Author: Jay W. Richards
A Thoughtful Catholic Response to Darwinism
In the midst of much confusion among Catholics about evolution, I am very pleased to see an excellent piece by Monsignor Charles Pope on the website of the Archdiocese of Washington DC. Monsignor Pope has clearly seen the fundamental incompatibility between the standard, Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution, and Catholic theology. According to Neo-Darwinism, the adaptive complexity of life is the result of natural selection and random genetic mutations. Given this definition, Monsignor Pope argues that while many aspects of “evolution” may not be problematic, “a simple, uncritical acceptance of evolutionary theory is for a Catholic untenable.”
Science Reporters Should Quit Crying “Life!”
Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press is reporting that astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet in the “goldilocks” zone of its star. That is, the planet appears to be in the circumstellar habitable zone where water can persist at liquid temperatures on its surface. The planet, named Gliese 581g, is a mere 20 light years away from Earth. The article is referring to the circumstellar habitable zone, though presumably it is also in the galactic habitable zone since it’s so close to Earth. That means that Gliese 581g may have two of the major factors needed to make a planet hospitable to life. Unfortunately, we’ve seen hundreds of reports like this, so I now read them with a bit of Read More ›
Ayala: “For the record, I read Signature in the Cell”
Over at BioLogos, Professor Francisco Ayala has responded to Signature of Controversy — the collection of responses to criticisms of Signature in the Cell. As with the previous Ayala response at BioLogos, this one includes an introduction by Darrell Falk. The burden of Ayala’s response is to wax indignant that some of us have suggested, based on his original “response” to Signature in the Cell, that he had not actually read the book. Why would we suggest that? Well, because he so profoundly misrepresented Meyer’s thesis. Here’s what he said: “The keystone argument of Signature [sic] of the Cell is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms.” He goes on to Read More ›
Teaching More, Not Less
Any critically-thinking parent whose child has been forced to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will sympathize with petitions to ban discussions of global warming in public school science classes. Apparently such petitions are starting to crop up around the US. But I think this impulse, while understandable, is deeply misguided, as Vincent Carroll argues in the Denver Post. While it might be easier just to avoid subjects like man-made global warming (or Darwinian evolution), it’s hard to see how scientific literacy will be improved by avoiding them altogether. It’s much better to separate the data from the propaganda (a tall task, to be sure) and to help students learn to analyze the issue. As Carroll argues: Climate change happens Read More ›
On Mechanism: Response to Some Thomist Critics of Intelligent Design
Several “Thomist” critics of ID have claimed that ID is either committed to, entails, or somehow relates to what they consider an unsavory “mechanistic” philosophy. While a number of ID proponents have explicitly denied this, the details are somewhat complicated. So I’d like to respond to this critique at some length in a series of posts. Orthodox Catholics have long opposed the overreaching of a “mechanical philosophy” that came to prominence in the seventeenth century with René Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Christoph Cardinal Schönborn calls mechanism “the dominant form of reductionism in science.” 1As critics of the Aristotelian philosophy that had come to dominate the thinking in medieval Europe, Descartes and Bacon banished formal and final causation from Read More ›