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WCC is a Catholic liberal-arts college, so it accepts the traditional Catholic view of the harmony

of faith and reason. Its overall intellectual bent is Thomistic, and the teaching of Thomism with

regard to the philosophy of nature, as opposed to nominalist and fideist rationalities, is that

secondary causes are truly causal, and that God likes to do things in the world through them,

even giving them true creative and necessary power. In other words, nature truly exists as

distinct from God (yet never separate from Him, for, through created esse, He is closer to all

beings than they are to themselves), and she possesses a relative autonomy and real causal

power that doesn’t require God’s perpetual intervention. Hence the real conviction for some,

and prima facie credibility for many, of scientific and philosophical atheism. Furthermore,

nature’s causal structures can be known through man’s unaided reason, and the effects of

these causes, like biological phenomena, can be explained without the use of Revelation,

though, of course, not explained in their fullness, for all things evince a certain

unfathomableness and mystery due to their having been created and sustained in existence

and activity by an unfathomable, transcendent, and mysterious God.

All this is to say that science is and should be taken seriously at WCC, and where modern

science has discovered truth about the material world, modern science has discovered truth

about the material world. Science has the capacity and duty to take care of its own, as it were,

without any interference from natural philosophy, metaphysics and theology—unless, of

course, it oversteps its humble charge of cataloging, describing, law-making, predicting,

interpreting, shaping, and controlling matter, and then offering up its data to the higher

sciences of philosophy and theology for ultimate and more certain interpretation, that is, if it

attempts to teach on things that it knows nothing about and trespass against the divinely given

hierarchy of knowledge. If it attempts this, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology are in

their rights to step in and put science in its place.

It is overstepping science’s bounds to claim that debatable, very debatable, theories are facts—

something that Pius XII condemned very unequivocally with regard to evolution in Humani

Generis. It is also overstepping science’s bounds to think to have rendered certain non-verified,

non-facts, such as common descent from mono-celled organisms, as verified facts by using the

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irrational and sophistical force of the so-called “scientific consensus”, the same force that fires

and character-assassinates people who dare to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles that

endorse intelligent design. It is overstepping philosophy’s bounds to teach a debatable and very

idiosyncratic philosophical theory about causality in the natural world and its relation to God as

if it were the only rational way to explain things, and as if serious and sophisticated

philosophical challenges to it were just, a priori, philosophically and theologically otiose and

fundamentalist. It is overstepping Catholic theology’s bounds to dismiss the very serious

challenges, not only to evolutionary theory but the very fact of evolution ever having happened

at all with regard to Adam and Eve, by not only the Catholic Magisterium and Tradition and

Fathers of the Church, but also the latest scientific evidence, which has confirmed and proved

neither common descent from primitive organisms, nor the generation of all life, in all of its

glorious complexity and design, from mindless natural selection working on random genetic

variation and mutation.

The selections in the Florilegium on evolution from the International Theological Commission,

John Paul II, and Pope Emeritus are the strongest case against teaching anything but theistic

evolution at Catholic colleges and universities, for they suggest rather strongly and

unequivocally that mainstream evolutionary theory, along with the big bang, is the only

contender for being true science, the only reasonable view of things biological and

cosmological, and thus that any Catholic institution that takes science and reason seriously, as

we do, would have a grave obligation to accept theistic evolution as the truth and teach it that

way, or at least, teach it as that theory of things that scientifically educated Catholics have the

most reason to accept as true. That is, if what the International Theological Commission and

these recent Popes teach is true, then theistic evolution should not be taught dialectically and

neutrally along with other competing theories, but should be, more or less, indoctrinated.

The problem with this, of course, is that this theological commission has no real theological,

philosophical, and scientific authority. And these words from these Popes are just their private

opinions, gleaned perhaps a little from whatever amateurish study they have done in science,

probably not much, but most of all from just their deference to the mainstream view of science,

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derived perhaps through the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, many of whom are non-Catholic,

and who are exclusively neo-Darwinian evolutionist. Moreover, this Commission’s facile and, I

would say, naïve and irresponsible acceptance of only the mainstream scientific consensus,

which entails that the Commission has ignored or dismissed, or isn’t even aware of!, all the

serious challenges to this neo-Darwinian consensus by credentialed scientists and philosophers

of science, such as those mentioned in the Koons article, as well as traditional interpretations of

the book of Genesis, in both Church Fathers and the Magisterium, reveals its narrowness and

bias and thus its great lack of credibility. I’ll stick with the evidence, thank you, not the findings

of a Vatican Commission that it behaves as if whatever the scientific institution says today, an

institution that surely can discover truth, but as notoriously as corrupt, dishonest, materialist,

ideological, and godless as the secularist, godless society it serves slavishly, is gospel truth.

In short, there is surely indisputable scientific evidence that living beings change, that living

beings adapt, that living species have genetic similarities, some more than others, and some

quite remarkably similar. I don’t see how there can be any debate here. But, as there is,

however, no indisputable scientific evidence, at least that I know of, that all species have

descended from a primitive ancestor, that species evolve, and that evolution of species has

taken place at all, or at least the presence of such indisputable evidence is itself debatable, we

are dealing here with a dialectical classroom topic, not a demonstrative one. In fact, the many

missing transition fossils in the fossil record, the Cambrian species explosion, and the

irreducible complexity of many biological phenomena, along with a whole host of evidence I am

only just beginning to learn about, seem to disprove Darwin’s original theory as well as the neo-

Darwinianism of the theistic evolutionists, or at least make it debatable.

Intelligent design is as scientific and evident as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution, or at least it is

debatably as scientific and evident, and I would say even more scientific and reasonable, but

you’d never know that it was even debatable, let alone possibly true, due to the irresponsible

deference among so many in academia and media, including Catholics, to the idols of the tribe

and marketplace, the so-called “scientific consensus.” To me, this bespeaks not loyalty to

reason and science, but kneeling to the world.

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It’s beyond obvious that a good case can be made for intelligent design, as fully in accordance

with both science, reason, and faith. Any course at WCC treating science, then, should give as

much deference to the possible truth of intelligent design as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution,

for the sake of the students’ good and the integrity of the College, regardless of the private

beliefs of the professor, which he is, of course, free to express to students.