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At the Mercy of Chance?

Evolution and the Catholic Tradition


William E. Carroll
Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Theology and Science, Blackfriars
University of Oxford

Little is left to chance in ceremonies at the Vatican, and those who organize events for
the Holy See are well aware of the symbolism of what is said and done there. It was
no accident then that, at the general audience of Pope Benedict XVI on 9 November
2005, the scriptural passage read was from Psalm 136 which celebrates God's mercy
and points to creation itself as the first visible sign of that mercy. In his remarks, the
Pope referred as well to Psalm 19, according to which "the heavens proclaim the glory
of God and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands." Concentrating on the
theme that the created order discloses God's greatness, the Pope turned to the
commentary of the Greek Church Father, St. Basil (330-379), on the opening of
Genesis. Basil had observed that, in spite of the evidence of creation, there were
people in his own day who, "fooled by the atheism which they carry inside of them,
imagine a universe free of direction and order, as though it were at the mercy of
chance." After quoting these words, the Pope added that there were many people
today who, "'fooled by atheism,' contend and try to demonstrate that it is scientific to
think that everything is deprived of direction and order, as though it were at the mercy
of chance."
As is the custom in such papal locutions, the Pope was not specific in his brief
comment; he did not identify those who he thought were "fooled by atheism" to deny
order and purpose in nature. The setting of the Pope's remarks was significant,
however, for sitting near him in the Paul VI Audience Hall was Cardinal Christoph
Schnborn, Archbishop of Vienna who, along with other bishops from Austria, were
in Rome for their regular visit ad limina. The Vatican was well aware that the
question of design and order in nature was the subject of a short essay Cardinal
Schnborn had published on the opinion page of The New York Times on 7 July 2005,
and that much of the reaction to what he had written, even in some Catholic circles,
had been negative.
In this essay, "Finding Design in Nature," to which the newspaper added as a
kind of subtitle, "the official Catholic stance on evolution," the Cardinal indicated that
for years he had been troubled by the way in which many writers (including Catholic
theologians) had "misrepresented" the Church's position as endorsing the idea of
evolution as a random process. Yet evolution, so construed, apparently excluded any
role for God in nature. What was particularly troubling, he thought, was the misuse of
Pope John Paul II's remark in 1996 that evolution "was more than a hypothesis,"
which led many erroneously to think that there are no problems for Catholic teaching
were one to accept the claims of evolutionary biology.
Throughout his essay the Cardinal reaffirmed Catholic teaching that there is an
order and purpose in nature, an intrinsic finality, which discloses the existence of God
as its source. He also cited the statement of the Catechism of the Church, of which he
was one of the principal editors: "The existence of God the Creator can be known
with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." The Cardinal argued
that "evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense," with its claim that biological change is at
its roots "unguided," "unplanned," and "random," is incompatible with Catholic
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teaching concerning creation and God's providential ordering of the world. He cited
the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI that "we are not some casual and meaningless
product of evolution." In addition, the Cardinal claimed that "any system of thought
that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in nature
in biology is ideology, not science." The latter, of course, is a claim in philosophy,
not theology, but the Cardinal was well aware of the traditional Catholic defense of
reason, since, as Thomas Aquinas would say, reason is a way to God. Here is the
penultimate sentence in his essay: "Now at the beginning of the 21
st
century, faced
with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology
invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern
science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the
immanent design evident in nature is real."
The publication of the Cardinal's essay, in the most prestigious newspaper in
the United States, was itself a news story; reporters were quick to suggest that a
leading cardinal had "redefined the Church's view on evolution." The essay appeared
at the same time that a crucial case in the courts, in Pennsylvania, and decisions of the
State Board of Education in Kansas, about the teaching of evolution in the public
secondary schools, were being widely discussed.
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This long-standing debate in the United States, although in many ways
peculiar to American culture, reveals how discussions about creation and evolution
can easily become obscured in broader political, social, and cultural contexts.
Evolution and creation have taken on cultural connotations, serve as ideological
markers, with the result that each has come to stand for a competing world-view. For
some, to embrace evolution is to affirm an exclusively secular and atheistic view of
reality, and evolution is accordingly either welcomed or rejected on such grounds. As
Michael Ruse, the distinguished philosopher of science, has written recently,
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"creationism" and what he calls "evolutionism" represent rival religious views of the
world: "rival stories of origins, rival judgments about the meaning of human life, rival
sets of moral dictates. . . ." What Ruse calls "evolutionism" is a set of broader cultural
claims which have their roots in, but ought to be distinguished from, the scientific
discipline of evolutionary biology.
One need only read works of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett to think that
Cardinal Schnborn is surely correct in concluding that there is a conflict between
evolutionary biology and Catholic teaching. After all, Dawkins writes that belief in
God "is a computer virus of the mind" and that the universe disclosed by evolutionary
biology "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no
design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
3

Daniel Dennett writes in no less stark terms: "Love it or hate it, phenomena like this
[DNA] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal,
unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis
of all agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe."
4

Although at times critical of the unwarranted excesses in the claims of scholars like
Dawkins and Dennett, the late Stephen Jay Gould, when commenting on the
appearance of the human species, wrote that if we were to "replay the tape a million
times from a Burgess beginning. . . , I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would
ever evolve again." Man is but a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent
limb on a fortunate tree."
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The publication of the Cardinal's essay in July was not the beginning of the
wider debate about how to understand the philosophical and theological implications
of evolutionary biology,
6
but it did focus attention on the ways in which the Catholic
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intellectual tradition can be brought to bear on this topic. Indeed, the Cardinal
himself, in October 2005, inaugurated a series of monthly talks in the Stephansdom in
Vienna on the subject of creation and evolution, and in January 2006 he published a
longer essay on the topic in First Things. As we shall see, these later writings by the
Cardinal offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of order and design in
nature.
Natural selection as the mechanism by which biological change has occurred
is a crucial feature of evolutionary biology with which Cardinal Schnborn and others
are especially concerned. According to Neo-Darwinian theory, as a result of chance
variations at the genetic level, variations in organisms result, such that some are better
adapted to their environment than others. Nature, then, selects these better adapted
organisms and "eliminates" competitors. It is through this process of natural selection
that evolutionary biology explains the diversity of species in the world. Before
Darwin the only way to explain the obvious design in the natural order seemed to be
to appeal to the direct agency of God. Darwin, however, offered an explanation
which relied exclusively on causes in nature. After Darwin there seems to be no role
for God as an explanation for what biology discovers about the world of living things.
Much of what Cardinal Schnborn wrote was a good reminder that Catholic
teaching, while recognizing the appropriate autonomy of the natural sciences to
describe the physical universe, rejects philosophical claims, sometimes masquerading
as the conclusions of science, that the universe is wholly self-sufficient, with no need
of a Creator. What troubled some commentators, however, were the arguments the
Cardinal advanced in support of Catholic teaching. These arguments, at least in his
initial essay in The New York Times, can be too easily placed in the context of the on-
going debate about evolution in the United States. Supporters of "intelligent design"
might take considerable comfort in the Cardinal's reference to "the overwhelming
evidence for purpose and design found in modern science." Proponents of "intelligent
design" think that there are "irreducible complexities" in nature which cannot be the
result of random processes: ultimately, this type of design discovered by biology can
only be explained by an appeal to a designer. This conclusion, they claim, is properly
speaking, a scientific one.
7
In the analysis of William Dembski, the leading
theoretician of "intelligent design," natural entities which reveal what he calls
"specified complexity"
8
cannot be brought about by natural processes alone and thus
must be the outcome of intelligent design. The intelligent designer is not simply the
source of the form or pattern of what is designed but is also the agent cause of its
production in the natural order.
To refer to "intelligent design" as science is what troubles many scientists, and
their concern is that the Cardinal's essay represented a rejection of the fundamental
tenets of modern biology and would, accordingly, cast the Church as an opponent of
modern science. Their fear was that, in defending the Church's traditional claim that
nature and human nature fall under God's providence, the Cardinal offered a defense
which looked as though it were based on dubious claims associated with "intelligent
design." Once "intelligent design," rightly or wrongly, is considered a threat to
science, then any apparent support of its claims is suspect.
Unfortunately, in his July essay the Cardinal did not distinguish adequately
between arguments about order and design in nature, on the one hand, and arguments
about God as Creator, on the other. A similar failure to make such a distinction can
be found in the analyses of Dawkins and Dennett when they reject creation on the
basis of what they consider to be the absence of order and design in nature.
Furthermore, there are different senses of "order and design" which need to be
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distinguished before one can conclude that nature discloses an "intrinsic finality." The
debate about "intelligent design" concerns to what extent modern science, as the
Cardinal argued, offers "overwhelming evidence for purpose and design." One
attraction of "intelligent design," at least for some believers, is that it provides, or
seems to provide, scientific evidence for the existence of God. I think, however, that
arguments offered in support of "intelligent design" do not really advance the cause of
belief in God, and, in some sense, these arguments only add to confusion about
creation and evolution. We ought to distinguish, I think, between the evidence of the
individual sciences and the conclusions drawn from that evidence in the philosophy of
nature.
In important ways the Catholic tradition, especially the thought of Thomas
Aquinas, has much to offer to help disentangle the confusion in contemporary
discussions about the theological and philosophical implications of evolutionary
biology. First of all there is Thomas' general commitment to the complementarity
between faith and reason and that the truths of science pose no threat to the truths of
faith, since God is the author of all truth. In particular, there are three fundamental
insights of Thomas which are especially relevant: 1) his understanding of creation as
an explanation of origins in a metaphysical and theological sense: so that God's
creative act is the cause of the complete existence of all that is, as it is; 2) his
understanding of how God's causality functions in a radically different way from the
kind of causality exercised by creatures, both animate and inanimate: so that there is
no competition, no conflict, between God's causality, including His providential
ordering of all that is, and the kinds of causality which the natural sciences discover in
the world; and 3) that nature does disclose an "intrinsic finality," but such disclosure
is found in the discipline of natural philosophy and is not inconsistent with chance and
randomness in nature. The third category, concerning order, design, and chance in
nature, has been more widely discussed than, even if at times confused with, the other
two, and it will be the major focus of this essay.


Creation
On the specific question of creation out of nothing, the key to Thomas
analysis is the distinction he draws between creation and change. The natural
sciences, whether Aristotelian (with which Thomas was primarily concerned) or those
of our own day, have as their subject the world of changing things: from subatomic
particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be something
that changes.
Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of
whatever exists. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in
something, is not to work on or with some existing material. If, in producing
something new, an agent were to use something already existing, the agent would not
be the complete cause of the new thing. But such complete causing is precisely what
creation is. To create is to cause existence, and all things are totally dependent upon
the Creator for the very fact that they are. Thomas thought that by distinguishing
between what things are, their essences, and that they are, their existence, one could
reason conclusively, in the discipline of metaphysics, to the existence of God as
Creator.
The Creator does not take nothing and make something out of nothing.
Rather, any thing left entirely to itself, wholly separated from the cause of its
existence, would be absolutely nothing. Creation is not primarily some distant event;
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it is the complete causing of the existence of everything that is. At this very moment,
were God not causing all that is to exist from subatomic particles to the color of the
sky, to our own thoughts, hopes, and dreams were God not to be causing everything
that is, there would be nothing at all.
For Thomas, there is no conflict between the doctrine of creation and any
physical theory. Theories in the natural sciences account for change. Whether the
changes described are cosmological or biological, unending or finite, they remain
processes. Creation accounts for the existence of things, not for changes in things.
Whether the universe is understood to be evolving, as we think today, or whether the
universe is eternal, as Aristotle thought, it is still a created universe. Thomas was
always alert to distinguish between the origin of the universe and the beginning of the
universe. Even if the universe were not to have had a temporal beginning, it still
would depend upon God for its very being, its existence. The root philosophical sense
of creation does not concern temporal origination; rather it affirms metaphysical
dependence. It is true that Scripture reveals that the universe has an absolute
beginning: here faith adds to what reason can conclude about the origin of all things.
Furthermore, Thomas thinks that the central revelation found in the opening of
Genesis is, as he says, the fact of creation, not the manner or mode of formation of the
world. He does not read Genesis as a textbook in the sciences.
Gods creative power is exercised throughout the entire course of cosmic
history, in whatever ways that history has unfolded. No explanation of evolutionary
change, no matter how radically random or contingent such an explanation claims to
be, challenges the metaphysical account of creation, that is, of the dependence of the
existence of all things upon God as cause. When some thinkers deny creation on the
basis of theories of evolution, or reject evolution in defense of creation, they
misunderstand creation or evolution, or both.
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God as Cause and Creatures as Causes
The affirmation of the radical dependence of all things upon God as their
cause is, for Thomas, fully compatible with the discovery of causes in nature. Gods
omnipotence does not challenge the possibility of real causality for creatures,
including that particular causality, free will, which is characteristic of human beings.
As Thomas says: "God is the first cause of both natural causes and voluntary agents.
And just as His moving natural causes does not prevent their acts from being natural,
so also His moving voluntary agents does not prevent them from acting voluntarily,
but rather makes it be just that, for He works in each according to its nature."
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God causes creatures to exist in such a way that they are the real causes of
their own operations. For Thomas, God is at work in every operation of nature, but
the autonomy of nature is not an indication of some reduction in Gods power or
activity; rather, it is an indication of His goodness. It is important to recognize that
divine causality and creaturely causality function at fundamentally different levels.
According to Thomas the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to
divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural
agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way.
11
It is not the
case of partial or co-causes with each contributing a separate element to produce the
effect. God so transcends the created order that He is able completely to cause causes
to be causes. God's transcendence is so radical that He is able to be immanent in the
world without compromising the integrity and autonomy of the created order.
12
God
causes chance and random events to be the chance and random events which they are,
just as He causes the free acts of human beings to be free acts. Thomas does not think
6
that one must compromise divine omnipotence in any way in order to make room, so
to speak, for there to be real causes in the world.
13
God as primary cause is not
threatened by the existence of real secondary causes in nature, including those causes
which evolutionary biology investigates. As the Catholic International Theological
Commission notes (2004): "Divine causality and created causality radically differ in
kind. . . . Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless
fall within God's providential plan for creation."
14

Contemporary discussions about causality, whether divine or that of creatures,
tend to suffer from impoverished notions of cause, at least in comparison with
analyses in the Middle Ages. Mediaeval discussions of causality often distinguished
between universal and particular causes, actual and potential causes, and essential and
accidental causes. For many thinkers in the Seventeenth Century, the famous
Aristotelian distinction in terms of four causes -- material, formal, efficient, and final -
- was reduced to only two, the material and the efficient; then limited to what could be
quantified. Often agent or efficient cause became "force." As a result of the critical
thought of David Hume, cause and effect came to be seen not as features of the world
but only in terms of our experience of a sequence of events. Thus, causality was
increasingly a topic in epistemology rather than in natural philosophy and
metaphysics: a question of predictability rather than dependence in nature. For many
today, only explanations in terms material constituent parts and of changes in and
among these parts are considered to be scientific. Reductionist conceptions of nature
have resulted, for example, in form being an effect rather than a cause. Yet, however
successful contemporary science has been in enhancing our understanding of the
world, there remains the lingering suspicion that its reductionist paradigms can
provide only a partial view of the whole of natural entities.
15
An adequate analysis of
divine and creaturely causality, including the analogical senses of cause, would
require, however, historical and philosophical investigations which go well beyond
the scope of this essay.

Order, Design, and Intrinsic Finality in Nature
It is important to distinguish an analysis of creation from questions concerning
order and design in nature, questions which are properly the subject of the empirical
sciences and natural philosophy. The biologist Francisco Ayala, who has also written
on the philosophical and theological implications of evolutionary biology, notes that
"it was Darwin's greatest accomplishment to show that living beings and their
configurations can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection,
without any need or resort to a Creator or other external agent. . . . [H]is mechanism,
natural selection, excluded God as accounting for the obvious design of organisms. . .
. . Darwin's revolutionary achievement is that he extended the Copernican revolution
to the world of living things. The origin and adaptive natures of organism could now
be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, as the result of natural laws
manifested in natural processes."
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The Neo-Darwinian synthesis adds to Darwin's
insight the claim that the natural process begins with chance mutations at the level of
genes. Randomness and chance, as the source of whatever order and design we
observe in nature, would seem to make any appeal from the evidence of biology to an
author of that order unjustified. It is, however, one thing to say that the explanatory
categories of evolutionary biology do not go beyond descriptions of chance and
randomness as the basis for change; it is another thing to say that there is nothing
more needed to account for biological change than chance and randomness.
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Despite the rhetoric of some proponents of evolutionary theory and of most
opponents, the natural processes at work in evolutionary change are not themselves
random. As Ayala points out, "the traits that organisms acquire in their evolutionary
histories are not fortuitous but are determined by their functional utility to the
organisms, and they come about in small steps that accumulate over time, each step
providing some reproductive advantage over the previous condition."
17
Still, the
hereditary variations with which natural selection works come about as the result of
genetic mutations which are random in the sense that they occur without any relation
to whether or not they are beneficial to the organisms in which they occur. These
random mutations are not events without causes. Again, in the words of Ayala, "the
theory of evolution manifests chance and necessity jointly intertwined in the stuff of
life; randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process that has spurted the
most complex, diverse, and beautiful entities in the universe."
18
Furthermore, in
addition to stochastic processes at the genetic level,
19
the wider environment, physical
and biological, plays an important role in the outcome of natural selection.
Historical studies of the development of evolutionary thought have shown the
important role of mathematical analyses of natural selection, especially with the work
of R.A. Fisher in the 1930s.
20
Using insights from Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical
mechanics,
21
Fisher based his own "'fundamental theorem of natural selection' on
idealizing assumptions of randomized mating and analogies drawn from
thermodynamics that treated statistical individuals in populations like molecules in a
gas." Darwinian thought, thus, came to be incorporated into what scholars call the
"probability revolution" in science.
22
Phillip Sloan has shown that the notion of
randomness in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis has its source in "the idealizing
mathematical assumptions of these statistical re-interpretations of natural selection
theory [which] involved the incorporation at the theoretical level of assumptions of
random and stochastic processes." According to Sloan, it is precisely such
assumptions which inform the emphasis on chance and randomness in Neo-Darwinian
thought. Thus, the frequent reference to the chance and "purposeless" character of
evolutionary processes is "the direct result of the reification of these foundational
idealizations of population dynamics as realistic metaphysical claims about the world:
nature [accordingly] 'really is' governed by the statistically randomized processes
postulated in theoretical population dynamics."
23
Obviously, then, an important
question is whether such reification is justified.
As the Jesuit scientist William Stoeger has observed,
24
any discussion of
chance and purpose in biology needs to recognize that the natural sciences discover an
order and directedness inherent in physical reality. The natural sciences seek to
describe that order in terms of laws and conditions which help us to understand the
natural order. These laws are more than simply a pattern of regularities that we
observe; that pattern must have some sufficient cause in nature itself. At least this
must be true if we think that science offers us knowledge of nature: that science is
about the world and not just an analysis of concepts we use to describe the world. To
speak of regularities in nature, or of there being laws of nature, means that there are
processes oriented towards certain general ends. If there were no end-directed or end-
seeking behavior in physical reality, there would be no regularities, functions, or
structures about which we could formulate laws of nature, and, thus, there would be
no science of nature. There is an obvious level of regularity in the structure and
properties of natural entities and in the activities in which they engage. There is in
these entities an intrinsic capacity for motion and for self-organization. It is, perhaps,
better to speak of such intrinsic capacities rather than to say that nature obeys laws,
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since to speak of obeying laws may well involve a notion of intentionality which is
proper only to voluntary agents. These causal powers or intrinsic capacities are what
constitute the regularities in nature, and it is these causal powers and properties which
the natural sciences seek to discover.
The reality of chance events in the evolution of living things, and whatever
indeterminacy and unpredictability result, do not justify making chance an ultimate
explanatory principle. Chance events occur within nature: within the context of a
reality susceptible to rational investigation because it is intelligible, and it is this
intelligibility which makes possible the laws of nature. Indeed, chance is really
meaningless apart from a recognition of finality. It is only because we do recognize
that things act to achieve ends regularly that we recognize the failure of this to
happen, that is, chance. For Thomas Aquinas, the intelligibility of nature is a
manifestation of intrinsic principles, including the ends in which given changes find
their completion. Here is the "intrinsic finality" of nature which is so important for
the Catholic tradition. It is a finality disclosed in natural philosophy as this discipline
reflects on the evidence provided by the empirical sciences. It is a finality which does
indeed lead us to God as its source, but it is far different from the account of
"irreducible complexities" central to the argument of "intelligent design": which
claims to discover God's agency in the inability of causes in nature to produce certain
kinds of biological structures. The "intelligent designer" becomes a cause within the
world, needed to supplement other causes to explain the appearance of specific
natural phenomena. "Intelligent design" represents a kind of "extrinsic teleology,"
similar to William Paley's famous argument about design in terms of a watchmaker.
25

Ayala has a useful distinction between what he calls "external teleology," the
result of the purposeful action of an agent (e.g., when human beings make things) and
"internal teleology," when teleological features are the result of an exclusively natural
process. The example he uses, for the latter, are the wings of birds. They have a
natural teleology; they serve the purpose of flying, but they are not the result of the
design of a conscious agent. Here we must remember that the conscious agent whom
Ayala excludes as the source of natural teleology is an agent acting in the world: an
agent not fundamentally different from other agents, even if more powerful. Ayala
then distinguishes between two kinds of natural or internal teleology: 1) bounded or
determinate or necessary teleology; and 2) unbounded or indeterminate or contingent
teleology. An example of the first is the achievement of a specific end state in spite of
environmental fluctuations. Embryological developments, from fertilized egg to
adult, are examples of such bounded natural teleology. The characteristics of the
mature adult are essentially determined in the fertilized egg. On the other hand,
contingent or unbounded natural teleology "occurs when the end state is not
specifically predetermined but rather is the result of selection of one from among
several available alternatives." Ayala's claim is that when we speak of the adaptations
of organisms being "designed" it is in the contingent teleological sense. The wings of
birds, designed as they are for flying, did not have their source in some remote
ancestor such that their appearance was necessitated or determined.
26
As Ayala
observed in a text already quoted, evolution discloses that there is no need to appeal to
an "external agent" to account for the design we find in nature. The origin of real
design in biological phenomena can be explained without having recourse to a
conscious agent operating in nature to produce this design. Such a view would only
exclude God as the ultimate explanation for design in nature if one were mistakenly to
think that God is an agent in nature differing only in degree from other conscious
agents. We must remember, however, that God transcends the created order in which
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He acts in such a way that He "differs differently" from all other causes: God does not
differ from creatures in the way in which creatures differ from one another. It is also
important to remember that to say that nature discloses intelligence -- in part because
of the order, design, and teleology in nature -- need not mean that there is an
intelligent agent in nature as one of the causes which the empirical sciences need to
take into account. The recognition of teleology in nature is not first of all the
discovery of intelligent agency. Nevertheless, the natural philosopher, using many of
the distinctions Ayala draws about teleology, can argue from the intrinsic finality in
nature to its ultimate source without making the mistake of conceiving of this source
as simply an external agent. Finality in nature, whether bounded or unbounded, to use
Ayala's categories, calls for explanation, and chance is not, indeed cannot be, such an
explanation.
For Thomas Aquinas, the "principle of finality" refers not simply to the
purposeful actions of voluntary agents, but also to an immanent teleology intrinsic to
the operation of a natural entity. Thomas formulates the principle in two fundamental
ways: 1) potency refers to act (potentia dicitur ad actum); and 2) every agent acts in
view of its end or purpose (omne agens agit propter finem).
27
The explanation of any
change in terms of potency and act allows Thomas to claim that, in its broadest sense,
and prior to any reference to a conscious agent, we discover finality in the immanent
ordering of potency to act. Here we can have purposes without conscious intentions.
Change is unintelligible without reference to the end towards which it tends.
Intention, from the Latin intendere, has as its root sense simply a stretching out
towards: actions have ends which enter into an understanding of what the actions are.
The second formulation of the principle of finality introduces, as Vittorio Possenti has
observed, "the decisive term 'agent,' which possesses far more general implications
and range than the term 'efficient cause.' Reflection on the principle of finality
involves a reflection on the concept of agent and action (immanent, transitive, with or
without consciousness), and indirectly on that of nature as a principle of becoming."
28

Hearts' pumping blood, animals' acting instinctively, plants' engaging in
photosynthesis, genes' mutating, are all examples of agency in the broad sense of the
term. Increasing attention in contemporary biology to self-organizing principles in
nature is consistent with notions of nature and immanent activity in terms of end
which one finds in the traditional Thomistic principle of finality. Behind all of this is
Thomas' rich understanding of nature as the dynamic source of the characteristic
behavior of physical beings.

Chance, Design, and Providence
Thomas Aquinas would help us to recognize the error in "absolutizing" chance
and randomness to universal principles of change, or to think that their existence in
nature is a challenge to God's providential ordering of the world. Here it would be
useful to compare Cardinal Schnborn's original criticism (July 2005) of Neo-
Darwinism with the passage he cited on the same subject from the International
Theological Commission. The Cardinal identified evolution in the Neo-Darwinian
sense as essentially an "unguided, unplanned process," and called it ideology and not
science. The Commission rejected "those theories of evolution, including those of a
neo-Darwinian provenance, which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly
causal role in the development of life in the universe."
29
Notice how, unlike the
Cardinal, the Theological Commission did not necessarily equate Neo-Darwinism
with the denial of any role for divine providence: it only refers to those theories of
evolution which do in fact deny providence. Surely some thinkers do use arguments
10
which have their roots in Neo-Darwinism to deny divine providence, but only if one
illegitimately raises biological arguments to the level of metaphysical and theological
claims does such an error occur. Thus, the real problem lies not in the commitment of
evolutionary biology to explanations in terms of randomness and contingency, but
rather in unwarranted extrapolations about the absence of meaning and purpose in
nature. It is these extrapolations which, to use Cardinal Schnborn's phrase, are
"ideology and not science."
In an essay in August 2005, John Haught, a Catholic theologian at
Georgetown University,
30
criticized the Cardinal for attempting "to extort divine
design directly from the data of science. . . . Schnborn has every reason to defend
Catholicism against materialist philosophy, since these are indeed incompatible. But
he merely capitulates to the current confusion on evolution, and does no service to the
nuances of Catholic thought, when he fails to distinguish neo-Darwinian biology from
the materialist spin that many scientists and philosophers place on evolutionary
discoveries." Haught argued that the Cardinal's comments were "a setback in the
dialogue of religion and science," since the "Cardinal is intent on making science
itself a defender of the notion of divine design, an old mistake still repeated today. To
claim that a divine mind or designer lurks behind natural phenomena is not a
conclusion that science as such is ever permitted to make." Haught concluded that, if
we were to follow the thought of Cardinal John Henry Newman, we would see that it
is a mistake to have "any theological inquiry that seeks divine design in nature apart
from religious experience. Such an approach, Newman wrote, 'cannot be Christian, in
any true, sense at all.'" To limit the discovery of design in nature to the realm of faith
runs counter, however, to the traditional Catholic commitment, especially evident in
the thought of Thomas Aquinas, that reason alone does indeed find order and design
in nature. We ought also to guard against appeals of those, like Stephen Jay Gould,
who distinguish between two separate magisteria: a magisterium of science which
deals with facts, and a magisterium of religion which concerns meaning, purpose, and
value.
31

In his initial lecture at the Stephansdom in October 2005, the Cardinal
reiterated what he had written in July and argued more clearly, I think, that analyses
of order, design, and purpose in the context of evolutionary theory require the
mediation of philosophy. The Cardinal did not retreat from his commitment that on
the basis of reason alone one discovers purpose in nature. "The acceptance of
purposefulness, of 'design,' is entirely based on reason, even if the method of the
modern natural sciences may require the bracketing of the question of design. Yet my
common sense cannot be shut out by the scientific method. Reason tells me that plan
and order, meaning and goal exist, that a time-piece does not come into being by
accident, even less so the living organism that is a plant, an animal, or, above all,
man." The crucial point here really concerns in what discipline -- the natural sciences,
themselves, or the philosophy of nature -- does reason disclose design and purpose in
nature. And, concurrently, the question must be how we understand the relationship
between the philosophy of nature and the individual empirical sciences. In a sense,
the philosophy of nature is a more general science of nature which draws upon and
unifies the conclusions of the different natural sciences.
One of the Cardinal's critics, George Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican
Observatory, argued that the Cardinal had obscured the proper distinctions between
science and religion. Science, Coyne wrote, "is completely neutral with respect to
philosophical or theological implications that may be drawn from its conclusions."
32

Accordingly, contemporary science can lend support to either atheism or theism,
11
whose claims to truth remain topics for philosophy or theology, but not for science.
But, whether or not the natural sciences, either explicitly or implicitly, disclose order
and design in nature involves, as I have already suggested, what one means by order
and design, as well as what one means by science. Too often those who seek to
isolate science from its philosophical or theological implications accept a kind of
positivistic philosophy of science which denies any role to teleology in nature.
Furthermore, it is difficult to see how there can be any science separate from
elementary philosophical reflection. Assumptions about what one means by nature,
change, time, causality, and the like have always guided science's search to discover
order in the world of experience.
33

Writing in the January 2006 edition of First Things, the Cardinal agreed with
the importance of philosophical reflection on these matters and conceded that what he
called "a metaphysically modest version of neo-Darwinism could potentially be
compatible with the philosophical truth (and thus with Catholic teaching) about
nature." He quite properly rejected the view that only in reference to revealed truth
can one know that there is purpose in nature. The Cardinal remained concerned,
however, that the kind of randomness affirmed at the heart of Neo-Darwinism is far
more radical than the randomness which the physical sciences employ concerning our
inability to predict the precise behavior of parts of a system. Discussions of
randomness and chance are complex, as I have already suggested in the discussion of
this topic, and it is it is not immediately obvious what the Cardinal means when he
writes about different kinds of randomness in biology and physics.
It seems to me that there are three dangers to be avoided. The first is to try to
move directly from the individual empirical sciences, such as biology, to God as the
source of design in nature, without the mediation of philosophy. The second danger is
to think that design and purpose in nature are only disclosed in religious experience
and that, therefore, reason without faith must remain silent about whether there is
purpose in nature, and consequently reason alone cannot lead us from nature to God.
In some ways, the restriction of arguments about design and purpose to the realm of
faith, and the denial that reason alone can disclose evidence in nature of God's
existence, are more threatening to a traditional Catholic understanding of nature than
is the seduction offered by "intelligent design." As Thomas would remind us, it is
important to avoid bad arguments in support of what is believed,
34
but in avoiding bad
arguments one ought not to reject the proper role of reason alone in disclosing truths
about nature which complement what is believed. The third danger is to confuse
arguments about creation, the complete dependence of all that is on God as cause --
arguments in metaphysics -- with arguments about design and purpose in nature --
arguments in natural philosophy.
35
It is in natural philosophy that much work needs
to be done.
At least we can say that Gods providence is not threatened by evolution
viewed in terms of random variations, unless, of course, one mistakenly argues that
the natural sciences are the only source of truth about the world. An important lesson
here is that we do not need to defend divine providence by rejecting evolutionary
biology, but only by rejecting certain philosophical claims which deny providence.
36

God accomplishes His purposes in and through the universe He has created.
Science discloses the way the universe operates in terms of principles in the universe.
God so transcends the created order that He can be the cause of all that is without
compromising the causal efficacy of creatures, so too His purpose issues from the
same transcendence, beyond the categories of time, place, and change. When
discussing Gods providence, Thomas distinguishes between God as universal cause,
12
which is an immediate manifestation of His goodness, and the role of particular
causes which bring to fruition, each in its own proper way, specific ends. In fact, it is
a sign of Gods goodness that He creates a world in which there are such true, albeit
secondary, causes. In the realm of secondary, particular causes, chance events can and
do occur. Gods providence, although manifested in the workings of His creatures,
cannot be fully apprehended if ones vision is only that of the activity of these
secondary causes. In other words, Gods providence is most properly disclosed in
theology, not in the natural sciences.

Conclusion
Catholic thinking in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas helps us to see the
poverty of the arguments of those who appeal to evolutionary biology to deny the
existence of God. But, in showing the inadequacy of arguments which deny creation
and providence one must be careful not to defend arguments for creation and
providence which themselves are inadequate. Thomas Aquinas provides a more
subtle analysis of creation, finality, order, and purpose than that offered by those who
criticize the comprehensiveness of evolutionary theory on the basis of "intelligent
design." Even though some conclusions Aquinas reaches about God's direct creation
of the first individuals of certain species are at variance with what evolutionary
biology claims, I think that the fundamental philosophical and theological principles
he embraces are consistent with contemporary science. A philosophy of nature in the
tradition of Thomas Aquinas recognizes order and purpose understood in terms of
intrinsic principles in nature and that, on the basis of such a recognition, one can use
reason to come to know God as the source.
It is true that the existence of all that is depends upon a Creator who
transcends the world. God causes all causes to be what they are. It would seem
strange to argue that causes in nature were somehow, in principle, insufficient to
explain the changes which occur in nature. If nature is intelligible in terms of causes
discoverable in it, we ought not to think that changes in nature require special divine
agency. In fact, deficiencies in the causal structure of nature which require an appeal
to an intelligent designer, would call into question God's omnipotence and
providence, rather than serve as an argument in support of God's agency.
37
To explain
the development of complex biological structures by an appeal to causes other than
those in the natural order would suggest that God could not have created a natural
order endowed with causal principles adequate to produce the changes in that order.
Appeals to an "intelligent designer" do not really defend the agency of God in the
world. Against those who would use contemporary science to deny Catholic teaching
on creation, order and finality in nature, and providence, the Church has ample
philosophical and theological resources without rejecting central claims of that
science.

1
In Europe, some commentators of the Cardinal's essay feared that the American-style debate on the
origins of life would break "the peace between science and religion that in Old Europe had held almost
since the Enlightenment -- and at least since the historically hard-won eviction of the Church from
politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Such, at least, was the conclusion of Helga
Nowotny, Chair of the European Research Advisory Board. Her essay, "Enlightenment on Trial,"
appeared in many European newspapers in early November 2005, and she claimed, mistakenly, that the
Cardinal "seemed to say that revealed truth must be accorded primacy over the truths science reveals
through reason." "Enlightenment on Trail," Project Syndicate: An Association of Newspapers Around
the World, November 2005.

2
The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
13


3
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 6.

4
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York Simon &
Schuster, 1995), 203.

5
Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 289, 291.

6
In addition to concerns about order, design, and the role of divine agency in biological change, which
will be the focus of this essay, the theological and philosophical implications of evolutionary theory
include: 1) the relationship between evolution's claim of common descent of all living beings and the
view that human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, are somehow fundamentally distinct
from the rest of nature; 2) the theological doctrine of Original Sin which, as a historical claim, seems to
contradict evolution's understanding of the origin and development of human life; and 3) the obvious
waste and suffering in the battles for survival which evolution discloses and how suffering on such a
scale in compatible with a loving, providential God.

7
William Dembski puts it this way: "Design is detectable; we do in fact detect it; we have reliable
methods for detecting it. . . . As I have argued throughout this book, design is common, rational, and
objectifiable." No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence
(Lanaham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 367.

8
"Irreducible complexities," such as Michael Behe's famous bacterial flagellum, are special cases of
the more mathematically based notion of "specified complexity": a notion involving elaborate
statistical analysis and probability theory.

9
For an examination of this topic, see: William E. Carroll, "Creation, Evolution, and Thomas
Aquinas," Revue des questions scientifiques 171:4 (2000), 319-348.

10
Commentary on Aristotles De Interpretatione, Book I, lectio 14.

11
Summa contra Gentiles III, c. 70, 8.

12
For an excellent discussion of what she calls "non-contrastive transcendence" (i.e., not contrasted
with immanence) see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or
Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); see also William Placher, The Domestication of
Transcendence (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1996).

13
One way in which many contemporary scholars have sought to speak of divine agency and the
autonomy of nature is to refer to a kind of divine withdrawal, a kenosis, according to which God limits
in some sense His omnipotence so that there is a metaphysical space in which there can be causes other
than God. John Polkinghorne is an important proponent of this position; see his The Work of Love:
Creation as Kenosis (London: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001).

14
Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God (Vatican City, 2004),
69.

15
Robert Sokolowski, "Formal and Material Causality in Science," American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 69(1995), Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 69 (2005), 57-
67, at 60. See also, Michael Tkacz, "The Retorsive Argument for Formal Cause and the Darwinian
Account of Scientific Knowledge," International Philosophical Quarterly 43:2 (2003), 159-166, at
161-2.

16
Francisco J. Ayala, "Design without Designer: Darwin's Greatest Discovery," in Debating Design:
From Darwin to DNA, edited by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 55-80, at 58.

17
ibid., 64.

14

18
ibid.

19
Recent biological studies suggest that the mutations at the genetic level are really "genetic switches,"
i.e., new patterns of control in turning genes on and off. Changes in gene regulation, rather than the
coming into existence of new genes, is the source of variation. These controlling genes, called Hox
genes, have been found in almost all animals. See Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The
New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (New York: Norton, 2005), and
Marc W. Kirschner, John C. Gerhart, and John Norton, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's
Dilemma (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

20
R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).

21
Statistical mechanics is the science which provides the connecting links between the world of atoms
and molecules, on the one hand, and the world of gases, liquids, and solids, on the other. The positions
and velocities of individual gas molecules, for example, are the "hidden variables" which underlie the
laws of behavior of gases in terms of volume, temperature, and pressure. These laws can be derived as
the statistical consequences of the mechanical behavior of individual molecules. For Boltzmann (1844-
1906), "inertial mass is replaced by the most probable behavior of statistical arrays, force is replaced by
energy, and equilibrium is construed not as a balance of forces but as the point in the energy gradient
where the ability to do useful work is exhausted. If this framework was already bursting through the
boundaries of Newtonian thinking, much to the annoyance of its creators, it is because in it time is
irreversible and chance events have ordering properties. There can certainly be no doubt that Darwin's
theory would eventually find a more congenial home in a framework whose paradigm cases are
statistical mechanics and irreversible thermodynamics . . . . Boltzmann said (in 1886) that the
nineteenth century was 'Darwin's Century,' pointing out that Darwin had acknowledged the reality of
time and of time's way of creating order out of chance. If anyone deserves the credit for seeing Darwin
in these terms, it was Boltzmann himself, and perhaps even more justly the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce, rather than Darwin. Moreover, in viewing Darwin in these terms, Boltzmann
and Peirce tend to screen off Darwin's most important explanatory notion, natural selection, which
Darwin considers an analogue of gravitational force, and to stress instead the self-ordering properties of
chance setups." David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the
Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 155.


22
John Beatty, "The Probabilistic Revolution in Evolutionary Biology: An Overview," in L. Kruger, et
al. (eds), The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1 Ideas in History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987).
David Depew and Bruce Weber argue that recent developments concerning self-organization and
complex systems (with their nonlinear dynamics) add new dimensions to the importance of probability
in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, especially as we come to see "the pervasively probabilistic and
statistical character of the world in which organism, including ourselves. . . .Nonlinear dynamics is
extending the probability revolution by severing dynamics from its last links to classical physics. . . .
Boltzmannian systems share with their Newtonian predecessors commitment to equilibrium thinking.
External forces are required to make a system change its inertial condition of motion or rest. Change is
from one equilibrium state to another. Boltzmannian and Newtonian systems differ, however, insofar
as the former are, while the latter are not, probabilistic. Boltzmannian systems share their probabilistic
character with self-organizing systems. Both have an inherent arrow of time. They show what will
spontaneously happen to an array of elements with various degrees of connectivity as time passes. But
Boltzmannian and nonlinear systems differ because the latter do not assume that initial differences
always average out. On the contrary, in self-organizing, nonlinear systems, outliers can unpredictably
initiate large-scale spontaneous reorderings as systems move toward new attractors. From this
perspective, self-organization advances probabilistic thinking by cutting it loose from the axioms and
techniques of linearization that still tied Boltzmann to Newton, and in consequence tied Fisher to
Darwin. This is likely to be significant for the Darwinian tradition because living systems seem
intuitively to involve chance and self-organization as well as selection. In this respect, what seems odd
is not that the new dynamics can be used to model the evolution of living things but that the evolution
of living things could ever have been thought to fit particularly well with earlier dynamics.. . ."

"Darwinism never really fit comfortably within Newtonian background assumptions. The dynamics of
evolving biological systems are simply not those of Newtonian systems. The shift to Boltzmannian
15

background assumptions created a liberating explanatory space more congruent with evolutionary and
selective phenomena. That space was fully exploited by the modern synthesis. The rise of the sciences
of complexity and self-organization now promise an even more robust set of background assumptions
that is harmonious with the kinds and degrees of complexity that are at work in the evolution of living
systems." Depew and Weber, 486, 487, 490.

23
Phillip R. Sloan, "Getting the Question Right: Catholics and Evolutionary Theory," Secretariat for
Scientific Questions: Pax Romana 64 (September 2003), 13-32, at 19. Sloan quite rightly points out
that "critique of the assumptions of chance and contingency involved in evolutionary theory . . .
requires some attention to the reasons for these claims, and at some point involves us in debates over
scientific realism, and the status of theoretical idealizations of science in relation to constitutive
metaphysics. If we are willing to allow that ideal constructs of science do in fact give us important
insights into the nature of reality, as seems to be broadly granted in the physical sciences, we must
decide why similar assumptions must be denied in the life sciences" 20. At issue here as well is the
particular question of the role -- and the limit -- of mathematics in our understanding nature.

24
William R. Stoeger, S.J., "The Immanent Directionality of the Evolutionary Process, and its
Relationship to Teleology," in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine
Action, edited by Robert John Russell, William R. Stoeger, S.J., and Francisco Ayala (Berkeley, CA:
Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1998), 163-190.

25
For a good discussion of the pros and cons of "intelligent design," see William A. Dembski and
Michael Ruse (eds.), Debating Design. From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).

26
Ayala, 66-67.

27
For omne agens agit propter finem, see Summa theologiae I, q. 44, a. 4 and Summa theologiae I-II, q.
1, a.2.

28
Vittorio Possenti, "Nature, Life, and Teleology," The Review of Metaphysics 56 (September 2002),
37-60, at 49-50. Possenti continues: "Unlike the first [formulation of the principle of finality], the
second formulation possesses transcendental range; and it applies also to the divine action." The
reason the first formulation does not apply to God is that there is no potency in God. More generally,
Possenti concludes: "To introduce the theme of final causes, we have to re-launch a philosophy of
action (in an ontological sense even before a moral sense). If we turn our attention to efficient cause,
we come up against the disadvantage of placing ourselves on the side of transitive action alone,
forgetting immanent action, where nothing is produced but one's own being is perfected. Newtonian
physics, like [Jacques] Monod's biology, in which only efficient causes are considered, are tributaries
of impoverished ideas of action and of agent, in the sense that the only action considered is that which
works from the outside, so that immanent action and inner finality of organisms are cancelled."
Finality in its fundamental sense needs to be seen as "an inner nexus between agent and end." Possenti,
50.

29
Communion and Stewardship, 64.

30
Commonweal, 12 August 2005. Haught has written extensively on the theological implications of
Darwinian thought. See God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2000) and Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect of Religion in the Age of Evolution (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2003).

31
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1999).

32
The Tablet, 6 August 2005.

33
More than twenty years ago, Gerard Holton, famous for his case-studies in the history of modern
science, wrote an illuminating essay on this topic: "Do Scientists Need a Philosophy," The Times
Literary Supplement, 2 November 1984, 1231-1234.
16


34
In a different context -- discussions about whether one can know on the basis of reason that the
universe has a beginning -- Thomas writes: "That the world had a beginning . . . is an object of faith,
but not a demonstration or science. And we do well to keep this in mind; otherwise, if we
presumptuously undertake to demonstrate what is of faith, we may introduce arguments that are not
strictly conclusive; and this would furnish infidels with an occasion for scoffing, as they would think
that we assent to truths of faith on such grounds." Summa theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2.

35
Although one discovers order and design in nature through the natural sciences and natural
philosophy, this recognition is ultimately included in the metaphysical conclusion that God as Creator
is the cause of all that is. As Thomas observes: "Divine wisdom is the effective cause of all things,
insofar as it produces them in being and it not only gives being to things, but also being with order in
things [esse cum ordine in rebus]. In De Div. Nom., c. 7, lec. 4. n. 733.

36
In note 6, I indicated that the suffering among living beings which evolution discloses is seen by
many as a strong argument against an all-good and all-powerful God. David Hull, philosopher of
biology, asked rhetorically:"What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by
the species on Darwins Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance,
contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. . . .The God of the Galapagos is careless,
wasteful, indifferent, and almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would
be inclined to pray." David Hull, "God of the Galapagos," Nature 352 (1992), 485-6. Although
evidence from biology may bring the problem of evil in nature to our attention with a particular clarity,
if not poignancy, it is not, however compelling it may be, an especially new argument against divine
providence. At least, in the context of this essay, the argument based on evil in nature must be left
aside.

37
Thomas Aquinas thinks that to defend the fact that changes in nature are explicable in terms of
causes discoverable in the world is to defend divine omnipotence. As he says, "to detract from the
perfection of creatures [i.e., to deny their power to produce effects] is to detract from the perfection of
divine power." Summa contra Gentiles III, 69.