Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith

The following text is excerpted from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn’s “Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith” (First Things – April 2007 (21-26)). The whole article (which currently requires a subscription to fully access) is highly recommended.

     … Darwin wanted [i.e., purpose, intention are present!] to give a scientific and plausible explanation of the origin of species able to dispense entirely with distinct and independent creational acts of God… Darwin made exactly the opposite argument: The whole diversity of species has its origin in mutations based on coincidence and their probability of survival… There is scarcely any doubt that Darwin wished to assist materialism in securing scientific victory…

     We must first and foremost recover and understanding of what the modern scientific method is able to explain and what it is intrinsically unable to explain. We must recognize that by its method it cannot deal directly with top-down causation or with the natures or essences of things. It proceeds instead by means of mathematical and mechanical explanations that, in the old expression, “save the phenomena.”… neuroscience cannot prove that the mind is reducible to the brain, because its methods are unable directly to grapple with immaterial realities…

     … Darwin must be disentangled from Darwinism; modern evolutionary theory must be freed from its ideological shackles…

     … The possibility that the Creator makes use of the instrument of evolution is one that the Catholic faith can countenance. The question is whether evolutionism (as materialistic, reductionistic, worldview-forming concept) is compatible with faith in a Creator. This question in turn presupposes that one distinguishes between the scientific theory of evolution and its philosophical and reductionist interpretation. This in turn presupposes the attainment of clarity regarding the philosophical presuppositions behind the current debate over evolution.
     Often one seeks a way out based on the notion that biology and, for that matter, all the natural sciences are merely methodologically materialistic and mechanistic, and thus they do not require materialism and mechanism as a worldview or a philosophy. Even if this were so, it still remains clear that this methodological option is a spiritual act that presuppose human intelligence, will, and freedom. That alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the limitation of the methods in the natural sciences to purely material processes cannot do justice to the whole of reality.
     … The Catholic faith, along with the bibles of the old and New Covenants, holds firmly that reason can discern the existence of the Creator through His traces in Creation with certainty, albeit not without effort.
     As the philosopher Hans Jonas was writing his important work The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), it became clear to him that it makes no sense to speak of ethics and responsibility if there is no such thing as the spirit, the soul, reason, and free will. Genes do not assume responsibility. After all, they are not subject to judgment when they produce cancer cells. Animals also are not answerable to responsibility. Only human beings carry responsibility and must (finally before the judgment of God) give an account for their deeds.

     To be able to promise something, to make an effort to keep the promise, with the danger of being able to break it also—all of this cannot be the effect of forces of a purely material sort. The development of a scientific theory is a spiritual process, even when this theory is materialistic. Alfred North Whitehead’s ironic remark about those Darwinists who disavow any form of directedness toward an end is well known: ‘Those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting object for study.” Human action is not conceivable as anything other than as oriented toward a goal, and there is hardly an example of any activity more goal-oriented than scientific activity.

     There is a fascinating text by St. Thomas that articulates clearly the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology: “Nature is to be distinguished,” he writes, “from technology only in that nature is an internal causal principle, while technology presents us with an external principle.” In order to indicate the “internal principle,” Thomas makes use of a comparison: “If the technology of a ship’s structure were immanent to the wood, then the nature (of the wood) would bring forth the ship, such as normally happens through technology.” Somewhat later in the passage, Thomas explains again: “Nature is nothing other than a certain technology, namely, the skill of God, which is infused into things, and which is directed towards its determinate end by the things themselves.” And again, Thomas explicates this using the image of a ship structure: “This is as though the builder of a ship could impart the capacity to the wood pieces of being moved from within themselves to bring forth the structure of the ship.”

     … An oft-cited remark by George C. Simpson runs: “Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that does not have him in mind. He was not planned.” If Simpson had said merely that no plan according to which mankind came about may be discerned using the purely quantitative-mechanical methods of scientific inquiry, then this assertion could be correct. But this way of looking at things—this “self-limitation of reason,” in the words of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address—is not “given by nature” but is a deliberate, methodological, and eminently goal-oriented choice.
     The conscious limitation of its point of view to the countable and the measurable, to material conditions and interconnections, has permitted formidable advances of the natural sciences, allowing modern man to dominate and control nature for his own needs to an amazing extent. But it would be highly problematic if one wished to declare as simply nonexistent everything that is here being methodologically suppressed, starting with the faculties of reason and free will that permit this methodological choice to being with. It is true that the genetic code of human beings differs only very slightly from that of chimpanzees. Yet only a human being can arrive at the notion of exploring the genetic codes of human beings and chimpanzees.

     … God speaks the language of His creation, and our spirit, which is likewise His creation, is able to perceive it, to hear it, to comprehend it.
      This, in the end, is the reason modern science grew in the nurturing soil of the Judeo-Christian belief in creation. A materialistically constricted science studies the letters but cannot read the text. Scientific exploration of nature is possible only because it gives us an answer. Nature is “built” such that our spirit can penetrate its structure and laws.

     … Exploring and analyzing the material letters is the presupposition for being able to read the immaterial text. But the letters do not constitute the text itself. They are only the material bearer. Science that confines itself exclusively to material conditions is one-handed and thereby one-sided. There is missing from it that which actually marks a human being as human: his gift of elevating himself over material conditions with reason and intuition so as to press ahead to meaning, to truth, and the Message of the Author of the text.”

     One thing should be clear, and it requires a frankly theological explication: Let us not be excessively hasty in wanting to demonstrate “intelligent design” everywhere as a matter of apologetics. [emphasis added] Like Job, we do not know the answer to suffering and chaos. We have been given only one answer—but that from God himself: The Logos, through whom and in whom everything was created, has assumed flesh; the cross is the key to God’s plan and decisions. As important and indispensable as renewed effort in matters of natural philosophy may be, the Word from the cross is God’s final Wisdom. For through His holy cross, He has reconciled the entire world. And the cross is the gate to the Resurrection.
     If the Resurrection of Christ is, as Pope Benedict said in his 2006 Easter Homily, the “explosion of love” that has dissolved the indissoluble network of “death and becoming,” then we may also say that this is the goal of evolution. We know its meaning from its end, its fulfillment. Even if it sometimes seems without goal or direction in its individual steps, the lengthy path has had a purpose toward Easter and from Easter onward. We gladly affirm the Christian understanding, derived from Greek and Jewish culture before, that unaided reason can attain basic knowledge of the purposes built into nature and the intelligence behind it. But it is only through God’s self-revelation in Christ, and our response of faith, that we can begin to glimpse the ultimate purpose of the cosmos and to trust in God’s provident care of all cosmic details. It is not that “the path is the goal.” Rather, the Resurrection and the Second Coming of the Lord are the purpose of the path.