I’m not a Catholic but I’m following the choice of a new Pope with concern. I’m not a Christian of any description, either, but I’m troubled by some study results that John Zmirak highlights today at The Stream. They include, for example, that “only 3.9% of Protestants attend Sunday services each week, while a tiny percentage of Catholics (0.26%) attend Sunday Mass each week.” Those are ominous numbers. The health of the Christian faith, whether Protestant or Catholic, is crucial to the health of the West, but Zmirak observes that it is in a perilous condition.

What Lies Behind That Peril?

Zmirak nails it. It’s one thing:

I think it’s a false paradigm, a cultural myth, that seeped into the Western mind 150 years ago that renders faith so fragile these days. Even most of us who grew up in the Church and attended religious schools have been soaking in this anti-religious acid bath all through our lives, unaware….

Put bluntly, I’m talking about Darwinism. I don’t mean his careful research into plants and flowers, or even his speculative claim that all living creatures share a common descent. No, I mean his broader project, which came to permeate every aspect of Western culture: the effort to explain away human life, all life, and finally the entirety of the universe, as the product of random chance. 

That’s a faith-killer. You can’t believe that, even implicitly, and still cling to faith in the God of the Bible. The Jewish and Christian traditions teach us that life is a wondrous, mysterious gift from an all-knowing, all-loving Mind. Since Darwin’s time, every intellectual discipline, from the hard sciences to religious studies, has striven to prove the opposite: Life is just some flotsam that happened to wash up on the beach. Those two views can’t be reconciled, full stop.

What happens when you try?

You end up like Francis Collins, whose crusade against Intelligent Design marched in lockstep with his jihad to force an untested, abortion-derived vaccine onto millions of believers and his LGBTQ initiatives at the National Institutes of Health — all of it which he did while claiming to be a born-again believer.

All roads, it sometimes seems, lead to Francis Collins. He plays a role in my new book about the thinking of mathematical biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of Immaterial Genome. When Sternberg was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, where he was being punished for publishing a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer arguing for intelligent design, Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship called a dinner meeting that included Sternberg and Collins, seeking to mediate between the two. Dr. Sternberg felt he was being intimidated by Dr. Collins (I emailed with Collins for the book and he says he remembers the event differently).

Deadly for Our Culture

Collins, and others like him, are what happens when people of faith concede the realm of biology to Darwinian ideology. I hope the Catholic Church selects a new Pope who understands that and is willing to articulate it. Darwin is deadly for our culture. As Zmiraks puts it, faith is “fragile.” That’s why he makes a point of directing his readers to the work of Discovery Institute and the evidence for intelligent design. I’m grateful to him for that, and so should you be, too.

It’s not incidental to mention here that physicist Brian Miller wrote earlier today with a wonderful concision about why Sternberg’s immaterial genome spells doom for Darwinism. As Dr. Miller explains, it’s all in the math. Unlike Zmirak’s ominous numbers, these numbers are really good news.