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I believe those quotations express a false dichotomy (note the word "instead" in both). When Paul writes 2 Cor. 5:1-10, his ultimate hope remains the resurrection of the body (soma)—as earlier expressed in 1 Cor. 15:38-58 and later in Phil. 3:20-21. Green and Anderson correctly state that Paul's principal longing is the transformation of this present body ("tent") into the resurrected body (the heavenly "house," a more permanent and durable dwelling than a tent).

That longing is fulfilled not at death but at Christ's return. Death itself fills Paul with anxiety because of the prospect of being "unclothed" (2 Cor. 5:3-4), i.e., of his soul's being separated from his body—a thoroughly unnatural condition reflected in our fear of corpses and of ghosts. At the same time Paul "would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord" (5:8, with 6; c.f. Phil 1:23). There is hope of more than "soul sleep" between death and resurrection: verse 7, "we live by faith, not by sight," implies that the bodiless soul will see Jesus at death and remain capable of fellowship with him (doubtless of a deeper kind than was possible on earth); and verse 9, "so we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it," suggests that even disembodied souls can serve Christ (for example, by interceding for saints on earth). It is true that the word "soul" (Greek psyche) does not appear in this passage: but what sort of experience is being described in verses 7-9, if not that of a soul separated from its body? But the separation is temporary: on the day the trumpet sounds, the soul will be reintegrated with the body for the person's full enjoyment of life in the heavenly kingdom.

Knox Chamblin
Reformed Theological Seminary
Jackson, Miss.

Darwinian Ethics
Unlike Larry Arnhart, I don't see anything to celebrate in the supposed consilience of Edward Wilson's views and Christianity ["Evolution and Ethics," November/December]. Wilson's views are a forthright refutation of Christianity and all religions—which, Wilson assures us, "can all eventually be explained as brain circuitry and deep, genetic history." Wilson adds that "Science has taken us very far from the personal God who once presided over Western civilization."

Arnhart's claim that Aquinas (and thus all Christians, presumably) can uphold Wilson's ethical empiricism fails to engage adequately Wilson's ethical categories. In his chapter on ethics Wilson argues that his ethical empiricism is categorically opposed to transcendentalist ethics. He states the opposition as follows. The transcendentalist view: "I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not." The empiricist view: "I believe that moral values come from humans alone; God is a separate is sue." Given these definitions, how can Arnhart suggest that Christians can embrace Wilson's empirical ethics? Could Aquinas have agreed with Wilson that "by exploring the biological roots of moral behavior, and explaining their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wiser and more enduring ethical consensus than has gone before"?

Furthermore, on the penultimate page of Consilience, Wilson states, "The legacy of the Enlightenment [which Wilson forthrightly embraces] is the belief that entirely on our own we can know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose wisely." This statement rejects two tenets crucial to understanding Christian ethics: divine revelation and original sin. Arnhart errs by not considering these two issues, for if Christians may recognize that some human instincts lead to morality, Christians also acknowledge that some lead to sin; ultimately we need divine revelation to arbitrate. For Wilson there is no way to arbitrate between competing instincts within an individual, competing individuals within a society, or competing societies.

Finally, though Arnhart rightly points to some universal moral standards, Jesus reduced ethics to two commands, the first of which Wilson tries to undermine, and the second of which he never even mentions. My conclusion: Wilson, not Arnhart, is right in seeing Darwinian ethics as diametrically opposed to Christianity.

Richard Weikart
California State University, Stanislaus
Turlock, Calif.

While not objecting to Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa's ["Darwin Comes to America," November/December] or Larry Arnhart's assessment of America's cultural standoff, I wish they had related it to another current news item. Along with the uproar over Kansas there is the recent journalistic concern over the Princeton professor, Peter Singer, who is teaching that there is no big difference between people and other animals, in terms of their rights. The general public is shocked because it would like to think that human beings are special, and that each one of us has some sort of right to exist. They remember that, traditionally, this view has been symbolized in an account of divine creation. Evolutionary biology has nothing to say about any such right.

As far as this naturalism goes, there's no big difference between us animals and plants or bacteria. It's all just hydrocarbons. Nor is there a difference between life and non-life, if you have no non-functional way of assessing value. So all the talk of our destroying nature is nonsense; all we can do is destroy nature's ability to support human life. But if you adopted evolution as an all-embracing ideology you wouldn't worry about human survival. Our planet will go right on without us.

The people in Kansas didn't mandate the teaching of creationism, after all. They must just think that if the schools teach a story of what it's all about, that it ought to be anchored in an awareness of human inviolability—the lesson that Professor Singer missed. Because while we may be made of hydrocarbons, that's not all we are.

C. John Sommerville
University of Florida
Gainesville, Fla.

Editor's note:
Look for a piece on Peter Singer later this year in B&C.

Intelligent Design
I thought John Wilson's comments ["Speaking in Tongues," November/December 1999] concerning the recent books by Robert Pennock and William Dembski were right on target. However, I am planning to add a healthy dash of Thomistic seasoning to my discussion stew. I am confident that it will add flavor. If others would like to do the same, here's the recipe.

Dembski nicely summarizes his conclusions on p. 247 of Intelligent Design. He writes,

1. Specified complexity is well-defined and empirically detectable.

2. Undirected natural causes are incapable of explaining specified complexity.

3. Intelligent causation best explains specified complexity.

A standard Thomistic response would run something like this:

1. Specified complexity is not quantifiable, and hence not empirically detectable apart from the action of an agent intellect.

2. Dembski's second proposition is true.

3. Dembski's third proposition is too weak. The existence of meaningful sentences conceptually implies intelligent causation.

1. I assume that "well-defined" means quantifiable (so, for example, Dembski's use of phrases such as "full statistical rigor") and "empirically detectable" means measurable by scientific instruments (either in fact or theoretically). Thomists reject such a conclusion. Though we believe that design (final causation) is indeed observable in nature, it is observable only for those equipped with nous (intellect). And since the intellect is immaterial, no wholly material scientific instrument will ever detect design.

The same point can be made without resorting to the technical language of Aristotle. It is not possible to quantify something's form or essence, i.e., what it is. For example, the first pair of claws on a lobster are pinchers. But there are no quantifiable or measurable terms for defining the essence of a pincher because there are an indefinite number of ways to create pinchers. I have at least five different kinds of pliers in my garage; three different kinds of salad tongs in my kitchen; and two different kinds of tweezers in my bathroom—all of which are pinchers.

Now Dembski may reply that such examples constitute "false negatives"—that is, instances of design that are not detectable by the complexity-specification criterion. He concedes that there are such instances, but he adds that while some "things that are designed may occasionally slip past the net" of the complexity-specification criterion, only things that are designed will end up in the net. So he would ask Thomists to produce examples of "false positives."

Here I am puzzled, because such examples seem readily available, and yet I am reluctant to suppose that Dembski missed what seems so obvious. Flip a coin 100 times and record the results as a string of zeroes and ones. Then ask five clever people to create a code that results in the string of zeroes and ones becoming a meaningful sentence—that is, a false positive. Dembski would certainly agree that this is possible, but he would argue that such a code is not "detachable":

Detachability can be understood as asking the following question: Given an event whose design is in question and a pattern describing it, would we be able to construct the pattern if we had no knowledge which event occurred? Here is the idea. An event has occurred. A pattern describing the event is given. The event is one from a possible range of events. If all we know was the range of possible events without any specifics about which event actually occurred, could we still construct the pattern de scribing the event? If so, the pattern is detachable from the event.

And of course he is right: our clever code that produces a "false positive" is not detachable. But there is an obvious problem: the DNA code is not detachable either! Certainly Dembski cannot believe that a mathematician might have figured out that life on earth would be based on a code constructed of four protein bases arranged in the shape of a double helix. Wasn't God free to create life based on six protein bases, or from some other arrangement altogether?

Dembski is caught in a dilemma. If he gives up the detachability criterion, there will be no end of "false positives." If he doesn't give up the detachability criterion, he has reduced biology to a purely mathematical, a priori discipline, and he has denied a fundamental doctrine of Christian theology—namely, that God was perfectly free to create in any way he saw fit.

2. If we bracket the above objection to Dembski's definition of "specified complexity," Thomists would say that the second thesis is true: undirected natural causes are incapable of explaining the existence of life on earth. However, Dembski and I may disagree about what is entailed by the term "undirected." The sort of direction Thomists argue for transcends scientific categories—that is, it is ascientific without being unscientific. Direction does not re quire the miraculous suspension of natural causes.

I'm not sure what Dembski believes on this point. He notes that "to say that an intelligent agent caused something is not to prescribe how an intelligent agent caused it. In particular, design in this last sense is separate from miracle" (p. 127). On the other hand, in response to criticism that Intelligent Design relies on a God-in-the-gaps, he says that "without the freedom to seriously entertain gaps in the causal nexus of nature, we place naturalism in a privileged position" (p. 241).

Now Thomists would certainly agree that many of the biblical miracles are instances of the supernatural suspension of the laws of nature. Christ's resurrection is the supreme example. But what is the point of this miracle? While there are many, one of the most important is that Christ thereby triumphed over Satan, sin, and death, and that through God's grace we can do the same. However we unpack the significance of Christ's resurrection, though, we should not attempt to turn it into an argument for the existence of God. Christ's resurrection is a sign of who Jesus is, not that God exists.

C. S. Lewis is absolutely right: any intelligent defense of the biblical miracles presupposes the existence of a supernatural realm. That is why the third chapter of Lewis's book Miracles, entitled "The Self-Contradiction of Naturalism," is crucial to his project. Lewis understood that he must first demonstrate that naturalism is philosophically incoherent before considering the biblical miracles. Otherwise, he would be begging the question—just as Richard Dawkins and his crew do when they argue that science de monstrates the truth of atheism!

3. Finally, Dembski's third point is too weak. Intelligent causation is not merely the best explanation of specified complexity; it is the only philosophically coherent account of the fact that words have a meaning transcending any causal effects they may also have. Dembski has made what Aristotle, Aquinas, and Mortimer Adler would call a little mistake in the beginning that will have disastrous effects in the end. In Thomist terms, the little mistake is confusing shape with form. "Design" is not in living things the way hidden dirt is in rugs, invisible to all but the most sophisticated machines. Rather, design is in living things the way meaning is in words, clearly visible to all who have intellects.

By seeking to find confirmation of Christian truths in the latest discoveries of modern science, id is assuming a dangerous hermeneutic. How did Paul's first readers understand Romans 1:20? They obviously knew nothing about DNA or the "anthropic numbers" Dembski alludes to on page 164. In what sense, then, was God's invisible nature made clear to them? Should not the universal truths of Christianity be grounded in an equally universal hermeneutic and a perennial philosophy that takes as its premises nothing which has not been evident to all people in all cultures? Of course, grounding a philosophy in common sense is neither flashy nor fashionable, but it is not impossible—witness the Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysic and the tradition it has engendered.

Ric Machuga
Butte College
Paradise, Calif.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
May/June 2000, Vol. 6, No. 3, Page 4

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