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The Evolution of Conscience in the Western World

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Mormons and Christianity: Asking the Right Questions

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, in an editorial in the March 2000 issue of First Things , discussed the issue of Mormon claims to be Christian in considerable detail. He explained that as an ecumenically oriented magazine, First Things was primarily interested in topics related to the relations between Christians and Jews, but his intention in this column was to extend the outreach a little further. Certainly, since Mormons (Latter-day Saints) often claim to be Christian, this attention was reasonable. But if Mormonism is a variant of Christianity, he writes, the differences with other Christians are enormous:

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GOP Debaters Still Fail to Connect the Dots

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:01:00 -0500

March Web Campaign

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Failing to Connect the Dots on Contraception

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:01:00 -0500

At the January 7, 2012 Republican presidential debate, there came a point at which the questioning turned to “social issues.” Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Mitt Romney whether he thought a state could ban contraception. Stephanopoulos had in mind the 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut , which ruled that a state could not ban contraception, and which, by invoking a presumed “right to privacy,” laid the groundwork for the subsequent Roe v. Wade decision overturning bans on abortion.

Romney did not catch the drift of Stephanopoulos’ questioning, and kept wondering why he would ask such a question and why any state would be interested in banning contraception. Eventually, Stephanopoulos explicitly mentioned Griswold to indicate why he was posing the question. Romney answered jocosely, “Contraception: it’s working just fine. Just leave it alone,” prompting laughter in the audience.

Understandably, none of the other candidates were eager to respond to Stephanopoulos’ gotcha question. Rick Santorum said he thought a state theoretically had the right to ban contraception, but did not take the opportunity to follow up regarding the connection with Roe v. Wade . Jon Huntsman just pointed to his large family, indicating his lack of interest in contraception. Ron Paul pointed to the interstate commerce aspect: if it is legal to import contraceptive pills, then it is legal to sell them.

What the debaters could have pointed to, of course, was the fact that the “right to privacy” interpretation (variously and ambiguously related to the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution), which has been used to support the right of couples to use contraceptives, was also an important ingredient in the 1973 decision protecting the right of a woman to abort her child.

One thing the GOP debate illustrates dramatically is the broader cultural sea change that has taken place in regard to contraception. It may seem that the “catalyst” for this change in attitude was simply the invention of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s, which was far more convenient than existing methods of birth control. But even before such convenient methods surfaced, contraception in previous decades had become progressively more in vogue, even for Christians who had previously strenuously opposed it. The following March 22, 1931 editorial of the Washington Post in the aftermath of the 1930 Episcopalian Lambeth Conference, which spearheaded the acceptance of contraception for Protestants in the U.S., is absolutely inconceivable today:

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The Weirdness of Commanding Love

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:01:00 -0500

The greatest commandment, Jesus tells us, is: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Well, of course. But a commandment ? I tend to empathize with the Danish Philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, who writes, in Works of Love ,

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Intelligent Design: Atheists to the Rescue

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:09:00 -0500

During the 1980s, two books” Evolution: a Theory in Crisis , by Michael Denton, and The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories , by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen”unwittingly gave rise to the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Books by scientists”Michael Denton, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer and others”pointed out various deficiencies in the theory of evolution: millions of gaps in the asserted “tree of evolution,” the impossibility of producing certain types of “irreducible complexity” by chance interactions, the failure of algorithms used by evolutionists to explain certain evolutionary developments, etc.

Critics of ID, on the other hand, especially prominent militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, have been ridiculing ID theorists for years as unscientific, and extolling “natural selection” as a kind of “blind watchmaker” accomplishing something that just “seems” like design through random developments over billions of years.

Surprisingly, two recent books by atheist philosophers of science have joined with ID theorists in the criticism of neo-Darwinism.

J erry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in What Darwin Got Wrong come at neo-Darwinism from a number of directions. Initially, they draw a comparison with B.F. Skinner’s psychological theory of “operant conditioning,” which attempted to explain changes in human behavior by patterns of stimulus and response. Limitations of that theory have eventually been revealed: it did not take into account internal mechanisms in organisms subjected to external stimuli; and the intention of researchers or subjects affected the results of experiments. Skinner’s behaviorism can be corrected by taking these aspects into account. But no such correction is possible in neo-Darwinism, which has no interest in “the internal organization of creatures . . . (genotypic and ontogenetic structures)” and recognizes no “intentions” in evolutionary processes.

The remaining chapters of their book add qualifications that almost seem like ID arguments: Fibonacci patterns, in which each term is equal to the sum of the two preceding ones, seem to be prior to all evolutionary developments; scaling factors in organisms are multiples of a quarter, not of a third, according to the “one-quarter power law”; computational analysis of nervous systems of organisms show that their “connection economies” are perfect; “cost versus speed” analyses of the respiratory patterns of the song of canaries show the most efficient use of energy; tests of the ratio of foraging honeybees to those staying in the hives show perfect solutions in all situations. There is perfection everywhere. They also offer an example of a type of wasp whose patterns of feeding her young competes with ID theorist Michael Behe’s notion of “irreducible complexity.”

But the major neo-Darwinist problem, they conclude, is that natural selection, in analogy to artificial selection, depends on the existence of a mythical “Mother Nature.” But since there is no Mother Nature, “she is a frail reed for [adaptationists] to lean on. Ditto, the Tooth Fairy; ditto the Great Pumpkin; ditto God. Only agents have minds, and only agents act out of their intentions, and natural selection isn’t an agent.”

Bradley Monton, in Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design , in contrast to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, is not so much concerned with deficiencies in neo-Darwinism, but rather in pointing out unfairness and invalid criticisms of arguments by proponents of ID. Monton maintains he is looking for the truth , wherever it leads.

Monton’s starting point is the recent trial, Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District , which ended with a decision against a school board in Pennsylvania. The school board wanted to require a disclaimer read to 9th grade biology students, informing students of the existence of ID as an alternative theory regarding evolution. Judge John Jones in 2005, however, ruled against the school board. After hearing expert witnesses on both sides, he concluded that ID is a religious view and not science, and thus cannot be taught in public schools.

The reason given for the “non-scientific” nature of ID was that science had to be restricted to a naturalist methodology, prohibiting any approach or evidence which could bring in the supernatural. Monton considers such a restriction as completely arbitrary, and even offers some thought experiments showing how a supernatural agent could be detected through scientific methods. He mentions with approval some examples of two conversions of atheists to theism, on the basis of scientific evidence: The physicist, Fred Hoyle, whose atheism was “shaken” when he came to the conclusion in 1982 that some “superintellect” had “monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology”; and the famous philosopher, Anthony Flew, who in 2004 announced that he could no longer remain an atheist, largely because of his study of “fine-tuning” arguments in physics and the resistance of DNA evidence to any naturalistic explanation.

The reason that Monton, in spite of some doubts, sticks to his belief in atheism, has to do with his belief that the universe is infinite. In an infinite universe, or an infinite number of universes, of course, there are infinite possibilities”even our world!

But philosophers such as Aristotle and John Locke, as well as some contemporary physicists, have maintained that a physical infinity is impossible; the fact that the universe seems to have begun with the Big Bang has led some atheists to extraordinary stretches of the imagination, purely speculative attempts to avoid dealing with the possibility of creation.

Mouton’s insistence that we should search for the truth, and not restrict our search to naturalistic scientific methods, is refreshing. And the arguments of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, although they hold no brief for ID theory, in their criticism of “natural selection,” unintentionally bring out examples that certainly sound like, well, design.

Howard Kainz is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. His most recent book is The Existence of God and the Faith-Instinct .

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