The idea that the universe shows evidence of design was the usual assumption among scientists in past centuries. Indeed, if they did not see such a design, they would hardly have considered trying to understand the universe. Why try to read a book that makes no sense?

From the twentieth century on, there have been many advances but many far-out ideas have also displaced the underlying awareness of design, with unfortunate results:

For example, Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) has argued

‘the universe can and will create itself from nothing’, sparking a religious debate.

‘It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper and set the universe going,’ he said, adding: ‘Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing.’

Jonathan Chadwick, “Is there a God? Scientists give their definitive answers to the eternal question,” Daily Mail, February 9, 2029

That, of course, means accepting on faith the idea of the spontaneous creation of everything from nothing as an accidental unintelligent process. But that is just as much an act of faith as accepting that the universe is the product — a thought if you like — of a divine mind.

The difference is that, given the fine-tuning of the universe for life, unintelligent creation is a much less evidence-based idea than than an origin in a mind beyond the universe. And there is simply no evidence for the currently popular notion that there is a multiverse — an endless series of universes that accidentally come into being, in which anything can happen, including us.

Logically, nothing comes from nothing. But, equally logically, a greater thing, like the mind of God, can give rise to a lesser thing like the universe.

Pushback against fashionable but illogical thinking in science — like accidental origin from nothing or a multiverse — has mostly been associated with evangelical Christians. But recently Catholic thinkers have started to weigh in more frequently as well.

One of them is Fr. Martin Hilbert, a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Toronto, who has a Masters of Applied Science (Electrical Engineering) and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science. His recent book, A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Discovery Institute Press 2024), looks at the issues from a Catholic perspective, focusing on claims about evolution of life from nothing at all.

Some excerpts have been made available at Evolution News, of which we quote snippets here:

“Life’s History and the ’Ode to Joy’”

Darwin’s theory requires a bottom-up tree. In his scenario, by the time that we get to something that taxonomists are willing to call a phylum, there should be numerous species, genera, and families all hinting at its eventual arrival. On the Darwinian view, species develop into genera; genera, into families; families, into orders, etc. Instead, the fossil record shows a top-down approach. A small number of life-forms suddenly arrive representing an entirely new body plan, a new phylum. Then, as time goes by, the phylum gets filled in with more and more representative species.

The history of life can perhaps be likened to a collection of different musical themes. In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the four beginning notes are the theme. They are then developed into many variations that still recognizably reflect the same theme. But there is no smooth way to get from the theme in his Fifth Symphony to the theme of the “Ode to Joy” movement of his Ninth Symphony. The fossil record, in other words, fits more the pattern of an artist creating a new theme and then working variations on it. Or to return to Darwin’s proposed picture of an evolutionary tree of life, with all of life’s variations branching out from a single ancestor “trunk,” it seems that the history of life instead is more like a separate collection of bushes than a single tree. “December 2, 2024,”

“Natural Selection: The God that Failed“

Natural selection, a term coined by Charles Darwin (1809–1882), is invoked to explain how immensely complex life forms can arise from chemicals in mud. It’s quite unlikely but it is nonetheless seen as “the view from science.” Hilbert’s response:

The methodological materialist will object that, having let God into the lab, scientists will grow lazy, throwing up their hands at every mysterious physical phenomenon and saying, “God did it.” But history tells precisely the opposite story. It was because Christians believed that God, a rational lawgiver, was the Creator of the universe that science got started in the first place.

Nor has the design perspective outworn its usefulness. The ID perspective can still guide science in fruitful ways. Take, for example, the evolving view of DNA. At first, most of it was dismissed as “junk” because only about 2 percent of the human genome codes for genes and because biologists, tutored by the Darwinian paradigm, assumed that these non-coding strands of DNA were just useless leftovers from Darwinism’s trial-and-error process. Darwinists trumpeted all the non-coding DNA as proof that evolution is messy and undirected, hardly the work of a wise designer. But design theorists pushed back, predicting that much of the non-coding DNA would turn out to have function. And that prediction turned out to be correct. In this case, then, the theory of intelligent design proved to be the more fruitful heuristic, with Darwinian presuppositions holding back scientific progress.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

Fortunately, even in today’s climate of prejudice against ID, its proponents sometimes manage to get their papers published in peer-reviewed journals. As of May 2024, there were over 200 such papers. This is good news, for science originated in Medieval Europe in part because Europe’s cultural presuppositions at the time included the design perspective. The predominantly Catholic culture of Western Europe in the Middle Ages held that the universe was well-ordered because it was created by God, and that humanity could come to appreciate this order because we are made in God’s image, which means we have the rationality to be able to investigate His creation. “(December 9, 2024)”

He also offers a specifically Catholic design argument: “Intelligent Design and Aquinas’ Fifth Way:”

The argument is taken from the work of the immensely influential medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

Saint Thomas did not have readily available examples of specified complexity such as are revealed by modern molecular biology, but it is possible to find a text that strongly suggests that he would be in favor of ID. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, he writes:

“That which results from the action of an agent, but apart from the intention of the agent, is said to happen by chance or by luck. But we observe that what happens in the working of nature is either always, or mostly, for the better. Thus, in the plant world, leaves are arranged so as to protect the fruit, and among animals the bodily organs are disposed in such a way that the animal can be protected. So if it came about apart from the intention of the natural agent, it would be by chance or by luck. But this is impossible, for things which occur always or for the most part are neither chance nor fortuitous events.”

Thomas is giving a basic lesson on the detection of purpose. A true roulette wheel, for example, is designed to produce chance events; that is to say, each of the numbers should come up with more or less the same frequency. A roulette wheel that kept giving the same number consistently would clearly not work according to chance, but would be fixed by the unscrupulous casino owner. In Thomas’s view, it is clear that organic structures result from the intention of an agent, because they occur regularly and for a reason. And only intelligent agents can have intentions.

At this point, one can engage in learned arguments as to how the intelligent agent causes the highly specified information-rich elements of life. One can find theistic evolutionists singing the praise of providence that can use “chance” to do its work. But the problem is that these same people tend to look upon chance as something that escapes God’s foreknowledge. And it should be clear to the reader by now that there is not enough probabilistic potential in the universe for life to have assembled by chance. The grasping at the weak straw of infinite multiverses is a clear admission of that basic fact. As the physicist Bernard Carr said, “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” Once chance is eliminated, we are left with intimations of God’s personal involvement on the evolutionary path to the flora and fauna of today — or alternatively, of His particular intelligent fashioning of each such form. December 16, 2024

Here’s a podcast with Fr. Hilbert (33:36 min) at ID The Future, hosted by Brian Miller.

Next: Fr. Martin Hilbert talks about human evolution