I’ve gotten to the point where just hearing the word “evolution” makes me want to bang my head against the wall. My irritation is mostly with those who believe that “science” has proved that God does not exist, or at least made the likelihood that God exists vanishingly small. But it’s also with those on my own side who implicitly accept the atheists’ terms, that the debate is about the mechanisms of physics and biology. And it reaches the bang-head-on-wall point when I read the extremely dim-witted accounts of the conflict in the popular media.
So here, in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday, is an essay that explains why the question of God’s existence is intrinsically and forever outside the competence of the physical sciences: Thomas Aquinas vs. the Intelligent Designers, by Michael W. Tkacz, a professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University. For those who may not want to take time to read the whole essay, here’s a crucial section:
Thomas points out that the judgment that there is a conflict here results from confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that I call the “Cosmogonical Fallacy.” Those who are worried about conflict between faith and reason on this issue fail to distinguish between cause in the sense of a natural change of some kind and cause in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. “Creatio non est mutatio,” says Thomas, affirming that the act of creation is not some species of change. So, the Greek natural philosophers were quite correct: from nothing, nothing comes. By “comes” here is meant a change from one state to another and this requires some underlying material reality, some potentiality for the new state to come into being. This is because all change arises out of a pre-existing possibility for that change residing in something. Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a taking of something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.
Strictly speaking, points out Thomas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something. On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist—it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates, not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.
There’s much more where this came from, at Gonzaga’s Faith and Reason Institute (see the Links page). Thanks to Jack for pointing this out to me.
And by the way Gonzaga is a Jesuit school. The Jesuits are not by any means finished.
For the record, I’m of two minds about the ideas of the intelligent design movement; it’s possible that they’re right, in at least some cases, and they may well be pointing out genuine problems with evolutionary theory. But I don’t really see how their ideas, even if true, could be proven scientifically (not that the evolutionists don’t have their own library of unprovable assertions).
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