Chance Within a Structured World

Catholic Tradition vs. Darwinian Dogma, Part 2

Populus seed dispersal in spring (source)

In the first post on this subject, I summarized the teaching of Divine Revelation on the primacy of God’s free causality in creating the world and the resulting primacy of order within creation. Today, I shall examine what chance can and cannot explain. For it is obvious that nature often makes use of random methods, as with the scattering of seeds into the breeze so that at least some might take root, or the vast multiplication of insect offspring, many of which will not survive.

When looking at such phenomena, we must be careful not to fall prey to anthropomorphism. When Richard Dawkins objects that nature is “cruel” because wasps “brutalize” their prey, or that nature is “inefficient” because millions of seeds are scattered abroad only to rot, we are seeing the telltale signs of anthropomorphic sentimentalism. St. Thomas knew well that, when it comes to material beings, “the generation of one is the destruction of another.”¹ So carefully did the entomologist J. Henri Fabre observe the lives of wasps and other insects that Darwin dubbed him the “incomparable observer,” yet Fabre’s intimate knowledge of insect behavior did not lead him to horror and atheism but to a serene admiration of the masterful craftsmanship of “the divine Architect.”

Indeed, for the Catholic tradition, not even human life has an absolute value such that it cannot be legitimately taken away; God alone has, or is, absolute value, and all His creatures have value relative to Him. This is why God could rightly ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Human life is sacred precisely when considered as a gift from God and as innocent; thus we have no right to take the lives of the innocent, but God is a debtor to no one. Moreover, Catholic theology has always taught that the world as a whole was somehow adversely affected by the fall of Adam — if only in a loss of the blessed relationship that obtained between all the parts with a view to man, their pinnacle.

The epitome of Darwinian dogma: in Monod’s account, the combination of necessary laws of matter and chance events accounts for everything. Groovy cavemen!