Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Note to self…no matter how badly you need to see your sports rehab specialist, do Not try to drive from Waco to San Antonio through Ft. Hood and Marble Falls in the afternoon, become evening, the day before Thanksgiving. Twelve hours round trip when it should have taken eight.  Now, with the whining out of the way, I would like to add a couple more thoughts to yesterday’s post.

I had mentioned that modern psychiatry takes an unwarranted step in presupposing the human person to be no more than a biological entity. The quote I cited yesterday reflects one way in which they do this:

“We don’t really know, but we suspect that exposure to, say, 10, 20, 30,000 pages of pornography may bias a young person in terms of what they consider a normal relationship,…

Why do you suppose that this person thinks that it might take 10-30K repetitions of exposure to pornography to “bias” a young person? Well, he appears to have no clue, apparently, about the lasting, even ontological, effects of one’s decisions upon his personal constitution. In many ways, we are self-made. That is, our decisions make us into the persons we are for the better or worse…not what we are, but who we are.

This representative of the academy seems to assume that the child is a pavlovian test subject who is simply conditioned by a rather large regimen of repetitive stimuli. Rather, the child, assuming he is of the age of reason, when he sees obscene images and consents to the perhaps rather confusing impulses he experiences, develops a distorted appetite for these images. If he recognizes the evil of his consent, he (de)creates himself as evil.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in a treasure trove of great insights in a work called Way to Inner Peace, provides a sort of phenomenological assessment of the process of decision making in this regard in a chapter about what makes us normal (Chapter 32). He points out that emotions are what lead us to action and so when we experience an emotion, we need to act in some way in order to discharge the motivational energy that is the emotion. But before we experience the emotion, the process starts with an idea. The idea must come first and then the emotion is begotten. He points out that before the emotion arises is the most effective time to banish an evil idea from our minds. If the evil idea is allowed to remain it can give rise to an emotion. If it does, we then have a more difficult task because we now have to discharge the emotional energy in someway, but the inertia is going to be in the direction of the evil idea.

In banishing the evil, we are not talking about repressing the emotion (i.e. supressing it from our consciousness but allowing it to remain) out of guilt which is not yet a factor until consent occurs, but we are banishing the evil idea from our minds. But what to do with the emotional energy?  Sheen shows that we can direct the energy in the opposite direction so that it becomes a force for good. For example, the rush that one might get from the idea of viewing porn, the subject of our post, can be used to get oneself up and go to make to an appointment with our priest to go to confession if we have consented in the past, or if we have become habituated to giving in to temptations and cannot get out of it ourselves, to get up and find a good counselor who can help us to deal with our addiction.

Let me say that I do not know if the egg head quoted above has ever done an examination of conscience, but I think if he were to do so, he would find that it takes fewer than a dozen events of consenting to evils associated with primary needs such as sex, food, or drink, to become habituated to consenting to the evil. Some with a predisposition to addiction can become addicted in as many consents.

Bishop Sheen warns us that the appetite grows on what it feeds upon. If we give it evil, it will develop an insatiable appetite for more and more evil. If it is good, the appetites will develop an insatiable appetite for the good. The difference being that evil is a privation of being and so this appetite can never be satisfied. For the one addicted to evil then, the world eventually comes to seem a cruel joke. For one addicted to the good, there is only one ultimate satisfaction for what becomes a desire for the infinite Good and that is Good Himself–God.

As I said in my last post (though not in these words), one need not consult Pub-Med to find out if someone has done a study that would verify what I am saying. He need only consult his experiences to know the truth of it because while we are all fallen, and even though some of us are wounded in ways much more severe than others, we are also all human.  We know from experience that our virtuous acts lead us to happiness and our evil acts lead us, once the novelty of the pleasure wears off which it always eventually does, spiritual woundedness. Some may not have a clear idea of what it is to be normal because normalcy was denied them an all too early age.  But while they may not be able to verify that the good alternative exists to the evil they have experienced, they can verify that the insatiable evil does exist.  They know that living in a way that plays to their base emotions does seem to lead to a hopelessness about ever finding authentic happiness and life then does seems to become little more than a cruel joke upon them.

It is not among those who remove morality from consideration that anyone who needs healing from evil is going to find it. One must go to the expert in human personhood, the Catholic Church, if one is going to find the full resources for healing. The psych docs who plot the demise of common sense also lead their patients into the death spiral which comes from treating a human person like little more than an animal. Anyone who is faced with the prospect of a dealing with one of these reductionists ought to demand that the doc incorporate Catholic anthropology and the Sacramental system into the treatment plan or else find another doctor. God has given us what we need to overcome the ramifications of the fall, we need to ensure that our scientistic culture, and cultural elites do not deprive us of our sacred patrimony.

Christopher, who is in the midst of a graduate degree program in counseling and so is excused from not having posted in a while, was perusing the APA’s website last week and sent along a link to this story that they had featured that day. Here is the header:

Web pornography’s effect on children

Although research is scarce, investigators see links between young people who access Web porn and unhealthy attitudes toward sex.

The average person reading this would respond with “duhhh!!!!!” I would suspect. However, in reading the article, even the short intro above may seem to overstate the case. I say this because the author concludes the article with:

It’s too early to say what these findings mean—or even what to do if clearer results are shown. Some, for example, believe that being sexually curious is part of the developmental process and that Internet porn is one, albeit problematic, way to satisfy that curiosity. And it may prove nearly impossible to completely prevent it … .

This statement, while it certainly reflects the sad state of affairs, indicates that the sad state of affairs is contributed to in no small measure by a psychiatric academy that has jettisoned an integral view of the human person. Rather, they have left aside traditional morality as socially relative and completely unrelated to personal wellbeing. They do not even seem to know what comprises wellbeing any longer. For example, this appears to be the most that we can say about human flourishing in terms of healthy relationships:

“We don’t really know, but we suspect that exposure to, say, 10, 20, 30,000 pages of pornography may bias a young person in terms of what they consider a normal relationship,…

“We don’t really know.” This is the main point of this post. What is revealed by this statement is that theses folks assume that common sense must be dismissed in their new “world order.” Why? Because we do not “know” anything unless it has been empirically established and verified by other empirical investigators. This is scientism at its worst. That is, it is assuming that empirical science is the only source of valid knowledge.

But wait you say, isn’t this just medicine? Don’t we use the scientific method in medicine? Yes, we do. However, what is problematic is that when we reduce what we can know about the human person to that which can be established by empirical methods alone, then we have a reductionist view of the human person and so we make ourselves utterly incompetent in trying to understand him.

For example, one does not need to empirically verify in order to know as fact that anyone who habitually submits to his emotions without subjecting them to reason and gaining full possession of himself, will not flourish. Experience tells us that we will become slaves to our passions. We do not need a research study to tell us that this in order to know that it is true for everyone, though some experience it more severely with some things rather than others. We know that there is a universal structure to human beings that we call human nature. We know when we violate human nature, that sooner or later, we will suffer for it.

Furthermore, empirical data is meaningless outside of contextual models. The data has to be understood in terms of a world view for it to be useful. These models are built upon theories about the human person. The difficulties found among the soft sciences is that there is an inbuilt contradiction between the underlying presupposition that the subject of the study can be reduced to a biological entity describable by deterministic laws and the recognition that, in reality, there is something that cannot be accounted for (called intellect and free will) and this works at cross purposes with these presuppositions.

These models (not proven–i.e. not “scientific” but presupposed) cut the subject free from any structure that one could call human nature and so the subject is to be understood only in terms of the variety of individuals studied. The closest thing to nature they will allow is statistical averages. If one comes at this data from the reductionist perspective, he will interpret it completely differently than if one comes at it with the common sense, traditional, perspective…i.e. that there is such a thing as human nature and violating it comes with problems.

This is what explains the hesitancy of these so called “experts” to say that exposing kids to pornography will damage them. Someone with less knowledge and more wisdom can look at the data and say, yes, this confirms what we know about children and human nature. The academy, most of whom have traded wisdom for knowledge, say no we have to collect more data to be make such a claim because they rule out, out of hand, the classical understanding of human nature.

These are the people to whom we subject ourselves for healing when we, our children, or other loved ones experience psychological or emotional difficulties. The “experts” reductionism ought to scare you given the sage insights this article reflects. Added to that, is that too often, those who enter the profession (as Shelray has pointed out many times) are drawn to it because they suffer from the same maladies they are trying to treat. Because those treating them cannot heal them because they do not have an integral view of the human person, the most they have learned are coping skills. This brings to mind the local psych hospital in which the child sexual identity expert is a man who is undergoing a “sex change” operation. I cannot imagine a parent in good conscience letting her child be “treated” by someone who himself needs treatment.

I’ll tell you what. I think that the average person would be better off sitting down with a wise ole grandmother or grandfather who can apply their common sense with wisdom than subjecting oneself to these folks who are not willing to say that children should be prevented from being exposed to pornography because the data is not yet conclusive that it is harmful. If a psych doctor does not exhibit common sense, I would recommend exercising your own…and finding one who does (like here).

Monica posts some interesting news on the recently reported monkey embryonic stem cell research advances and a recent surprise by the researcher who brought us Dolly the cloned sheep.

We mentioned a little while back that Monica had begun the Adult Stem Cell Awareness blog. She has arranged to have Dr. Dan Pepin write a regular Q&A column for ASCA. Dr. Pepin is professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Edison College in Naples, FL; instructor of Human Biology at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey, MI; and Consultant on Bioethics for the Dioceses of Venice, FL and Gaylord, MI.

So, if you have questions about stem cells, Monica has given you the venue to get them answered. Go over and ask Dr. Dan your questions.

The other day I cited John Paul’s admonition of what happens when we forget God–man become an enigma to himself and ends up turning against himself. As I was preparing for a theology of the body lecture, I reread John Paul’s Jan 20th, 1980 Wednesday Audience in which he teaches that because man is created in the image of God, Who is Self-gift, man becomes a gift to the world.

How different this view of man is from those who have rejected God. We are hearing more and more from even the mainstream media about man as not a gift to the world but rather its bane. This view is being fed to them by misguided atheistic ecologists who, after rejecting the Triune, transcendent God of Christianity, have divinized sub-personal creation. They now consider mankind a virus. For example, last year a Texas ecologist was being investigated by the FBI for statements he made that seemed to advocate bio-terrorism. According to LifeSite he said:

“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”

To “save” the world from the “scourge of humanity” he advocates the eradication of 90% of what he terms the “fat, human biomass.” Earlier this year an interview with an author who wrote a book about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth, Matt Lauer from the Today Show seems to advocate this same line of thinking. Rather than asking critical questions, he and co-host Meredeth Vieira talk about human developments such as cities, dams, canals, etc. as making a mess of the environment. They both agree that the world would be much better off without us. What the world without humanity would mean is a unanswered question. Does it make a difference to the world if it is a molten mass of lava or a lush green paradise? These confused souls seem to presuppose that “better off” means pristine conditions for the highest forms of life but then they reject the highest forms of life–human beings–as the problem. This dichotomous thinking is also epidemic amongst those fanning global warming hysteria. Global warming, if human caused, will only harm humans…so what would be the beef that these anti-human ecologists have with it?

Let’s look at this confused “thinking” a little more closely. The interesting thing here is that the first premise in their logic is that humanity is just another form of life, with no more value than any other. They reduce humanity to the animal aspect of its hylomorphic nature. However, they then have to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animals in order to be able to declare that human beings are the virus while the rest of the animal kingdom is not.

Therefore, for the next step in logic they are forced to make a distinction and it is a fundamental one. The reason that humans are dangerous for the world are that they alone have the capacity to transcend themselves and their environment. The capacity that makes us distinctly different from the rest of creation is no longer a sign that man has a vastly higher moral worth than sub-personal animals. Rather, not being constrained by instinct and having intellect and will, free will, becomes a danger that reduces us to the level, ironically enough, of a virus. A virus is a non-living entity that has no free will and simply responds to environmental pressures according to its nature. A virus is seen as bad, by the way, because it is dangerous to humans. There is no consistency in thought here, except to throw whatever one can at one overriding idea–the self-hatred of man.

However, it would not be correct to say that this self-hatred arises simply out of nowhere. It is a self-hatred that arises from a hatred of God and the fact that we are made in His image. It is a rebellion against the only creature which God put here on earth for its own sake. When one rejects God, he rejects himself and comes to hate in himself the reminder that he is created in God’s image–his free will. Paradoxically, he must employ and, in fact, make his will into an idol in order to do so. But again, we have shown that it is hate and self-will, not logic, which drives this movement.

We have removed God from public life and our late-modern thinking has eliminated the idea of things having a nature. The result is that there is no foundation for morality. One can no longer speak of divine law in public discourse. Nor can one easily speak of natural law because there is professed to be (by our high priests of modern science) no order to nature but a random arrived at arrangement of matter (that only begrudgingly will these “thinkers” admit is ordered). The “thinking” exhibited by these folks is vague at best. If one recalls the tradition that Satan’s non serviam was a rebellion against serving humanity because its animality was too far below him, one might justly call this latest assault on human dignity, satanic.

I read an article earlier today about a scientist, Craig Venter, who believes that the artificial chromosome he has created from lab chemicals will be able to take over a donor bacterium cell in order to replicate and metabolize. While the construction of an artificial 381 gene, 580K base pair chromosome has not been done before, I wonder why this announcement comes prior to verifying that this chromosome will in fact work as he plans.

While it appears to me that at this point the concerns here are more over safety than morality, what does cause me pause is the attitude he seems to display in the comments attributed to him. Venter told the reporter that this is:

“a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

The phrase “philosophical step in the history of our species” seems quite misplaced for a scientist. What does he mean by this? At most here, as I understand it, is that if he is successful he may coax a cell of one bacterium species to replicate according to the genome of an artificially assembled chromosome that was based upon another bacterium’s genetic sequence which had been pared down to the minimum they think necessary to support life. I suppose that this could mean that he thinks that this project in some way brings man more to the level of creation ex nihilo? If this is what he is getting at, it seems that he ought to keep his day job or go back and take some classical philosophy.

The final quotation is just as vexing. He states:

“We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking,” he said. “We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can’t expect everybody to be happy.”

Well, again, it seems that his purpose is not so much for improving life and healing disease, but in dealing with”big issues” and “trying to create new value systems for life.” Perhaps this might be the reason for his early announcement. A failure might dampen or even put the breaks on his ability to deal with big issues and create new value systems. For that he needs media attention. If his primary interest for the sake of the science and medicine, the artificial chromosome construction would probably be sufficient even if he cannot get the last phase to work.

I dunno. This sounds to me more like the “science” of Richard Dawkins than Louis Pasteur. That is, the abuse of science to promote an ideology. I don’t want to say megalomaniacal ideology but does this not smell like an attempt to wangle an apparently significant biotechnical achievement into a bully pulpit for promoting what seems to be a Nietzschean world view in which Venter is the ubermensch? I wouldn’t mind being wrong here.

According to a nationwide survey, psychiatrists are the least religious of all physicians. Although a religious belief does not necessarily mean one will always behave according to an established set of moral standards/ commandments, a lack of faith may most certainly make one more susceptible to adjusting one’s moral obligations according to the social contract theory (read media pressure). The APA has illustrated this point brilliantly when it succumbed to political pressure rather than empirical scientific data (much less common sense) in its decision to remove the diagnosis of homosexuality as a legitimate DSM diagnosis (but still permits the diagnosis of “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” for someone with “…persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation“) and has recently adopted a pro-abortion position based on the perception of civil rights NOT scientific data.

The survey, published in the September issue of the journal Psychiatric Services, found that religious physicians are more likely to refer patients to a clerical person rather than a psychiatrist because “the gap between the religiousness of the average psychiatrist and her average patient may make it difficult for them to connect on a human level.”  Unfortunately, I have first hand experience in witnessing the business side of the psychiatric industry and the inability of the average psychiatrist connecting on any level with the patient.  The ability to be sensitive to the patient’s beliefs (i.e. connect) was not a primary concern. When venturing into the largely subjective (in the pejorative sense of the term) world of the professional psychiatric industry, one should beware of a dark sided subculture in which some practitioners and patients figuratively feed off one another for the purpose of attaining self-centered mutual benefits (income stream, appeasement, pharmacology, victimology, co-dependency, etc…). If your require mental health assistance, if at all possible, I would recommend you check out the Catholic Therapists’ listing, if you are in the Maryland, Northern Virginia or DC area either Alpha Omega Clinic or IPS Clinic, or consult your local Catholic charities.

An elitist scientific establishment actively suppresses any research that conflicts with the accepted Darwinian theory.

“Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. Its anti-the whole concept of learning.”

Movie Trailer from “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” starring the New York writer and intellectual Ben Stein. The film, set for release in February 2008.

LifeSite

A couple of months ago I posted on, among other things, the religion of those involved in the human caused global warming crusade. One of the problems of late modernity is that they have rejected much of the rationalism of early modernity. This in itself isn’t problematic. What is, is that in its place they adopt the Nietzschean admonition of the will to power. Thus, they deem it fair to use any method they think useful in order to obtain their ends.

They take advantage of the fact that much of society is bewitched by the word “science” but that many knowing little about science’s limitations. Thus, late moderns will appeal to science when it suits them. In that they cannot debate on the level of science, they will deny the credibility of those who present opposing scientific evidence. They rarely debate the evidence but rather seem to go straight to ad hominem.

A recent lecture by S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, takes on the emoting of these pseudo-scientists on the issue of human caused global warming. Looking at the claims of the global warming promoters, Singer notes that it is possible that global warming is not even a real phenomenon. For example, he shows that temperature have not risen over the last eight years although the rise in CO2 levels has increased. This suggests to him that last 30 year warming trend is due to more to other causes than to human causes. He also notes the failure of measured data to validate greenhouse computer models which also points the finger toward natural causes for the trend.

He also clears up misstatements about so called scientific consensus on this issue. He first shows that there is no consensus. Explaining that only a relatively few scientists have been consulted on this and that estimates are that well over half of the members of American Meteorological Society disagree with the so called “consensus” position. He goes on to explain that science does not proceed according to democratic means of establishing truth claims. Rather, science proceeds by validation of theories with empirical evidence that goes beyond simple trend correlation. I suppose that the media is so used to using their truth by poll method that this error could not be helped.

The irony here is that the claims of scientific obfuscation by those who oppose the will of the late moderns is what they themselves are guilty of. It is these same folks who know little about thinking and usually less about modern science, who use their scientism to justify their unbelief.

The next time you hear Christopher Hitchens railing about the inanity of Christianity in this age of science, think Al Gore and his scare mongering “documentary.”

At first glance, Eugene McCarraher’s recent, sharp-tongued rebuke of Christopher Hitchens’s ridiculous and juvenile God Is Not Great sounds like one of the more genuinely Catholic pieces ever penned for the equally ridiculous and juvenile periodical Commonweal. McCarraher seems rightly to pull no punches in attacking Hitchens’s alarming sophistry and ignorance. God Is Not Great, McCarraher tells us, is “Bullying and shallow…a haute middlebrow tirade, a stale venting of outrage and ridicule.” Hitchens is a mere “amateur in philosophy, an illiterate in theology, and a dishonest student of history.”

McCarraher fulminates against Hitchens for having become a run-of-the-mill spokesperson for capitalist modernity, that is, a bourgeois simpleton through-and-through. Hitchens has come to sound, McCarraher opines, more and more like one of Nietzsche’s infamous “Last Men,” the ignorant and arrogant (and godless) saps whose lives would embody the final, degraded spiritual condition of the European bourgeoisie. McCarraher follows Nietzsche: “Disdainful of all that has gone before them, the Last Men mistake their cynicism for knowledge and wisdom, ‘They are clever and know all that has happened, so there is no end to their derision.’” Of course, if I may fill in a bit from Nietzsche, in reality the “Last Men,” like Hitchens himself, are deluded. They are neither wise nor clever. Their cynicism comes too easy, without any real knowledge. They are not worthy of the great causes of the past whose spiritual impulses they dismiss in favor of their own trivial pleasures.

McCarraher summarizes quite well the real roots of contemporary atheism, found in the degraded condition of soul that passes for civilized humanity in the 21^st century, a condition exemplified by Hitchens himself:

Today’s atheism pays extravagant homage to idols dear to the professional and managerial ranks. Science as truth; the technological mastery of nature; credentialed expertise as the only credible form of learning; efficiency and profit as the sole ends of economic and political life: these shibboleths comprise the mental universe of the Western middle classes. Colored by an incoherent blend of Darwinism and environmentalism, a bland infatuation with science and technology is the bourgeois halo around instrumental reason, and nothing in the new secularism of Dawkins, Harris et al. serves to exorcise that enchantment.

There is little to quibble with in this pithy segment of McCarraher’s review of God Is Not Great. Indeed, if I may extrapolate, the all-consuming quest for middle-class comfort, on the one hand, and religious obligation, on the other, are antithetical to one another. It is no wonder that Hitchens so greatly hates religion. Marx’s protests to the contrary – that religion is the tool by which capitalist modernity promulgates itself – are of no lasting value: after all, Marx himself wanted little more than to spread the condition of the bourgeoisie as a privileged class to the entire globe (interestingly, for much of its history, this goal was quite consonant with Commonweal’s usual published fare – more on that in a second).

McCarraher continues his review by providing a list of facts demonstrating Hitchens’s palpable ignorance: Hitchens exhibits, for instance, no awareness of the role that Christians like Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste and Gregor Mendel played in the advent and development of science; he extols the Human Genome Project as a nail in religion’s coffin, while failing to notice that the head of the Project, Francis Collins, is an evangelical Christian; he makes the most simplistic errors in regard to theological argument – such as his childish assertion that theologians have never been able to overcome the dilemma posed for them by the question of “who created the creator?”; he accuses Christians of biblical literalism, ignoring the vast tradition, ancient and modern, of biblical interpretation that transcends the level of literal meaning. Other examples abound…

McCarraher is quite good, as well, in dismantling Hitchens’s pretension, common among the liberal intelligentsia, that modern literary and artistic culture should replace religious cultus. After all, McCarraher notes, 90 percent of our literary and artistic heritage is based in religion.

But, in the end, there is one thing above all about Hitchens that seems most irksome to McCarraher, and this requires us to take a second glance of the review as a whole. That is, McCarraher seems particularly upset about Hitchens’s increasingly vocal Americanism, and especially his support for the Iraq war. In this, we see how typical McCarraher’s review really is of Commonweal pabulum. After all, at various points in the article, McCarraher makes some other rather strange statements: at the beginning, he is flattering toward Hitchens’s earlier work, including his surpassingly stupid bromide against Mother Teresa; he includes religious intervention in abortion and gay marriage among “obvious sources” for the reaction of contemporary atheists against religion (apparently McCarraher doesn’t realize just how “bourgeois” the counter-forces to religion are on these issues); he wonders aloud if Hitchens has ever taken the time to debate a stalwart religious intellectual such as Garry Wills – whose own disingenuous religiosity, in my opinion, would serve more to confirm Hitchens (if Hitchens is at all honest) in his anti-religious sentiment than to dissuade him; he asks why Hitchens does not include in his book any mention of the profound conversations that Hitchens self-admittedly had with the Catholic senator Eugene McCarthy on religion. Indeed, McCarthy was, in McCarraher’s opinion, the last intellectual in American politics. But, truth be told, if one is not blinded by the Commonweal ideology, McCarthy was no more intellectual than, say, Newt Gingrich (Ph.D.).

The ultimate flaw in Hitchens’s latter-day polemics, in McCarraher’s opinion – it seems, is that it evinces a faith-above-all-else in capitalism. But this, in my opinion, is no more problematic than his earlier faith-above-all-else in socialism, expressed with an anti-religious fervor every bit as venomous as can be found in God Is Not Great. McCarraher thought that Hitchens’s earlier writings were the product of a “rigorous and undaunted mind.” In fact, they were no more or less so than his latest drivel. Why then should McCarraher turn his poison pen on Hitchens now? Is it truly because of his infantile atheism, or because of his “neoconservative” Americanism? Given Commonweal’s dubious track record, I suspect that the latter is the case.

An e-mail friend of mine, Steve, passed along an editorial in the 28 June 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The editors describe a claim by ETC Group out of Ottawa, Canada that “for the first time, God has competition.” This “environmental pressure group” suspected that the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD had “created” an organism using a synthesized, artificial genome–so called, synthetic biology.

While this turned out to be false, the Nature editors say clearly that synthetic biology will produce an artificial life form “in the next few years” (others claim it is only months away). They take this opportunity to turn from science to philosophy, though they do not realize it. In the context of these synthesized life forms they ask the question:

But should such efforts be regarded as ‘creating life’? The idea that such creation is a momentous step has deep roots running from the medieval homunculus portrayed by Paracelsus and the golem of Jewish legend to the modern faustian myth of Frankenstein. It will surely be hard to uproot. This is unfortunate, as the idea is close to meaningless.

What is it that the editors find to be meaningless–the “meaning of life” or the “creation of life”? Well it turns out that it is the former:

There is a popular notion that life is something that appears when a clear threshold is crossed. One might have hoped that such perceptions of a need for a qualitative difference between inert and living matter — such vitalism — would have been interred alongside the pre-darwinian belief that organisms are generated spontaneously from decaying matter. Scientists who regard themselves as well beyond such beliefs nevertheless bolster them when they attempt to draw up criteria for what constitutes ‘life’. It would be a service to more than synthetic biology if we might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept.

Now, the final sentence of the above quote might be taken as “scientific humility.” In other words, that life is a philosophical and theological concept and so science cannot circumscribe it. That would be great to hear from a journal such as Nature. Unfortunately, this is not what they are saying. That much should be obvious from the rest of the quote. Rather, the editors clearly are philosophical materialists and seem to uncritically presuppose that modern science warrants such a philosophical leap of logic…but of course, it does not. In fact, it cannot because it does not have the tools to engage in such speculation. The editorial goes on to opine that the synthesis of artificial cells can present more than a benefit to knowledge and medicine. Synthetic biology can, for Nature, benefit the culture at large by helping it to extinguish troublesome ideas such as concerns over the significance of life:

One of the broader cultural benefits of attempts to make artificial cells is that they force us to confront the contextual contingency of this troublesome idea.

What benefits can this bring to our culture? Well, how about the annihilation of moral thresholds when it comes to life. In that way, we could do away with any religious arguments that would give any special status to the embryo. Now what would that be worth? Science without morality…imagine the possibilities… Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” comes to mind here. Well, let’s let Nature speak for itself:

Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell is a powerful one. And it can and perhaps should be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo. If this view undermines the notion that a ‘divine spark’ abruptly gives value to a fertilized egg — recognizing as it does that the formation of a new being is gradual, contingent and precarious — then the role of the term ‘life’ in that debate might acquire the ambiguity that it has always warranted.

Nature clearly recognizes that empirical methods do not provide the ability to precisely define life. However, their problem is that they presume, therefore, that there is no other source of knowledge that can do so. This is called “scientism.” I have already pointed out Nature’s lack of recognition that they are, in fact, engaged in modes of thought which extend beyond the domain for which empirical science alone can authorize discussion. However, not realizing this and not being trained in these other modes of thinking and knowing, they do it very poorly. They presuppose answers to questions without even realizing it.

Because of their mechanistic materialism they are led to think that if one can understand how the material world is “mechanized” and how the mechanical sequence of events relate to one another, then this explains why things are the way they are. In other words, in explaining “the how” they hope to avoid having to answer the question why.

What I mean is that they are taking a philosophical question: “what is life?”, and trying to answer it solely with the tools of natural science. Since they apriori reduce knowledge to the empirical level they have no structures, no foundation for addressing the realm of knowledge beyond that to which empirical methods have access. Thus they find that they need to dismiss as non-questions those issues for which their tools do not apply…such as the question: “what is life.”There are many other errors at play here. Another I ought to point out is the presupposition about a faulty “God of the gaps” philosophy. For the editors, this theory implies for them that the only reason for believing in God’s existence is because we cannot explain “life” from a scientific point of view. Thus, if we make it occur mechanically, then obviously there is nothing to explain.

Of all of the reasons for believing in God one of these reasons has never been, in the entire history of Judeo-Christianity up until recently, the claim that we cannot explain the way the world works without Him. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas suggested exactly the opposite. He thought that God was shown to be greater by being able to accomplish His will in a world that had a certain autonomy (not in terms of existence but in terms of efficient causality in which for every effect, God is the Primary Cause but there is always a created secondary efficient cause).

Those who reduce Thomas’ third proof on the order of the cosmos to the idea that there must be some gaps in secondary efficient causality if we are to find room for God as the source of the cosmic order, mistake his meaning. This is no doubt because they are influenced by Cartesian/Newtonian mechanism. It was not until Newton, who was not even a Christian, that this “God of the gaps” theory arose. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to recognize God as Necessary Existence. One of these arises from contingency, which underlies all of Thomas’ five proofs. None of these have anything to do with the assumption that God must “intervene” in the world in a way that cannot be accounted for by regular laws of nature.

Because of their reductionist presuppositions, the Nature editors also succumb to the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy. The false dichotomy goes like this: Since empirical science cannot account for life then it cannot be more than a mental construct. Thus, if synthetic biology shows that through material means alone, it can “create” a working cell from a synthesized genome then it will have proven that “life” is a purely material process. Besides being wrong, it is faulty logic because it is based upon a mechanistic philosophy. Hylomorphism implies that there should be a corresponding material process for every hylomorphic formal cause.

If it were eventually possible to make a working cell from assembling constituent parts, it still would do nothing to undermine the existence of God. In fact, just as with cloning in which a human soul could be infused when the matter (the zygotic structure) was ready to accept it, so hylomorphic theory would surely say that a vegetative “soul” would be infused into the cell when the structure of the matter was ready to receive it.

The point is that scientism, though they do not admit it, bears the burden of proof when they want to limit existence to the material world. They have this burden because they are making a universally negative assertion with no proof. In the end, they are also left with the burden of defending the incoherent philosophy of mechanistic materialism rather than presupposing its validity simply because they refuse to admit the coherence of other modes of knowledge. However, I suppose that until scientists masquerading as philosophers come to terms with the fact that they are being self-contradicting by simultaneously doing philosophy and denying its legitimacy and also presupposing an incoherent philosophy for which “science” gives them no warrant, they will continue be, as philosophers, solely good technicians of the empirical method.

This is the title of a summer institute and conference that is jointly sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Nature and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is being held at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center in Champaign, IL. The summer institute will begin on Monday, June 11th and end with a conference on Friday and Saturday, June 15th and 16th.

Here is a description of the one week institute:

What:Four days of study and dialog on questions of science, natural philosophy, and their intersection. The questions and issues will be far-ranging, from anti-reductionism, emergentism, and structuralism in science, to “anti-realism” and “pluralism” in philosophy of science, to the continuing relevance of Aristotle’s understanding of nature.

The readings, lectures, and discussions will be organized around the theme of teleology in natural things. Teleology, even in the limited sense of “self-directness” or “intrinsic purposiveness,” has long been a source of controversy in philosophical reflections on nature and science. Using primarily texts and examples from modern chemistry, we will attempt to show that intrinsic teleology is neither a scary “ghostly cause” nor a “science-stopper,” but a common-sense conclusion from the data of modern science, and one that neither undermines the modern scientific edifice, nor remains irrelevant to it.

In order to maximize the value of week, students will be expected to read approximately 300 pages of materials from scientific, philosophical, modern, and classical sources in the month leading up to the Summer Institute. Those readings will be posted for download on this page about a month beforehand.

Here is a description of the conference that is entitled: The Nature of Nature:

What: A one and one-half day academic conference with one or two keynote addresses, and the presentation of 10-15 academic papers. Papers are encouraged on topics ranging from anti-reductionism/holism in science to self-organization, systems theory, and complexity, to papers in natural philosophy in the neo-Aristotelian or phenomenological traditions. See the ISN “articles, essays, and books” page to get a sense of the range or relevant topics.

Go here to read more about the institute and conference. If you are interested or know anyone who might be, I would encourage you to look into attending. It is sure to be a very interesting time.

A quasi scientific study sponsored by the theologically inept John Templeton Foundation allegedly found that those who were prayed for actually had more complications from heart surgery than those who were not. Are we to assume that God either ignores/hates Christians or there is no God?

Maybe it’s just the devil in the details.

I love the title of this book, The Dawkins Delusion. Richard Dawkins is a vociferous “anti-evangelist” who is intent on spreading his message that anyone who believes in God is a nut case. One of his Oxford colleagues has decided to take Dawkins to task for his pseudo-intellectualism in this book. Zenit ran an interview recently with the Oxford author, Alister McGrath, who is one of the book’s co-authors.

McGrath had begun on the same route as Dawkins. In the 1960s he was an atheist with a doctorate in molecular biophysics; however, he eventually corrected the mistaken aspects of his thinking that led him to his atheistic conclusions. In this book, he points out Dawkins’s errors.

Dawkins is an “expert” in evolutionary biology, though apparently he no longer has time to publish in this area since he is all consumed with his constant rehashing of the same old canards in book after book. In his latest book, the God Delusion, Dawkins reveals he is not an expert in philosophy, religion, or sound thinking. He seems to think that the louder he talks and more emphatic his rhetoric, the more convincing he will be. Here are some snippets of what McGrath has to say about Dawkins in the former’s Zenit interview:

McGrath declares himself disappointed with the level of argument in Dawkins’ book, which he describes as “the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching, substituting turbo-charged rhetoric and highly selective manipulation of facts for careful, evidence-based thinking.” He adds: “Dawkins preaches to his god-hating choirs,” relying on pseudoscientific speculation and aggregating convenient factoids.

It seems that Dawkins has little appreciation for the beliefs that he tries to condemn; nor does he have the capability for reasoned argumentation (which would demand that one knows what he is talking about):

McGrath devotes a chapter to explaining why God is not a delusion, as Dawkins maintained. He observes that the definitions used by Dawkins to describe faith, such as a “process of non-thinking,” are foreign to a Christian definition of faith.

Apparently Dawkins’s major concern is that he believes that religion and God are evil:

Another argument used by Dawkins is that God and religion are evil, being responsible for all sorts of violence and abuses in mankind’s history. McGrath readily admits that violence which draws its inspiration from religion is clearly something to be rejected.

McGrath, who grew up in Northern Ireland, had plenty of experience with religious violence. Nevertheless, he points out that it is an entirely different proposition to argue that violence is an inherent element of religion. Dawkins also errs in making out atheism to be a universally benign influence. A look at 20th-century history readily provides abundant examples of politically motivated violence, not least of which was that committed by the atheistic regime of the Soviet Union.

Clearly, people are capable of both violence and moral excellence, McGrath points out, and both of these qualities may be provoked by worldviews, religious or otherwise. It is true that religion can turn human conflicts into battles of good and evil. At the same time, a society that rejects God then tends to hold up as an absolute other realities or concepts. Thus, the French Revolution in its effort to replace Christianity with secular ideals carried out violent repression as it sought to impose its principles.

In the youtube interview below, Dawkins provides helpful insights into his acumen for critical thought. He points to religion as the source of suicide bombers and terrorists. He counters this with the fact that neither he nor any other atheist he knows is anything but a peace loving person. As McGrath points out above, Dawkins conveniently avoids the fact that many (if not all) of history’s greatest atrocities were foisted by atheists and that the same claim about peace loving believers could by made by 99.9% of those who hold religious convictions.

In a related topic, CNN recently did a piece on atheists as an oppressed minority. Someone in the atheist “anti-evangelical” movement, I think has figured out that since their arguments have proven to be generally ineffective, perhaps playing the victim card will bring them more success. After CNN’s “heart wrenching” piece about the fear in which atheists live in the US, they had a panel discussion. Well, they forgot to invite an atheist. The atheist community clamored for equal time and so CNN did an interview with Dawkins. I find this interview rather insightful. Take a look:

Here he appears to have been coached that it is time to play the victim card. Dawkins’s responses seem to me to reveal his disingenuousness. He admits that atheism is a belief… an opinion, rather than the ironclad, scientific fact that he tries to claim in his books. He claims that atheists do not want anything from anyone else except to pursue their beliefs and live in peace. He is pleading for tolerance for his “belief” all the while attacking as delusional the beliefs of others. This is justified I suppose because “they are in the habit of always having it their way.” This hypocrisy is a common feature of “victim-ality” (those who erroneously hold themselves to be victims of some sort of oppression).

At the end of the clip, he says concludes that atheism is better than belief in God because atheists believe that this is the only life they have to live so they have to live it properly, happily, and to the full. Whereas, those who believe in God think that they are going to have another life so, apparently by definition, they cannot live this one properly, happily, or to the full. This he says is a very negative way to live.

First, it is interesting that without God he can make the absurd statement that there even exists a proper way to live one’s life. If we are all just historical accidents, then isn’t the existential dogma the correct one? In other words, the meaning of life is simply that which each person gives it. If so, then Dawkins’s message is contradictory. If believers create their own meaning of life and it makes them happy then on what basis does Dawkins’s criticize it if his goal is happiness through “proper” living? It seems like he wants to start getting it all his way.

It is not clear what religion he is thinking about when he claims that believers in God can’t live “properly” because they think they will get another life. However, even if he is thinking about reincarnation, I do not think that he would find many who hold to incarnation that would agree that they think they can misuse this life because they get another chance. Certainly, this is not the view of Christians who do not see eternal life as a “second chance.” Is Dawkins really this ignorant of those systems of belief with which he finds fault?

I’m not a psychiatrist but I do play one here on this blog. As such, let me say that Dawkins seems to exhibit the common behavior of those who hold tenuous positions on issues of grave importance. They subliminally realize their precarious situations and, therefore, they require continuous reaffirmation that “they are o.k.” from everyone else.  Moreover, they cannot bear to hear anyone else tell them that they are wrong. This, by the way, I think is much the same phenomenon we see from those who suffer from and simultaneously embrace the SSA disorder. It is no wonder that rational argument is not possible with personalities such as Dawkins.

A clinical study conducted in Rome suggests that religious faith may help people recover more effectly from strokes and suggests spirituality can reduce the emotional stress which may impair in the recovery process, according to a report Thursday in the medical journal Stroke.

“The analysis showed higher scores on the anxiety and depression scale correlated significantly with lower scores on the religious and spirituality questionnaire,” said the American Heart Association, which publishes Stroke. “The association remained significant after adjusting for other factors that could influence a stroke patient’s degree of emotional distress (such as mental and physical functioning, living conditions and marital status),” it said in a statement.

Hierothee passed along an article by Mark Cole appearing in this month’s issue of New Oxford Review. In the article, Cole does an excellent job of summarizing the issues associated with Intelligent Design among various Catholic groups. He very concisely lays out the issues and positions and essentially says pretty much the same things that we have been saying here at C-L-S (which is why his article is excellent of course).

Here are a few snippets:

On the positions of various Catholics:

The Intelligent Design debate has not fallen along the Left/Right divide in the Church. It does appear to be a non-issue among liberal Catholics (many of whom have swallowed Teilhard de Chardin’s absurd and unscientific evolutionary theology), but orthodox and traditional Catholics have divided along often unexpected lines.

On the issue of randomness and its category as a “scientific” or philosophical assertion:

These criticisms seem quite anemic compared to those from other thinkers outside the movement. In Cosmos and Transcendence, Wolfgang Smith summed up Darwinism as a metaphysical belief that things create themselves. And economist, philosopher, and Catholic convert E.F. Schumacher, working from the common concepts of traditional philosophies, saw that Darwinism’s assertions violated the divisions of knowledge. Neither randomness nor unguidedness could be determined by purely experiential science, and the effort reflected a misguided attempt to replace philosophy with empirical science. Schumacher, in his book A Guide for the Perplexed, went so far as to predict that Darwinism might bring about the downfall of Western civilization if nothing stopped it. In a sadly fragmented world that seems incapable of anything remotely like clear thought, it appears that he may be right.

On the confused response of the popular press (and of many Catholics who should know better) to various Magisterial statements about evolution:

What they didn’t seem to notice was that the word “evolution” gets used in a number of equivocal senses. Those who thought that John Paul had endorsed “evolution” interpreted the word in its fullest Darwinian sense (i.e., random and unguided), while both he and Pius XII had used it in the sense of descent with modification, without any commitment to natural selection. Neither document makes the Church’s rejection of evolution unguided by Providence as clear as John Paul’s 1985 remarks. John Paul’s slightly reworked quote from Gaudium et Spes (in “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth”) tells us that God specifically willed man. Elsewhere John Paul insists that God created man in His image and likeness. Pius rejects any claim that evolution means that nothing is “absolute, firm or immutable,” and insists that God directly creates men’s souls. Both repeatedly affirm God’s role as Creator.

It would be wrong, however, to read this stunning insistence on man’s ability to discern design in the universe as an endorsement of the ID movement — that is, of a particular set of ideas or program of research.

It is a very good summary. Go read the whole article: Catholics, Intelligent Design, & Darwin’s Theory

My favorite man of folly, Richard Dawkins, is optimistic that physicists will soon provide a theory that would complete (former atheist) Albert Einstein’s dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. This “Theory of Everything” will ultimately furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of everything in the universe. This, he said, will “deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions”. A key part of the final theory will rely on the results of a Large Hadron Collider which is scheduled to be switched on later this year.

Guardian Unlimited

Edge World Question Center - asked more than 150 scientists and intellectuals: “What are you optimistic about ?”

I have been reading a lot lately works by the Eastern Orthodox lay theologian and poet Philip Sherrard (1922-1995), who, in several books (see The Rape of Man and Nature and Human Image: World Image), issued a radical theological critique of modern scientism. Sherrard was a masterful “deconstructor” of the heretical theological and misguided metaphysical presuppositions that underlay modern science. Influenced in part by the philosophy of René Guénon and his followers – disciples of the so-called Sophia Perennis – Sherrard was able to show that modern materialism, naturalism or scientism has its roots in the distorted image of the human self that was inculcated by bad theology in the modern period. As Sherrard poignantly notes throughout his writings, it is always the case that our human “self-image” generates our “world-image.” This is true of all civilizations and cultures, and our modern techno-scientific society is no exception (despite the silly pretensions of Enlightenment-influenced rationalists to the contrary). However, according to Sherrard, there is one big difference between traditional and modern societies in this regard: the self-image exemplified by modern society – formed by a faith-desire to see the world as nothing more than a mathematical grid – rejects the traditional idea that physical nature and the human subject have an essential connection to one another.

Sherrard argues convincingly that it is modern blindness to the essential connection of the human self to physical nature that is responsible for the environmental dilemmas of our age. For Sherrard, the modern environmental crisis is, in sum, the result of bad metaphysics. Viewing the world as nothing more than a mechanism susceptible to mathematical analysis and as detached from any participation in spiritual reality, modern humanity has, according to Sherrard, sought to “rape nature” for the sake of dominance and control. Moreover, in Sherrard’s opinion, it is little use to turn to scientists to seek a way out of this situation. Sherrard thinks that the blindness of many scientists to the metaphysical crisis of the modern age is total and complete:

Modern science has emerged because, knowingly or unknowingly, scientists themselves have accepted and continue to work within a certain framework of metaphysical or philosophical principles that constitute a reality in their own right and quite apart from the phenomenon to which they have given birth. This is to say that modern science, far from being merely a pragmatic, materialist or empirical discipline independent of metaphysics – and it is this which many scientists would want us to believe – in fact presupposes and implements in its every aspect, theoretical and practical, a metaphysical or philosophical view of things that is anything but neutral, self-evident, self-proven or a matter of common sense. It is this view that determines the whole character of modern science as well as the character of the society which is fashioned in its image.

Few contemporary scientists appear to be aware of this. Scientists are specialists, and within the confines of their specialties they are no doubt capable of producing theories and effects consistent with the premises they have adopted. But scientific knowledge itself has no depth and no complexity: it represents the lowest common denominator of the most average kind of mentality. Its authors have never even grasped the crucial distinction between wisdom and speculative hypothesis based on experiment. Hence once they venture outside the confines of their specialties and try to justify their theories and effects in terms of value or to assess their metaphysical or human significance, they produce only nonsense, because the premises which they take as their standards are not comprehensive enough to allow them to do anything else.

Indeed, judged by the normal standards of metaphysical or philosophical discourse, scientists – but for the rarest exceptions – display a total lack of competence in this realm: the thought in this respect of such a highly esteemed scientist as Albert Einstein, for instance, is bewildering in its naiveté (The Rape of Man and Nature, 11).

Sherrard, in typically modern, Eastern Orthodox fashion, lays the blame for our distorted, modern self-image too much at the feet of the acceptance by Western Christianity of Aristotelian philosophy. He calls for a return to a more Neo-Platonically influenced theology, such as was found in the great tradition of the Eastern Church Fathers. We here at C-L-S would not want to countenance all aspects of Sherrard’s analysis of things, least of all his bias against Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that some of the best modern Thomists have likewise called for recognition of the more overtly Neo-Platonic themes in Thomas himself, such as the participation of all things in God, or of a greater appreciation for intuition in the realm of knowledge.

At any rate, I find Sherrard’s “eco-conscious” critique of scientism – though extreme at times – quite a refreshing departure from much contemporary Christian discourse about modernity and science. Too often in the last half-century, too many of the great ecclesiastical figures of the Church have evinced a dangerous ambiguity toward the metaphysical distortions of modern thought and culture…

Be Here Mondays gives his take on this October’s “First Things” review by Stephen M. Barr on Creation and the book by the Harvard scientist Edward O. Wilson Ed, who is first and foremost an ant man, but also has a profound admiration for scarab beetles.

Last week when it was announced that Fr. Coyne had been replaced as director of the Vatican Observatory, the Daily Mail was all a flutter with the speculation that he was “sacked” because he went afoul of Benedict’s position on Intelligent Design.

Their article was quite ridiculous, frankly. They claim that Benedict favors Intelligent Design over Evolution and this was the source of Coyne’s “sacking.” I suppose they ought to be granted some allowance because if they listened to Fr. Coyne’s criticism of Cardinal Schönborn’s NYT’s article as their only education on the topic, perhaps their confusion is understandable (see my analysis of Fr. Coyne’s confusing comments from his talk in Palm Beach in January of this year).

If Fr. Coyne was removed for cause, I would suspect it is more because he publicly seemed to espouse at least Deism if not a Process philosophy (again see my above linked analysis). However, there is an article in an English language, Italian news source that is claiming that Fr. Coyne requested to be replaced as he battles cancer.

Well, the U.K. Guardian is continuing to fan the flames of confusion. They are claiming:

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of “intelligent design” taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

They cite Cardinal Schönborn’s talk at a conference in Rimini (see CNS news story) recently in which he proposed an open debate on Darwin. However, the point is still very much lost on the popular media and on many Catholic intellectuals to boot.

Cardinal Schönborn has been trying to uncover the scientistic thinking that has captured Western thought in his entry into this issue. He is criticizing the presumption that a Baconian type methodology is necessary to detect design in nature. This thinking shows the widespread capitulation to the reduction of knowledge to solely that which is “scientific” that has infected academic thinking since at least Hume. Now popular thinking accedes to this gnostic attitude and assumes if it does not come from a “priest” of science then it falls into the category of opinion (and even in this realm a scientist’s opinion is better than anyone else’s regardless of the other’s expertise or the scientist’s lack thereof).

What the Cardinal, and I assume Benedict, wish to do is to restore speculative knowledge to the realm of public discourse. This is also the mission of the Institute for the Study of Nature. They all recognize that, in general, modern thinkers have something of an emaciated view of reality.

It is clear that when orthodox Catholic scientists reject the idea of formal causality as an active principle then they have succumbed to a reductionist view of reality. In other words, the view that an entity is nothing but the sum of its parts. If the Aristotelian form is not an active principle then it is just the entity’s cognitive content to be extracted. If it is simply a passive description of the entity it “informs” then perhaps all knowledge does belong to purview of modern science and no one has anything valid to say about the material world if they don’t have a Ph.D. in some field of “hard” science. There are philosophical and theological difficulties with this view that we have discussed here before.

I look forward to these efforts to reframe the creation - design debate in an auspiciously Catholic context where it is no longer one of biblical exegesis vs. materialistic atheism under a thin veneer of Darwinian theory. Rather, it will be a recovery of classical tools of thought that can show how the common sense that all humans possess can see and know of God’s handiwork in nature by apprehending its form, without having to verify it with mathematical calculations and complex theoretical models.