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.

As a cradle Catholic, I took it as an article of faith to mark conception as the beginning of a human life. But the fact that there was public debate made me assume that science was still investigating the issue of when a new human organism comes into existence.

So when I was a university senior studying animal development, I was astonished that the consensus in biology is so clear and concrete. For any sexually reproducing animal, from fruit flies to humans, the moment in which an egg and sperm merge is developmentally and evolutionarily the point at which a new organism is considered to come into existence. There is no scientific debate on the subject.

Embryos and self-interest

Self-interest is a key concept in this discussion. Every cell acts in its own self-interest, and in a multicellular organism such as a human, that means every cell acts in the interest of the body as a whole. (This concept is taken to its extreme conclusion in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene.)

Immediately upon fusion of the egg and sperm, a human zygote begins acting in its own self-interest with an event called the cortical reaction, which stops additional sperm from penetrating the egg (which would be lethal). Shortly afterward, it begins secreting hormones to cause its mother's body to allow it to implant in the uterus and gestate it. Every event associated with the embryo has as its aim the continued survival of the embryo, not necessarily the well-being of the mother.

Thus the question of when human life begins is not a semantic one — it is a scientific one, and one that has a known answer.

Science and politics

This is why I felt so much disgust when Congresswoman Diana DeGette falsely declared that science supports the position that it is ethical to kill embryos. Now, in an ironic turn-about, another Congressional Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has made remarks that are in plain contradiction to science.

According to a statement reported on several blogs to have been e-mailed to Catholic bishops, Pelosi justifies her position that a just-fertilized zygote is not a human being on an alleged statement by St. Augustine: "[T]here cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation…" (On Exodus 21.22).

Other commentators, from bishops to bloggers, have done an outstanding job of refuting Pelosi's words on theological grounds. Her statement is also unsound on scientific grounds.

Irrespective of whether she is quoting St. Augustine in context (I suspect not), and of whether it accurately reflects Catholic moral teaching on the issue (it clearly does not), her statement blatantly disregards the insights we have from developmental biology.

St. Augustine's statement was an expression of the science of his time, and consists of little more than a definition: a thing that senses has a soul and a thing that does not sense does not have a soul. That view is derived from the classical philosophy of his day.

In modern science, there is no such thing as a natural soul (vitalism having been rejected long ago). The soul is a purely theological concept. While supernatural souls are part of Catholic belief, science is not capable of investigating them.

As for lacking sensation, a freshly fertilized zygote may not have a nervous system, but it does respond to its environment.

Pelosi's remarks on the issue of the beginning of life are ill-informed — not only from a Catholic point of view, but from a scientific one.

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Image: Human ovum before fertilization. Illustration from Gray's Anatomy.

First, a quick note to those reading from a feed: the first post about the Universal Genome was accidentally published before it was ready. As a result, the version you saw in your reader or e-mail contained unfinished sentences and other confusing flaws. Please click here to read the correctly edited version.

That post contained my first impressions of UG. Now I have looked at the paper in Cell Cycle, and I have questions about its scientific value.

I have written and rewritten and unwritten portions of this post, trying to decide what to say about this paper. I researched the journal, which is a relatively new but bona fide biology journal. I searched for other mentions of "Universal Genome" but, except for an Intelligent Design blog or two crowing about this paper, it seems not to have appeared anywhere.

What it boils down to is this: I cannot understand how it passed peer review. There is no place in the theory of evolution for the following statements from the abstract:

(a) the Universal Genome that encodes all major developmental programs essential for various phyla of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism shortly before the Cambrian period; (b) The Metazoan phyla, all having similar genomes, are nonetheless so distinct because they utilize specific combinations of developmental programs.

In other words, right before the evolution of the very first animals (metazoans), back when more or less all life on earth was single-celled, some multi-cellular creature appeared that had all the main genes that would be used for all future animals. Somehow its DNA "knew" what genes its descendants would need to grow everything from bilateral symmetry to eyeballs, though it itself presumably had none of these features.

The author, Michael Sherman, is not a zoologist nor an evolutionary biologist; he is a biochemist at a medical college. Thus his qualifications to propose a new theory of evolutionary zoology may be questionable. Still, this paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

Am I missing something here?

No sooner did I post about the blog The Deeps of Time than it introduced me to a concept brand-new to me: the Universal Genome. In a nutshell, UG proposes that all animals have a large, and largely shared, genome; the differences between animal species result from different genes being expressed. Click here for a good explanation of the model, which appeared in a paper in the journal Cell Cycle in 2007.

Unlike evolution, UG really does hypothesize that complexity arose all at once — as if a Boeing 767 had appeared fully formed from a junk yard. In the case of UG, the 767 is the genome, not the phenotype (appearance). A better metaphor would be that the genome is a yard full of every kind of mechanical part one could want, and in each species only certain parts are used.

Clearly, UG fits in very well with Intelligent Design and very poorly with the theory of evolution.

Immediately two problems with this hypothesis jump out at me:

1. Life on earth does not consist solely of animals. I don't believe these genomic observations are found in other kingdoms, such as plants, nor in other domains, such as Bacteria and Archaea. Plant genomes are quite different from animal genomes in terms of what they can contain; for example, unlike animals, plants can easily accommodate many copies of large amounts of the genome, as in polyploidy (multiple copies of chromosomes). Universal genome is not a universal hypothesis if it applies only to animals, meaning some other hypothesis is necessary for other kingdoms of life.

2. Convergent evolution can explain at least some of the observations attributed to UG. For example, the paper notes that cubozoans (box jellies) have eyes that are genetically similar to the eyes of chordates, even though the last common ancestor of cubozoans and chordates did not have eyes. If this observation is true, an alternate explanation is that the eye evolved independently in both lineages from the same genes, genes that happened to be the best suited to the changes that could result in eye genes.

The observations cited in the paper in Cell Cycle hardly require the construction of a brand new theory of dubious scientific value to explain them. Good science would require searching for explanations among existing biological models first.

It has come to my attention that Leave the lights on is not unique. I have discovered another blog on "Science and Catholic faith": The Deeps of Time.

TDOT is a bulletin-style blog, which is something lacking here on LTLO. My approach here is to write articles and essays; TDOT keeps its readers up-to-date on science issues for Catholics, with recent posts on a new source for adult stem cells (wisdom teeth) and Pope Benedict XVI's prayer intention for August (awareness of God's Creation).

Interestingly, TDOT uses an opposite sort of metaphor for its title. But it's worth noting that it also uses "illumination" imagery in its banner logo. My banner shows a light shining down, while TDOT's banner shows a brilliant sunny day lighting up a cathedral.

Be sure to visit TDOT and consider subscribing.