We are delighted to offer an excerpt from Father Martin Hilbert’s new book for Discovery Institute Press, A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. This article is adapted from Chapter 3.

One of the often-encountered objections to ID is that it is just a modern version of the “god of the gaps” fallacy. When faced with mysterious phenomena such as lightning, thunder, or earthquakes, the pre-Socratics explained them as the work of various deities: Zeus throwing thunderbolts or Poseidon (“The Earthshaker”) hitting the ground with his trident. As understanding of nature progressed, these deities were swept into the dustbin of history. It can even be argued that science could progress only once such deities were banished from the mental landscape.

A Science-Stopper?

ID is thus portrayed as a science-stopper. Right now, the argument goes, we do not know how life began, but if we say that God did it, we will never know the “real” answer. So let’s not give up on chance and necessity. At some point, we will hit upon some purely naturalistic explanation.

The god-of-the-gaps objection does have some merit to it, but it does not rule out ID. The progress of science has dethroned a multitude of false gods. For that it should be commended. But it cannot banish the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is not a stop-gap explanation for a particular phenomenon. He is the First Cause and the ground of all being, the Creator by whose intelligence the cosmos is sustained. But in most events there are also secondary causes at work, which science tries to find and better understand.

We have just seen that it would be pointless to look for a secondary cause of a human soul, because God alone can create a spiritual being. Given that vast numbers of scientists for many years have been trying to figure out how the specified complexity necessary for life could have arisen without the intervention of an intelligent agent and failed miserably, it may not be daring and premature to conclude that intelligent design is the better explanation.

“God Did It”

The methodological materialist will object that, having let God into the lab, scientists will grow lazy, throwing up their hands at every mysterious physical phenomenon and saying, “God did it.” But history tells precisely the opposite story. It was because Christians believed that God, a rational lawgiver, was the Creator of the universe that science got started in the first place.

Nor has the design perspective outworn its usefulness. The ID perspective can still guide science in fruitful ways. Take, for example, the evolving view of DNA. At first, most of it was dismissed as “junk” because only about 2 percent of the human genome codes for genes and because biologists, tutored by the Darwinian paradigm, assumed that these non-coding strands of DNA were just useless leftovers from Darwinism’s trial-and-error process. Darwinists trumpeted all the non-coding DNA as proof that evolution is messy and undirected, hardly the work of a wise designer. But design theorists pushed back, predicting that much of the non-coding DNA would turn out to have function. And that prediction turned out to be correct. In this case, then, the theory of intelligent design proved to be the more fruitful heuristic, with Darwinian presuppositions holding back scientific progress.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

Fortunately, even in today’s climate of prejudice against ID, its proponents sometimes manage to get their papers published in peer-reviewed journals. As of May 2024, there were over 200 such papers. This is good news, for science originated in Medieval Europe in part because Europe’s cultural presuppositions at the time included the design perspective. The predominantly Catholic culture of Western Europe in the Middle Ages held that the universe was well-ordered because it was created by God, and that humanity could come to appreciate this order because we are made in God’s image, which means we have the rationality to be able to investigate His creation.

Further, the Scriptures tell us that God “hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wisdom 11:20) and that “from the greatness and beauty of created things, comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wisdom 13:5). Investigating the created world, then, was recommended as a good thing. Lest these verses be dismissed as coming from a book that is not even considered part of the Bible by Protestants, a survey of medieval literature found that one of the most commonly quoted biblical verses in medieval times was Wisdom 11:20. It was clearly the inspiration for the famous work of medieval art shown at the top. The insight conveyed in Wisdom 13:5 is also echoed in the New Testament by the apostle Paul.

The Church and Science

The notion that Christendom gave rise to science is something foreign to most people. The average person has been taught that the Church’s relationship to science boils down to the Galileo case, and not even the actual Galileo case, which is full of complex characters and nuances, but a cardboard caricature of that conflict, with nuances assiduously filtered out to prop up the “science vs. Christianity” myth. But historians of science know better, and in fact, it is conventional wisdom among historians of science that the thoroughly Catholic culture of medieval Western Europe was absolutely central to the rise of science.

Even non-Christians such as Alfred North Whitehead attest to the historical connection between the Church and the rise of science. He comments:

I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research: — that there is a secret, a secret that can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the human mind?

When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered; the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking about the explicit belief of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries.

Many of the ID proponents today who are producing good science are in line with this tradition and their success is a cause for hope.

The God-of-the-Gaps Fallacy

Darwinism is not just a science-stopper; it is also, as Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox points out, guilty of itself adopting the god-of-the-gaps fallacy. In this case, the god is natural selection. Whenever materialism cannot come up with any empirically verifiable explanation, it invokes natural selection. Lennox cites Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin:

Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories; they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function as an anti-theory called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action — evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken — evolution! The brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!