The two pictures shown above may seem to be totally unrelated. The picture on the left of the crucifixion relates to the realm of faith . The picture on the right is a NASA picture of a planetary nebula. The nebula is made up of material emitted from a star near the end of its life. Astronomers believe that our sun will go through this stage billions of years from now. This picture is from the realm of science, which many think to be completely divorced from faith. This is a serious error. I am a Roman Catholic who accepts all the teachings of the Magisterium. I also have a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry (The Pennsylvania State University) and am a Professor of Chemistry at a private teaching oriented university. In the course of my teaching I have encountered other areas of science including astronomy. I have also worked for nine years in the chemical industry doing applied research. My work and my faith are not separate compartments which have little or no relation to each other.
As Pope John Paul II has stated in his encyclical
Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word , to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. " Faith and reason both have truth as the goal, and if either one is clouded, the truth cannot be found.Truth is the goal of religious faith and scientific investigation. Many people seem to lose site of this fact. One example of this problem is the creation versus evolution controversy. I believe that the point of contention is not over the age of the earth or the age of life on earth. The contention is over how life came into existence. Did life come into being through totally naturalistic means such as Darwinian natural selection or some other naturalisitc process? Did life come into being by means of some sort of intelligent design, by an agent or agents which come from outside the natural environment of the earth? We see design in buildings, computers, automobiles, pencils, and countless other things. Yet living cells, which are much more complex and packed with more information than any human creation supposedly came into being without any external design.
Life is based on chemistry. Chemists have done wonderful things to make life easier and more enjoyable. These achievements required hard work and lots of intelligent design. As a chemist, I have observed no tendency in chemicals to come together to make wonderful things. Wonderful things have been made and continue to be made, but intelligence as well as hard and painstaking work is necessary. Carelessness or an erroneous design leads to what is known as "a mess". The "god" residing within nature may have been around millions or billions of years ago but now seems to be absent. The living cell possesses a tremendous amount of organization and information but has the same tendency to "go to pot" as do all organic chemicals. This tendency is opposed by complicated mechanisms of repair and regeneration which keeps the organism together far beyond the life of the individual organic chemicals. Once a cell or an organism dies, the natural tendency toward disorganization and disintegration comes into play. How did complex "prelife" chemical organizations move toward life in order to get the first living cell in the face of the natural tendency of organic chemicals to disintegrate? It seems that only external design or an inner "god" could accomplish the task of forming life.
Michael J. Behe, , a biochemist has recently written a book called Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (The Free Press, 1996). Dr. Behe argues that life must have been designed. Although his reasons for asserting design are different from my own, they are consistent with my own experience as an organic chemist. Those who are interested in Dr. Behe's arguments should read his book.
Dr. Behe's book has also generated a lot of negative criticism from scientists. Many of the critics seem to exclude the idea of intelligent design as a first assumption. If the goal of science is truth, why should the idea of intelligent design be excluded? Is it "scientific" to exclude an idea because you don't like it? Yet some scientists seem to believe that supernatural causes are beyond the realm of science. They say that "miracle" is invoked to explain what cannot be explained by science. As scientific knowledge increases, the number of miracles increases because as the laws of nature become better known, our knowledge of what events are independent of nature is more precise. Only those who exclude miracles, the supernatural, or intelligent design as a first assumption will not see the evidence. The idea that science has nothing to do with intelligent design of life is only true in a naturalistic world view which excludes the supernatural.
Critics of Dr. Behe's book attack him but also tacitly accept some of what he is saying. We read of evolution "tinkering" to produce more complicated structures or using components which are "lying around" or using things which had been used for one purpose to accomplish a different purpose. This is what intelligent designers such as computer programmers, auto mechanics, inventors, and the like do to make something. The "intelligence" of evolution must come from the external designer(s) or the pantheistic god lurking in matter.
If the supernaturalistic world view is correct, there should be evidence of the supernatural, and this is provided by miracles. Claims of miracles must be investigated using reason to validate them. Those who have a naturalistic worldview and believe in the pantheistic god who operates from within nature can validate their view by showing that dead molecules can self organize (without human intervention) to produce life. Darwinian evolution by natural selection is an assertion of a naturalistic worldview, but I cannot accept it as a scientific fact.
Besides Dr. Behe, other authors have also written excellent books explaining the concept of intelligent design. Dean L. Overman has written
A Case Against ACCIDENT and SELF-ORGANIZATION (Rowman & Littlefield 1997). This book carefully and logically explains why the self-organization needed for the evolution of life is impossible.William A. Dembski has also written an excellent book called
Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press 1999). In this book Dr. Dembski uses information theory to show how life must have been designed.I believe that reason and science do not bar the door to a supernatural faith and Christian faith. But they cannot make you enter into that faith. That is where choice and free will comes in and that is the hardest part of the road to Truth.
Email: relsci@hotmail.com
