How Chaos Theory Refutes the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins

I would like to briefly examine the claim, made by advocates of Neo-Darwinism and others, that advances in contemporary systems theory now give a rational explanation for the development of highly complex structures in the universe without recourse to the hypothesis of a Divine Creator.

Further, I will show that such claims, while purporting to be based on the evidence of empirical science, are, as certain postmodern philosophers of science have shown, metaphysical assertions. I will offer a few brief remarks on how advances in the mathematics of complex systems (illustrated by cybernetics and so-called chaos theory) actually can be reconciled with a theory of theistic evolution. Finally, I will discuss how the “critical realist” philosophy of the Canadian Jesuit cognitional theorist and theologian, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, offers a coherent response to the dogmatic scientism of the neo-Darwinists, on the one hand, and the simplistic “pseudo-science, relativism and nihilism” of postmodern philosophy on the other. You do not have to throw out the baby of logical coherence and rationality with the bath water (rightly critiqued by postmodern theorists) of metaphysical naturalism and scientism.

The Blind Watchmaker

Many contemporary Christians, especially those without training in mathematics, the metatheory of logic or the philosophy of science, are under the impression that the teleological argument for the existence of God has been definitively refuted by new developments in cybernetic systems theory, fractal geometry and evolutionary biology. This refutation is symbolized, in popular culture, by the widely influential book, The Blind Watchmaker, written in 1986 by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins purports, and is purported by many others, to have delivered an analytical coup de grâce to the classic “argument from design” as formulated, for example, by the 18th century theologian William Paley. Paley argued that, just as a watch is far too complex and functional to have simply sprung into existence by chance, and so provides indubitable evidence of the existence of an intelligent watchmaker, so, too, the universe’s far greater complexity and functionality are proof of purposeful design by a Divine Watchmaker.

Au contraire, says Dawkins. The complexity and apparent functionality of the universe only give the illusion of design and planning. In reality, the intricate complexity inherent in the universe’s systems is merely the result of blind, unconscious natural forces. “There may be good reasons for belief in God, but the argument from design is not one of them,” he writes.

“Despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Advanced Systems Theory and Evolution

Dawkins’s assertion, that random mutations alone explain what he calls “cumulative selection” – the gradual evolution of more and more complex biological structures – has seemingly been buttressed in recent years by rapid developments in systems theory, aided, of course, by the analytical tools used in creating new supercomputers . For our purposes, systems theory actually has two relevant components.

(1) Chaos theory, pioneered by such scientists as Edward Lorenz, is the scientific study of simple, nonlinear, dynamic systems that give the appearance of random activity but which are actually the result of simple deterministic forces. A practical example of chaos theory is fractal geometry and the study of snowflakes, which show how simple processes can give rise to apparently random variations of immense complexity.

(2) Cybernetics, developed by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (d. 1957) and further developed by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine at the University of Brussels, is the scientific study of what are called “self-organizing systems.” Self-organizing systems are complex assemblies that generate simple emergent behaviors. Practical applications of self-organizing systems studies can be found in the study of cellular automata (self-reproducing systems), neural networks (artificial learning), genetic algorithms (evolution), artificial life (agent behavior), fractals (mathematical art) and physics (spin glasses).

Interestingly enough, systems theory is not really the stalwart alley that advocates of a blind, random universe believe it to be. And in fact, many Neo-Darwinist theoreticians now recognize this. The inability of Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist theories to convincingly explain the origin of life from non-life is part of the reason why “self-organizing systems” are among the hottest topics in the philosophy of science. Further, analysts who study self-organizing systems often insist that they resist reductionist explanations, indeed that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint. This is why systems theory has been so enthusiastically embraced by advocates of process theology, because it provides for both a scientific study of the complex processes of nature and yet does not reject the existence of a Divine Intelligence that set these processes in motion in the first place.

In other words, systems theory, like any branch of science, can be viewed as merely the rigorous, mathematically-based description of actual processes that exist in nature. It describes precisely how these processes work themselves out in practice – simple forces giving rise to seemingly random, complex structures (chaos theory) and complex systems giving rise to simple behaviors (self-organizing systems). Neo-Darwinists want to pretend that these bare empirical descriptions alone constitute a rational explanation for the complexity of the universe, but of course that goes far beyond the scope of systems theory as an empirical, descriptive discipline.

The Philosophical Temptation

That is why, when all is said and done, Dawkins, like many scientists before him, can’t resist abandoning science for philosophy. The crux of Dawkins’ argument in favor of a blind, random universe is not, as he imagines, scientific analysis but a metaphysical assertion.

Dawkins’ rejection of theism is actually the old objection that recourse to an original “first cause” is essentially a circular argument. After hundreds of pages in which he attempts to show how the complex structures of nature are the result of natural selection and random mutation, he must, in the end, resort to a philosophical argument. “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer,” he says. “You have to say something like, ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.”

But Dawkins, like many scientists before him, is making a fundamental epistemological error here. The inability to explain one reality (e.g., God) does not, in and of itself, free one from the necessity of explaining other realities. If that were the case, then one should abandon science altogether. Advocates for the argument from design assert that it is illogical, and contrary to all observable phenomena, to assert that something can happen without a cause. That human beings cannot, at this stage, explain what caused God does not logically mean that we can rationally assert that things happen without a cause. If Dawkins can prove that a sophisticated robot factory exists that can produce, blindly, a perfectly made watch – and scientists and engineers can describe in detail the complex processes by which the robot factory produces these watches – that does not answer the obvious question of who or what made the robot factory. It merely begs the original question.

If anything, chaos theory and its related disciplines are only further strengthening this fundamental metaphysical axiom that all things must have a cause, showing how the apparent randomness of certain natural processes are not, in fact, random at all – but only appear to be random. Chaotic systems appear disorderly, perhaps random, but are not. Underneath their random behavior lies an order and a pattern that, with the aid of new supercomputers, can now be for the first time actually tracked mathematically. It was Lorenz’s discovery that, as his famous metaphor put it, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Ecuador may affect weather patterns in Alaska. The Alaskan weather patterns may appear random, and without cause, but that is only because of the inability of human minds to know all of the deterministic processes involved.

Theistic Evolution

Advocates of Neo-Darwinism and so-called creation science rarely agree on anything, but they are often united in their contempt for what is called theistic evolution. Dawkins asserts that any attempt to bring God into the scientific picture is “transparently feeble” because “science” can show how organized complexity arises spontaneously. As we have seen, science does no such thing: It merely describes the processes by which complex systems arise, without explaining what set these processes in motion in the first place. Creationists, for their part, object that theistic evolution is, in effect, incoherent, an ungodly pact with the devil in which Christians compromise their fundamental belief in divine providence. Typically, theistic evolution is described as evolution guided by God. But, creationists argue, this is a contradiction in terms: If it is evolution, then it is a theory of change in which natural processes are governed by random chance. If it is theistic, then change occurs through divine guidance.

But this presents a false dichotomy. As some of the early “fundamentalist” theoreticians saw (A.C. Dizon, Louis Meyer, R.A. Torrey), there is nothing inherently anti-theistic in a theory of Creation by which God created the universe using evolutionary processes. Christians have long accepted the notion, in physics and chemistry, that there exist observable, seemingly deterministic laws of nature. What is the essential difference between laws which govern atomic particles and, say, the complex DNA encoding by which a single cell develops into a newborn child?

Moreover, it is not even clear, from a logical standpoint, why a theistic worldview could not accommodate elements of randomness as part of the universe’s physical processes – why, contrary to Einstein’s famous assertion, God could not play dice.

Purpose, design and planning do not, in and of themselves, rule out an element of randomness. Indeed, randomness can be part of a design and purpose. College officials may plan and organize a football game – to be played according to fixed, unvarying rules – and yet require, as part of their plan, that the first kick-off be determined by a random flip of a coin. God, for His part, could conceivably create a universe in which randomness can and does occur – not least in the free choices of spiritual beings not entirely bound by deterministic forces. In other words, even if Quantum Theory (to take one example) is somehow able to prove the existence of irreducibly probabilistic laws – in which random events simply occur apparently without a cause – that could still be seen within the boundaries of natural laws established by a Divine Creator.

This is what the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan set out to show in his classic work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Lonergan thought through the implications of a shift from a classical to a statistical worldview, from a mechanistic cosmology to one in which universal order is constituted by emergent probability. Lonergan argued that a world process, governed by schemes of recurrence best described by the laws of probability, is still a world of design and purpose. Intelligence can both discern, and, ultimately, create, an underlying purpose in an aggregate of systems – a system of systems – that operate seemingly independently.

Systems theory and chaos theory have, in fact, proven Lonergan’s basic point: Systems are fundamentally “schemes of recurrence” that, while often appearing to be random, and which are best described by statistical probability, nevertheless exhibit patterns of cumulative complexity.

In the end, therefore, we begin where we started. Popularizing scientists such as Dawkins are justly proud of their new analytical tools. As a methodological starting point, science can and should proceed according to naturalistic presuppositions – lest every scientific mystery be explained away as “God does it.” The purpose of science is to describe the mechanisms discoverable in nature, to discern the patterns observable in what appears to be, to unaided human eyes, random or disorganized events. Chaos theory… and Ilya Prigogine’s self-organizing systems… have demonstrated just how unfathomably complex the processes of nature actually are.

But science, by its very nature, must recognize that its descriptive theories do not, ultimately, explain the origin of the universe. They only describe how the universe works, not how it came into existence or for what purpose. It is the task of the philosophy of religion, and systematic theology, to learn from new disciplines such as chaos theory and propose a new rational synthesis that takes into account the discoveries of these new disciplines and integrate them into classical Christian affirmations about creation. It is by no means clear that we live in a random universe, but if we do, Christian theology can show how the Creator can work His purposes through the “schemes of recurrence” of emergent probability just as He could under the old laws of classic Newtonian mechanics.

Relevance for Apologetics

Ultimately, Christian apologetics must face up to the intellectual challenges posed to it by the culture in which it is operating – and that culture, in the West at least, is dominated by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies and disciplines that call into question both the simple-minded determinism of 19th century modernist science and the “head in the sand” anti-science attitudes of postmodern “critics.” Young people, born with Nokia cell phones in their hands, and struggling with the challenges of mastering ever-more-complex technologies, know that postmodern philosophers are not serious when they deny the existence of objective facts.

Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, so, too, they are no sincere postmodern theoreticians in the cancer ward. When the postmodern theologian is sitting on the examination table, and her physician is explaining that she could have (a) a brain tumor requiring immediate surgery to save her life; or (b) a headache, requiring an aspirin, it’s a good bet that this postmodern theologian will NOT explain to the doctor that, in fact, she rejects the “foundationalist” premises of his science “practices,” that reality is really a social construct and that just because a tumor is “true for him,” it doesn’t follow that it is necessarily true for her. Instead, she will probably demand more tests – thus proving to everyone, including her students, that when push comes to shove she very much believes in objective reality over and above what she thinks about it. She even believes in absolute truth – because, if she takes an aspirin rather than undergoing surgery – and makes the WRONG choice – she will probably die. In her case, at least, the truth matters. Her life depends upon it.

In a similar way, a Christian apologetics that does not display at least as much conviction will not persuade anyone. That is why it is important that theologians today meet the challenges posed by contemporary science and not flee from them into a postmodern humanist ghetto. As I have attempted to argue in this paper, such flight is unnecessary. We have the intellectual resources to meet the challenges posed by contemporary systems theory, evolutionary biology and quantum physics. We do not have to accept either a simplistic naturalism, advocated by proponents of neo-modernism, nor a simplistic postmodern relativism and skepticism. While critiquing the excesses of 19th century modernist science, we do not have throw out the baby of truth with the bath water of scientism and naturalism.

The Medium is the Message

Friends often ask me why, after all these years, we still go through the weekly ordeal of getting our large, rambunctious family off to Mass.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s an ordeal. We usually attend the 9:00 a.m. Mass because of First Communion classes taught then (our five kids range in age from 7 to 18). That means getting up early on a Sunday morning… dragging recalcitrant, barely-conscious teenagers out of bed, usually kicking and screaming… hurriedly getting dressed… searching for shoes and dresses and lost hair ribbons for the girls… nagging and kvetching and pleading and threatening… driving 10 miles to our parish church… then scurrying in, often late, to squeeze into a pew. Yet we do it… week after week, month after month, year after year. We haven’t “broken the spell,” in the words of atheist writer Daniel Dennett’s telling phrase.

In many ways, we’re lucky. We belong to a very affluent, involved parish in a nearby seaside town. The church sits on the bluff overlooking the town harbor. It’s a very modern (too modern!) church in the “theatre in the round” style with a second-story balcony that even has movie-theatre style seats usually only found in Protestant churches (and which make you feel like you’re watching an opera, not worshiping God). The pastor is a gregarious, barrel-chested man in his mid-50s who is funny and engaging, occasionally profound, and who usually keeps even the teenagers’ attention during his sermon. Assisting him are three other priests – all of them likable and smart.

I hear the stories all the time about empty Catholic churches with the proverbial little old ladies and their rosary beads, but I have to say: the masses at our parish are usually packed. Business people, surfer dudes, moms and kids, they’re all there, mingling after Mass, chatting with the priests, scarfing down donuts. They, too, somehow make the effort to get up every Sunday morning and show up.

The Catholic Mass is quite unlike a typical evangelical church service. For one thing, the sermon is rarely as polished or as long as in a Protestant church, and not given nearly as much emphasis. The music, too, can be perfunctory, although in our parish it’s actually very good and performed by dedicated professional musicians. Most obviously, the entire focus of the Catholic service is on the actual ritual of the Mass itself – an ancient series of gestures and prayers that, in its basic outline, goes back to the Last Supper and the dawn of Christianity.

In our parish church, as in most Catholic churches, the entire building focuses on two elements that draw your eyes to them: A large altar, often made of stone (conspicuously not a table!)… and, above it, an enormous crucifix (not a bare cross) with a typically gruesome and lifelike representation of Jesus dying on it. At our church, the silver crucifix above the altar is truly a work of art, enormous and lifelike, suspended directly above the altar with wires and a large steel bar connected to the ceiling.

Thus, the architecture and design of Catholic churches themselves testify to what is going on in the Catholic Mass: It is a ritualized memorial of the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary. That is the entire focus and purpose of the Catholic Mass. Everything else is secondary – the scripture readings, the sermon, the extra prayers. The entire point of this ancient ritual is to memorialize, re-present and offer to God the act of self-sacrifice that Christians believe Jesus performed on the Cross. The priest reenacts the Last Supper – repeating the Words of Institution found in the scriptural accounts – but his purpose in doing so is to dramatize, as an act of worship, how Jesus consciously and willingly went to his own death.

For Catholics, in other words, the medium really is the message. The Gospel is proclaimed, not with words, but with deeds. As the apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.”(1 Cor. 11:25).

Catholics perform this ritual, not weekly, but daily – in hundreds of thousands of churches around the world, in abbeys and convents, hospitals and schools, universities and orphanages. A Mass is celebrated before, during or after virtually every significant event whenever Catholics are involved. At a wedding or funeral. At the start of a school year. At the beginning of a new legislative session.

In a sense, evangelical and atheist critics are correct: The Mass is the sole surviving example of magic in a faithless, machine-dominated world. It’s a moment of enchantment when hard-nosed businessmen and sex-obsessed teenagers alike encounter the awesome mystery of God “really present” on earth.

Whether brainwashed as Daniel Dennett says, or merely faithful to the ancient command of Christ to “do this in memory of me,” Catholic saints and sinners, skeptics and pious believers, continue to gather for this ancient rite. It is as Jesus said it would be: a way of remembering. And whatever else we do, every Sunday morning, we drag ourselves out of bed, meet with others like us, in an unbroken chain that stretches back 2,000 years in time, and remember.

A Comparison of Catholic and Reformed Views on the Salvation of Non-Christians

“God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right, is welcome to him.” — Acts 10: 34-35

In Lumen Gentium, the Decree on the Church in the Modern World, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council forever committed the Roman Catholic Church to a belief in the possible salvation of non-Christians — even, apparently, of non-theists.

“Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his church, yet, sincerely seek God, and moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is know to them through the dictates of conscience,” the Fathers declared. “Nor does divine Providence deny the help necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, but who strive to live a good life, thanks to his grace.”

Many evangelicals, and not a few conservative Catholics, believe this teaching of Vatican II represents a dramatic change in official Catholic doctrine — a concession, perhaps, to the liberal theology of Karl Rahner or to an ecumenical movement gone berserk. They may be surprised to learn, however, that the roots of this teaching are entrenched in magisterial (that is, “official”) Roman Catholic pronouncements, go back through Trent, St. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval scholastics to Justin Martyr (c. 150) and ultimately to the New Testament itself.

Put simply: Centuries of reflection on the Biblical testimony as a whole gradually led the Catholic Church to develop a theory of salvation (explicitly rejected by the early Reformers) in which persons are saved or lost depending upon whether they trust in God (whether consciously acknowledged or not) and follow the dictates of their conscience to the best of their ability. Incredible as it sounds, the rudiments of this teaching are explicitly stated in the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent.

The New Testament clearly and explicitly teaches that those who have faith (“Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household,” Acts 16: 30) and/or are baptized (“And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you,” 1 Peter 3: 21) will be saved. And the New Testament also clearly teaches no human being will be saved apart from the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. But does it necessarily follow from these texts that those who do NOT have faith and are not baptized are damned? Does the New Testament teach that? Some careful readers of the New Testament are doubtful.

While it’s true that if you rob a bank you’ll be rich… it doesn’t follow logically that if you refuse to rob a bank you’ll end up poor. In other words, while it’s true that no person may be saved apart from the redemptive work of Christ, it doesn’t follow that every person must be aware of that work and have explicit faith in it. And while it’s true all those who are baptized and believe in Jesus will be saved, it’s doesn’t follow logically that all those who are not baptized and do not believe will not be saved.

Nevertheless, as a result of numerous scriptural texts that seem to emphasize the necessity of the sacraments (“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” John 6: 53), the early Fathers of the Church believed that a person could only be saved within the context of the Christian community. It was only within the body of the church that a person had access to the sacraments (baptism and Eucharist), true doctrine based on the unbroken Tradition of the apostles, and knowledge of the life and teaching of Jesus.

For that reason, the early Fathers of the Church believed that membership in the body of the Church was quite obviously necessary for salvation. Augustine, ever willing to follow the “hard sayings” of the Gospel to their logical conclusions, believed that there was no salvation for unbelievers — even for those who had never had a chance to hear the Gospel preached. Augustine was aware (unlike many Christians) that there were, as he put it, “countless barbarian tribes among whom the Gospel has not been preached,” yet he believed (as would John Calvin centuries later) that a strict adherence to the teaching of the New Testament (particularly Mark 16) required the belief that all unbaptized persons were lost. Later, Augustine sought to justify this seemingly harsh view by appealing to his interpretation of the doctrine of Original Sin: All human beings stand justly condemned, even infants; and so God is not unjust if those who die without having had a chance to accept the Gospel are punished.

Medieval scholasticism and the official decrees of the Catholic Church, however, had a more nuanced view. St. Cyprian’s slogan extra ecclesiam nula sallus was given dogmatic force by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Pope Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302), but various “loop holes” were proposed for how an all-merciful God, whom scripture teaches desires “all men to be saved (1 Tim. 2:3),” could save even those outside the “visible” boundaries of the church and therefore who did not have access to the sacraments. Among these theoretical proposals were the concepts of “implicit faith,” “invincible ignorance” and “baptism by desire.”

St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) comes very close to Karl Rahner’s idea of the anonymous Christian in discussing the “implicit” faith of Cornelius, the Roman centurion who is saved (Acts 10). Thomas taught that belief in Christ is necessary for salvation, but, because of God’s universal salvific will, God would somehow ensure that all persons had the opportunity to believe. St. Thomas wrote: “If anyone were brought up in the wilderness or among brute animals, provided that he followed his natural reason in seeking the good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him, by an inner inspiration, what must be believed, or would send a preacher to him, as he sent Peter to Cornelius (De Veritate, q. 14, a. 11, ad 1.)” What is more, St. Thomas and later Catholic magisterial teaching would affirm that, while “without baptism there is no salvation for anyone” (Summa III, q. 68, a. 1), that baptism does not have to be the literal sacrament of water. There is a “baptism of repentance” just as there is a “baptism of blood” as well:

Consequently, a man may, without Baptism of Water, receive the sacramental effect from Christ’s Passion, in so far as he is conformed to Christ by suffering for Him. Hence it is written (Apoc. 7:14): “These are they who are come out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” In like manner a man receives the effect of Baptism by the power of the Holy Ghost, not only without Baptism of Water, but also without Baptism of Blood: forasmuch as his heart is moved by the Holy Ghost to believe in and love God and to repent of his sins: wherefore this is also called Baptism of Repentance. Of this it is written (Is. 4:4): “If the Lord shall wash away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall wash away the blood of Jerusalem out of the midst thereof, by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning.” Thus, therefore, each of these other Baptisms is called Baptism, forasmuch as it takes the place of Baptism (Summa III, q. 66, a. 11).

The early Reformers — including Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin — were not impressed by these scholastic subtleties. They all taught that non-Christians were predestined for eternal damnation. For the Reformers, saving faith by its very nature includes an explicit acknowledgement that Jesus Christ is one’s personal Lord and Savior and a firm commitment to him. For Calvin, there mere fact that someone has not had the opportunity of hearing the Gospel is proof that God has predestined him or her for eternal damnation:

“Those, therefore, who He has created for dishonor during life and destruction at death, that they may be vessels of wrath and examples of severity, in bringing to their doom, he at one time deprives of the means of hearing his word, at another by the preaching of it blinds and stupifies them the more (Institutes III, 24, 12).”

The Reformation doctrine of total depravity meant that human beings were incapable, without an explicit faith in Christ, of fulfilling even the minimal requirements of the moral law. In the Heidelberg Disputation, Martin Luther taught that the works of the righteous are, in fact, mortal sins. “Human works appear attractive outwardly, but within they are filthy, as Christ says concerning the Pharisees in Matt 23,” Luther wrote. “For they appear to the doer and others good and beautiful, yet God does not judge according to appearances but searches ‘the minds and hearts.’” (Cf. Timothy F. Lull, editor, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, p. 34.) Luther added that “the person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him adds sin to sin so that he becomes doubly guilty.” (Ibid., p. 41)

It was precisely this view of human nature — that human beings are utterly incapable of doing anything good before justification — that the Council of Trent explicitly rejected. In Canon 7 of the Sixth Session, the Council Fathers declared: “If anyone says that all works done before justification, in whatever manner they may be done, are truly sins, or merit the hatred of God; that the more earnestly one strives to dispose himself for grace, the more grievously he sins, let him be anathema.”

Of course, both Trent and the Reformers affirmed that human beings are saved by grace through faith, and they agreed that there is nothing human beings can do to “earn” salvation from God. As the Council of Trent put it, “the sinner is justified by God by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Decree on Justification, Session 6, Chapter 6 ) The Council added that “we are therefore said to be justified gratuitously, because none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification. For, ‘if by grace, it is not now by works, otherwise,’ as the Apostle says, ‘grace is no more grace.’” (Ibid., Chapter Where the Catholic Church differed with the Reformers was on the question of whether it is by faith in Christ “alone” that that human beings are saved. In the Catholic view, faith was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for salvation: There was also, as St. Paul taught, hope and love.

Not all the figures of the Reformation, of course, subscribed to the Lutheran/Calvinist view of sola fide and double predestination. James Arminius (d. 1609), and his Remonstrants followers, rejected Calvin’s views on predestination and the damnation of the unevangelized. How could a just God condemn people who had no opportunity to hear the Gospel? he asked. Later, John Wesley (d. 1791), the founder of Methodism, was even more forceful in his rejection of Calvin’s “double predestination,” which he even called a “blasphemy.” “I would sooner be a Turk, a Deist, yea an atheist, than I could believe this,” Wesley wrote.

The Tridentine teaching on justification, that it is ultimately a “cooperation” with divine grace, ultimately led the Catholic Church to adopt the view that non-Christians can be saved. This view is hardly “new” or the result of ecumenism. All this explains why, nearly 900 years after St. Thomas, and 20 years before Vatican II, the Catholic Church would officially condemn the teaching of Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J. in the 1940s in Boston. Feeney, who left the Jesuits and was officially excommunicated, taught a rigorous literal interpretation of extra ecclesiam nula sallus that insisted on the damnation of all non-Catholics. In rejecting Fr. Feeney’s interpretation of this dogma of the Church, the Vatican’s Holy Office (now renamed the more politically correct Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) declared that “this dogma is to be understood as the Church itself understands it.” That understanding, the Holy Office declared, is this: “To gain eternal salvation it is not always required that a person be incorporated in reality (reapse) as a member of the Church, but it is required that he belong to it at least in desire and longing…. When a man is invincibly ignorant, God also accepts an implicit desire, so called because it is contained in the good dispositions of soul by which a man wants his will to be conformed to God’s will.”

This remains the official teaching of the Catholic Church: “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments (CCC 1257).” In his encyclical Quuanto conficiamur moerore, promulgated in 1863, Pope Pius IX simultaneously affirmed the doctrine extra ecclesiam nula sallus (“outside the church, no salvation”) and taught that those “invincibly ignorant” of the Christian religion, but who cooperate with divine grace, can arrive at justification and eternal salvation. More than 100 years later, the current pontiff, Pope John Paul II, would make the identical point in his encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio: “The universality of salvation means that it is granted not only to those who explicitly believe in Christ and have entered the Church. Since salvation is offered to all, it must be made concretely available to all. But it is clear that today, as in the past, many people do not have an opportunity to know or accept the Gospel revelation or enter the Church…. For such people, salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the church… This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his Sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit. It enables each person to attain salvation through his or her free cooperation.”

In conclusion, it is apparent that the teaching that non-Christians can be saved is not an innovation in Roman Catholic theology, the result of radical ideas adopted by the Second Vatican Council or a misplaced ecumenical zeal. The roots for this teaching lie deep in Catholic tradition and go back all the way to the New Testament. It took centuries for the Catholic Church to think through the implications of its teaching on grace, freedom and the role of faith in the journey of salvation, but ultimately Catholicism affirmed a quite liberal understanding of how God’s grace works in the world. This view is quite opposed to the Reformation teaching on sola fide, which is that only persons with an explicit faith in Jesus Christ can be saved.

Atheists Take Credit for Science When They Had Nothing to Do with It

So if, as Albert Einstein insisted, Biblical religion was the necessary intellectual precondition for the gradual development of scientific method, how did the myth of the “scientific revolution” come about?

One reason: For the past 400 years, the partisans of irreligion-from the Marquis de Sade to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins-have deliberately misrepresented the way science actually developed in the West as part of their ideological crusade against Judaism and Christianity.

What’s worse, the partisans of atheism have been intellectually dishonest in the extreme: They have tried to take credit for the development of science when, in fact, they had little if anything to do with it.

Many of the most ideological and dogmatic of atheist crusaders, although continually referring to science, and seeking to use science to justify their own philosophical assumptions and declarations, were not scientists themselves.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years-who sought to use science to justify their unbelief-never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation.

That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H.L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

In dramatic contrast, most of the true giants of empirical science-the people who founded entire scientific disciplines or who made landmark scientific discoveries-were primarily devout Christians who believed that their scientific studies, far from being in conflict with their religious faith, ultimately was dependent upon it.

In his book, The God Delusion, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins once again tries to reclaim Einstein for atheism, citing quotations at length in which Einstein denied belief in a personal God, but the truth is that Einstein was struggling to enunciate a middle position between atheism and classic theism and couldn’t seem to make up his mind how to describe it. “There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like `God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or `He does not play dice’ or `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic,” Dawkins writes. “`God does not play dice’ should be translated as `Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means `Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using `God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense.”

Perhaps. Yet when Einstein was explicitly asked whether he believed in “Spinoza’s God”-meaning an impersonal Deistic God-this is what he said:

“I can’t answer with a simple yes or no. I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

Not an orthodox Jew, certainly, but hardly a snide atheist ideologue along the lines of Dawkins, Chistopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, either.

To sum up: We have two rival claims.

On the one hand, we have scientific (let’s be charitable) amateurs-from Nietzsche and Ingersoll to Chrisopher Hitchens and Sam Harris-insisting that science and Biblical religion are fundamentally incompatible.

On the other hand, you have the greatest minds in the history of science, the people who actually made most of the discoveries that created modern science to begin with-folks like Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, Werner Heisenberg, and even Albert Einstein-who insist that, not only is religion not at odds with science, but Biblical religion is what made science possible in the first place.

Whom should we believe?

Should we believe the attorney Clarence Darrow, who said “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose” … or should we believe Albert Einstein who said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind”?

Frankly, in the great debate over religion and science, faithful Christians and Jews stand with the more enlightened half – those who make the actual discoveries in science.

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