CORRESPONDENCE.

Without religion

I'd like to respond to William Pfaff's thoughtful commentary ["Lonely New World," January 28]. While it may be true that a significant decline or even absence of belief in a divine master marks our age, I'm not certain we can assume that will automatically translate into poorer behavior. If Pfaff's assertion-that more than twenty centuries of Western history have been marked by such a belief-is true, we might well hope for change. The period is stained in blood. Leaders of every stripe have demonstrated a thirst for power, heedless of religious or humanitarian propriety. An age stripped of these "transcendent" values might at least work without hypocrisy.

robert hannon

Fairbanks, Alaska 

Back to the Mount

Let me see if I correctly understand William L. Portier's defense of the Mount Saint Mary's seminarians [February 11]:

The U.S. church now finds itself in a pluralistic society, a situation that came about only after the relatively recent dissolution of the Catholic immigrant subculture. The church must respond to this new challenge by adopting a new approach to engaging the world, namely evangelical witness of the sort pioneered by American Baptists and Methodists in the nineteenth century. This is a form of Christianity "especially fitted to modern social and cultural conditions, especially pluralism." We are not told why it is especially fitted but, because it is, Catholics should be "investing significantly in dramatic forms of religious witness that go beyond the example of a good life in the world." The seminarians in question have for some time been exploring this new and more relevant way of being Catholic, and that's why we should not think of them as conservatives or fugitives from the world.

Portier supports this reading with examples of the seminarians' evangelical behavior: wearing a Roman collar; wearing a cassock and surplice; swinging a thurible in a 180-degree arc; touching the floor with one's head during Mass; saying grace before meals individually instead of as a community. This last, by the way, is "an act of piety...intended to be witnessed." Presumably, therefore, the other activities are as well. In any case, this list is Portier's proof that the seminarians are in the vanguard of a new Catholicism, one more appropriate to engaging our surrounding, pluralistic culture.

Historians no doubt will agree that pluralism has been part of the environment of the U.S. church since the dominant immigrant subculture of Catholicism ended. They will want to add, however, that pluralism was a factor in the church's environment before and during the immigrant era as well, so it is not a new challenge. Baptists and Methodists may be surprised to hear Portier imply that distinctive garb and intentionally ostentatious devotionalism are modern expressions of their ancestors' type of religious witness. And Catholics may wonder why any kind of garb, posture, or gesture-all of which are superficial by nature and unrelated to either the gospel or the core doctrines of Catholicism-should be thought of as evangelism. In short, Portier has yet to make his case.

john hazard

Downers Grove, Ill.

Charming Alice

Alice McDermott's "Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic" [February 11] is an excellent portrayal of the changes in her outlook and practice of Catholicism during the changes in the Catholic church in recent decades. My generation and others with a Catholic college education shared her antipathy to the religious mannerisms so well described in her article and in her novel, Charming Billy. Despite changes in the church and the modernization of religious practices, the defection of youth, and others, continues.

Although I have been annoyed by certain Catholic religious practices, I have never been inclined to abandon my faith. I am convinced that our society needs the perspective of those who reflect traditional Catholic values. Our concern to be "hip and intelligent and modern" should not preclude us from distinguishing between superficial religious practices and the priceless values of our heritage.

john f. o'connor

Winchester, Mass.

Throwing dice

As a biologist studying evolution at the molecular level, I found John F. Haught's comments on Darwinism and theology ["Evolution and God's Humility," January 28] of great interest. However, like many commentators on the evolution-creation issue, Haught is hampered by a very old-fashioned view of evolutionary biology, essentially that of the premolecular era in biology. This old-fashioned view is perpetuated by popular writers like Richard Dawkins and is implicitly accepted by many anti-evolutionary writers such as Michael Behe.

In fact, Behe and Dawkins have much in common. They share a philosophical framework dating from the Enlightenment, which has little in common with the Christian philosophical tradition or with the Hebrew Scriptures. This philosophy views nature as a mechanism, and the goal of both scientist and philosopher is to explain how the mechanism works. The theistic approach holds that certain aspects of the living world (in Behe's view, cellular biochemistry) are so complex that no natural mechanism can account for their origin, while the contrary view claims that natural mechanisms (natural selection) are at least in principle sufficient to explain all aspects of life. Both sides assume an essentially deterministic, mechanistic view of nature. Interestingly, "intelligent design" champions like William Dembski adduce as incontrovertible evidence of divine creation the very same facts that certain biologists cite as evidence for the ubiquitous working of natural selection.

However, what we are discovering about biology at the molecular level is that organisms are far from the well-designed machines assumed by both Behe and Dawkins. Rather, molecular biology reveals a colossal waste of resources, a myriad of complex Rube Goldberg-like ways of getting things done, and the accumulated residue of past evolutionary dead ends. Evolution seems to proceed not by design but by chance and serendipity. If life is "intelligently designed," one might well question the intelligence, not to mention the sanity, of the designer.

As usual, the historians of ideas have got it all wrong. It was not the agnostic Darwin who had the "dangerous idea" in nineteenth-century biology. Darwin's mechanistic view of evolution fit in well with the Enlightenment presuppositions of his vaguely theistic precursors. Rather, it was the Catholic Gregor Mendel who propounded the truly radical and dangerous idea. Mendel showed that every act of sexual reproduction is set up as a lottery. Contrary to Einstein's famous objection to the quantum theory ("God does not throw dice"), God does indeed throw dice at every fertilization. It was left for Sewall Wright and, most importantly, Motoo Kimura in the twentieth century to work out the population implications of Mendelian genetics. What their models predicted-and what molecular biology has confirmed-is a biological world in which not design (intelligent or otherwise) but chance rules.

Does this pose a problem for theology? Personally, I don't think so. First, the Mendelian-Kimuran revolution can be beneficial in breaking the stranglehold of Enlightenment philosophy on the creation-evolution issue. Protestant fundamentalism in particular, in spite of its claim to be scripturally based, accepts a world view far more indebted to the Enlightenment than it is to either the Bible or the Christian tradition. As Haught suggests, a theology that is genuinely scriptural can accommodate itself easily to a God who is no watchmaker. In addition, it is important to keep in mind the distinction, well known to Catholic philosophy since Aquinas, between natural science and philosophy-a distinction ignored both by atheistic evolutionists who think that evolution "disproves" the existence of God and by the "intelligent design" school who think that divine design can be a testable scientific hypothesis.

austin l. hughes

Columbia, S.C.

The author is professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina.

The author replies:

Professor Hughes is correct in saying that biology is still too often presented in an obsolete mechanistic format, and that theological encounters with evolution are therefore hampered by having to deal with this version. In fact, the theological objections to Dawkins or Behe have to do not with science but with the confining metaphysical assumptions underlying much of science. Even after Mendel and Kimura, however, I doubt that we can plausibly go so far as to make life simply a matter of chance. Even a nonmechanistic interpretation of life requires an ingredient of order with the serendipity.

john f. haught

Discovering fire

I am always glad to get my Commonweal magazine and particularly enjoyed John Haught's "Evolution & God's Humility." I strongly agree that different images of God and related theologies are necessary for us not only to deal with scientific discoveries and realities, but also to deal with age-old questions of how God can allow pain, suffering, and evil. Ideas of a relational God of compassionate love, who is with us but separate from us and is calling all of creation to a vision and a future that we all participate in creating, provide a hopeful and invigorating set of images of God, of creation, and of us as human beings.

Such a set of images is not refuted by evolutionary materialists who think we are a random result of chemical and biological processes. They are probably right that human beings are the result of those evolutionary processes.

But that is all they can and should say about human beings. The nature of our destiny is not within the scope of science. Teilhard de Chardin once said, "The day will come when after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire."

Science is understanding and harnessing the wind, and tides, etc. It is up to all of us as human beings to harness for God the energies of love and continue to truly bring about a new creation. Haught's theology will help get us there.

robert beezat

Glendale, Wis.

God as parent

As its title suggests, John F. Haught's "Evolution & God's Humility" seems to be as much about our image of God as about Darwin's theories. Images of God can invite reflection on how we live our lives, and Haught's image of a God who embraces evolution strikes me, a father of college-age children, as a model for being a parent.

As a parent of emerging adults, I lack the control of an "intelligent designer." However, I feel called, as Haught puts it, into the "realm of an open and incalculable future." There, as Haught says about God's work, my children stand "ontologically distinct" from me and not as "a simple extension" of me. Like the God Haught describes, I must concede to my progeny their "own autonomous principles of operation," and release them "into the realm of liberty," where they become "more and more independent," and where I watch their "own internal coherence intensify, not diminish."

When loving a young adult, the "intelligent designer" risks being self- serving and less the effective lover Haught calls our "humble God." As a parent, I am grateful for this God's example.

tim reuland

Aurora, Ill.