Just as the governor of a state is responsible for the smooth running of a states government without having to become personally involved in every decision”without, in other words, feeling that his office obligates him to serve as the traffic cop at every busy corner”so too the Cosmological Argument contains no implication whatever that God has become the traffic cop of cellular evolution. Newman wrote: I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design. So does Johnson. The problem is that so many educated people take the supposed success of Darwinian science as a proof of the materialist metaphysics upon which the theory is based. The review of Phillip E. Johnsons book The Wedge of Truth by Edward T. Oakes shows that the reviewer does not understand the concept of irreducible complexity without which the Intelligent Design movement cannot be understood. We see that things lacking awareness, such as natural bodies , act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result [which was exactly Darwins point, by the way]. An organ can be designed for seeing or eating or mating or nursing, but it had better not be designed for the beauty of nature, the harmony of the ecosystem, or instant self“destruction. Anything that showed signs of design but did not come from a long line of replicators could not be explained by”in fact, would refute”the theory of natural selection: natural species that lacked reproductive organs, insects growing like crystals out of rocks, television sets on the moon, eyes spewing out of vents on the ocean floor, caves shaped like hotel rooms down to the details of hangers and ice buckets. But besides the sheer prima facie preposterousness of the charge that John Paul II has been taken in by secularist and materialist arguments, my main worry in Prof. Johnsons criticism of the Popes letter on evolution is the way he continues to suffer under, well, the fallacy of the false dilemma. In some cases, for some people, it can suggest that the world may be more complex than they had been led to believe. However, as Newman himself recognized and articulated so brilliantly in The Grammar of Assent , the reasonableness of theism in general and of Christianity in particular is the result of the convergence of a large number of evidences and reasons, of which design is only a part.
But no one”not Paul in Romans nor Aquinas in his Five Ways nor Intelligent Design theorists”supposes that arguments from nature lead directly to the God of Scripture. And that prior orderedness is the precise focus of Thomas Fifth Way. I have the greatest respect for John Paul II, and have consistently defended his statement by explaining the importance of the crucial qualifying sentence that the reporters fail to quote. Yes, of course Cardinal Newman was right that design teaches us only the power, skill, and goodness of the Creator, not His sanctity, mercy, or future judgment. For by the authors lights, God has left the finches on the Galapagos Islands to fend for themselves, and will intervene but occasionally, and only when absolutely necessary, to get a significantly different species up and running.