It's not often that the secular media get anything right about the meat of Catholic theology. Father Robert Barron gives us a splendidly reasoned exception with his argument for priestly celibacy, published on the CNN website. From the essay:

This is why, as G.K. Chesterton noted, there is a tension to Christian life. In accord with its affirmation of the world, the Church loves color, pageantry, music and rich decoration (as in the liturgy and papal ceremonials), even as, in accord with its detachment from the world, it loves the poverty of St. Francis and the simplicity of Mother Teresa.

To sum up Fr. Barron's argument, priests should be celibate because in so being, they become living models of the transcendent communion with God that we will experience in heaven.

He even mentioned G.K. Chesterton. I am pleased.

This blog is not all philosophical, rational-Christianity heaviness. Inspired by a post on the blog Hacking Christianity, which I found via Entrecard (see my widget at right, under "Blog Love"), I thought I would post about this topic, which is deeply important to all children (including, as Hacking Christianity points out, Bart Simpson) — and not a few adults.

Do cats and dogs go to heaven?

The Catholic short answer is "No." Certainly they do not have free will nor immortal souls and therefore do not participate in God's plan for salvation. But the long answer seems a lot more complicated.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has only a short section on animals (CCC 2415-8) which says little beyond the need to respect God's creation. Against Heresies, by the second-century church father St. Irenaeus, is sometimes quoted in the discussion of animals in heaven:

Neither the structure nor the substance of creation is destroyed. It is only the "outward form of the world" (I Corinthians 7:31) that passes away – and that is to say, the conditions produced by the fall. And when this "outward form" has passed away, man will be renewed and will flourish in a prime of life that is incorruptible, so that it is no longer possible for him to grow old any more.

The context here is a refutation of the Gnostic heresy, which held that creation and the material world are evil. Considering what Irenaeus' purpose was in writing the above, it is clear that he was not addressing the question of whether our pets go to heaven.

Being rational about pets in heaven

Let's assume that some animals do go to heaven. The animal kingdom contains a spectrum of complexity; some very simple organisms are included as "animals." Related to these are certain one-celled organisms as well as fungi. (In evolutionary terms, animals and fungi are more closely related to each other than either is to plants.) Unless one wants to argue that mushrooms and molds are in heaven, there must be some cut-off point, with creatures on one side enjoying heaven and creatures on the other side stuck with the final death. It seems like the cut-off would be arbitrary, but this cannot be, since nothing about God is arbitrary.

One might speculate that animals go to heaven by merit of having been loved by humans. In other words, our pets go to heaven, but wild creatures do not. The idea that human love confers some kind of immortality on animals is alien to Christian thought; you cannot "love" someone or something to heaven, be they human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.

That leaves only one final argument in favor of pets in heaven: that since we will be happy there, we will have everything we need to make us happy — including beloved pets. That's a nice thought, but a childish one. We already know that everyone we love will not necessarily be in heaven (Catholics believe in hell), so the happiness of paradise must be possible without the actual presence of loved ones. I tend to think that part of perfect happiness will be the peaceful acceptance of those things that bother us here on earth, such as separation from beloved humans and pets.

Always with us

In a way, our pets will always be with us. In heaven we will be united with God, and God exists outside of time, so in a mystical way I think we will be somehow reunited with the good of creation throughout time, including our pets. And, of course, our love and the memory of our pets' natural love will always stay with our intellects, even in heaven. But I cannot find room in Catholic teaching for the idea that pets will be physically present with us after the Resurrection of the Body, the article of faith enshrined in the Creeds.

I had the pleasure recently of re-reading science fiction author John C. Wright's conversion story, "Why I am not a Deist." Wright was an atheist who converted to Catholicism after a series of theophanies he describes as "totally humiliating" and "an embarrassment of evidence" of the truth of Christianity.

Christianity as rational

Certain atheists today have devolved into a kind of fundamentalist and evangelical atheism, notably the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the king clown of noxious atheist behavior, P.Z. Myers. Wright does not seem to have been that sort of atheist. His writing, both fiction and non-fiction, makes it clear he has always sought Truth over Ideology, objective reality over subjective belief.

The fundamentalist atheism movement prefers to charge religion with being irrational. (They confuse religionists, who frequently are irrational, with the religious ideals they strive toward but often fail to follow.) So it is refreshing to read Wright's story, in which he insists that Christianity is an utterly rational religion:

The Christian religion places an emphasis on Reason that other religions, with the exception of the Jewish, do not share, or not to the same degree. None of them mention LOGOS, the rational account, the word, issuing directly from the Father.

Catholicism has a long tradition of rational thought. The Church honors no fewer than 33 thinkers with the title "Doctor of the Church." (Three of them, about 9%, are women, which is quite remarkable considering that in Western history, probably many fewer than 9% of educated persons were women.)

Christianity is not only a proponent of rational philosophy; it is a promoter of rational science. Indeed, Wright points out,

...Christendom invented science.... The Christian world-view is not only NOT incompatible with the scientific and logical one, they reinforce each other. You must imagine my befuddlement when I see science presented as somehow being the enemy of religion. Science is the enemy of Taoism or Buddhism, perhaps, but not the enemy of a religion that combines the rationalism of Athens with the mysticism of Jerusalem. We invented the University, for God's sake.

Taoism and Buddhism as irrational

My previous (and largely disastrous) attempts to study kung fu exposed me to Taoism and Buddhism, particularly Chan Buddhism, the Chinese ancestor of Zen Buddhism. Taoism is the philosophy behind the art of tai chi and emphasizes the use of chi (ki in Japanese), an utterly unscientific force. The belief in chi is a form of vitalism. It is inherently unscientific in the same sense that the theory of intelligent design is unscientific: it attempts to explain natural observations by appealing to a force that is supernatural.*

Both Taoism and Buddhism include elements that are at once impersonal and supernatural. The idea of a force both supernatural (that is, outside or above the laws of nature) and impersonal (that is, not a person or being nor arising from one) is irrational itself. Any force that exists independent of a person begs an explanation. If it acts on nature, it must be a law of nature — or (if one accepts the existence of supernatural beings) it must arise from a supernatural being.

*Of course, rational Christianity recognizes personal supernatural forces and the possibility of their acting on the natural. An appeal to the supernatural is not necessarily irrational, but it is unscientific, because by definition science can only be concerned with the natural world. Thus elements of intelligent design may be true, but it will always be an unscientific theory.

Michael Dowd, the self-proclaimed "evangelist of evolution," wants religious people to discard their beliefs while keeping their religious language, which he would like to redefine to refer to concepts from the scientific theory of evolution and speculations of evolutionary psychology.

This is a pretty big horse pill to swallow. Dowd knows this, so he markets his ideas with his Seven Reasons for the Gospel of Evolution. And here they are, seven reasons Dowd thinks people of faith should come around to his way of thinking:

1. The gospel of evolution would give us a common creation myth. Since Christians and Jews already share a common creation myth, I assume Dowd must mean to use the gospel of evolution for a sort of universal ecumenism, in which all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity among them — acknowledge one and only one story of origins: naturalistic evolution.
   
2. It validates both scientific and religious ways of speaking. Of course, religious ways of speaking are already "validated" in the religious community. Dowd must mean therefore that religious ways of speaking will be validated among the atheistic community. Indeed, throughout his interviews, Dowd comes across as desperate for the approval of atheists.
   
3. It is a key to understanding and alleviating suffering, which comes from not living "integrously" with the flow of evolution. History, with its lessons on the eugenics movement and on Nazi genocide, teaches a far different lesson on what happens when humans try to base their ethics on the theory of evolution.
   
4. Religious language can be interpreted in a way that's universally true. By this, Dowd means it can be interpreted naturalistically. He says, "I don't have to wait to die to go to a place called heaven. When I'm in a place, integrity, love, compassion, generosity, care, consideration, I'm in heaven now, and so are you. It's true for everybody." But obviously, it's not true for those whose earthly lives are full of suffering, whether from loneliness, physical or mental illness, drug addiction, or other causes of grief. It seems cruel of Dowd to be so eager to steal the hope of a happy afterlife from people who are far from experiencing "heaven" on earth.
   
5. Only by knowing how we really got here and the trajectory we're on can we respond to problems like terrorism without making things worse. "It is impossible to know how to move into a healthy sustainable future" without understanding evolution, says Dowd. I agree that understanding evolution is important, but there is no reason religious beliefs should be discarded at the same time.
   
6. It unmasks the powers of manipulations. "We are so easily led around like a nose-ring (sic)." Here I assume Dowd is giving in to the frequent atheistic criticism of religion, that organized religion exists to manipulate the masses. Yet people of faith like myself believe we are more free in many ways than are people without faith.
   
7. "It gives us the tools for understanding how to have a great life and thriving relationships no matter what hand life deals us." That's funny; my Catholic faith also gives me those tools, and much more explicitly. I imagine that the Gospel of Religion has no sacraments, for example.

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

The recent post about this blog's position on evolution has attracted a lot of attention. Perhaps I should have added that I believe evolution is "only a theory" in the sense that it is nothing more than an idea of secular science and is not at all a sacred thing. I say this to make a contrast with the position of Michael Dowd, a self-described "evangelist of the gospel of evolution."

Dowd, previously a Catholic and then a fundamentalist Protestant, is now the inventor of "evolutionary theology" and the author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. He was recently interviewed in two parts on the secular humanist radio program "Point of Inquiry," where he explained his naturalized religion.

There is a lot to Dowd's message, parts of which will be addressed in future posts. But his ideas all boil down to one central thesis: God is not a supernatural, personal being, but a personification of reality. In other words, God is the "proper name" we give to all of nature. His term "Religion 2.0" seems to refer to a hybridization between pantheism and the philosophy of Spinoza, both descendants of Eastern philosophy.

Though he calls it a "personification," Dowd's thesis about religious thought actually makes God into a non-person. In other words, God's personhood is merely symbolic.

Dowd explicitly rejects all private revelation (what Catholics would call "the deposit of faith") in favor of the revelation uncovered by science. He says that scientific facts are "God's native language." This idea echoes the beliefs of the Deists, who accepted "natural theology" but rejected the revealed theology that is central to the claims of Christianity. Interestingly, in the radio interviews at least, he makes no attempt to refute the idea that revelation contains truth, but merely denounces it.

The Catholic Church holds that while doctrine can develop in the same way a flower unfolds, its core content never changes. The original deposit of faith was completed with the writing of the books now included in the Bible. The Church is so careful on this point that she uses a dead language as the official tongue of faith, lest the natural evolution of living languages distort the unchanging contents of revelation.

Nature likewise never changes (except, the Christian would maintain, through the rare interventions of God known as miracles), but our understanding and description of nature — in other words, science — changes frequently and often dramatically. For example, consider how the uncertainties of quantum mechanics (a model which even has a postulate called the Uncertainty Principle) compare with the clockwork universe of Newton. Even the theory of evolution, the scientific nucleus of Dowd's philosophy, may in principle be one day replaced or drastically modified as the central unifying theory of biology.

And much of Dowd's message draws not on the overall theory of evolution, which is a very strong model with overwhelming scientific consensus, but on the much more speculative field known as evolutionary psychology. To derive our behavioral "integrity," as Dowd recommends, from such a controversial discipline is to build our morals on a foundation of sand.

I subscribe instead to the Cartesian (and fully Catholic-compatible) view that science, as the study of nature, is subordinate to supernatural truth. By removing the supernatural from reality and calling the remnants "God," Dowd has made himself into an evangelist of nonsense. A commenter on the Point of Inquiry website put it well with these insightful remarks: "If the universe is god is the metaphor, then doesn’t god lose all meaning? ... An impersonal and unknowable god seems like no god at all, at least from a teleological point of view."

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

Posts on Leave the lights on take for granted certain things, such as the truth of the Catholic faith and the value of science for investigating nature. As I read other blogs on science, on faith, and on both, I see clearly that my positions are not universal. Indeed, if they were, there would be little use in many of the posts of this blog.

This is the first of a series of position statements for Leave the lights on. This statement is on the theory of evolution.

Evolution

This blog takes the position, controversial among people of faith, that evolution is both a historical fact and the best theoretical model to explain the observations of biology.

When I earned my B.S. in Zoology, I unofficially specialized in paleontology and evolution. Ironically, this interest was born of my faith and a desire to know how to refute evolution. Instead, I learned not only of the overwhelming evidence behind the theory, including predictions that have been shown to be true, but the subtle intricacies that derive from a few simple statements. As a theory, it is truly a thing of beauty.

In particular, I was enthralled with the discovery that evolution is compatible with the Catholic faith. While this is a theme I would like to explore further some day, for now let it suffice to say that I believe that God imbued two individuals, who we call Adam and Eve, with immortal souls, and that they were the ancestors of all human beings. I believe in the Fall, in original sin, and in the special place of humans among (and above) the animals.

Also, I try to eschew the term "Darwinism." "Evolution" or "theory of evolution" suffice just fine. Calling it "Darwinism" suggests there may be an alternate theory of evolution, which I reject. Besides, the modern theory of evolution may have begun with Darwin, but it has been developed quite heavily since then.

Intelligent Design

My position is that Intelligent Design is not science because it does not explain the natural world — rather, it posits that the natural world cannot be fully explained; and because it makes no specific predictions, though compatible "theories" such as genomic front-loading may do so. I think ID gives people of faith a bad name in the science community.

Young-Earth Creationism

In consideration of what has been observed in geology, biology, and other disciplines, young-earth creationism is a noxious theory that makes God out to be a liar, since it requires God to have placed abundant evidence for evolution and an old earth in creation.

I am making my way at a sedate pace through NASA astrobiologist Peter D. Ward's book Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life. Astrobiology is the real-world version of what science fiction fans have sometimes called “xenobiology.” Though “astrobiology” means “the study of star life,” Ward doesn't limit the possibility of alien life to other stars or even to other planets. We may not only find alien life on Mars, but even on earth.

The scientific definition of life — little more than an intellectual exercise for most biologists, since they know life when they see it — is the most fundamental problem in astrobiology. We have to know what we are looking for if we are to recognize it.

Ward discusses the history of defining life. Some famous scientists have addressed this question, including more physicists than biologists. One of the first books was What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger (yes, the guy who both killed and didn't kill theoretical cats). Ward extensively discusses the criteria developed by Paul Davies, another famous physicist. Davies' book The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life lists six qualities that could be expected in any life form: metabolism, organization, development, autonomy, the ability to reproduce, and the ability to evolve. Here are a few thoughts on these qualities.

Metabolism and organization

I grouped these together because they are inseparable. Metabolism is the processing of energy to reduce entropy, and entropy is the opposite of organization. So metabolism preserves organization. And since metabolism requires enormous complexity, organization enables metabolism.

Development

Development is the change in an individual organism over time. I am unconvinced that development, separate from metabolism, is absolutely necessary in the definition of life. Some microbes develop little, if at all, between their asexual “birth” and their reproduction; why should we require it of a microscopic alien creature?

Autonomy

This is the slipperiest of the concepts in the Davies definition of life. Not only is it difficult to pin down exactly what it means (something about “self-determination”), but also exactly how it applies. For example, is a bee hive with a single queen an autonomous unit? Or does that apply to each individual bee in the hive? Or to each cell within each bee? The bee's cells, and the hive's bees, depend respectively on the bee and the hive for their “self-determination.”

Ability to reproduce

Organization means information, so reproduction requires a means to transmit information. Therefore, for any potential life form to reproduce, it needs both a way to reproduce its physical substance and metabolism and the information necessary to organize it. In other words, life needs a genome.

Ability to evolve

I am not sure this item is necessary for the list, not because it is inaccurate, but because of parsimony. The other five qualities can all apply to single organisms, but evolution is something that happens to populations. Metabolism and organization imply variations in efficiency (and therefore competition among members of a population). If reproduction involves any errors or changes in the genome, then logic shows that any population would evolve through natural selection.

Aliens and Origins is an occasional series on Leave the lights on. To make sure you never miss an article in this series, you can subscribe for free.

A wealth of new questions and speculations have occurred to me. Non-intelligent alien life would be theologically no more remarkable than life on earth. The really important question applies to another race or species of intelligent aliens.

Angels: Known aliens

Some theological background is called for here. In Catholicism, there is a difference between creatures with immortal spirits and creatures without. The two known "races" of creatures with spirits are angels, which are pure spirit with no body, and humans, which are both bodily and spiritual creatures. Each human's spirit is called a soul. All other known creatures are animals, and are entirely mortal.

Angels are intelligent, rational beings. In a sense, as a wholly separate race of thinking beings, they are aliens. When most people think of another intelligent race, they usually think of creatures with bodies, not pure spirits like angels. Nevertheless, angels can give us some insight into what God's relationship with a race of thinking, breathing aliens might be like.

Angels' and humans' relationships with God have a central theme in common: both have free will, so each individual can choose whether to serve God or to reject him. In fact, in all of known creation, free will, the ability to reason, and immortality are a package deal. Assuming God stayed with that pattern another intelligent race would have the same attributes, and thus aliens may have immortal souls.

The fall of man, the fall of angels, the fall of aliens?

Both humans and angels were subjected to a fall, an opportunity to decide whether to follow or to reject God. In angels, the fall was individual, while in humans it is collective. In both cases, however, it results the from the free will of the creatures in question, not from divine imposition. So it is possible that a theoretical race of aliens might not have fallen. They might, essentially, exist in their version of Eden.

But perhaps there is a race, or even many races, of fallen aliens. If their fall was collective like ours, it is a sure bet that God would redeem them, as he did for humans. This thought leads to some wild speculation and fanciful theology about whether God's Son could have been sent (and incarnated) separately for each race, or whether Jesus, the human incarnation, was meant to redeem aliens as well as humans. The potential for accidental heresy is high here, so I will desist from speculating at this point.

Rational but soulless beings?

Earlier I mentioned that free will, rationality, and immortality are always tied together in that part of creation known to humans. It may be, though, that God has created rational beings without immortal souls. They may be able to perform feats of logic, to speak and understand language, and to solve problems even better than humans can, yet may be entirely mortal. In that case, aliens would be nothing more than clever animals. Their ability to out-think humans would be analogous to a horses' ability to outrun us, or fishes' ability to outswim us.

A final note

All this speculation is nothing more than a mental exercise. While Catholics are certainly permitted to believe in intelligent aliens, they are not required to do so. In the case that aliens exist only in human imagination, it is an entirely moot point.

Read the whole Aliens and Origins series here. Make sure you don't miss upcoming posts by subscribing.

A modern cell, even of a simple organism like a bacterium, is intensely complicated. The cell membrane is studded with receptors like keyholes that allow sophisticated communication among cells. The cytoplasm, the fluid making up the interior of the cell, hosts elaborate biochemical pathways that process and propagate biological signals. Complex structures called ribosomes are like sliding clamps with integrated information readers; they produce new proteins in assembly-line fashion.

Proponents of the pseudo-scientific theory "Intelligent Design" (ID) use the above examples as evidence to suggest that no natural process could have resulted in a cell. In ID, cells are purported to be "irreducibly complex," meaning they cannot function in the simpler forms that would be expected according to the theory of evolution.

One cannot prove a negative; a single example to the contrary falsifies a negative statement. Inconveniently for ID proponents, recent research is working steadily to falsify this particular negative statement.

While modern cells possess the array of machinery described above and more, no researcher has ever shown that all of it is absolutely necessary for life to exist. According to one astrobiologist, Peter Ward, the bare minimum for a cell to live, metabolize, and reproduce may be no more than a membrane to separate cell contents from its surroundings and a bit of genetic material.* And Scientific American recently reported that Harvard Medical School researchers have caused this type of structure to arise spontaneously in a test tube. They mixed certain organic molecules (ones thought to have been around in earth's early pre-life days) in a test tube of water.

The result seems like wildly optimistic science fiction: some of the molecules (lipids, which are the building blocks of oil and fat and which don't mix with water) spontaneously formed a "pouch" with another molecule (DNA) inside, then more molecules (nucleic acids, building blocks of DNA) spontaneously crossed the barrier, and the DNA spontaneously replicated.

Did I mention that all this took place spontaneously, with no tinkering from an intelligence? Not only that, it required no more than 24 hours. Chalk up a blow to the argument that the cell is irreducibly complex.

*Actually, Ward suggests the minimum definition of life may be considerably less even than that. I am currently reading, and must recommend, his book Life As We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life.
Read the whole Aliens and Origins series here. Make sure you don't miss upcoming posts by subscribing.

To the typical Catholic, this question is not even very interesting, let alone important. But to a small group of Catholics — and not just the Roswell-following crowd — it deserves intense attention.

The short answer to the question is, "Yes." Belief in extraterrestrial life is not contrary to Catholicism. The corollary is that if extraterrestrial life were discovered, Catholicism would not be thus falsified.

Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, announced in the article "Aliens Are My Brother" that any alien life form would be just as much a part of creation as life on earth. The article itself is no longer available online, but according to the BBC, Fr. Funes even speculated that intelligent aliens may be free from the effects of original sin — that is, they may still live in their equivalent of the Garden of Eden.

Contrast that with the belief of certain Creationists. The staunch Creationist organization Answers in Genesis came to a far different conclusion about even non-intelligent extraterrestrial life:

However, the notion of alien life does not square well with Scripture. The earth is unique. God designed the earth for life (Isaiah 45:18). The other planets have an entirely different purpose than does the earth, and thus, they are designed differently.

(Hat-tip to the Blue Collar Scientist.)

The Bible verse refers to God "not creating it [the Earth] to be a waste, but designing it to be lived in." Based on this verse, a formal logical fallacy called "denying the antecedent" underlies this argument:

• If God created a planet for the express purpose of being lived in, then it will have life.
• God created other planets for another purpose.
• Therefore, other planets do not have life.

I would like to point out that Isaiah 45:18 does not say that the earth is unique, nor that the other planets were created for another purpose.

You can believe in aliens and still be a good Catholic. Apparently, however, you cannot believe in aliens and still be a good Protestant Fundamentalist.

Read the whole Aliens and Origins series here. Make sure you don't miss upcoming posts by subscribing.

Aliens and Origins is a new occasional series on the origin of life, extraterrestrial life, and the creation of the universe.

Is there a topic you would like to see covered in this series? Would you like to write a guest post? If so, post a comment or send me an e-mail. (See my profile for my e-mail address.)


Posts in this series:

• Can you believe in aliens if you are Catholic?
  
• The origin of life and the first cell
• Would aliens have immortal souls?
• What is life? Six criteria
  

The graphic for this series was developed from a photograph of stromatolites published by the National Park Service of the United States Government. This pre-Cambrian formation is thought to be about 3.5 billion years old, which would mean life on Earth originated almost a billion years earlier than previously thought.

Ben Stein has an impressive curriculum vitae: presidential speechwriter, actor, comedian, social commentator, game show host, attorney, author. Now he has added "filmmaker" to that list with his documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Its central premise is that the theory of intelligent design (ID) is better than the theory of Darwinian evolution, but "Big Science" refuses acknowledge that fact. Like the medieval Church, it excommunicates any academic who questions Darwinian dogma or advocates for ID.

I have not had the opportunity to see the film (it isn't playing in my city), so I will base my commentary on reviews and materials from the Expelled website. I'll start with the two-minute "Super Trailer," which opens with this dialogue between a teacher and Stein, who is sitting in the back of the classroom:

Teacher: Moving through history in an unguided and undesigned way, the theory of evolution --
Stein: Excuse me!
Teacher: Yes, Ben.
Stein: How did life begin in the first place?
Teacher: Mr. Stein. You have the same question every time.
Stein: Well, you never answer it, sir.
Teacher: (sputtering) You know, we've been through this so many times, you have been so --
Stein: Could there have been an intelligent designer? (cue electric guitar solo)

The film has been accused of being propaganda rather than a documentary by the site "Expelled Exposed," and this conversation between a cool, collected Stein and a caricature of a hapless teacher certainly supports that assertion.

The trailer continues with interview snippets from what are presumably supposed to be academics disgraced by their belief in ID, and then a choppy bit of an interview about the origin of life that reeks of out-of-context editing. It ends with some indignant comments about those people, including (heaven forfend!) the National Academy of Sciences, who insist on the separation of religious and scientific thought. Stein complains, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box, where it can't possibly touch a higher power, cannot possibly touch God."

This trailer has two main themes -- that scientists can't answer questions about the origin of life, and that science and religion are improperly kept separate -- both of which I strenuously disagree with. (Lest I be accused of taking things out of context, feel free to peruse the official overview of the film.)

I'll start with the second theme about the separation of science and faith. Religion and science have both different methods and different ends. Since both seek truth, they can never contradict each other when conducted properly, but neither do they answer the same question. Religion is ordered to learning about God and his relationship with us, and about sanctification -- ultimately, about all things supernatural. Science is ordered to learning about Creation -- all things natural. The scope and methodology of science is such that it is impossible for it to make conclusions about religious topics. If science attempts to explain a miracle -- a supernatural suspension of natural law -- it cannot call that event a miracle, only declare it "unexplained so far."

So yes, science absolutely should be kept in a little box where it can't touch supernatural things. That is its proper place. And religion properly should touch on only those aspects of the natural world that affect our relationship with God, and leave the rest to science.

The exact historical process by which the first living DNA cells originated is one of those events that belong to science. Religion can tell us only that God was the ultimate cause; science alone can (possibly) discover the method. And in only the last few years, new discoveries have begun to shed light on this method. We may someday (soon, even) have a pretty good idea of the nitty-gritty chemistry that sparked the first DNA life.

But there is another issue that begs to be addressed. Regardless of how the first life came into being, whether a natural process or an ex nihilo fiat, the origin of life actually has no bearing at all on Darwinian evolution. Evolution is concerned with what happens to life that already exists. In other words, even if the origin of life can never be explained naturalistically, evolution by natural selection is not thereby invalidated.

The information available to me about this film does not make me hopeful that it contains much scientific investigation. I rather suspect it will follow the fallacy that if you say something loudly and often enough, it will come true.

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