Denver Catholic

22 AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 14, 2019 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives B ishop Robert Barron and others working hard to evan- gelize the "Nones" — young adults without religious conviction — tell us that a major obstacle to a None embracing Christian- ity is the cultural assump- tion that Science Explains Every- thing. And if science explains it all, who needs God, rev- elation, Christ, or the Church? To be even more specifi c: if Darwin and the Darwinian theory of evolution explain the origins of us (and every- thing else), why bother with Genesis 1-3 and Colossians 1:15-20 (much less Augustine's "Thou hast made us for Thee and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee")? That's why "Giving Up Darwin," an essay by David Gelernter in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, is both a fascinating article and a potential tool in the New Evangelization. No one can accuse Dr. Gelernter of being an anti-modern knucklehead. He's a pioneering computer scientist, a full professor at Yale, and a remark- able human being: a package from the Unabomber blew o¨ his right hand and permanently damaged his right eye but didn't impede his remarkable intellec- tual, literary, and artistic productivity. In his Claremont Review essay, Gel- ernter gives full credit to what he calls "Darwin's brilliant and lovely theory" and readily concedes that "there's no reason to doubt that Darwin success- fully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape." But Dar- winian evolution can't "explain the big picture — [which involves] not the fi ne-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones." What Darwin cannot explain, in short, is "the origin of species" — the title of the British naturalist's fi rst, revolutionary book. The argument is complex, so it's important to read Gelernter's entire article carefully, and more than once. But to be desperately brief: First, Darwinian evolutionary theory can't explain the so-called "Cambrian explosion," in which, half a billion years ago, a "striking variety of new organisms — includ- ing the fi rst-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record." How did this "great outburst" of new life forms happen? The slow-motion processes of Darwinian evolution can't answer that question. Gelernter concludes that "the ever-expanding fossil record" doesn't "look good for Darwin, who made clear and concrete predictions that have (so far) been falsifi ed." (This gaping Cambrian hole in the Darwinian account goes unre- marked in the otherwise-magnifi cent new David H. Koch Hall of Fossils at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.) But there is more. For "Darwin's main problem….is molecular biology:" a scientifi c fi eld that didn't exist in his era. Given that he knew nothing about the inner-workings of cells through proteins, Darwin "did bril- liantly" in explaining species adap- tation. But Darwin and his Neo-Dar- winian disciples can't account for the incredible complexity of the basic building-blocks of life: for as we now know, "genes, in storing blueprints for the proteins that form the basis of cellular life, encode an awe-in- spiring amount of information…. Where on earth did it all (i.e., all that "profound biochemical knowledge") come from?" From random muta- tions? Maybe, but very unlikely, for as Gelernter puts it, "You don't turn up a useful protein by doodling on the back of an envelope, any more than you write a Mozart aria by assembling three sheets of sta¨ paper and scat- tering notes around." Put the Cambrian fossil record together with the high statistical improbability that the informa- tion-dense building-blocks of life happened through random mutations and you're forced to consider what amounts to cultural heresy: that "the explosion of detailed, precise infor- mation that was necessary to build the brand-new Cambrian organisms, and the fact that the information was encoded, represented symbolically, in DNA…" falsify the Darwinian expla- nation of the big picture. David Gelernter is intrigued by "intelligent design" approaches to these evolutionary conundra but also suggests that, "as a theory," intelligent design "would seem to have a long way to go." But to dismiss intelligent design out of hand — to brand it piety masquerading as science — is, well, unscientifi c. The fossil record and molecular biology now suggest that Darwinian answers to the Big Ques- tions constitute the real fundamental- ism: a materialistic fi deism that, how- ever shaky in dealing with the facts, is nonetheless deeply entrenched in 21st-century imaginations. Thus, Gel- ernter asks whether today's scientists will display Darwin's own courage in risking cultural disdain by upsetting intellectual apple carts. The empirical evidence suggests that the notions of a purposeful Cre- ator and a purposeful creation cannot be dismissed as mere pre-modern mythology. That may help a few Nones out of the materialist bogs in which they're stuck. W e are all too familiar with the phrase from the very fi rst lines of Book One of St. Augustine's Confessions, "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are rest- less until they rest in Thee." That line about our restless hearts, along with the famous tolle lege incident in Book Eight, are among the most well-known parts of Augustine's famous work. Tolle lege refers to the moment when Augustine received a divine inspiration to "take and read" the Bible and was thereby converted to the Catholic faith. In that moment Augustine received a grace which fi lled his heart and gave him a brief taste of the rest for which he longed. While many know about the theme of the restless heart in Augustine's Confessions, few are aware that the common human search for rest is also the central theme in his manual on teaching the faith, written a few years after the Confessions, called in its most recent translation, Instructing Beginners in Faith (New City Press, 2006). In response to a request on how to catechize newcomers to the Church from a deacon in Carthage in North Africa, Augustine presents advice on both the content and meth- odology of this form of evangelizing catechesis. In the sample lesson he provides to Deacon Deogratias, Augustine makes the desire for rest the central concern of the fi ctional inquirer that he describes to Deogratias. "Let us … assume that, when asked whether it is for some advantage in the present life that he wishes to become a Christian or because of the rest that he hopes to gain after this life, he replies that it is because of the rest to come." In the catechetical address he then o¨ ers to this supposed faith-seeker, Augustine uses the theme of rest in a unique way. He says that the very rest that our hearts seek is that same "rest that is meant by scripture when it expressly mentions that, from the beginning of the world when God made heaven and earth and every- thing that is in them, he worked for six days and on the seventh day he rested" and that it is also the same rest "which is promised to the saints in the world to come." That is, the restlessness of our hearts is, so to speak, tuned to the key of the whole universe, from its fi rst creation to its ultimate culmination. And then he o¨ ers to his restless hearer a stunning promise. Because he has set his sights on the rest pro- vided by God and sought entry into the Church, Augustine says, "It will be for you to taste its sweetness and delight even here." To achieve this "sweetness and delight," "the person who longs for true rest and true hap- piness must take his hope away from perishable and transitory things and place it in the word of the Lord, so that, by holding fast to that which remains forever, he together with it may also remain forever." In what follows, Augustine tells The Catholic Di² erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL Getting beyond Darwin The Catechism: The rest of the story the Bible tells Guest Column Dr. Sean Innerst is an assistant professor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary and teaches classes for the Denver Catholic Catechetical School. DR. SEAN INNERST

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