubt that the technical achievements of biology put it squarely into the league of hard sciences such as physics and chemistry.

But there is a field of biology where there is precious little agreement, and where even the limited agreement is far less about evidence than intellectual orthodoxy: origins biology and, specifically, evolutionary biology. Universities and scientific journals try to minimize the areas of uncertainty and dissent, but sometimes the truth comes out. As an example of a kowtowing to the Darwinian orthodoxy, consider the following statement from the website of BioLogos, a self-proclaimed Christian enterprise promoting a marriage of Darwinism and Christian theism. After defining evolution to be the theory that all present life-forms have descended from one original living cell via gradual changes over geological time scales, i.e., the Darwinian scenario, it goes on to state:

There is very little debate in the scientific community about this broad characterization of evolution (anyone who claims otherwise is either uninformed or deliberately trying to mislead). The observational evidence explained by common ancestry is overwhelming. Of course new data causes scientists to adjust some of the specifics (like how long ago species diverged, or which species are most closely related), but this core view is overwhelmingly supported and agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists in the field.⁷

But then consider the following: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini describe themselves as outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists. Their co-authored book is titled What Darwin Got Wrong, and it is clear that they mean something more than minor details. As they explain:

This book is mostly a work of criticism; it is mostly about what we think is wrong with Darwinism. Near the end, we’ll make some gestures towards where we believe a viable alternative might lie; but they will be pretty vague. In fact, we don’t know very well how evolution works. Nor did Darwin, and nor (as far as we can tell) does anyone else. Further research is required, as the saying goes. It may well be that centuries of further research are required.⁸

I have deliberately chosen counter-intuitive sources for these pro and con quotations. The more obvious option would have been to cite an atheist such as Richard Dawkins to champion the health and strength of the case for modern evolutionary theory, and the devoutly Catholic Michael Behe to underscore its shortcomings. But the fact that it is possible to find praise of Darwinism from Christians and far-reaching criticism from atheists underscores the difficulty facing anyone seeking clear answers regarding the status of evolutionary theory.

There are, of course, many books written on the theory of evolution, both pro and con. So one may legitimately wonder whether there is a need for yet another one. Has not everything that needs to be said on the subject been said? Although some arguments date back to Darwin’s day, such as what to make of the lack of transitional fossils, each new scientific discovery reignites the debate between Darwinists and their critics. So there will always be a need for more up-to-date reports on the status of evolutionary theory. But my main concern is to help Christians understand what is at stake in the debate. My intention is to put into one volume diverse discussions that all have a bearing on assessing what science teaches us about the origin of species and especially about the origin of our species, Homo sapiens. At the same time, I intend to look at the implications of accepting Darwinism for our ability to know objective truth, which, of course, has a huge impact on philosophy. Finally, I want to look at the consequences that Darwinism has for Catholic theology.

To be clear, I never thought that the Bible was meant to be a science textbook. I am perfectly happy to accept that some fourteen billion years have elapsed since the Big Bang, and I find much evidence of deep time in physics, cosmology, and geology. I also am convinced that the testimony of nature, rightly interpreted, should be relevant to one’s religious commitment. I could not, for example, imagine myself believing in monogenism—that we are all descended from one first couple—if there were conclusive reasons coming from science showing that our species never comprised fewer than ten thousand individuals. I take seriously the biblical notion that the order of nature is a powerful starting point towards coming to know nature’s Creator. I find ill-informed all attempts, such as those of Stephen Jay Gould, to separate science and faith into non-overlapping magisteria: science dealing with truth, and faith with values. Only those who do not think that religion could be true can feel free to divorce it from reason.

I am aware that there are many well-catechized and fervent Catholics who seem to care little in what sense, if any, evolution is true. They know that the Church teaches that the first human couple rebelled against God and that original sin is an essential teaching of the Faith. But they are in no way disturbed by an otherwise completely naturalistic explanation for man’s origin. They do not take the claims of evolution seriously enough to see that they can dissolve the very basis of their Christian commitment. These Catholics are joined by many evangelicals and Orthodox of a similar mind.

My hope is to waken such Christians from their slumber, and to give those Christians who care deeply about empirical evidence something to help them assess the status of the theory of evolution.

Evolution is a multi-faceted subject not confined to the science of biology. It quickly escapes its scientific confines and becomes a new metaphysics. It provides a new worldview persuasive to many. It should not come as a surprise, then, that it is going to be hard to unravel the empirical science from its wider cultural implications, interpretations, and influences. The threads do not easily come apart.

After the present introductory chapter, we will look, in Chapter 2, at the different possible meanings of the term evolution. Does it mean just change over time: transformation? Sometimes. More often it also encompasses an explanation of how the transformation comes about. We will need to look at the evidence for what kinds of transformations have actually occurred.

Chapter 3 will introduce an alternative account of biology: the theory of intelligent design (ID). This theory formalizes the steps by which investigators routinely detect design, in fields as diverse as forensics, archaeology, code-breaking, and data encryption. A seminal work in this field, The Design Inference by William Dembski (Cambridge University Press), offered a way to apply this reasoning in general. To appreciate the novelty of this approach to biology, we will look at a brief history of the philosophy of science, one of my areas of academic specialization. This will help us see how science has come to be presented as a materialist enterprise that regards any and all spiritual realities as vestiges of a pre-scientific mindset. This historical flyover will give us the tools to assess the legitimacy or illegitimacy of this shift in how science qua science is understood.

In Chapter 4 we will look at how ID—or, more broadly, teleological thinking—supports reason’s path to knowledge of God’s existence. A reflexive dismissal of the teleological argument undermines this path. It is an