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What a year was 1996 for the discussion of evolution, with the publication of several key books, the inaugural meeting of an energetic new group of critics, a lively debate in the thought journal Commentary, and headlines created by the pope.

On October 22, John Paul II sent greetings to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, "the Church's scientific senate." His message was reported in the general press as "Pope accepts evolution" as if it were "Church finally accepts heliocentrism." Phew. What a relief.

The pope's message was no such thing. Papal teaching had previously accepted the idea of the descent of all life forms from common ancestry. John Paul II was largely reiterating in a much less formal manner Pius XII's understanding and reminding the scientists that if they were to be faithful Christians there were limits beyond which their science could not take them. Those limits were theological: no theory of evolution was acceptable that was purely materialistic and that did not recognize the direct divine origin of the human soul.

Having laid down those limits, the pope encouraged the scientists to follow where their researches led them. Truth cannot contradict truth, he said.

From design to Designer
Perhaps the pope asked too little of his scientists. For although the pope made the headlines, it was a good Catholic boy at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who was challenging evolutionary thought at a more fundamental level. Biochemist Michael Behe has demolished the idea that complex biological structures could possibly happen by means of gradual accretions of random mutations chosen and preserved by natural selection (see the review of Behe's Darwin's Black Box in CT's sister publication Books & Culture, Nov./Dec., 1996).

Some structures, like the modern city, are complex simply because they have lots of parts, but rearranging or removing certain parts does not reduce the structure's essential function. Other structures, like the bloodclotting mechanism, the human eye, or a bacterium's flagellum, consist of a host of parts all of which are necessary and which must be arranged in one and only one way for the structure to work. Such structures cannot come together the way standard evolutionary theory says they do, by a gradual accretion of minor structural changes. None of these individual changes is valuable in itself, and so natural selection would have no reason to preserve them while waiting for the other changes to accrue. Either direct intervention or a guiding mind that knows the target at which the organism is shooting would be necessary. The details Behe marshals are utterly compelling.

What Behe argues about complex structures, Walter Bradley and Charles Thaxton (The Creation Hypothesis, IVP, 1994) argue about biologically coded information: unlike the complexity of a snowflake (which derives its structure from the nature of the materials it is made from), the complexity of genetic information is independent of the nature of amino acids that record it. Design and a designer are again an almost necessary hypothesis.

Such arguments are part of a current revival of Paley's classic argument from design. And revival is the right word, for not only have biochemist Behe, historian-of-science Thaxton, law professor Phillip Johnson, and others given the argument a more sophisticated dress, they have preached it with a religious fervor that demands a kind of Great Awakening among Christians in the sciences (see "Debunking Darwin?" p. 64).

The new advocates of Design are not simply wanting to add a God-gloss to the standard account of biogenesis: they want not simply a theistic evolution, which sees God as the one who placed within the universe he called into being the potential for developing along the lines it has actually developed (although Calvin College's Howard Van Till has found just such a view in the church father Basil the Great).

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January 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 1